The Emblazoned - Fire/Darkness and More

[astralInferno]

This addon adds, currently, five trees, and a class for Ashes users. It can be found here.

Corruption/Candle is granted to the Reaver, the Corruptor, and the Emblazoned.
Corruption/Blaze is granted to the Reaver and the Emblazoned.

Corruption/Night is granted to the Corruptor and the Emblazoned.
Corruption/Midnight is granted only to the Emblazoned.

Corruption/Herald is a generic tree granted to the Reaver, Corruptor, Emblazoned, Doombringer and the Demonologist.

The Emblazoned is a new class that has access to the five new trees, as well as Bone, Blight, Shadowflame, Spellblaze, Fearfire, Doom Covenant, Survival, Hexes, Curses and Torment. As it uses and is built around several Ashes trees, it is only available to Ashes users. It also shares the Ashes start.

The demonfire damage type, used by the Darkfire talent and several Ashes talents, is now half-fire half-darkness.

Corruption/Candle
Become a flickering flame that burns your foes down.

Light the Wick
Transforms the enemy into a candle, burning down. They suffer %d fire damage over five turns. If they die during this time, they explode, dealing %d damage again to creatures within a radius of two.
Dancing Flame
Light your body with flickering, demonic flames that launch %d random slow-moving fire bolts per turn at targets in sight and a range of 4, doing %d fire damage with each bolt.
The projectiles are not stopped by allies, and grant you vim equal to 20%% of the damage done.
Brightest Lights...
Surround yourself with a bright, burning light. This increases your light radius by %d, and causes attackers to suffer %d fire damage over three turns.
...Deepest Shadows
Your flames cast unnaturally deep shadows, horrifying those they strike with dark visions.
Once per turn, if you deal %d%% of a target's health with Fire damage, or kill them, you have a %d%% chance to panic foes within two of the target, causing them to run away.

Corruption/Night
Manipulate the terrors of the night as powerful spells.

Suffering
Inflict black visions on the target, dealing them %d darkness damage over three turns, and granting you vim based on the damage done.
Fever Dreams
Inflict a vicious curse on the target, making their temperature fluctuate. This deals %d darkness damage, and lowers fire and cold resist by 20%% for five turns.
Nightmare
Release a bolt of torment. If it strikes a target, it deals %d darkness damage in a radius of %d and may Panic the original target, causing them to flee. The damage will increase with your Spellpower.
Shadowblaze
Your shadows burn with a dark flame. All darkness damage you deal also sets the target alight, dealing %d%% of the darkness damage as fire over four turns.

Corruption/Blaze
Powerful, corrupted fire magic that obliterates all.

Airburst
Launch a burning explosive into the sky, causing flames to rain down. This causes %d random fire explosions in the target area.
Each explosion does %d fire damage in radius 2, and will each trigger at one turn intervals.
The damage will increase with your Spellpower.
Incinerate
Fire a powerful beam of flame, melting any walls in its path up to %d.
The beam also damage any creatures in its path, dealing %d fire damage to all.
The damage will increase with your Spellpower.
Shooting Star
You engulf yourself in flames for the next %d rounds. During this time, your movement speed is increased by %d%%, and moving causes %d fire damage to enemies in a radius of 2.
The damage increases with your spellpower. The radius becomes three at raw talent level 4. You regain three vim per creature killed with this talent.
Twice as Bright
Who cares about the future? You need power now.
You burn away your life force with every spell. You increase your damage by %d%%, but take damage equal to %d%% of the total cost of any talent you use.

Corruption/Midnight
Powerful, corrupted darkness magic that isolates all.

Enervate
Fire a beam of draining darkness, dealing %d darkness damage to those in its path, and attempting to slow them by %d%% for %d turns.
The damage will increase with your Spellpower.
Shadow Cascade
Conjures %d bolts of darkness that you target individually at any target or targets in range. Each missile deals %d darkness damage, and has a chance to pin the target for four turns.
At talent level 5, you can conjure one additional missile.
The damage will increase with your Spellpower.
Lost and Forgotten
You strike down the foe with dark magic, isolating them. This deals %d darkness damage, and has a chance to blind and or silence them.
Echoes of Eternity
You call upon dark powers that echo, resonating with themselves to grow in intensity. This deals %d darkness damage to foes within one at the start of your next turn, and then %d damage to foes within two on the next turn, and then %d darkness damage to foes within three on the turn after that.
The damage ratings increase with your spellpower. Each radius increases by one at level 5. You regain three vim per creature killed with this talent.

Corruption/Herald
Bear the hallmark of the demons that forged you.

Marked of Uhr'rok
Demons fear you, and you walk among them as a master or an equal.
You take %d%% less damage from demons and deal them %d%% more damage.
Demonic Fury
You manifest your fury with a burst of demonic energy, dealing %d damage to all around you in a radius of %d.
The damage done will increase with your Spellpower, and will be chosen randomly from Acid, Blight, Cold, Darkness, Fire and Physical damage.
Fearscape Affinity
Your experience with the fearscape makes you highly resistant to the dangers it wields. You gain %d%% resistance to Acid, Blight, Cold, Darkness, Fire and Physical damage.
An Eldritch Call
Demand aid from the servants of Uhr'rok, summoning %d fire imp(s) around you. Your fire imps will return to their native hell after %d turns.
Your fire imps' stats will improve with the talent level and your Magic. If you learn the Blighted Summons prodigy, your fire imps gain the talent Darkfire.

Corruption/Shadowflame
Harness the power of the demonic shadowflame.

Darkfire
Now first talent. Heals demons.
Shadow and Flame
Releases one cone of fire and one of darkness, aimed seperately.
Flames of Uhr'Rok
Cost and speed boost reduced. Will conflict with Starkeep's Shadowflame addon.
Fearscape
No longer changed.

Corruption/Spirit
Become a vicious spirit and attack the soul.

Wraithform
No longer a Shadowflame spell.
Soul Shred
Dash to a location, even through barriers, as long as you could teleport to it, dealing darkness/physical damage on the way.
Spirit Drain
Deal darkness damage while reducing either their global speed or all resist, and increasing your own.
Soulbreak
Darkness damage also deals mind damage.

Known Bugs
miracles

Planned Features/Changes
Cold trees. A high level physical tree called 'Twisted' that is built for melee and based on 'enhancing' yourself. A second class to use cold/night - the Abandoned, probably.
Also, consider another generic tree, this isn't a big enough patch.
Soulbreak or Shadowblaze needs to be changed.
Brightest Lights needs an extra feature.
Maybe make Shattered Mind/Infernal Awe mutually exclusive?

1.0.1
I forgot to save an edit before uploading. I'm not even sure what it was but it might be important. Also fixed a typo.

1.0.2
Light The Wick now applies its effect before dealing damage, meaning it will explode if it kills with initial damage.
Midnight talents now properly use High magic requirements.
Suffering, Light The Wick and Fever Dreams (And Lost and Forgotten) no longer cause lua errors or go on cooldown when targeted on empty space/out of range.
Shooting Star only works if you actually moved,
Nerfs everywhere. Most damage nerfs were targeted at early game values, as that's where they seemed excessive.
Secret bonus feature added to Demonic Fury.
Demonfire is now half fire and half darkness, modifying several ashes talents by extension.
Borrowed Starkeep's Shadowflame changes, also cheapened Fearscape.
Twice As Bright is now talent Four. Shooting Star is talent Three. Twice As Bright gives a lower damage bonus, but is a no-unlearn-last passive.

1.0.3
Brightest Lights now has a unique orange particle. (It still needs to be buffed, but I'm not sure what to add to it.
Shadowflame rework:
-Darkfire is now Shadowflame 1. Emblazoned now start with it. Don't use it in the uhr'rok starting zone.
-New talent: Shadow and Flame. Releases two cones, one of fire and one of darkness, much like Earthen Missiles. This is both more and less interesting than it sounds.
-Fearscape is no longer altered by this addon, due to the 1.4 change to its sustain cost.
-Wraithform is now talent 1 for a new generic tree, Corruption/Spirit. Corruptor, Doombringer and Demonologist receive this tree.
-New talent: Soul Shred. Allows you to dash in a line, dealing physical/darkness damage to all foes hit. Can travel through walls, as long as the destination isn't no_teleport.
-New talent: Spirit Drain. Drains either Passion or Will from the enemy, reducing their global speed or all resist and increasing yours for five turns.
-New talent: Soulbreak. Dealing darkness damage also does mind damage. This was more interesting before I realised that Shadowblaze already does this, but the fluff makes sense. X-x Should likely mess with it.
New talent for Corruption/Spellblaze: Infernal Awe. An alternative for Shattered Mind, it causes the same effect when you crit with a spell.

[Einander]

I've barely dipped my toe in this so far, but I have sort of complex feelings about a basic concept here.

See, I've always viewed Vim as sort of a high-risk high-reward resource. The signature features of the resource are the lack of regen and the "kill to gain Vim" and "kill with Vim and your spell is free" aspects, and the signature tree is Disease, a DOT that develops into a way to use a massively powerful AOE nuke. This is interesting, because that reveals the central tension of Vim: sure, the ability to blightnuke an area for massive damage is useful, but you need to be damn careful with it, because if you're not getting enough kills out of that nuke, you're losing a resource that can be a pain to get back. Spend too much on any one engagement and you may walk into the next fight with a low fuel tank, especially if you cast Drain at the wrong point in the fight.

The thing is, the new trees have a lot of ways to get Vim back aside from killing, and that's fairly rare in the existing Defiler material. Here, Suffering is a "cast for free Vim" spell basically from the word "Go" but without the longer cooldown of Drain, and the second ability of the Candle tree is a sustain that basically gives you a in-combat regen. The new unlockable Fire tree has an escape, and a Defiler escape basically forces you to accept the loss of Vim in exchange for your life... Except that you get extra Vim if you cherry-tap anything with it on the way out. The new unlockable Shadow tree has an AOE nuke that's basically a DOT, and Vim DOTs are hard to cast for free... But it gives you extra Vim when you kill with it.

It raises the question of why this is Defiler material that sort of ignores Defiler rules. That seems like a boring design philosophy.

Any more precise feedback'll wait until I play past a starting area with it.

[astralInferno]

I see your concerns, and I partially agree with them?

The problem is that DoTs don't give back the vim cost in the same way that target spells do, so I had to give them an alternate means of vim recovery. I made Suffering their vim-regen spell, although I may well have to nerf both its damage and the vim rate.

Dancing Flame's vim regen is similar, really, but it also serves the vital purpose of 'mean you're not entirely screwed if you hit zero vim'. When I was testing, there were several times Rain of Fire dropped me to zero, and Dancing Flame was how I got enough vim back to cast Suffering. Not being able to cast your spells really, really sucks.

As for Shooting Star and Echoes of Eternity, they give vim on kill specifically BECAUSE vim DoTs are so obnoxious. If you've tried housepet's witherer, you'll have felt that same pain.

Basically, though, having to worry /too/ much about your resource just isn't fun, at least for me. It clearly needs tuning - Suffering should not instantly fill your entire bar - but I'm happy with the basic concept.

I'm also not certain that the risk is worth the reward. I don't know how hard the plague tree scales, but I generally use mage spells as damage comparisons.

But the tl;dr of it is that the class is vim because Shadowflame is vim. If it helps, all of the vim recovery in the class is based on making things suffer, so you at least can't regen it out of combat. (At least, I really hope suffering is set up to not work on self-target. I'll test that.)

Edit: Suffering could probably also use longer cooldown. They could also use another starting class tree or two; having only two DoT damage spells at the start will really hurt if suffering is nerfed.

[Einander]

I did actually play Witherer! And I definitely see how that'd result in some caution with Vim DoTs, because that class's start is just painful.

If the point of Dancing Flame is to give you a at-zero-Vim option, why not just make Suffering 0-cost, same as Drain? With its low cooldown, that lets Suffering do the job of getting you back up to usable Vim all on its own. And/or add some form of Bloodcasting to one of the new trees (replace Brightest Lights's +light radius? that's kind of random, from a purely mechanical perspective), because then you have an emergency "get Vim back at a cost" button. At that point, you always have something you can do and the issue is basically void. (And you can make it synergize with Twice as Bright somehow, so that players are more likely to pick up and level the constantly-setting-yourself-on-fire Passive. It's mechanically good, but that part is sort of icky to the lizard brain.)

I just really don't like Dancing Flame's passive recovery, to be honest.

[astralInferno]

The thing is I just really don't like 'oh crap I'm running out of vim' as a thing. I could be persuaded to alter Dancing Flame to be on-kill instead of on-damage, but I have no desire ever to be seeing zero vim if you're not spamming everything carelessly.

...also lite radius makes perfect sense. You are surrounded in fire. Fire is bright.

[Micbran]

(replace Brightest Lights's +light radius? that's kind of random, from a purely mechanical perspective)

...also lite radius makes sense. You are surrounded in fire. Fire is bright.

Yes, but from a MECHANICAL perspective it probably feels absolutely useless.

[astralInferno]

That's fair, but it does also give damage when hit. It's a Chant, basically. Might be in need of an extra perk, though.

[HousePet]

Shadowy flames of darkness aren't bright.

[astralInferno]

Depends. Fearscape looks pretty bright to me.

[astralInferno]

Now, 1.0.3!

1.0.3
Brightest Lights now has a unique orange particle. (It still needs to be buffed, but I'm not sure what to add to it.
Shadowflame rework:
-Darkfire is now Shadowflame 1. Emblazoned now start with it. Don't use it in the uhr'rok starting zone.
-New talent: Shadow and Flame. Releases two cones, one of fire and one of darkness, much like Earthen Missiles. This is both more and less interesting than it sounds.
-Fearscape is no longer altered by this addon, due to the 1.4 change to its sustain cost.
-Wraithform is now talent 1 for a new generic tree, Corruption/Spirit. Corruptor, Doombringer and Demonologist receive this tree.
-New talent: Soul Shred. Allows you to dash in a line, dealing physical/darkness damage to all foes hit. Can travel through walls, as long as the destination isn't no_teleport.
-New talent: Spirit Drain. Drains either Passion or will from the enemy, reducing their global speed or all resist and increasing yours for five turns.
-New talent: Soulbreak. Dealing darkness damage also does mind damage. This was more interesting before I realised that Shadowblaze already does this, but the fluff makes sense. X-x Should likely mess with it.
New talent for Corruption/Spellblaze: Infernal Awe. An alternative for Shattered Mind, it causes the same effect when you crit with a spell.

[Hellcommander]

ok found a error when a clone died to emblazoned candle effect:
Lua Error: /data-emblazoned/effects.lua:20: attempt to index local 'src' (a nil value)
At [C]:-1 __index
At /data-emblazoned/effects.lua:20 callEffect
At /mod/class/Actor.lua:4983 fireTalentCheck
At /mod/class/Actor.lua:2842 die
At /mod/addons/ashes-urhrok/superload/mod/class/Actor.lua:25 die
At /mod/addons/orcs/superload/mod/class/Actor.lua:123 die
At /mod/class/NPC.lua:55 actBase
At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:119 tickLevel
At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:64 tick
At /engine/GameTurnBased.lua:51 tick
At /mod/class/Game.lua:1271
---------------- Stack Dump ----------------

[astralInferno]

I've been thinking about the Emblazoned recently, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm really unhappy with it. It doesn't feel different in any way.
It doesn't feel like a vim caster, really - some of you are going to say that's because of the vim regain being easy, but I'm ffffairly sure that's not true.

I know I'm happy with the first Candle talent; it's particularly different and fun. I know I have reason for the theme overall; given the Shadowflame tree and the Ashes classes. But it doesn't feel cohesive. The new trees don't feel like they belong alongside the Corruptor's trees.

Do you know what I mean? Do any of you have suggestions on what might help?

[Hellcommander]

Ya one of the issues is that the burn your life talent is not worth getting.

[astralInferno]

That's a fairly minor issue compared to the others.
But I'll take it. Are the values too high, or would you just not take it however low the damage was?
Would you take it if the damage bonus scaled, but the penalty was a flat 100%?

[echo42]

Honestly I felt it was the other way around - the healing from Shadowflame meant you could heal off the burn damage fairly easily for the most part and the massive increase it power made it very worth it to max it out. Plus Spine of the World turns it from a liability to a massive bonus. It might be worth it to consider making it an increase in vim with corresponding increase in power instead, although maybe as a sustain.

Speaking of sustains I think the early fire tree is a bit sustain-heavy - there's only one activable move. I do think that one of the reasons it feels lackluster is that most of the moves just do plain damage - the secondary effects are rarely if ever the main reason to use a move, which in turn means that you only ever really need to invest heavily in one or two core moves to use.