Spellsword (formerly Addon reworking Arcane Blade Class)

[Reidan]

very cool class, unfortunately this addon isn't compatible with infinite500 for some reason, the loading screen never finishes.

2 things - my weapon is currently tier 11 so most of the bonuses are around 22% however the character sheet shows the stats for most of these at tier 10. do ranks above 5/1.2 mastery in martial mastery do anything for weapon bond?

and around half of the rank 4/5 enemies i've killed in ID don't seem to have counted

[Hirumakai]

Hi siegfried2p. Welcome to the Tome forums.

after short playing, I found that spellsword combat's effect doesnt' work even skill tooltip shows that skill occure chance is 40 percent. but stance effects working correctly.
I'm playing v28. sorry for my bad english

Thank you for the bug report. As far as I can tell, Spellsword combat is triggering for my test characters.

Do you both have a stance sustained and Spellsword combat sustained at the same time?

Could you attach your te4_log.txt file (not a copy and paste into a post, but use the file attachment function of the forum) to a post in this thread?
Basically start the game, play through a level of a dungeon with your spellsword, with both a stance and spellsword combat sustained, then save and quit. Then attach the te4_log.txt file from the directory where the Tome executable file is to a post here. Thanks.

very cool class, unfortunately this addon isn't compatible with infinite500 for some reason, the loading screen never finishes.

2 things - my weapon is currently tier 11 so most of the bonuses are around 22% however the character sheet shows the stats for most of these at tier 10. do ranks above 5/1.2 mastery in martial mastery do anything for weapon bond?

and around half of the rank 4/5 enemies i've killed in ID don't seem to have counted

Talent points above 5 don't do anything for Weapon bond. It uses talent level raw, and has a hard cap on its effectiveness at 5 talent points. The other talents in the tree do benefit.

The +2 accuracy and +2 damage improvements occur every time you cross the kill threshold. The increasing the material tier effects ("base" damage, base APR/base critical chance) occur each time you kill a rank 3 or higher enemy.

There's a bug where you have to unequip and requip the weapon to get the "wielder" effects to refresh (or generally do a level up or something like that). I need to fix it so it recalculates character status when the weapon improves. For the time being, you'll probably need to unquip and re-equip after each tier 4+ kill to get the latest benefits. It will be fixed in the next release.

Currently, only if the weapon does the killing damage does the kill count. I'm playing around with the idea of an on-hit effect of the weapons putting an "other" debuff on the target for 1 or 2 turns, such that if the target dies while the debuff is on them, the kill counts for the weapon. That way I can avoid having players play sub-optimally in order to ensure the weapon does the killing damage, and simply reward hitting stuff. I hope to have this in the next release. This will also make it fairer for dual-wielding weapons, as the offhand tended to get more kills. It will also allow shields to better keep up.

As for the Infinite500 incompatibility, I need to go through my code and figure out what hooks I need to ask Darkgod for, so I can superload more of the ocde and make it compatible with more addons. Its on my to do list, but probably not for the next release. In any case, additional hooks would need to wait for the next version release of Tome.

[Kalarion]

Hiru,

I think there's a bug with artifact weapon creation through Weapon Bond. Or maybe it's intended idk.

I use a plain steel waraxe for my artifact weapon. I killed the Minotaur, Wrathroot and the Sandworm Queen with no problems. Then I decided to stow the axe until I fought another boss and switch the weapon back in when I did.

Problem is I've killed 6 rank 4+ mobs now and (1) get no update on the item description and (2) get no new bonuses.

Is this intentional to keep people from doing what I am? Or is it a bug? I would have just written it off as the mainhand weapon not being counted for the kill (the dw "bug" you talk about above) but it's happened SIX TIMES and worked fine before I switched it to my inventory.

If it's intentional I'll just wait for a stralite/voratun weapon to drop and start over; you might consider adding that to your patch notes so people don't "waste" unique/boss kills in the future though.

[siegfried2p]

here is my log
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vkiz6kd5jwd54my/te4_log.txt

[Reidan]

ah ok I see, also great job on making an actual hybrid melee based on and able to use a lot of skills.

one last question, is there a hard cap on weapon bond tier?

[Hirumakai]

here is my log
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vkiz6kd5jwd54my/te4_log.txt

Hi siegfried2p,

It looks like you are running the Barbarian addon with the Spellsword addon. My guess is its due to my poor implimentation of superloading the combat functions rather than using hooks. Unfortunately, both the Barbarian and Spellsword classes superload Combat.lua and the attackTargetWith function, which is where the Spellsword combat trigger occurs. You can play them one at a time, just not both at the same time.

For the moment, when you start TOME, there's an "Addon" option on the first screen. Select that option, then on the right side of the screen that pops up, set which ever addon you don't want to use to "Manual:Disabled" (it will be red).

This way you can easily switch between characters you might want to play.

Long term, I am planning on cleaning up the code so its a bit more addon friendly, but that will probably come after I finish balance and current bug passes.

Hiru,

I think there's a bug with artifact weapon creation through Weapon Bond. Or maybe it's intended idk.

I use a plain steel waraxe for my artifact weapon. I killed the Minotaur, Wrathroot and the Sandworm Queen with no problems. Then I decided to stow the axe until I fought another boss and switch the weapon back in when I did.

Problem is I've killed 6 rank 4+ mobs now and (1) get no update on the item description and (2) get no new bonuses.

Is this intentional to keep people from doing what I am? Or is it a bug? I would have just written it off as the mainhand weapon not being counted for the kill (the dw "bug" you talk about above) but it's happened SIX TIMES and worked fine before I switched it to my inventory.

If it's intentional I'll just wait for a stralite/voratun weapon to drop and start over; you might consider adding that to your patch notes so people don't "waste" unique/boss kills in the future though.

Thanks for the bug report. That is definitely a bug and unintended behavior. I'll try replicating that situation and see if I can fix it. If the weapon is used to deal the killing blow, then it should get the bonuses. I'm trying to get a bug patch out today or tomorrow. Hopefully its not too hard to spot.

ah ok I see, also great job on making an actual hybrid melee based on and able to use a lot of skills.

one last question, is there a hard cap on weapon bond tier?

Thank you. There is no hard cap, but there is effectively soft capped.

At 5/5 points, the tiers go like:
1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096,8192,16384,32768,65536, etc.

These are culmulative, so to reach tier 3 from tier 0 takes 1 + 2 + 4 = 7 kills. I'm assuming an effective cap is going to be in the tier 11-13 range for a weapon used since level 10, based on the number of enemies available in game. This was intentional to make this be on par with, but slightly stronger than a reshape weapon effect. A late game weapon that just sees High peak will probably hit tier 7-8 or so.

You might hit tier 14 if you use the farportal ALOT. Assuming you killed 1 enemy a second with the weapon, straight for a little more than 12 days, you could reach tier 20.

I still need to do a few runs with pre-enchanted weapons and see if the bonuses feel right compared to Reshape weapon. Is 5/5 generic points worth +16 base damage (plus moving its base damage to max for tier 5) and +16 accuracy on a tier 5 weapon? Compared to weapon mastery and combat accuracy?

Weapon mastery 2.5/5 would provide something like 27 attack power and 33% damage increase. Combat accuracy 2.5/5 would provide 27 accuracy. On an average rolled greatsword, its damage is 62 base, but best roll is 66. So 62->62+4+16 = 82. 82/62 *100 = 132%. So I may need to tweak the values for pre-enchanted weapons.

[daftigod]

Wonderful job Hiru

[Hirumakai]

I finally had some time to do a full playtest run with a v28 Spellsword (its useful to play the class you're trying to balance).

http://te4.org/characters/894/tome/0494 ... a9b1116a9b

The character was saved/restored on several occasions, partly to test bugs, undo effects (like the permanent accuracy reduction), or recover after a corrupted save. Although the character never actually died. It in fact did the Vor room of death 3 out of 3 times without really droppping below 900 hit points or so.

At some point after coming back from the East and doing the backup guardians, the character became a steamroller. I almost never used Irresistable Sun, as there never really was a need. Most difficult parts were mid-game, in the 24-30 range. Died once to the Master and nearly died to the Grand Corruptor.

Had a very interesting discussion on IRC with Torokasi, Supermini, FlarePusher, PureQuestion, SageAcrin and some others regarding the Weapon Bond "create your own artifact" artifact.

For reference, at the end of the game (about half way through the 4 Prides) it had the following stats:
120% str modifier, 2-handed, 1.6 damage range for being a Greatsword
88 base damage
+22 accuracy
+22 APR
+22% crit
78% attack speed
+44 on hit physical damage
+11 Str/+12 Dex/+12 Mag/+2 Wil/ +2 Cun/ +2 Con
44% physical resistance penetration
22% critical damage multiplier
22% global speed

It was effectively an "improvement tier" 11, with over 32 boss kills (of which you can see nicely listed in the sword description )

Talking it over some suggestions came up including having the skill simply spawn a weapon or weapon set (sword and shield, sword/dagger, dagger/dagger sort of thing), which naturally levels as you do, and has abilities proportional to the number of talent points spent on the skill.

Another concept was to allow you to convert a pre-existing enchanted weapon (ego, greater ego, randart or artifact) and turn it into a personalized weapon. Most of the stats get changed to the Weapon bond artifact, but it could utilize some theme information from the initial weapon. Convert a fire weapon and it does fire penetration and bonus fire damage. That sort of stuff. It would then let you keep the kill count from the enchanted weapon for the personalized artifact, allowing you to swap weapons perhaps once or twice a game.

Given how the bonus tiers scale with kills at 5/5, even at the half way point around level 25-30, you'll still most likely reach tier 10, compared to tier 11. Swapping at level 40 or so probably results in in tier 9, perhaps a ~10% drop in effectiveness, since base damage is such a big factor in effectiveness.

As for the general types of buffs, I'm planning on removing the global speed buff, toning down the damage penetration and stats. Attack speed will probably be tweaked as well. I should aim to be on a power level with a 4 ego randart near end game plus some padding for the fact that it costs 5/5 generic points to get a high tier one.

Other things that need to be changed:

1) Drop Wind Storm from scaling of "self:combatTalentSpellDamage(t,5,45)/100"0 to 5,20. At end game it was providing -48% global speed penalties to all enemies in 3 squares if they didn't save each round. This change should make it more like -21% at the very end game. This may have been why I didn't notice much of a bump from the +22% global speed on the weapon.

2) Arcane Armor was providing 54 armor due to my 36 base armor randart massive armor. I'm thinking I need to put a hard cap on the bonus at some lower, more reasonable value, like 24. With the extra category point in Magical Combat, Earth stance was providing 38 armor and 10% resist all. That combined for about 92 armor just from skills, roughly half of the characters total 179.4 when in Earth stance. Earth stance will probably have to be revised down again, closer to 24 armor at end game. Perhaps with a little bit higher starting value. Combined should provide about 48 extra armor late game, roughly the amount base Shield wall provides late game. Bringing that particular build's armor down from 180 to 145. Even without those effects, the character had roughly 90 armor, and with some equipment swaps, nearly 100 base.

Earthen Shield and Aura of Fire felt about right through the game. Early game Aura of Fire was in the 20% range, mid game 33-ish, late game 40-50, partly due to an extra category point in fire. The new Master Parry and Master Deflection felt useful, but didn't last long enough to grant one complete immunity. Also I didn't get my accuracy high enough to really stop truly high spell power enemy spells.

I didn't really use Mark of Fire that much, although at level 50, its 50 mana cost was eating about 1/6th or a little less of my mana bar to cast (with no fatigue).

[MisiuPysiu]

Hmm,

Strange. I tried to run the class on the latest svn and arcane combat didn´t trigger at all, although i had a 45% chance of triggering the effect on every attack.

On the last version of the addon, I played (v26 I guess) arcane combat triggers only if the target is not death after the initial weapon hit. Also when dual-wielding, if the hit from the main hand kills the mob, the offhand cant trigger AC thus reducing the overall chance of triggering the spell effect. Its quite important as the effect affects multiple mobs, not only the one I´m fighting.

[Hirumakai]

Hmm,

Strange. I tried to run the class on the latest svn and arcane combat didn´t trigger at all, although i had a 45% chance of triggering the effect on every attack.

On the last version of the addon, I played (v26 I guess) arcane combat triggers only if the target is not death after the initial weapon hit. Also when dual-wielding, if the hit from the main hand kills the mob, the offhand cant trigger AC thus reducing the overall chance of triggering the spell effect. Its quite important as the effect affects multiple mobs, not only the one I´m fighting.

Hi,

Are you running any other addons which might be overriding the Combat.lua file, and specifically the attackTargetWith function?

You do make some valid points. I can try switching back to Mainhand only triggering (although it is uglier to code ). I can remove the if not target.dead clause as well, although it'll make the class a bit more mana intensive. Sometimes you do want it to trigger after dead and sometimes you don't. Shrug, I suppose it can be toggled on and off without energy cost, so maybe thats fine.

[MisiuPysiu]

Hmm,

I removed all other addons and used the teaa addon file (normally i unzip the teaa files into separate directories). It seem to work now again.
Ok testing time

The idea of a toggle when to trigger AC is a good idea I guess. With autoexplore I start moving only with full hp and mana, so the additional mana usage after the last mob is killed is not an issue I guess.

Cheers.

[Reidan]

I like the ego idea and agree with windstorm and the weapon being a bit too strong

[Kalarion]

A couple things.

(1) I may have misunderstood how artifact creation works with Weapon Bond when I was complaining about it earlier. I was under the impression Rank 4 mobs are tagged as "Unique", rank 5 was "Boss" and rank 6 was "Elite Boss". Is that incorrect? If so my complaints are partially unjustified, I was trying to get credit for Unique kills. At any rate I still have a hard time, especially at very high levels, getting credit for boss+ kills, even after turning off spellsword combat. What else do I need to do to ensure at least one of my weapons gets kill credit?

(2) Skill suggestions: Earthen Shield is just about right. I was initially upset about the shield not regenerating in combat but I think it tweaked it just enough to keep it from being op. I do suggest simply letting the skill stay up when it hits zero and just not allowing it to regen or absorb until it starts regenerating hps again (IE once you aren't in combat). Having it drop into CD makes it a better then even chance I will completely forget about it and not turn it back on for several fights.
Aura of Fire is... the tweak had the right intentions but it feels pretty weak right now for a third tier skill. I understand not making it a guaranteed removal given the rest of the spellsword kit but I was only able to get it to 53% by the end of the game. What about increasing the risk AND the reward? Change the percent remove scaling to increase it by about 50% (IE by endgame most would be at ~70-80% chance to remove effects) and change the scaling of the HP% cost from 7% -> 3% to 9% -> 5%. Something along those lines.
Weapon Bond is, imo, the only skill in the martial mastery lines worth getting. You might consider buffing all of the skills after Weapon Bond, or moving Weapon Bond to the final tier for mastery. And still buffing the other skills ;p On that note I actually LIKED the idea of different stances. What I didn't like about them was their penalties increasing with level along with bonuses. Consider bringing them back in to replace one of the other mastery skills and changing the penalty scaling from 5>10>15>20>25 to 20>17.5>15>12.5>10, or something along those lines. Where you still have a penalty but it gets more manageable with points invested, rather than less.

[Hirumakai]

A couple things.

(1) I may have misunderstood how artifact creation works with Weapon Bond when I was complaining about it earlier.

Rank 4 and Rank 5 are dungeon end bosses. Enemies like Prox, The Shade, The Master, those sort of characters. As far as I know, random rares and the like should not qualify as Rank 4 and Rank 5.

(2) Skill suggestions: Earthen Shield is just about right. I was initially upset about the shield not regenerating in combat but I think it tweaked it just enough to keep it from being op. I do suggest simply letting the skill stay up when it hits zero and just not allowing it to regen or absorb until it starts regenerating hps again (IE once you aren't in combat). Having it drop into CD makes it a better then even chance I will completely forget about it and not turn it back on for several fights.

Thats actually an interesting suggestion. You can replicate the current effect with such a change, since you can always just turn it off when its sitting at zero, then start it back up at full after the 25 turn cooldown. It certainly feels like a quality of life improvement, but it is also a small buff in power. I'll play around with it and see how it works in the next release. May not keep it, but certainly can try it out.

Aura of Fire is... the tweak had the right intentions but it feels pretty weak right now for a third tier skill. I understand not making it a guaranteed removal given the rest of the spellsword kit but I was only able to get it to 53% by the end of the game. What about increasing the risk AND the reward? Change the percent remove scaling to increase it by about 50% (IE by endgame most would be at ~70-80% chance to remove effects) and change the scaling of the HP% cost from 7% -> 3% to 9% -> 5%. Something along those lines.

I'd be willing to change the scaling from being based off spellpower to being purely based off talent points. That would allow you to have 50% or 65% early and late game. Thats a similar way the Archmage wildfire tree talent works. I don't know, is aiming for 75% the right number. Everyone agrees that 1 per turn was too much. Is 3 every 4 turns too much? The current setup was aiming for 1 every 2 turns late game, and about 1 every 4 turns early game.

But perhaps 1 every 4 isn't really much of an effect, since early game effects don't last all that long.

Weapon Bond is, imo, the only skill in the martial mastery lines worth getting. You might consider buffing all of the skills after Weapon Bond, or moving Weapon Bond to the final tier for mastery. And still buffing the other skills ;p On that note I actually LIKED the idea of different stances. What I didn't like about them was their penalties increasing with level along with bonuses. Consider bringing them back in to replace one of the other mastery skills and changing the penalty scaling from 5>10>15>20>25 to 20>17.5>15>12.5>10, or something along those lines. Where you still have a penalty but it gets more manageable with points invested, rather than less.

Weapon Bond is getting heavily reworked in the next release. Its getting toned down to be approximately equal to 4 Egos (like a randart), plus the Accuracy and Damage bonuses (like reshape). However it now creates artifacts out of both white items as well as ego (but not rares or already existing artifacts). The artifacts it was creating were too strong. However, I'm come up with a solution for counting enemy kills. Each time you hit the enemy, it will put a 2 turn mark on the target. If it dies while the mark is on it, all your currently wielded weapons (or shield) will count the kill. So it should be far more robust when actually taking enemies down with melee.

People were complaining about Master Deflection back when it was a sustain, for mitigating far too much damage. I'm not sure I'm ready to buff it back up again. On my playthrough, it felt about right.

I could imagine perhaps adding another resistance/immunity to Combat Grip, like pinning resistance. I'm hesitant to raise the disarm % chance further. It will generally make the opponent off balance for another -15% global speed penalty along with the disarm (assuming you have high accuracy).

I could up the percentages on Master Parry. And maybe up the cooldown to 12 turns. 2 turns up, 10 turns down at 100% evasion late game (perhaps in the 70-ish accuracy range) seems pretty good for a melee class, with old style riposte effects for those 2 turns.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Frumple]

Out of curiosity, any idea if the upcoming weapon bond will play nicely with psi-weld weapons? I wouldn't exactly count it as something you'd be paying attention to, but a recent muckabout noticed that spellswords seem to play fairly nicely with adventurers (water strike, ferex, used all three weapons when tri-wielding, iirc, and having both arcane combat and the spellsword equivalent running didn't make things explode) and I was half-way wondering if you were doing that intentionally (that is, actually coding things so adventurers using spellsword talents wouldn't bug out) or not.

If you are, that'd be kinda' awesome. Tri-weld spellsword is an interesting experience, heeheeehee.