ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Corruptors are one of the straightest classes to play, but that obscures the actual variety in their talents. Bone shield is regarded as so good that corruptors must take it. Given that reavers are generally better suited for major diseasing anyway, this further discourages use of the DoT options available to the class in order to emphasize instant damage, which is very blight-heavy but offset fairly well by vimsense and helps complement the relatively hard-to-regenerate kill-based resource that is Vim. It doesn't help, either, that many of the other damaging spells a corrupter might want to take are fairly shitty except for being off-damage type, which is not so good anyway.

So corrosive worm, poison storm, and darkfire are all damage-based examples of spells that could use buffing to make corruptors think twice before ignoring them to focus on blood, vim, and bone. One good way to fit into the class is to give a more potent side effect, since corruptors basically gain advantage by debuffing. Corrosive worm should maybe reduce blight resistance as it works its magic, which helps to compensate for the fact that it can be dispelled with a wild infusion anyway. Poison storm might increase your healmod as you stand in it. Either of these two talents could instead have bonus damage based on enemy vim resistance. Darkfire, on the other hand, might have a chance to blind and a chance to remove a beneficial effect on all targets. I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas, but 'twould be good to think of them to make the talents at least marginally useful when you have to take them at 1 point, and reasonably rewarding when you level them compared with the opportunity cost of not leveling the talents that are currently considered the standard offensive tools of the class.

parcel wrote:...Make the talents at least marginally useful when you have to take them at 1 point, and reasonably rewarding when you level them compared with the opportunity cost of not leveling the talents that are currently considered the standard offensive tools of the class.

I couldn't agree more. I don't like having to waste talent points, and just blasting with direct-damage attacks would probably get boring after a while.

I wouldn't mind seeing more variety for Corruptor talents in general. Bone should be made a viable nuking tree, and the Shadowflame/Acid section of their toolkit should be improved. Simply buffing those 3 talents would be a good start, but I wouldn't mind seeing a dedicated Shadowflame and Acid damage tree.

I'm content making bone a bit crappy in order to encourage other choices for unlocks, though from the reaver's point of view bone spear and bone nova should scale a bit better with increasing talent level. A dedicated acid tree would be cool, but as I said, it's probably better to fix existing talent variety before adding more potentially useless chaff. We should at least be cautious.

Shadowflame is not that bad of a tree, really. Wraithform might deserve a further buff or should maybe just be made an instant effect, but it's reasonably useful at one point as-is so is close to balanced. Darkfire is not, as I said. Bloodcasting and Absorb Life are other talents that could stand to get a secondary effect, especially Absorb Life since the vim regeneration mechanic is a bit clunky and not worth deep investment. If it also gave minor vampirism on your vim regains and gave bonus damage against undead, for instance, then it would be cooler.

While Bone's damage is pretty anemic, my problem with it is more that it's really dull. Shield/Grasp are good, but 'standard beam' and 'standard pbaoe' are kinda boring when compared to alot of interesting spells.

Shadowflame is a good tree except for Darkfire, which is why it confuses me a little. Except for Darkfire they're all utility talents of a sort, then we have this underwhelming nuke. It might be better to just replace it entirely with some sort of utility, and eventually create a Darkfire nuking tree. I heard that a 'Doombringer' class is in the works, a demon themed melee class, so maybe that'll offer a tree to slot Darkfire into.

But yes, as for the spell itself, I'd buff the damage and make it heal demons for a % of damage dealt. Then with Flame sustained it becomes a combo heal+nuke, and we already have that mechanic in place with Demonfire damage type so it seems quite elegant. Perhaps abit too close to Blood Grasp though.

As for Sanguisuge, what about merging it with Torment? I've always thought Torment is a rather underwhelming tree but still required due to the max Vim talent, while Sanguisuge is also lacking. So something like this:

Drain - Unchanged
Bloodcasting - Also increases maximum Vim passively, like Wilful Tormentor
Overkill - In addition to the splash damage, increases Vim gain from kill. Absorb Life was really awkward to use, so a straight up buff would be better I think.
Life Tap - Also provides the cooldown reduction passive from Blood Vengeance.

This'd allow you to make some improves to Hexes/Curses to encourage a deeper investment into it, now that they have less generics. Perhaps you could even move Sanguisuge to generic, as except for Drain everything is a support/utility skill.

Good ideas.

[Edit]

Thinking about your proposal further, how about these additions:

1. Give the neglected bone talents a side effect that is good on reavers but meh on corruptors. BS can give a temporary reduction to armor hardiness, BN can give a temporary bonus to armor, and while we are at it, Bone Grab can be buffed in damage and pin duration, but have a longer cooldown which reduces with talent level.

2. Healing darkfire is a nice consistent idea, and I'm not too afraid of giving corruptors more vampiric effects. This fits with the volatile nature of the class and helps encourage use of a bloodcasting effect to work with limited Vim. To make it more interesting, though, and more synergistic with the rest of the tree, how about a vim penalty for each demon healed by the nuke, which is negated if you are in wraithform?

3. Curses and Hexes could definitely use improvement. Here's one proprosal that appeals to me:

• a. Give burning hex a reduction in your cooldowns each time the target gets burned.
  b. At levels 3+ the empathic hex effect also causes the target weep a radius 1 ball of corrupted blood when they damage you. The blood hurts others but heals you.
  c. Domination hex randomly throws some of your other hexes at the target if it resists domination. The number of hexes thrown increases with talent level, and at higher talent levels fewer of the thrown hexes are forced into cooldown.
  d. All curses have the property that if the victim dies, a recast is attempted on a random target in range that doesn't have the curse. The range increases with talent level. 'Curse of Defenselessness' is applied to new targets first, for reasons that you'll see below.
  e. If an action that dispels Curse of Death would leave a hex active on the target, a random hex is dispeled instead. At level 3 curse of death is split into two magical effects, one for the reduced healing and one for the damage. At level 5, if the reduced healing effect is dispelled, one of your other magical corrupted maluses on the victim (diseases, hexes, curses, corrosive worm) is randomly dispelled instead. The prevention of all healing might be toned back a tad so that it is instead a severe reduction in healing effectiveness (so that you get, say, only 10% of the healing that you would without the curse in place). Make duration of the effects scale with talent level.
  f. Remove the defense penalty from 'Curse of Defenselessness' if thematically appropriate, because we are going to move it to tier 4 and re-skin it. The talent reduces saves, as before, but also has a bonus to spellpower explicitly for overcoming enemy spell save. Further, if you have other curse talents cooled down (and available vim) when you successfully apply the curse, it will automatically cast up to 1,1,2,2,3 of these other curses selected randomly on the target, ignoring saving throw. The bonus curses go on at least twice their normal cooldowns, though. A new name might be in order for such a talent, of course. Maybe 'Curse of the Forsaken'.

Some extra categories you want?
Most of this I've written up quickly so the flavour hasn't been elaborated on.

Rust - high level category
Vitriolic Spear: Active. A beam of acid that dissolves armour. Low cooldown, low vim cost, medium damage.
Rust Storm: Active. Your corrupting influence extends around you, causing metal to decay into flakes of rust. These flakes are caught up in a fell wind that blows them around you, blinding and poisoning your enemies.
Metal Fatigue: Active. Hurl a sphere of corrupting acid at the target location. It will explode on impact, releasing an acidic mist that eats away at enemies weapons. Disarms for a reasonable duration and does some acid damage.
Critical Failure: Active. Everything wears down and things break, when you want them to. Target enemy experiences a critical failure, making them unable to perform a critical for a medium duration. If they fail a spell save they are also stunned. If they are also a golem or construct, they take large blight damage.

Withering - high level category
Withering Touch: passive or sustain. Any creature that hits you or is hit, in melee has its stats reduced. eg. Turn back the clock.
Wraithform: Moved from Shadowflame.
Ashen Miasma: active. Creates a cloud of darkness that blinds and does darkness and blight damage over time.
Death and Decay: passive. Gain vim for each debuff on a creature when it dies. Increases you spellpower for the purpose of applying Spellshocked.

Alterations to existing categories:
Bone: Change the damage done by all Bone talents to physical+bleed, which automatically increases damage done by 50%. If Bone Grab is used on an adjacent enemy, push the creature away from you instead.
Blood/Sanguisuge: Move Bloodgrasp to Sanguisuge 2. Merge Bloodcasting and Life Tap and move to Blood 2. Add life steal to Absorb Life.
New talent for Sanguisuge 4, Blood Thrall: active. Link target creature to your life. Each turn you siphon off some of their life to refill your Vim. A fraction of all damage to take is redirected to your Blood Thrall.
Shadowflame: Increase damage on Darkfire, move to slot 3. New talent for Shadowflame 1, Black Flame: active. A beam of fire damage that inflicts darkness damage over time.

HousePet wrote:Death and Decay: passive. Gain vim for each debuff on a creature when it dies. Increases you spellpower for the purpose of applying Spellshocked.

I really, really like this one.

I kind of think that a Death and Decay effect should be intrinsic to vim users, though. You gain a fraction of the cost of non-hex corrupted maluses when the creature dies that scales with willpower. If you can't recoup disease losses easily then that's another stroke against the builds that are more focused on DoT.

Ideally, in terms of gameplay and theme, I'd like it if there were slightly more emphasis on willpower for corruptors. This would give them a third stat to level to keep them busy, and it would also encourage use of what I'd consider to be the 'master' races to play as corruptors. The Rhalore make good corruptors of the heavy-crit type, but there's a reason why you always see them unlocking a reaver tree to grab bone shield. This should not be the only way to play. Highers take enhanced damage, intrinsic regen to go with willpower, and a superior bloodcasting so they can do very vim-heavy stuff. Halflings resist stunning and can focus a bit more on those pesky unique singletons with militant mind to handle crowds, and can also leverage crit without going heavy on cunning (more willpower). Ghouls could rule supreme by taking the healing talents in shadowflame and things like the proposed addition of healmod to poison storm as a way to complement retching, while having good reserves for bloodcasting.

Actually, its Vim gained on kill proportional to willpower and the talent cost of the direct damage talent that killed them is 100% refunded.
But your point still stands. It does make it much easy to manage Vim with direct damage talents.

I think we cross-talked a bit. My statement "You get..." in the first paragraph of my prior post was grammatically a descriptive sentence, but the intent was to use this construction metaphorically. The intended meaning was thus prescriptive, so a clearer way to render the sentence would be "[In the better imagined reality that should be the actual reality] you [should/would] get..."

Sorry in any case. My construction would be hazy for a number of native speakers, and English has a lot more ambiguity (and more non-native speakers in the audience) when writing online.

The fundamental issue with non-blight damage talents on Corruptors is that without Temporal Form, there's no way for them to compare to their blight damage. A possible idea is to add a talent that causes your darkness, acid, and nature damage to be set to a minimum percentage of your blight damage (maybe about 60%). This way blight is still their core element but they can use other elements effectively without significantly weakening their blight attacks. Alternatively, Endless Woes could be changed so it doesn't totally suck...

While we're on the subject, Necromancer could use similar treatment to make Grave and Ice damage less terrible for them.

Rather than that, I think just having more support for those elements on Corruptor gear would be better. Greater staves already buff fire/dark/acid on top of blight, so we'd just need to make pure blight gear have some addition bonuses to those elements. I think a lot of the top Corruptor artifacts like Life Drinker already do, so maybe the problem is with the terrible damage ratios on things like Bone and Darkfire. And yes, Endless Woes needs improving.

To contribute to the brainstorming, here's my idea for a reworked Corruptor. These probably aren't very well thought out at the moment, so other people's ideas would be good.

Class Trees:
Vim
Bone
Plague
Blood
Corrosion (New)
Shadowflame
Demonology (New)

Generic:
Hexes
Curses
Sanguisuge
Blight

Vim - Soul Rot and Dark Portal remain. Vimsense and Leech are removed (see Blight). This leaves 2 free slots - rather than yet more Blight nukes, perhaps some debuffs or utility could go here. Can't think of anything at the moment though.

Bone - As part of my Necromancer addon, I actually reworked the Bone tree before scrapping it in favour of a new tree. Here's what I put in:
Bone Spear: Now fires a bolt that deals high physical damage on impact and then shatters, inflicting physical bleed damage in a cone behind the target. It gave a fun new aiming mode to an otherwise dull spell, and buffed the damage.
Bone Grasp: On use, you can now pick the new location of the target. So Reavers can drag them next to them, Corruptors can knockback. I also made it shove aside and Daze other targets for a bit more utility. Was thinking about also letting it to be self targetable, as a pseudo-teleport.
Bone Nova: I was thinking increase damage based on distance (so a buff for Reavers) and inflict the Impaled debuff, causing targets to take bleeding damage over time that stacks each time they move. Does hilarious things when you then toss a mob away with Bone Grasp and inflict enormous stacks, or just fire it off and let them run to you.

Plague and Blood - Unchanged, these are good trees. But I agree with the earlier suggestion to have bonus Vim for debuffs on death as a passive. Maybe just make it baseline.

Corrosion - Acid/Poison themed tree. Less direct damage, more support.
Seeping Decay: Wraithform, but acid themed. In addition to the usual effects, also leave behind pools of spreading acid on move (similar to Mucus) and reflect Disarming Acid damage on being hit in melee. Helps Corruptors survive with bone shield down.
Toxic Blight: Sustain that lets your spells have a chance to inflict random poisons, and also lets Nature damage you deal scale with your Blight/Acid damage bonus, as your Nature damage for poisons will be nonexistant.
Corrosive Worm: Moved from Blight. Increase the damage, shorten the duration and cooldown, let it explode regardless of whether the target dies or not, and have it reduce Acid resistance while active.
Poison Storm: Moved from Blight. Buff the damage, radius, cooldown, everything. Also have it drain life on dealing damage, and each time it deals damage apply a stacking healmod buff to you.

Shadowflame - Locked tree focusing on Shadow and Fire damage. This would have Darkfire in it, and then some other talents on the same theme. Can't come up with any compelling ideas currently though. Perhaps a passive or sustain allowing your Shadowflame to harm hostile demons, reduce Fire/Dark resistance. Maybe Breath of Urh'rok that the unique demon general uses, but with something to make it fancier.

Demonology - Has Flame of Urh'rok and Fearscape in it. A more utility based tree. As for the other 2 talents, maybe these?
Possess a target with a demon that causes it to take damage over time and randomly attack friends instead. Maybe have them also be considered a demon, and give a passive that increases your damage dealt and resistance to demons, either on this or another Demonology talent?
Bind a target demon, turning it into a temporary pet like Domination Hex. Maybe spice it up a little by greatly increasing the offence and decreasing the defence of the pet. Against elite/demons, have it inflict some sort of painful debuff instead. You could then remove Domination Hex and give Hexes something else.

Hexes - Aside from the above comment, no idea really. Pacification Hex is quite good, Burning Hex has niche uses, Empathic is bad. I think this tree could do with some assistance if only for flavour. Parcel's suggestions are good.

Curses - In general, I'd buff the ratios on all of these. As they're single target and take a turn to use when you could just be exploding stuff with blight, they should have a serious impact.
Curse of Vulnerability - Curses the target, reducing all resistances, armor and defence. Merged this and Defencelessness as neither were massive on their own.
Curse of Impotence - Curses the target, reducing all damage dealt and chance to critically strike. May as well give it some more flavour.
Curse of Death - Curses the target, dealing Darkness damage over time and reducing healing factor. Seeing as Blood Lock is removed, this helps as anti-healing.
Amplify Curse - Amplifies your next curse, causing it to apply in a X radius ball and triggering additional effects. Vulnerability would dispel blocks/shields and prevent their reapplication, Impotence would silence/disarm briefly, Death would cause healing to instead damage the target.

Sanguisuge - As per the earlier comments I made, merged with Torment.

Blight - Dark Ritual and Corrupted Negation are unchanged. I'd give this to Reaver as a tree as well, due to Vimsense and Leech being moved here. This solidifies the tree in a support role, full of talents to enhance your damage and negate your foe's offence and defence. As Leech would now be a T4 talent, I'd significantly buff it. Maybe allow your attacks to also siphon off health/vim.

And as part of the necro addon bpat, I've made Grave and cold damage in general way better for Necro. I'm hoping to have a working version sometime next week if I have time.

They only have one talent that synergises blight damage. So I don't see why you could equip around a different element.

HousePet wrote:They only have one talent that synergises blight damage. So I don't see why you could equip around a different element.

I'm guessing you meant to type "couldn't equip around a different element." The issue is there is no way Corruptor's other non-blight damage can be buffed to be comparable to the likes of the Plague, Blood, or Vim categories without massively buffing the class as a whole (which is bad because they are already top-tier and the new damage would have to be absolutely ridiculous to compare to Plague, the strongest ranged damage category for any class) or massively nerfing blight damage (which is neither fun nor fitting since Corruptor's are meant to be powerful blight mages). I'd rather have a new Defiler class added to focus on other damage types like acid than have those damage types added to Corruptor since there isn't really any way to make them viable without messing up other aspects of the class.