ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

It's time for yet another 'lets try to balance solipsists thread'. All the efforts so far have helped, but they are still very much broken.

Here's my "effort": http://te4.org/characters/13640/tome/23 ... c1bc2a4f37

I was incredibly bored while playing this, because solipsists offer no challenge whatsoever and thus no enjoyment. This solipsist suffered any kind of meaningful damage twice in the entire game. Once was having 4 overpowered wyrms breathing on me. The other time was Atamathon using irresistible sun. I went through the final fight without problems or taking any serious damage and even most of Atamathon's attacks didn't do enough damage to cause me problems. I didn't have to run away from him ONCE. Even if I had an extraordinary amount of gear luck compared to other solipsists, it is such a big chasm compared to most other classes, that I think serious nerfs are required.

So, lets try to make solipsists fun. From my experience with them, there seems to be several abilities that need a hard nerf. Not necessarily all of these need to be implemented, and I'll try to make the case for each separately.

1. Forge shield is too powerful. While this ability is powerful enough on it's own, it's the interaction with AM shield that makes it go over the top. It's not uncommon in mindpower based classes, which is something SageAcrin already talked about in another topic.

While I don't have an universal solution for AM shield and mindpower, I have a few ideas on how to fix forge shield.

First of all, reduce the amount absorbed by a third. Unless the absorption amount is nerfed, no amount of shuffling is going to help, because taking zero damage is always an attractive proposition.

Second, increase the cost of the Forge shield buff. It should cost double what it does now at least. Solipsists should not be able to run all the sustains they want without thinking about the cost - and taking a risk with a damage spike.

Third, make the entire dream forge tree generic. That way it will directly compete for points with fungus, AM, racial trees, feedback, dreaming and mentalism. It will make AM the less straight forward option, and make it harder to run every defensive option available.

I normally wouldn't suggest moving an entire tree but they need most of their defensive abilities competing for a limited pool of points if any kind of balance is to be achieved (that includes forge armor and dreamforge).

2. Forge armor is way too powerful. With enough mindpower, 1 level of forge armor will give you more armor than 5 points of armor training. It will also give you both a defense bonus and psi on hit. It is one of the most powerful defensive abilities in the game, and it works for the price that you already paid (sustaining forge shield). If you look at the closest equivalent - ice armor on wyrmics - it gives more defensive abilities than ice armor, costs way less, and doesn't interfere with AM shield the way ice armor does.

First of all, I'd make forge armor a separate sustain, and give it a cost of 50 psi. I don't think solipsists should get off so cheap compared to other classes or that running sustains should be a no brainer for them.

Second, cut the bonuses in half. Solipsists need defensive abilities, but they sure shouldn't be more armored than sun paladins.

Third, rescale the ability so that you gain more on higher levels of the talent than on lower. Currently this is a one point wonder, and that needs to change.

Between moving this entire tree to generic and the nerfs I suggested here, I believe there will be a serious amount of strategy involved in building a solipsist defensively - to defend yourself from physical you'll need either armor training or mobile defense and forge armor, which will push back your ability to get fungus and AM shield going.

I don't want to run the solipsists into the ground, and I don't mind them having a plethora of good abilities, but I'd like to make it hard for them to run all of their good abilities at once.

3. Thought-form Unity. On the higher levels of ability and mindpower, thought form: defender gives 10-15% resist all. For the price of just 5 class points, it's a really powerful effect for very cheap. I'd suggest cutting the resist all bonus in half.

From my experience, the other bonuses are powerful as well, but I wouldn't say that they are too powerful. I'd leave them as they are.

4. Mind sear. Right now it's possible to neglect a majority of your offensive abilities for about 60% of the game, and get by with just mind sear and maybe one other ability.

Rather than directly hit the damage, I would increase the cooldown of mind sear by 1. While getting by with just mind sear should be ok for maybe the first 10 levels, there needs to be an element of strategy here - if you want to focus just on your defensive abilities which is what most solipsists do (from about 10 conversations I had on the subject), you need to be limited in your offensive ability. As long as mind sear can be spammed every other turn, this won't be possible.

While solipsists do quite a good amount of damage in the later stages of the game, I wouldn't really interfere with that, apart from increasing the cooldown of mind sear. Doing damage is a part of what makes the class fun, and at least the distortion - psychic assault combo does good enough damage and is varied enough to be interesting.

Thoughts and comments are welcome.

From my own looks at the class and comments about it, I'll go along with most of this.

There's a few things I'll chime in specifically on, though.

Third, make the entire dream forge tree generic. That way it will directly compete for points with fungus, AM, racial trees, feedback, dreaming and mentalism. It will make AM the less straight forward option, and make it harder to run every defensive option available.

I am highlighting this because it is a very good idea, and one I strongly approve of.

From what I've seen, there's just enough Generic to splash around to buy every single thing in the Generic set that you'd want-and all of it is very good. Point pressure would, for once, actually improve a class' interesting elements, and Solipsist is a creature of vastly differing builds. Raising that impact would be nothing but good, to me, and nothing in the skillset feels especially out of place in Generic(No more than, say, Energy on Paradox Mage. Actually, less so, Energy has some fairly Paradox Mage specific moves, and these work for everyone.).

Above and beyond all other changes, I strongly recommend taking this on, even if people disagree with the rest of the suggestions.

Also, it lets me make more broken Adventurers because it creates one of the best Generic universal defensive skillsets. :3

First of all, I'd make forge armor a separate sustain, and give it a cost of 50 psi. I don't think solipsists should get off so cheap compared to other classes or that running sustains should be a no brainer for them.

While I don't necessarily disagree with this, I would rather see this get added later, rather than initially with the rest of this at the same time.

Mostly, Dream Shield getting the cost doubled, as well as notable nerfs to the defensive skills otherwise, makes me think that this may be better as a wait-and-see change. I'd hate to see defensive builds of Solipsist collapse entirely.

(I suppose you could choose any specific detail here to say this about, per se, but this caught my eye. I think endgame Solipsists average 600 Psi, and effectively dropping the normal defensive build's Psi by 100 seems a little high right now. 50 seems fair though.)

4. Mind sear. Right now it's possible to neglect a majority of your offensive abilities for about 60% of the game, and get by with just mind sear and maybe one other ability.

Rather than directly hit the damage, I would increase the cooldown of mind sear by 1.

While I agree with this, I have to note that this is mostly because I personally like Distortion Bolt a lot. Distortion Bolt becoming one of the core pieces of offense, along with Mind Sear, instead of the monoskill we currently have, is fairly fun to me.

It's not as if it's worse than, say, Paradox Mage's options for baseline offense, a 2 CD blasting bolt and a 3CD beam, though.

But yeah, otherwise, these seem like reasonable suggestions.

Some very interesting ideas here.

supermini wrote: Solipsists should not be able to run all the sustains they want without thinking about the cost - and taking a risk with a damage spike.

Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but it's worth bearing in mind that a big part of the solipsist class concept is that their psi doubles as their HP. Sustains that effectively reduce your max HP can easily become too expensive to be worth getting.

That said, I think this unique feature of solipsists isn't pronounced enough - with no inherent need for stats other than Willpower, it's easy to get solipsists with large HP *and* large psi bars supplementing each other. I'd rather see a bigger HP reduction and more-or-less proportional increase in psi, which would force people to balance psi-as-health against psi-as-mana.

supermini wrote:to defend yourself from physical you'll need either armor training or mobile defense and forge armor, which will push back your ability to get fungus and AM shield going.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that armour training was of little use to solipsists since they get hit hard by fatigue penalties.

supermini wrote:Thought-form Unity. On the higher levels of ability and mindpower, thought form: defender gives 10-15% resist all. For the price of just 5 class points, it's a really powerful effect for very cheap. I'd suggest cutting the resist all bonus in half.

I really don't think anyone would pay 5 class points for 5-7% resist all. I can easily name a dozen abilities which would deliver far more benefit for that sort of investment.

supermini wrote:4. Mind sear. Right now it's possible to neglect a majority of your offensive abilities for about 60% of the game, and get by with just mind sear and maybe one other ability.

Rather than directly hit the damage, I would increase the cooldown of mind sear by 1. While getting by with just mind sear should be ok for maybe the first 10 levels, there needs to be an element of strategy here - if you want to focus just on your defensive abilities which is what most solipsists do (from about 10 conversations I had on the subject), you need to be limited in your offensive ability. As long as mind sear can be spammed every other turn, this won't be possible.

100% agreement. I have no idea why Mind Sear is so much more powerful than every other basic beam attack in the game. If it's meant to offset the risk of the target saving to reduce mind damage, it goes way too far.

I really don't think anyone would pay 5 class points for 5-7% resist all. I can easily name a dozen abilities which would deliver far more benefit for that sort of investment.

On the other hand, it's 6%~ Allresist or one of two good offensive benefits.

Used intelligently, it's better than any of its individual parts, since it's flexible.

I don't think that it having a relatively low defensive impact with what is likely the best Thought Form is a bad thing, either.

I think that most Solopsist talents are too cheap.
I like the way that they are a tanky caster, but they can nuke things without worrying about running out of psi.
I'd like to see many of their talents have their psi costs increased by around 50%.
Psi is very easy to regenerate for a Solopsist, so increased costs would just slow their damage output a bit.

HousePet wrote:I think that most Solopsist talents are too cheap.
I like the way that they are a tanky caster, but they can nuke things without worrying about running out of psi.
I'd like to see many of their talents have their psi costs increased by around 50%.
Psi is very easy to regenerate for a Solopsist, so increased costs would just slow their damage output a bit.

Costs are meaningless. They run fungus and the regen keeps them topped up on both psi and hp. That's why they can run in heavy armor all they want. Who cares about fatigue when you have +100 to your resource every turn?

On the other hand, push the costs too hard and fungus becomes a requirement rather than a choice.

Maybe cap the amount of psi converted from regen at a certain amount?

having finished the game with a solipsist recently , i think , of all the sugestions: mind sear to 3 would change play most... even 4 turns cooldown.. would make it CLEAR that you need to solve your attack with other options
i didnt have fungus and the 5 sustains i used made my psi way too short, i was always playing with fire.
also solipsism ... nobody should/will take 5/5 when 3/5 is actually objectivly better ... more points should always make it better (even if only marginaly)

also the whole mentalism line (projection and so) SUCKS

Projection lets you Dominant Will people through walls. You can also apply other status effects, such as Inner Demons. Sure, it's not Ambushcade, but there are plenty of tricks you can pull off.

There's some good ideas here. Bookmarking this thread for future reference.

I have a somewhat different perspective on solipsists, I think, because I mostly play in the ID these days (having beaten the main campaign a few times too often) and solipsists do not scale well. Aside from Dreamscape, most of their abilities - especially the defensive ones - run into severe diminishing returns, which is fine for the main campaign but not so much at level 100.

In terms of nerfs, I would say that the way Sleep works should probably be changed. Right now, it is the most debilitating effect available in the game by far, with the possible exception of stoning.

Incoming wall of text about sleep.

I've been trying to figure out what it is about sleep that bothers me, and I think it might be explained by saying that player and enemy health are not equivalent. If I do 2000 damage in one hit, that's normal and it only takes a chunk off of the enemy's health. If I take 2000 damage in one hit, I die instantly no matter what and the game ends. This is obviously not very fair. Now normally what happens is that the things that would do 2000 damage to me, instead end up doing like 500 damage because of my beefy resistances, the fact that I just stunned them, Antimagic Shield, and various other defensive abilities. This is okay. I am giving and taking acceptable amounts of damage, because even though NPCs have more hp, point for point my hp is more valuable.

Now, rather than thinking of sleep as a "debilitating status effect", think of it as a direct damage attack with some quirks. If I get slept for 6 turns and every 300 damage ticks it down by a turn (I'm totally making these numbers up but bear with me), then there's a potential 1800 damage incoming all at once, plus everything on the turn that goes over the sleep limit. Think of this as an 1800 damage attack, plus an extra turn's worth of damage. I can reduce it down to 1500 if my passive defenses reduce the enemy's damage to 750 per turn. I can reduce it to 1200 if my passive defenses reduce the enemy's damage to 400 per turn... which means that in order to reduce the effective damage by 20% (1500->1200) I have to reduce the actual damage by 47% (750->400). So my passive defenses are greatly reduced in effectiveness compared to a normal direct damage attack. This is a much bigger problem for the player than for NPCs, who mostly rely on having huge banks of health instead. You can make sleep less of an offensive tool while keeping its disabling function by lowering the amount of damage that it takes to decrease the duration, but even at the extreme end of 0.0001 damage to decrease duration by a turn, that's still just pre-nerf daze. Oh, and it doesn't check stun immunity.

On the player side, however, the same sleep is just not terribly useful as an offensive measure because I'll probably break it all in just one Mind Sear, and at that point I could have just used Mind Sear instead of Sleep in the first place. Again, this is because most NPCs don't have noteworthy defenses but they do have a lot of health. If you lower the "sleep damage limit" even further, it just turns into old school daze. Despite this, Sleep is still incredibly useful for stalling fights... but then so are the myriad escape talents available to every class, and those have the added bonus of not checking saves.

tl;dr these are my suggestions for sleep:
-Reduce sleep duration on all sleep talents
-Make the damage required to reduce the duration be reduced by mind resistance and/or mental save
-Increase the damage required to reduce the duration to compensate so that it's equal or maybe even stronger against 0 mind resistance/ mental save in overall "direct damage".

It checks confusion immunity.

IIRC DarkGod was talking about making it actually utilize a temporary resource for a few skills that you could only use while sleeping. Dunno if he's planning on going with that, but that would fix most of the rest of the complaint.

IIRC it's a stated comment of his that skills where you can't do anything aren't any fun, and that he wants to phase them out eventually.

Having thought about it, I think that Sleep should prevent the target from dealing damage (100% damage reduction) but not from acting. It would then continue to be a very powerful effect without being an instakill on players. Also, as Donkatsu pointed out, the damage-before-breaking could actually stand to be increased.