Void Scholar v1.2.4 "Forbidden Chants Three!"

[HousePet]

I'm making a note about the first issue.
I can't recall how that Taint is coded, so I have no idea what/how it would interact with a custom resource.
It might be that something in the base game has changed, and it went very wonky.

[Mr Frog]

Update time! No, I'm not dead. I'm mostly addressing some issues with the Logia; things not being blocked when they should be, or things not being blockable at all.

Changes for v1.2.0 "Forbidden Chants Three!"
Logia of Apraxis now blocks all weapon damage regardless of type, in addition to all physical damage regardless of source. Not gonna lie, this is almost purely so that the class has some sort of answer to Shadowblades, who are extremely good at remaining in melee range thus invalidating Dysnomy and Antiposition, and deal a large quantity of Darkness weapon damage (Shadow Veil...) thus invalidating Apraxis, and can inflict Silence and Pin simultaneously just as an added insult, overall making enemies with the class disproportionately deadly.
Logia of Dysnomy now blocks all wildgifts (the vast majority were already blocked on account of being mindpowers, but this catches a few odd talents that aren't, most notably summoned Ritches' flame spit)
Logia of Dysnomy now catches some spells such as Black Ice and Phantasmal Shield that don't flag their damage properly; the method used may or may not be prone to false positives but I think we can all agree that blocking damage you're not supposed to is much less annoying than letting through damage you're not supposed to
Logia of Dysnomy now blocks damage from any sort of map effect (the source still has to be at least 2 tiles away)! This is to catch the many, many spells that are not blocked by it on account of creating a map effect as an intermediary. I'm a bit concerned that this might be expanding Dysnomy's scope a bit too much but we shall see how this tastes, as always.
Logia of Dysnomy is now hard-banned from blocking any damage that comes from a weapon attack. Due to how zealous it is about catching things now, this is necessary to check it from potentially overstepping on Apraxis too much
Increased the magnitude of Logia Cipher's power/accuracy debuffs by 1/4
Added a message to Logia of Dysnomy's backlash effect from Logia Savant to make it clearer if/when it's actually doing something
Logia Enigma no longer reflects damage from dead sources or things that are not actors
Taking damage from friendly targets (most notably yourself) no longer stops you from losing Void Energy


E: And another quick update to add a small fix I forgot about! Aether Permeation can now be learned after visiting the Anomalous Sector -- potentially very useful, as getting your Logia dispelled is often very dangerous!

Changes for v1.2.1:
Entering a floor in the Anomalous Sector now flags the player as having been in space (as one would expect), thus allowing you to learn the Aether Permeation prodigy!


E: One more small update for one more small fix I forgot!

Changes for v1.2.2:
Fixed Fillarel not commenting on your class, which I swear worked at some point but as far as I can tell could not possibly have ever worked as it was coded. Mysterious!


E: Three strikes and I suppose this means I'm out Also I implemented Phoenixred's suggestion regarding the Liminal Seed's power source!

Changes for v1.2.3:
Fixed Logia Enigma never working due to checking for an incorrect, nonexistent variable
Liminal Seed now has Unknown as a power source!

[DAllan7m]

Not sure if it's weird interaction between +100500 addons I have or what but Linaniil, Supreme Archmage of Angolwen rolled Void Scholar and... spending her time by spaming -19 cooldown Erode on herself
It doing zero damage to her but how I should proceed with Urkis' quest?

[gooder1029]

Hello, I really like the mod you made, I translated it into Chinese, thanks

This translation only talents and birth data.

I also put them on google driver:

Code: Select all

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ihgh5EQCQQEHpqNC6DjKtL4VxriZl52A?usp=sharing

[visage]

I've taken a Void Scholar to 50 on Insane, and I figured I'd offer some feedback.

First off -- as always from Mr Frog, a fascinating character to play! Very well done; quite possibly my favorite addon class so far. Definitely one that rewards careful and considered play.

Bugs:

• dilation.lua, line 276 -- both references to tactic.attack should be to tactic.attackarea. (This causes a lua error when an NPC has it.)
• Visages appear on the worldmap, due to Hypersphere critting against patrols.
• Slime Spit seems to be bypassing Logia of Dysnomy.
• I think it may be the case that being blind can trigger Void Energy decay (though I am not entirely certain of that).

Quality of Life:

• It would be awfully convenient to have a callbackOnRest on Ex Nihilo so resting continues until it's full.
• Similarly, it'd be really nice if queued Diffusion damage evaporated when out of combat, or upon rest. As things stand, you can approximate that by de-sustaining it, resting, and then re-sustaining, but having to either do that or wait N turns before resting or exploring turns out to be more annoying than I'd expect.
• Given how important Arcane vs Temporal damage is to this character, I think it would have really helped me to learn the class if those talent icons cued more strongly which damage type(s) the talent did.
• I think it makes more sense for Hypercube's targeting to display the full 8-space radius than the smaller 6-space radius. I was quite surprised when I first put one down and was immediately yanked towards it.
• Does anything report to the character that Void Energy is vulnerable to manaburn?

Design Reactions:

• Reading through the talents, I was expecting this to be a character that doesn't do much damage casting generators; that the big damage comes from casting spenders. That is... not the way things seem to work, which makes me wonder if the damage and resource balance favors Arcane & generators too much over Temporal and spenders. I feel less like I'm casting generators in order to get to cast my big damage spells, and more like I'm saving up void energy to spend on utility (knockbacks, stuns, defenses, mobility). Part of this is perhaps is because Temporal damage really doesn't seem to come into its own until you've invested in and sustained all of the temporal-boosting skills; part of this is because...
• Void Energy is really scarce in the early game. The Void Energy that any given skill generates scales with investment and usually also with something that scales with level -- spellpower, raw inbound damage, etc. It takes quite a while before there's any real amount of generation available. On top of that, I keep on looking at Null Locus as costing too much life, so as to not be worth activating.
• At least until you get your spellcrit up around 100% and Visage starts being the solution to every problem, the class seems awfully vulnerable to being one-shot (though that perhaps describes many classes in 1.7), or having its escapes and defenses disabled, particularly by assorted melee classes. It feels to me that the defenses/mobility could be a bit more accessible, particularly in the early game, as...
• There's a fascinating tension around escapes. This class really wants to always have a reliable escape, but Voidwalk is thwarted by pins or being surrounded (especially since Antiphase takes a turn to activate), and Tesseract can always wind up with you in a worse position; and, of course, both are vulnerable to being silenced. So you kind of really want a reliable teleport (either a Blink rune or Haste of the Doomed) and a Movement infusion. That's a lot of category point pressure on a class that wants to unlock three class categories.
• It feels a bit odd that damage shields are discouraged by absorbing damage before Logia damage reductions, but are encouraged by the desire to retain accumulated Ex Nihilo. (Apart from damage shields, defenses seem to me to trigger in a reasonable order -- Logia before Nullify before Diffuse before Ex Nihilo. It's an interesting question whether the player would generally prefer Nullify before Diffuse or the reverse, but either strikes me as reasonable.)
• I was not expecting Visage summons to trigger your on-spell-hit-gear. That makes such gear quite good. (Ah, except that at some point on-spell-hit got nerfed down to at most one spell-hit proccing on-spell-hit effects per turn, so there's limited value in accumulating a bunch of on-spell-hit procs. ...and I'm getting the impression that all of the visages share the same cooldown on on-spell-hit procs.)

On the off chance you decide to come back to developing this class, some proposals on tweaks:

• Defensive buffs:
  • Reduce the cooldowns on Logia, and have them resolve before damage shields rather than after.
  • Make Antiphase instant and break pins and dazes.
  • Make Tesseract more reliable as a defensive tool: make it never drop a teleported enemy directly next to you, or have it clear all pending Diffusion, etc.
• Changing the generator/spender balance, so there's more reason to cast something other than Disrupt for damage:
  • Nerf Disrupt -- either give it ranged-based scaling like Filament et al, such that it only does its current damage at range 10; or, simply reduce its damage by a lot, perhaps as much as 50%.
  • Bump up the damage of Rift Surge and Degenerate, perhaps along with the damage of the big damage-only spenders (i.e. not Recession or Equalize).
  • Make Null Locus life loss scale strongly with level rather than using standard TOME scaling with spellpower. This makes it a viable tool much earlier.
  • Make Compressed Space drain 1/3 (or more) of your Void Energy over 30, rather than 1/5 of all of your Void Energy. I ended up leaving Compressed Space unsustained as not worth the cost.
  • Given the lack of Arcane+Temporal gear, I'd favor adding to a talent either or both of "Arcane uses your highest damage bonus" and "Arcane uses your highest resist penetration."
• Early Game; something that boosts pre-endgame Void Energy, such as one of:
  • Add a level-based negative scaling factor to Void Energy generation. For example, make it so that at character level 1 you'll get 10 Void Energy for casting a talent-level-1.3 Disrupt with 15 spellpower... but if you want to get that same 10 Void Energy at character level 50 you'll need 6.5 in Disrupt and 100 spellpower.
  • Add a level-based scaling factor to all Void Energy costs.

[Mr Frog]

Oh look, feature length feedback from someone with extensive experience. My favourite kind!

I will note that I very much did not balance Void Scholar around Insane and in fact have close to no concept of what Insane is like. I am willing to hazard that feeling as though Void Energy is better spent on escapes and utility may be a function of Insane being much more dangerous and having much tougher enemies that can't just be blasted away with a couple spells. So, playing it safe by just chipping away with your Arcane spells and saving your energy for emergencies is probably the way to go, for better or for worse. I can DEFINITELY see it being vulnerable to oneshots because I imagine the logias' flat damage reduction (...actually this class has a lot of flat DR don't it) means a lot less on Insane. I'm not personally sure what to do about this; I lack the game skill to really crack open Insane and the last thing I want to do is risk making the class less fun on the more commonly-played difficulties for the sake of attempting, haphazardly, to make it more fun on a difficulty I can't even play myself.
I remember deliberately putting shields on top of the logia because the other way around felt too strong, although it always vaguely irritated me that the evil perverters of the cosmic order seemed to have much better synergy with healing infusions than shielding runes. Ex Nihilo being at the very bottom is where it's supposed to be, since it's not really meant to be used as a defense per se; it's something you're meant to preserve, with the damage mitigation being more of a consolation for failing that gives you one last line of defense to save your bacon.
Having all 3 categories unlocked is very much not my intention! I, again, have no idea what the demands of Insane are, but I designed it to have one "main" advanced category that is focused on, one cat point used for an inscription, and any other points you get being used as desired.
Hypercube's radius display is... a bit of a pickle. What I'd *love* is to be able to display its explosion and pull radius in different colours, but I don't know how to do that, so I had to choose between either seeing the explosion clearly or seeing the pull clearly, and in the end I went with the explosion because usually you only care about not pulling yourself and the game always displays how far away the tile you're targeting is.
Visage summons don't actually deal damage them IIRC; they're just used as a center for the player's own damage projection. So, yes, multiple visages will proc spell on hit etc. multiple times. (Or they would if that was possible lol)

I'm not interested in pursuing most of the changes you suggested, but I do think I'll be changing Null Locus to have level-based scaling similar to a few effects in Faetouched (most notably Shattered Shape) because it feels less bad. I have a couple ideas for making Antiphase and Subduction better, because I was never really happy with either of their designs, but I am probably not making Antiphase instant; I'm personally really cagey about making talents instant because I want the player to think carefully about what their next move should be (and, based on your initial statement, I seem to have succeeded here, and I really hate potentially breaking things that are working well), and on top of that if too many of your talents are instant then the game really slows down because you can end up taking a bunch of actions before ending your turn and actually progressing the fight, which I personally dislike a lot.
Ex Nihilo holding your resting up sounds reasonable, as does doing something about Diffusion interrupting resting. The latter annoyed the crap out of me when I was playing but I forgot to actually do anything about it.

[visage]

Oh look, feature length feedback from someone with extensive experience. My favourite kind!

I am perhaps only too glad to oblige.

I will note that I very much did not balance Void Scholar around Insane and in fact have close to no concept of what Insane is like. I am willing to hazard that feeling as though Void Energy is better spent on escapes and utility may be a function of Insane being much more dangerous and having much tougher enemies that can't just be blasted away with a couple spells. ... I lack the game skill to really crack open Insane and the last thing I want to do is risk making the class less fun on the more commonly-played difficulties for the sake of attempting, haphazardly, to make it more fun on a difficulty I can't even play myself.

That's entirely fair!

(...actually this class has a lot of flat DR don't it)

It felt like a core part of the class's identity, yeah. ...and that influences a lot of decisions around gearing and prodigies, since the player has an extra-strong reason to find more ways to reduce damage. I consider Worm's Nest to be best-in-slot for the class, for example, because of its flat damage reduction and mobility (and mobility is another thing that the class wants desperately).

I remember deliberately putting shields on top of the logia because the other way around felt too strong,

...and the tension that creates is indeed interesting.

Having all 3 categories unlocked is very much not my intention!

Ok, that's reasonable. All three are strong defensive categories and what the class really wants on Insane is defensive tools. I considered Hyperspace and Genesis to be mandatory... to the extent that I was kind of sad that Hyperspace couldn't be unlocked at birth by a Cornac.
Terminus is very much an endgame category, since you really want to be plastering enemies with negative effects in order to get value out of it, and thus more skippable than the other two.

I'm not interested in pursuing most of the changes you suggested

Also entirely fair; it's your addon, after all!

Thanks again for creating it!

[phoenixred80]

There is an artifact called Void Star which you get if you complete the Angolwen quest. It irks me that it does nothing with void energy and... would it be somehow possible to give it to a void scholar?

[Mr Frog]

Changes for v1.2.4:
Heat Death's numbing effect is now cleared properly when stacking and removing the effect