[1.2.3] Class: Battlemage

[sorro]

This is the thread for battlemage class addon.
Feedback and criticism are welcome.
I will keep fixing bugs and tweaking things "quite regularly"!

Currently reworking manacalypse and adding sounds and particles.

A battlemage is a magical warrior.
Battlemages have been taught in both magical and physical combat. They utilize their knowledge to empower themselves and their weapons.
They can sling bolts of elemental energy while engaging melee targets with furious rage raising their damage.
The most gifted battlemages can learn to become Ragnarök, bringer of the end times, or to unleash their mana as an arcane explosion all around them.
Their most important stats are Magic, Strength and Dexterity
Stat modifiers:
* +3 Strength, +3 Dexterity, +0 Constitution"
* +3 Magic, +0 Willpower, +0 Cunning"
Life per level: +2

Addon talent trees:

### Warlockery - Master of manapulations ###
This tree focuses on manipulating mana to deal with enemies both offensively and defensively.

Magical Cleave
A successful melee attack will allow a cone of arcane damage to be cast. Swish and a flick.

Mana Armor
This sustain is the most important talent for any young warlock to learn. While active part of the damage dealt to you will be instead dealt to your manapool. VERY warlocky indeed.

Ley Lines
The second sustain of the warlockery tree is focused on manageneration and movement speed. 'Nuff said.

Manacalypse
The ultimate technique every warlock wishes to master. Manacalypse the grand "AoE Bomb" will suck up most of your current mana, but will also deal damage based on how much mana was used to cast it. The radius will also scale with used mana: radius 3 with 100-199 mana etc. until reaching the maximum radius of 9 at 500+ mana. And boom goes the dynamite.

### Viking Heritage - Praise thy ancestors for they were wise.###
The viking heritage will guide your rage to aid your offensive capabilities. This is the first of the two Elemental damage dealing trees, elemental damage is split evenly between fire, cold and lightning.

Dual Wield
Well.. This let's you dual wield any one handed weapons. (This will get a buff of some sort in v2)

Elemental Roar
Let loose your vikingy rage in a roar of pure elemental power. Deals elemental damage around you. Damage scales with spellpower and radius with talent level.

Viking Temperament
Someone bumps into you in the market? Axe them in the head. Someone looks at you funny? Axe them in the head. Someone is about to kill an innocent? Axe them both in the head. When you take damage, this passive talent has a chance to unleash your viking temperament that increases your global speed and all damage you deal.

Ancestral Body Paint
Paint your body with runes and glyphs your elders taught you and you shall receive resistances to the elements of nature (fire, cold, lightning) and some spell save too!

### Magic Steel - Let the magic steel guide your hand to victory. ###
This tree focuses on dealing elemental damage. Pure offensive awesome.

Power of the Magic Steel
By focusing elemental fury into your weapons, all your attacks deal extra elemental damage! Also, learning to cook eggs on the blade of your axe is a nice bonus.

Elemental Vortex
When the Power of the Magic Steel just isn't enough! Imbue more elemental fury into your weapons to fire an elemental bolt at your target every time you attack, as an added bonus, the bolt will hit even if the attack does not!

Bolt of Khan
KHAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNN! Fire a bolt of elemental energy from your weapon! Deals weapon damage + bonus spell damage as elemental to a target. The bolt will turn into a beam at talent level 3.

Ragnarök
You are become Ragnarök, bringer of the end times. Summon your three most loyal and fearsome dragons to fight beside you, while unleashing elemental novas around you on every attack!

### Two Weapon Fighting - Double the weapons, double the action. ###
A strength based dual wield tree, for your pleasure! Focuses on bashing your opponents' skulls in.

Quick Strike
Make a quick attack with your off-hand weapon. Does not use a turn!

Double Smash
Deal a massive blow with both weapons!

Hidden Power
Increases critical power, for easier skullbashing!

Spin to Win
Attack all enemies around you while looking awesome! Has a chance to not trigger cooldown so you can just keep on spinning! AWESOME.

### Talent trees from the core game ###
Technique / Combat Techniques
Technique / Shield Offense
Technique / Dual Techniques
Technique / Combat Training
Technique / Field Control
Cunning / Survival
Spell / Stone Alchemy
Spell / Staff Combat
Spell / Conveyance

[0player]

The concept sounds very interesting, yet it would be nce to have some explanations in the first post, besides those provided on the talent page.
Or maybe even a talent preview.

[marshmallowpeep]

First thing I notice is that the standard is for classes to have a total stat bonus of +9, where this guy has a total stat bonus of +2. +0 life bonus on a melee also has me kind of wary. The damage goes to mana talent should help with that, except you're stretched so thin on stat points. You need dexterity, and magic to use your talents, your melee damage scales on strength, no one can ignore constitution, especially not a melee with +0 life rating, and you need to pump willpower to have enough mana to both use your talents and sustain having a big chunk of your damage taken converted to mana.

Because of what I said earlier about stats being stretched so thin, and because strength isn't actually required for any talents, you're probably smarter to just go dual daggers. Dual short staffs if you can find them. That doesn't seem terribly in theme.

It would be nice to have a clarification of what you mean by "elemental damage" in talent descriptions.

The elemental cone portion of magical cleave never seems to activate.

The damage on the bolts elemental vortex does is way, way too low to ever be useful. I'm also not sure what the practical difference is between firing bolts at your target and just having it add the damage to your weapons like Power of the Magic Steel does.

Ley Lines has no requirements other than the previous talents in the tree.

Bolt of Khan doesn't do any weapon damage, just the listed elemental damage.

Viking Temperament doesn't appear to scale with points. It would be nice if the chance to proc (It seems to be nearly 100%) and duration of the buff were listed on the talent. The talent says it gives 10% global speed, the buff on my buffbar says it gives 0%, and it actually gives 15.3%.

Raknarok doesn't go on cooldown when I use it, but seems otherwise functional. Kind of strange that it asks me to target it, even though I can only target myself.

As of when I unlocked manacalypse my Thundering Roar (with three points) did 186 in a radius 6 and manacalypse did 71 in a radius 5, if I had full mana of 262, which is a pretty decent amount of mana for level 12. I don't know what your forumla actually is, but it seems like I'd have to have a pretty crazy amount of mana for manacalypse to ever be useful.

On a related note to the last one, Thundering Roar feels a bit powerful. My primary strategy is waiting around for Thundering Roar to come off cooldown.

Other dual wield talents (dual weapon combat and corrupted strength) increase your offhand damage to X%. Your claims to increase it by X%. That's vastly different; it's 50% by default, if you increased it by 91% like the tooltip says it would be doing 141% of normal damage, rather substantially more than your main hand. Either way, it doesn't appear to be increasing my damage at all. My offhand does half what my mainhand does pretty consistently. You might also want to make it say that it allows you to put a one handed weapon in your offhand. "Allows you to dual wield" doesn't really mean anything, you can already dual wield.

[NemesisZeru]

Speaking of Ragnarok:

"You are become Ragnarok."

Just a little typo I noticed looking in the vault. Looks like a fun addon, though, so I'll probably try it out. :3

[sorro]

v1.1 released!

I hopefully fixed everything major marshmallowpeep noted (thanks a lot for doing that btw <3 all my love), also fixed some minor thingimajigs and changed warlockery tree to be more arcane-y.
Will do a talent preview tomorrow!

[themuffinthief]

I really like the concept of this class, so I looked at it some and tried it out. Incoming harsh feedback (AKA constructive criticism)

Possible bug - Mana armor converts damage to mana even if i have a shield rune on (unclear whether the damage to shield is reduced). Also, would be nice to see the amount of damage converted to mana in the combat log

On to the class:

Mobility: This class has next to no mobility. Rush as its sole movement ability is terrible. Even arcane blades have conveyance for phase door/teleport. This was a huge reason why sun paladin got reworked, as they suffered from the same problem, and yet were far tankier.
Survivalness: Mana Armor, while a very nice skill, is it's sole source of damage mitigation, putting it as the least survivable melee class in the game. (and only paradox mages have less overall)
Stats: The dex just for dual wield feels very awkward. I wanted to pump strength and magic, and hated needing to pump dex for flurry. It feels like you should either make more dex-based talents, or cut dex entirely (and maybe add in a custom dual-wield strength based tree).
Locked categories: This class only has 2 locked categories, divination and stone. Divination is barely worth a cat point, and stone feels wrong for the class.

All that said, I haven't been able to look past all of this long enough to get to level 12 for T4 talents (although ragnarok looks awesome), so maybe it gets better. Hopefully you can figure out a way to fix some of these issues.

[sorro]

Possible bug - Mana armor converts damage to mana even if i have a shield rune on (unclear whether the damage to shield is reduced). Also, would be nice to see the amount of damage converted to mana in the combat log

The shield should be prioritized over Mana Armor, I'll have to fix it! I will also add the combat log notification for damage absorbed.

Stats: The dex just for dual wield feels very awkward. I wanted to pump strength and magic, and hated needing to pump dex for flurry. It feels like you should either make more dex-based talents, or cut dex entirely (and maybe add in a custom dual-wield strength based tree).

I have already started thinking about how to fix this. Currently thinking of making str based dual-wield tree and changing Viking Heritage requirements and scaling to dex/str, depending on which one is higher.

Locked categories: This class only has 2 locked categories, divination and stone. Divination is barely worth a cat point, and stone feels wrong for the class.

I will be tweaking talent trees for the next update. How? No idea yet.

About mobility and survivability:
Maybe more mobility is needed, I feel like the class should be more mobile than it currently is (not). Survivability on the other hand is a tricky one; Mana Armor gives >50% damage reduction as long as you have mana to spare. But the problem quickly becomes the low mana pool and high costs. I shall ponder upon this and return soonish.

Thanks for the feedback!

[themuffinthief]

After thinking about it a little bit more, and remembering disruption shield for archmages, how about adding scaling on mana armor? More damage absorbed per point of mana scaling off of magic or strength? On my 2 trial runs of the class, I felt like even with only 1 point in mana armor it was instantly draining my mana on any big hit, and as its only defensive talent, it probably needs to be maxed. Maybe if mana armor could be sustained for longer before running out of mana, and if they had some extra mobility, they could get away with little or no extra defense.

Looking forward to newer versions, especially some more talent trees. I will revisit the class as you update. Keep up the good work!

[0player]

This really sounds like that one Dredmor build I'm trying to pull off all the time.

[sorro]

Quick update: I've been fixing and tweaking, but I had a family emergency and I haven't had time or energy to do much. Also it's Ludum Dare weekend now so the next update will be up next week!

[sorro]

Battlemage 1.2 out now! Get yours before they run out! Feedback and criticism always appreciated.

[grayswandir]

Ragnarok is really, really strong. You could probably remove the on-hit damage entirely and it'd still be useful. But when you use it with flurry, everything next to you dies.

Dual Techniques should probably be locked or removed entirely. If you keep it in, definitely get rid of some sources of on-hit damage, particularly ragnarok. You could just limit it to once per turn, for instance. (Or just nerf the damage a ton.)

Also, I'd lock conveyance. They have a lot of generic sinks already, and conveyance is useful enough to warrant a category point.

Does Manacalypse scale with talent level at all?

Body Paint looked pretty underwhelming. I might be underestimating it, though.


Overall pretty nice. I had a lot of fun until I got ragnarok and started killing everything in a turn.

[sorro]

11.9.2014 v.1.2.1 "The nerfhammering"

- Mana Armor
-- Tweaked to use less mana: scaling with magic, 1-5 points of damage will be absorbed by a single point of mana
-- Log now tells how much damage was absorbed and how much mana was lost (in glorious light blue!)

- Ragnarök:
-- onHit elemental nova now onActBase (once per game turn)
-- Elemental nova radius now scales with talent level
-- Elemental nova damage lowered
-- Mana cost added
-- Duration lowered
-- Amount of dragons summoned (1-3) now scales with talent level

- Viking temperament
-- Global speed bonus changed to attack speed

- Ancestral body paint:
-- Reworked to give different effects depending on the amount of talent points spent, every talent point spent will also lower the effect of the first three tiers:
--- 1TP: Spell save
--- 2TP: Fire, cold and lightning resistance
--- 3TP: All resistance
--- 4TP: Chance to absorb any spell
--- 5TP: Chance to reflect any spell

- Conveyance and Dual techniques now locked
- Various small fixes and tweaks