Cursed and Auto-Explore

[benli]

One of the core qualities of the Cursed (and Dooomed) class is that they lose Hate over time which forces them to continually hunt for new victims. I really like this thematically and often enjoy it in the game as it really pushes you to move forward. Unfortunately, I also like the ease of Auto-Explore which pushes you forward even faster but consumes all of your Hate. These two features don't work well together, so I was considering removing the hate loss over time. Afflicted would still need to kill things to gain hate. This means a more strategic game that involves deciding how to spend the hate you gain. It would also require modifying the costs/gains of hate and changing Seethe in some way. This change is not intended to make the game easier, but it would eliminate the problem of having to fight a tough opponent after wandering around for a long time.

Any thoughts on this?

[Nori]

I agree with you. I like the hate loss over time but also like auto-explore. However, it is rather rough to get into a hard fight with only 0-2 hate. Not sure what the best solution is though. But your idea of no hate loss could work. Be kind of like the arcane blade not gaining mana. It would be tough to balance all the costs and gains out though, but it would give a good reason to try and increase the max hate.

One issue I've always had with the cursed class is that its better for my character to fight lots of easy monsters than a few tough ones as I get better hate gain and more health that way. I found that rather odd as a few harder enemies should help you out more I think.

[martinuzz]

Perhaps, seeing we seem to like the hate-loss over time, preserve it, but change Seethe as follows:

Seethe (activation, no hate cost, long cooldown):
- when your Hate is below 5, your next 5/4/3/2/1 succesful melee hits will boost your hate by 0.2x/0.4x/0.6x/0.8x/x
- x scales with monster danger level

[jotwebe]

Yup, I'm another one who likes both auto-explore and the hate-mechanic, but not their interplay...

How about making seethe a sustain that

• costs XY% of your current hate
• freezes hate at that level
• also freezes resource regeneration and talent/inscription cooldowns

Basically, activating seethe would put you in stasis, and you could amble about as long as you like.

Another possible thing would be to adopt the recent change in vim-gains that multiply values by the enemy's rank. This would help in boss fights and make hordes of chaff less tasty (if the default were reduced).

Whatever you end up doing, looking forward to giving it a spin...

[Canderel]

Just make hate reduce slower (33% of the current pace or so) while using the autoexplore function.

[Dekar]

I think thats a very bad idea because it gives autoexplore spammers an advantage over players who dont use autoexplore for every single step.

[tiger_eye]

Some of the suggested changes sound a lot like how Vim works.

So, instead of changing hate, how about changing auto-explore to be more aggressive for afflicted? By aggressive, I mean it would go through traps and open doors as if they were open tiles, and maybe even try to close in on enemies the player can detect but is not in sight of.

[donkatsu]

As long as we're changing hate, can we change positive/negative energy too? Unlike hate drain, the meager -0.2 regeneration rate doesn't even add anything tactically interesting. I mean come on, it takes 100 turns to drain the amount of positive energy you get back from using just a talent once. ~700 turns to drain the negative energy from one Twilight. It only makes you have to spam Twilight or whatever positive energy charging talent you have periodically while you autoexplore. Yes you can autocast stuff, but that's just a makeshift fix to a problem that shouldn't even be there in the first place.

[benli]

I suspect the slow regen on positive/negative energy is for classes that pick up a talent but don't have a means to regen.

I tried Cursed without hate loss. It really doesn't feel right and it messes up a lot of the mechanics, like the sense that talent use is expensive. Most changes that I have thought about or that have been suggested would only have a small impact on the problem. About the only thing I can think of is to change Seethe to store your current hate level and then restore it on a second use. As a penalty, this could cost a little hate to activate and restore the stored hate slowly. It seems a little gimicky, but would allow you to travel around like a normal hate-less person for a while. Players could do this when a level is almost complete and relatively safe. Also good for preparing for boss fights. I don't like that it encourages playing conservatively though. I'll think about it some more.

[bricks]

What about only decreasing Hate when enemies are in sight?

[donkatsu]

If you are not a Celestial you cannot gain any talents that actually consume positive/negative energy. You can only generate it.

[Aquillion]

What about only decreasing Hate when enemies are in sight?

Or have steady hate loss only occur while your health is below maximum? Or both?

(Perhaps also when one of your talents is on cooldown, while you have a negative status, etc -- pretty much, have hate loss occur whenever you have anything that would make you rest for more than one turn if you hit the rest key.)

This would preserve one key part (resting to heal costs you hate) without punishing players just for exploring.

[Parcae2]

I like the "only if health is below maximum/talents are on cooldown" idea. Tome 4 is very unusual in having a class that has an incentive to chase down enemies constantly without resting. It's thematically and tactically interesting, and I would hate to see the no-rest effect of hate disappear.

[benli]

I have a fix coded for this that I'm still playing with, but it looks like a good solution. First an unnecessary rambling discourse to explain what I'm tying to do with this change...

<Rambling Discourse>
The cursed class was originally an experimental design to overcome some of what I saw as play-style weaknesses in the way most early TOME melee classes played. Early classes would Stun..Attack..Stun..Attack..Rest, then do it again and again. Nothing wrong with that, but it didn't provide much variety and it wasn't non-stop action. I also wanted to experiment with a non-deterministc class that would be able to *rely* on randomness. These things were largely done with hate (to force the player to keep killing things), healing on kill (as a substitute for rest), and things like gloom to provide something that was both random and reliable. Things have evolved a lot, but this approach for Cursed still holds mostly true. I guess the important thing to realize about hate is that it is like an addiction. It's no Broken Bottles, but it's something like that. When you're killing stuff, your up and when you're not, you are in withdrawal. That withrawal is pretty important. Without it, the class feels flat and the cost of talents feel meaningless. When you are in an active combat zone, that hate addiction works great. When you are going to town or running around explored parts of the map, the withdrawal is excessive. I've tried to think of some passive way to balance the two modes of play, but it really doesn't work. The balance for active combat zones is too important to mess with and every solution adds worse problems. Because of that, I've decided that only an active solution will work well.
</Rambling Discourse>

I'm using the Seethe talent as a sustain that lets you pick whether you are in an active combat mode or are in a standby mode. I'm still balancing some of the numbers.

Seethe (sustained)
Activating: Reduces your current hate to 50% (at lvl 1) to 85% (at lvl 5) of its current value and sets that as your baseline hate. Hate loss over time stops. Any hate you gain quickly drops to the baseline value. Any hate you use (or lose) becomes the new baseline. All damage you do is reduced by 40%.
Deactivating: Resumes hate loss over time and eliminates the damage penalty.

The really important thing about this is that *both* modes are still a form of withdawal; they weaken you and eventually reduce your hate. The best place to be is still in combat with Seethe switched off. The second best place to be is to have the right mode active. You could travel with Seethe off, but you will lose most of your hate. You can fight with Seethe on, but you do so at a significant penalty and will lose some hate to talents. Also, the penalty is only applied when you switch to non-combat mode so you don't feel penalized when you switch Seethe off to start combat again. The high hate cost means you won't want to switch modes too frequently, just when you're pretty sure the payoff is worth the cost.

[Aquillion]

I just worry that switching it off and on is likely to feel finicky to players, especially since the 50% hate loss simply for hitting the switch makes it a bit of a risk to turn it on. The damage penalty also seems a bit awkward, since it could easily turn into a trap for players who are careless about micromanaging their seethe state.

It still seems to me that it'd be simplest to have hate loss gradually trail off and stop when you're fully-healed, have nothing on cooldown, and haven't seen an enemy for a while (with the drain resetting to normal the moment you see an enemy, of course). How gradual it would be would be something to tweak with, of course, but it'd probably be possible to adjust the relevant variables to make it so hate loss remains basically what it is now while you're exploring a level full of enemies, and only slows down and stops when you're traveling long distances through already-cleared areas. Based on your above numbers, say, it could be set up so the amount of downtime it takes for your hate loss to trail off to zero is the amount of time it takes for you to lose half your current Hate to it.

That would seem to have the same basic effect as your seethe change -- with fewer choices, sure, but also less micromanagement.