Nullpack 2019-02-21: Gravitic Infantry

[Doctornull]

I hit Random until it gave me something that seemed halfway playable - Yeek Striker! I played it as a caster, kinda like the ever so popular caster wyrmic. Stealth was pretty much the last thing that got added to the build, and even then it was mostly for reducing incoming ranged attacks.

It's been a long time since I played so I had quite a few stupid deaths, but I had a blast!

http://te4.org/characters/78970/tome/c1 ... be2a412e43

Nice combo.

Yeah, you can play Striker and totally ignore Stealth -- it's a fine high-mobility Lightning mage, with a few melee tricks.

I'm sorry you died right at level 10. That's when you start getting into the fun combos with Spell/Storm.

Please try again and die later!

[grooog]

I tried again! This time with a manually picked race. This one was able to melee pretty well once I got the two +defense traits.

http://te4.org/characters/78970/tome/60 ... 970794ba96

Because it was always my first spell, I put Illumination on auto-cast when-visibile-enemy, and I discovered an interesting property: because no targeting decisions are needed on the player's part, an autoexploring character will spot an enemy, often one-shot kill the enemy(s) with Illlumination, and keep autoexploring! Very efficient! I I tried disabling it for a bit to see if I wanted to use other spells as my opener, and no, not really. Huge AOE makes it a good opener, Blind makes it a good opener, and it actually hits harder than my lightning spells.

Now I've become a little bit obsessed with the idea of a character (adventurer, probably) with strong autopilot skills, but I haven't really found any spell that's as good as Illumination. Such a character would presumably have some shields or other defensive sustains, and at least one other good PBAOE to autocast after casting illumination? Nothing great came out of my adventurer tinkering thus far. Straight up striker as of yet performs better than my brews.

[grooog]

(Sorry for double post) I perused the vault to see what successful strikers choose as their race... and I didn't find any instances of a terribly successful striker!


http://te4.org/characters-vault?tag_nam ... ome-1.2.0#

That's probably simply due to few players playing and mastering the class, but it's still an interesting data point. Class might need more defense / emergency powers? The best one I could find was a level 19 Cornac on Adventure difficulty.

http://te4.org/characters/142408/tome/5 ... db24a3b8b4

As you can see in my char vault, I tried some other random classes, but none were as fun. I think I'm gonna try playing a striker in the main campaign now that I've had such a good time with it in the infinidungeon, but I really want to succeed and push this class to its limits, so I'm interested in any suggestions folks have on race, equipment, or talent point priorities!

[Doctornull]

(Sorry for double post) I perused the vault to see what successful strikers choose as their race... and I didn't find any instances of a terribly successful striker!

Yeah, it's a class that was based around 1.1 power-levels, and the core class power-creep has kinda left it behind.

I either need to convince the ToME community to stop being such power-creeps, or I need to buff the stuffing out of my classes.

That's probably simply due to few players playing and mastering the class, but it's still an interesting data point. Class might need more defense / emergency powers? The best one I could find was a level 19 Cornac on Adventure difficulty.

Maybe.

I notice very few people investing in Thunderstrike / Flash Jump, which is a Stealth-oriented defensive escape power.

As you can see in my char vault, I tried some other random classes, but none were as fun. I think I'm gonna try playing a striker in the main campaign now that I've had such a good time with it in the infinidungeon, but I really want to succeed and push this class to its limits, so I'm interested in any suggestions folks have on race, equipment, or talent point priorities!

Stealth takes a while to provide any benefit, and requires significant investment to really carry you through more than just the first strike. It's not reliable, and you need escape powers to compensate for when it fails.

My first suggestion would be to try playing a Storm Warden, which gives you a similar experience to a Striker, but without the Stealth game. Instead, it provides a palette of buffs which are also defensive.

My second suggestion would be to read up on how Shadowblades and Rogues compensate for unreliable Stealth.

[grooog]

Cool, I'll try stormwarden out. I usually avoid Warrior classes due to the amount of soulless bump-attacking they tend to do. But you say it has similar shock and awe lightning-ing-around gameplay...! Hooray!

Factoid: of the past 75 characters you've played, 0 of them are strikers, very few of them are nullpack classes in general, 24 are adventurers, and your two highest level characters are both Horror Things, whatever those are! So you've been instinctually leaning away from this class as well maybe, hehe.

Sorry to hear about the power creep. Honestly I wish there was less ENGINE/game creep... I keep finding really cool-sounding mods that have been broken by the continual little game updates. DarkGod scolds modders for superloading/overloading, but he's effectively superloading/overloading the game constantly, breaking everything! Make less destructive/risky changes, noob!

Thank you so much for doing the work to keep your addons up to date! So many others have fallen in the snow!

[Doctornull]

Cool, I'll try stormwarden out. I usually avoid Warrior classes due to the amount of soulless bump-attacking they tend to do. But you say it has similar shock and awe lightning-ing-around gameplay...! Hooray!

Factoid: of the past 75 characters you've played, 0 of them are strikers, very few of them are nullpack classes in general, 24 are adventurers, and your two highest level characters are both Horror Things, whatever those are! So you've been instinctually leaning away from this class as well maybe, hehe.

I use Adventurer to beta-test class ideas. Basically I put together a bunch of different talent trees and I try to identify what's missing, then I code a tree to see what's missing.

Also, I play offline quite a bit, since every time I modify a talent to test something out, it forces the game offline.

What you see me playing "officially" is less than 30% of what I play.

Horror Things are helpers you can buy, which work like Golems in the Infinite Farportal mod (which I use for testing high-level play). I guess if my character dies and the Horror Thing is still alive, apparently it over-writes my character class... oh well.

Sorry to hear about the power creep. Honestly I wish there was less ENGINE/game creep... I keep finding really cool-sounding mods that have been broken by the continual little game updates. DarkGod scolds modders for superloading/overloading, but he's effectively superloading/overloading the game constantly, breaking everything! Make less destructive/risky changes, noob!

The newest stuff from DarkGod is actually much better in that regard. He's moved a ton of code from hard-coded engine stuff into talent callbacks.

Like, take a look at the old Chronomancy code vs. the new stuff. The new stuff is so much cleaner.

[grooog]

Horror Things are helpers you can buy, which work like Golems in the Infinite Farportal mod (which I use for testing high-level play). I guess if my character dies and the Horror Thing is still alive, apparently it over-writes my character class... oh well.

The newest stuff from DarkGod is actually much better in that regard. He's moved a ton of code from hard-coded engine stuff into talent callbacks.

Like, take a look at the old Chronomancy code vs. the new stuff. The new stuff is so much cleaner.

vague recollection of farportal seeming bad/unfinished back in the day. may have to revisit it. for now loving infidungeon, it feels like a straightup roguelike!

Cool to hear about the new code!

This quest continues:

Now I've become a little bit obsessed with the idea of a character (adventurer, probably) with strong autopilot skills, but I haven't really found any spell that's as good as Illumination.

Autopilot Archmage (autocast, autotarget, which downgrades beams into singletarget nukes) actually did better in Arena than Twarden played as carefully/intelligently as I can. Love the warden tweaks though nonetheless.
Latest attempt was an thalore oozemancer. Oozey makes for a very good Borg. spit is basically an aoe that can't be mis-aimed, lots of PBAOEs. hit Z, watch things get instagibbed, character levels up and keeps on exploring! Healing is generally worse than shielding on a borg though. Thalore might not have been the greatest choice; the racial is at its best when manually cast, unlike Higher which was somewhat spammable.

i'm rambling... where do you come in? Well, this addon has been super helpful in this regard. http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/custom_auto_use Is there a chance you might be willing to hit a few of the easier-looking TODO items in that zip? Reactive, defensive, or mana-regen type things don't work so great with the current autotriggers.

[Doctornull]

i'm rambling... where do you come in? Well, this addon has been super helpful in this regard. http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/custom_auto_use Is there a chance you might be willing to hit a few of the easier-looking TODO items in that zip?

No, there's no chance that I'm going to work on someone else's addon when my own stuff needs work.

[grooog]

No, there's no chance that I'm going to work on someone else's addon when my own stuff needs work.

Haha, that's fair. Storm warden is great so far. I picked up a couple of deaths while I was thinking of myself as a "melee stormwarden", but now that I'm willing to just spam Shoot until something forces me to do otherwise, it's going rather well. I miss being able to spam Illuminate for its many benefits (I get nuked a lot by mages/slimes outside my vision, monster zoos are tougher) but it's very nice to be able to survive an alpha strike and then slowly get my revenge!

http://te4.org/characters/78970/tome/e4 ... 655f31479f

[astralInferno]

The chronomancy Magic/Willpower option is outdated by now; and iirc setting it to awesome causes errors (you might have fixed that since I last checked it?) meaning the new chronomancy trees are stuck as willpower. Could use a change next time you update.

[Doctornull]

The chronomancy Magic/Willpower option is outdated by now; and iirc setting it to awesome causes errors (you might have fixed that since I last checked it?) meaning the new chronomancy trees are stuck as willpower. Could use a change next time you update.

With the 1.5 compatibility pruning, those trees are now Magic by default. Yay!

Nulltweaks (where the Awesome setting was based) isn't 1.5 compatible yet, and might never be -- it looks like the new vanilla codebase is already pretty close to where Nulltweaks had moved stuff.

[smithfield]

With the Flenser.

I improved Con to 20, but in the Level Up dialog, Unflinching Resolve did not light. Had to raise it to 21, then it lit.

I don't recall but I think I only had one pt in that skill that raise Con.

[Doctornull]

With the Flenser.

I improved Con to 20, but in the Level Up dialog, Unflinching Resolve did not light. Had to raise it to 21, then it lit.

I don't recall but I think I only had one pt in that skill that raise Con.

The UI will fail to update when you're not touching the expected element.

I bet you could take the point out -- or even put a point in a different stat -- and you'd see the same behavior.

This is a core game issue and not something I can fix. Happens to Skeletons and Brawlers, too, and anyone else who has a talent that gives stat points.

Sorry it's impacting you.

[smithfield]

Its difficult at this point for me to evaluate the significance of a perceived error. I chose in this instance to err on the side of reporting it.

[Doctornull]

Its difficult at this point for me to evaluate the significance of a perceived error. I chose in this instance to err on the side of reporting it.

You're right, there was no easy way for you to know the source. So I chose to explain.

-- -- --

Anyway, new thought: the Bastion.

Bastion.jpg (157.99 KiB) Viewed 8169 times

This actually works pretty well so far: the Shoot talent can Mark, and Headshot seems to benefit from Counterstrike.

Bastion Gear.jpg (71.93 KiB) Viewed 8169 times

This has to be the silliest gear mix I've ever put on an Adventurer.

What's missing to make this concept complete:
- Stuff to do with the Psi pool.
- More stuff to do with Stamina, since what he mostly does is Shoot -> Headshot, or Shoot -> Block -> Headshot.
- A talent like Augmentation or Unified Body which gives stupidly good bonuses to Str and Dex, or conversely a talent which removes the need for Str/Dex in equipment and talent prerequisites.