Equilibrium revamp proposition

[Laerte]

I think the current equilibrium resource isn't good.

• It is an infinite resource;
• Using a wild gift talent increases the equilibrium;
• sustains increase the base equilibrium;
• skills gets a failure rate after equilibrium becomes higher the the willpower.

Right now, it is almost impossible to use 3 sustains, because the WIL required to have low failure rates is too high. Having a failure rate is the worst aspect, IMO. A failure to attack, heal, teleport etc. may be equal to death.

My propose (I don't know something like this was proposed before) is summarized below:

• Shift from the actual 0 ... INF range to a -MAX ... 0 ... +MAX one, were MAX would increase with WIL, mental power etc.;
• Some talents would unbalance toward +MAX (positive equilibrium cost) and some other would unbalance to -MAX (negative equilibrium cost), much like positive energy for a sun paladin;
• Instead of getting a failure rate, using talents when far from 0 (the equilibrium point) would just have a weaker effect (inverse of paradox);
• Sustains would just lower the MAX value, thus lowering the operational range, again like positive energy to a sun paladin.

Comments?

[marvalis]

Instead of adding failur rate with higher equilibrium, perhaps make your skills do less damage (negative damage_all multiplier), and perhaps also give a healing penalty for high equilibrium. Sustains would then lower your damage, and would have to be balanced accordingly.

Failure rate can be too much of a penalty (essentially a 100% skill penalty on some turns), and as you point out lead to sudden and unexpected death. The synergy with using sustains at the moment is terrible.

There does not have to be a hard cap on equilibrium. Suppose your damage is lowered, but with a limit (diminishing returns).
For example, at 100 equilibrium you do 30% less damage, at 200 60% less, at 2000 63% less.

The more you use it, the weaker you get. Then you have to rebalance yourself. I don't think there is a resource like this in the game right now, so it could fit?

[PureQuestion]

a damage multiplier is probably a terrible idea; making it work like Paradox (but in reverse) would probably make it less insanely horrible.

[Aquillion]

The problem is that Equilibrium is used for summoners, whose summons can't be scaled down in any reasonable way. It also encourages people to build characters focused entirely on non-scaling or slow-scaling talents and then using them as much as they want.

[marvalis]

The problem is that Equilibrium is used for summoners, whose summons can't be scaled down in any reasonable way.

Damage all affects summons. Any damage modifier affects summons (unless this was recently changed).
For example, equiping a ring with +20% fire damage makes your flamespitter do more damage.

As such, any damage penalty would directly affect your summons.

[omni]

Of note: I don't play a lot of equilibrium classes. I usually only see the resource if I go antimagic. That's my disclaimer. I just wanted to point something out:

Part one:

Allow me to do some word substitution. Wild Gift for Paradox and Paradox for Wild Gift, and some editing for coherency.

"It is an infinite resource;
Using a Time talent increases the paradox;
sustains increase the base paradox
skills gets a failure rate after paradox level becomes higher than willpower accounts for.

Right now, it is almost impossible to use 3 sustains, because the WIL required to have low failure rates is too high. Having a failure rate is the worst aspect, IMO. A failure to attack, heal, teleport etc. may be equal to death."

This is true, no? As paradox increases you get a failure rate, which interestingly enough may actually outright kill you as vs just failing (temporal storms, random teleportation, summoning hostiles, forcing self targeting, backlash, so on so forth). Admittedly you do get a power multiplier coupled in with higher paradox, but imho you ought not use it

Do you believe this should be changed as well? If not, why not? (in example, perhaps the will scaling is better on paradox failure rates)

Part two:

If I'm not mistaking the proposal, what you are wanting is to be able to sustain as much as you wish simultaneously, with lower Will investment, that punishes via less damage/effect as vs failure rate. Why not adjust the scaling as vs recode, or provide a talent sink for Wilder classes that rely more on equilibrium and sustains?

Still I'm not wholly sure this needs to be changed.

[PureQuestion]

Well, with paradox it doesn't really come up as badly, in spite of the increased dangers. The damage boost does a lot to counteract it; there is no upside at all to high equilibrium.

Secondly, Temporal Wardens are 90% sustain based and thus don't typically run into issues with failure rates, unless they're utilizing a lot of teleport skills. Paradox Mages, on the other hand, benefit a lot more from the damage boosts, and they get the Paradox Mastery skill, which applies a multiplier to your Wil for the purpose of negating failure, with a hefty 65% boost at max level.

[SageAcrin]

If anything, the main difference between Paradox and Equilibrium is the expanding Paradox costs as you get higher, I'd say.

It is far easier for Paradox to spiral out of control in a few actions than Equilibrium, doubling your failure rate within a couple of spells. The diminishing returns in damage in no way make up for this after a point, trust me, nor does Paradox Mastery prevent it from occurring for a PM(It just gives you a few more actions before this starts up).

Anyways, why are you expecting to run all your sustains for free? No class really gets that. An Archmage can't just run whatever they want with no penalty. (TW is close, but any failure rate at all on a teleport is pretty rough, still.) If running too many sustains is an issue, you need to prioritize.

Admittedly, right now, three of the selling points of Wyrmic are Icy Skin, Elemental Harmony and, soon, another Sustain, so this is rough on them. But it wasn't as if my Sun Paladin got to run around with Second Life on from the moment I got access to it; I'm pretty sure a Wyrmic later in the game would have no trouble running all three.

Honestly, the main issue I see with Equilibrium is an easy fix. Some skills just cost too much of it, feels like, mostly on Wyrmic. Breaths take 12 a shot, Tornado takes 14, Static Field takes 20(...), Lightning Speed takes 10, Burrow takes *50*...

(Granted, allowing the player to spam Burrow is a bad plan, but the cooldown seems like a better way to avoid that.)

A few of the more universal skills take an oddly large amount, too. 10 for Nature's Touch, Nature's Balance seems already balanced by 50 Cooldown and its 20 Equi cost seems...well, counter to what it does, which is let you use more skills...

Healing Nexus costing 24 is just silly unless I miss something, and Waters of Life costing 10 makes it rack up Equi stunningly fast if you're trying to set it to auto(And manually deciding when and when not to use Waters of Life has always led to me forgetting it, due to poisons and diseases only very rarely being life threatening.).

Summoners only have two class specific skills at 10, and two at 15, I think. That always felt reasonable. Wyrmic costs should be higher, but they tend to have to either use Stamina skills or spend 10+ Equilibrium all the time, and that's pretty rough, especially since their main draw seems to be an escapes/defenses oriented fighter. Nothing is worse than having those fail.

[donkatsu]

For summoners, just pretend that they have infinite equilibrium recovery every turn. This is approximately what having the jelly summon is like. Equilibrium is not even remotely an issue for them, ever. Whatever changes are made to equilibrium will not affect them until jelly is nerfed. So really we're just talking about wyrmics and antimagic users here.

[Laerte]

This is true, no? As paradox increases you get a failure rate, which interestingly enough may actually outright kill you as vs just failing (temporal storms, random teleportation, summoning hostiles, forcing self targeting, backlash, so on so forth). Admittedly you do get a power multiplier coupled in with higher paradox, but imho you ought not use it

Do you believe this should be changed as well? If not, why not? (in example, perhaps the will scaling is better on paradox failure rates).

Sorry, I cannot comment on paradox as I do not play this chronomancer stuff. What I have talked about paradox in my post is from what I read about it.

Anyways, why are you expecting to run all your sustains for free? No class really gets that.

No, not really. I really just want two things: no failure rates and make equilibrium sustains more in line with the rest of the game (mana, stamina, vim, positive and negative energy) were they limit the use of the resource. I like that concept.

And wyrmics do not have too much sustains: they max possible is 4, 2 of them accessible only via antimagic. Mages can run around with 4 or more sustains no? (thats really a question, I do not play archmages). I know anorithils can and probably sun paladins too. Even with 2 sustains (50 ~ 60 equilibrium), once you engage in a long combat the equilibrium can go fast over 100 and your talents start to fail badly.

Right now the equilibrium resource is a disequilibrium one in fact. There is no balance around an equilibrium point, you just goes far and far from zero, them do an effort to get back to zero. One point of my propose was to make the balance adjust with skills themselves, for example you use fire drake talents, equilibrium goes up (up to + max), use cold drake ones, equilibrium goes down (down to -max). I like to compare this to the current sun paladin where some talents generate positive energy and some consume it.

[SageAcrin]

Currently, if you were to combine Icy Skin, Elemental Harmony and Antimagic Shield, you'd be at about 80 Equi. That's pretty high, but it is possible to still start out at 0% with that later in the game, and Antimagic Shield is...not really intended for constant use, I think. (Antimagic is a weakpoint of mine for knowledge, I think the best characters I've done with it have been L20~. But considering how it functions by raising your Equi constantly as well as killing a good way to heal it while it is on, it doesn't seem like you should leave it on.)

That doesn't seem too bad. They end up with a few% fail rate at most, and can get it down to 0% lategame, unless I'm mistaken.

As to fail rates...well, I don't have a problem with Equilibrium being retooled, even if it doesn't bother me as a resource, just because it's pretty similar to Paradox all told(And, out of the two, Paradox is more interesting). The idea of damage% lowering as you gain Equi isn't too bad, I think.

Making it a range, well, I'd have to see the range to comment on it, but it doesn't seem too bad for Wyrmics... but off the top of my head, Summoners basically would have infinite resources then(some Summons would raise, some would lower, so all you have to do is keep summoning. They don't really get other skills besides summons or summon related abilities.). I guess that could be worked around, but.

Oh, as to the Jelly thing(missed that comment)...eh. It isn't really quite *that* good. You can easily use Frantic Summoning and rack up a good 30-40 Equilibrium, then utilize Rage, Detonate, etc. from there, to net even more(To say nothing of the fact that many Summoners will run AM, and may have Antimagic Shield up.). Then toss in a 20 Equi cost Nature's Blessing and rack up even more by summoning even more. One Jelly isn't healing all that, as it shouldn't.

Jelly is a great Manaflow/Static History/etc. equivalent, and a higher cooldown or somewhat worse conversion rate could be reasonable(I haven't ran a Summoner *that* far, though, so I don't know how well lategame Summoners do without a good source of Equi.), but it isn't infinite resources.