Gray's Illusions

[grayswandir]

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Alright, so this is two parts. A new zone, and a new class that you unlock by finishing said zone.
I'm not entirely sure how balanced either one is at the moment (looking for feedback ). The zone should definitely be doable if you're cautious. I'm not really sure how strong the class is late game.

You should get an in-game item that explains some things.

Illusory Wood
You'll find this place a couple spaces east of Zigur. Minimum suggested level is 18.
Complete the quest inside and you'll unlock the Trickster class. There's currently no in-game reward for finishing this, I'm open to suggestions.

Trickster
A psionic rogue.
- Use illusory walls and decoys to distract your enemies.
- A wide variety of debuffs that confuse and distract your foes.
- Turn enemies' confusion into your own power.
- Convince your enemies that they don't see you, even as you stand in plain sight.
- Stabbing things.
The basic idea is that you throw out illusions everywhere to cover you while you stab things to death.

Again, not sure on balance, need feedback, suggestions, etc.

[erinye2000]

Hi!

Did the escort, killed the bad trickster!!! Bad trickster, bad!!! But then got a lua error and nothing got unlocked. So, no testing for me!!! Or should I had not killed it?

I dont think I can get the lua error as I closed the game (and anyway not exactly sure how to post those). The bits about flase unlock I love tho. And i not feel cheap about it anyway, since I succeeded.

[grayswandir]

Bleh. Could I get the lua error?

Edit: To 'cheat' the unlock, just add to your allow_build.profile file in your saves directory somewhere.

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grayswandir_trickster = true

[grayswandir]

Alright, I fixed a few minor bugs, and I think I fixed the problem with the achievement.

[Teyar]

Well, their early is rough, I can say that. It REALLY feels like it wants to be a Mindstar class rather than Daggers. Stat-spreading, I guess? They need a lot of stats to be viable, at least. Then again, maybe I shouldnt make my experimental runs with Gnomes....

[astreoth]

gnomes probably didn't help but I agree that the class feels like it should be a mindstar class cause of the wide stat spread and it seems like the extra mindpower from mindstars would probably do the class way more good than daggers would since they need the stats for mindstars anyway, don't have any kind of defense booster one would normally see on a defense based class, could ignore dex entirely and just use items to get the stats for dex talents, ignore accuracy.

yeah listing it out I don't see any reason not to use mindstars on tricksters also the class feels a bit incomplete whats there looks good but it doesn't feel like your doing all you can with illusions what about imposing your own image onto a foe to make other enemies think its you and attack it, or cloaking your self in an illusion to blend among your foes, or trick them into thinking your some kind of unstoppable monster when your really just hiding inside an illusion of one, trapping foes in an illusion world, imposing your own pain (or just plain old pain) on their minds, projecting an illusion world onto the surrounding terrain to make them think their drowning or burning or something.

I realize some of these may be difficult to code or conflict with your vision for the class but they are only suggestions.

[marshmallowpeep]

The thing about mindstars is that their mastery is nature based and this is not a wilder class. They're almost certainly a better option than daggers, yeah, but you can get them trained in Zigur and daggers are perfectly functional. That said, a psionic version of psiblades would be really cool. I've always been slightly confused and disappointed by psiblades being a wilder thing.

For me, this class has a much easier start than standard rogue. Their control is effective, and they get pretty good health regeneration. I rely more on the daze/illusion damage talent than stabbing things with daggers at the beginning.

[grayswandir]

Ignoring willpower at the start seems to work for me. My general strategy at the moment is to build dex/cun as needed to get the next skill, up until around I get dagger mastery to 4, and then I start building willpower as well. Of course, I have no idea if this is the best strategy or not.

The thing about mindstars is that their mastery is nature based and this is not a wilder class. They're almost certainly a better option than daggers, yeah, but you can get them trained in Zigur and daggers are perfectly functional. That said, a psionic version of psiblades would be really cool. I've always been slightly confused and disappointed by psiblades being a wilder thing.

And yeah, that's exactly it. In the future I might add a psionic mindstar tree, as well as some sort of tree that makes daggers especially useful for them. (And as I mentioned elsewhere, a locked level 10 tree that needed 1 dagger and 1 mindstar would be pretty cool.)


I'm really interested in hearing about the actual level though, as that's the part of that's being graded in the contest. Any feedback on that would be appreciated as well.

In any case, thanks a lot for trying it out!

[marshmallowpeep]

I don't usually survive to level 18 because I like to play on roguelike even though I'm bad at this game

I've managed to get to the zone twice, both a couple betas ago. The fact that I was using an older version of the mod is one of the reasons I haven't really commented. The other is that I forgot to take notes while I was playing and I forget stuff.

The first time I went in at level 12. Did okay until the last zone, where I murdered the escort because I was relying on an unfriendly AoE that I couldn't get her to stay out of. Shortly after that I got myself killed. I don't even remember what class or what the talent was, because I'm silly, but I remember that she was getting hit by my main attack and I had no way to heal her.

The second time I went in at 18 with a Sun Paladin (who I had given the Aegis tree via Arcanum) and it was all in all really easy, I think largely because I was playing a pretty over powered character. I don't think I would have managed to keep the escort alive without Bathe in Light healing her. Also, for some reason my "auto-use when no enemies are visible" barrier wasn't working in the zone. When I noticed it, I tried just setting it to auto use when available, and it still wouldn't auto use. I got that lua error when I finished the quest, but this was before you made the patch that should fix it.

All in all, I like the zone a lot. Anti-perception is a really cool mechanic for enemies to have.

I'm not certain; is successfully escorting the person required for this mission? If not you can ignore most of my next paragraph.

I'm not entirely sold on having the quest rely on an escort. It's fine with just the random escorts in the main game because they don't feel very significant (they're not the whole point of the area they're in, they're bonus side missions on the way to the real point) and they generally appear early. If this was something that was part of the main game I would probably do the quest once to unlock the class then ignore the zone on most builds because of the high chance of being unable to deal with the escort.

[grayswandir]

I did beef up the escort considerably - they have more life than normal, and get a regeneration infusion as well. Also, the escort always starts with you between it and the rest of the level. That said, they might need to be even stronger. I'm also looking into making sure that they get the difficulty boost so they don't fall behind the other npcs on the higher difficulties.


Anyway, updates:

• Added an artifact that the boss has a decent chance of dropping.
• Added a new mechanic said artifact uses - read the intro note.
• You get a small reward for beating the boss (+25 see stealth/invis).
• Mind Sear on the wolves should have a longer cooldown.
• Some lore notes on levels 1-3.
• Some talent rebalancing.
• Boss is slightly harder. (I figured out how to get npcs to target that one talent correctly.)

[Teyar]

Yeah, a psionic variant on mindstars seems like something that really ought to be here by now.

[Doctornull]

Some feedback on the class:
- Trickery should be a Generic tree. Your Generic tree (Illusions) should be a class tree.
- The damage numbers start out really small on that first attack spell.
- Putting a 50 Psi sustain as the first talent tells me that you want to work with a more limited resource than Psi is usually. Have you considered using Hate instead of Psi? IMHO all of your stuff would go really nicely with Gloom and Gestures, instead of adding on Dex for daggers. Trickery could give Hate in small numbers (starting with 3 as you do but scaling slower), rewarding Gloom and Gestures attacks. It'd be a more interesting dynamic, I think.
- Antiperception would actually synergize better with Hate since -- unlike Stealth -- it never needs to cooldown.

[Thexare]

One day I will post something that isn't a bug report.

Unfortunately I accidentally lost my log for the first error by restarting the game too soon.

When I killed the boss of the Illusory Wood, I also died in the same turn. When I returned to the Eidolon Plane, I got the popup about sharpened senses; acknowledging it gave me an error. closing the error returned me to the dialog that caused the error. I was stuck in a loop and had to force quit through Task Manager. When I reloaded, I got a new error every single turn I was in the Illusory Wood, but only there; when I entered the Halloween zone, no errors followed.

The repeated error post-reload is copied below.

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Astar fail: destination unreachable
Lua Error: /data-grayswandir-illusion/autoloads/effects.lua:75: attempt to call method 'isTalentActive' (a nil value)
	At [C]:-1 isTalentActive
	At /data-grayswandir-illusion/autoloads/effects.lua:75 on_timeout
	At /engine/interface/ActorTemporaryEffects.lua:77 timedEffects
	At /mod/class/NPC.lua:297 timedEffects
	At /mod/addons/midnight/superload/mod/class/Actor.lua:207 actBase
	At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:116 tickLevel
	At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:62 tick
	At /engine/GameTurnBased.lua:46 tick
	At /mod/class/Game.lua:1181 

Edit: Upon further examination, I appear to have not unlocked the Trickster after that either. Hm.

[grayswandir]

Without the error message, I have no idea what went wrong in the first place. The second part should be fixed now.

[marshmallowpeep]

When I kill the boss of the zone, it pops up with "As he finally dies, you feel our senses sharpening." I selection the only option "a)..." and I get the attached lua error, and the dialogue doesn't close, so I'm stuck.