B43 preview version: Sleeper Cell the level 45 Solipsist

[Parcae2]

Edge very kindly explained to me how to install a version of b43, so I tried out the nerfed Solipsist. It still needs some nerfing.

I got to level 45 in the ID. I died twice, but both times were due to trying out Overmind and having my body die while my mind was elsewhere. I stopped not because I was having difficulty but because I got distracted by the new Prodigies. My build focused on Distortion for damage. I did not invest any points in Dismissal, Antimagic Shield, or Forge Shield, since I was curious if these were responsible for Solipsists being overpowered.

Inner Demons could use a major nerf. As it stands, it's the best summon skill in the game, bar none. Bosses wind up completely surrounded with copies of themselves after a few turns, and keep making more if one dies. It's insane. That one skill could easily make a non-threat of anything that didn't have sky-high will saves.

Distortion still feels a lot like Gravity. That doesn't bother me too much, since I love Gravity. In isolation, the tree isn't super powerful - it has some excellent debuffs, but the damage is fairly anemic. In combination with the Solipsist's many other damage-avoidance strategies, though, it might be a bit much. One idea might be to make it a pure crowd control tree that doesn't deal damage.

The feedback shield doesn't scale too well, but 400 extra hitpoints at low levels is a lot. I would change how it scales or even just get rid of it altogether, since it's the class's least distinctive and original defensive talent but also the one I wound up using most.

I made the character with a view to focusing on sleep skills, as the name suggests, but I only slept opponents a couple of times at low levels and only to give myself time to escape. Solipsists just have too many other powerful talents to need to bother too much with sleep, which is a pity. One radical solution would be to make them incapable of dealing damage to opponents that are awake.

I had the pre-nerfed version of Nightmare, but never used it.

[edge2054]

If you had the pre-nerfed version of nightmare you had the pre-nerfed version of Inner Demons too

I also went through recently and reduced almost all Solipsist talents to range 7 so now they have to actually leverage things a bit more rather than just sleeping everything from 10 tiles away. Which will trickle down and make them play way differently over all.

There's been some concern brought up about Projection and I may still look at that, but otherwise I'm going to hold off on more balancing until after b43 releases so I can collect a larger pool of data on the changes so far.

Even if they are still a bit to powerful when b43 hits, I've already taken a pretty big axe to the class and I'm afraid if I keep hacking at them without more data I'll end up over nerfing and they won't be fun to play anymore.

[Parcae2]

Oh, so Inner Demons has been dialed back? Neat! How exactly did you change it?

[edge2054]

I nerfed the chance of it working by a good amount, so using it in conjunction with sleep will be a lot more necessary. Waking Nightmare got the same change (chance reduced).

It was also part of the general range reductions for the class. Distortion was pretty much the only tree unaffected by that change.