Nullpack 2019-02-21: Gravitic Infantry

[Doctornull]

It's possible that the prices for Creep talents are too expensive.

Do any of them feel okay in price, or are all of them too costly?

Thanks!

[Doctornull]

Creep Hate Bonus: the Cursed / Horror sustain Void Communion now costs 20 Hate to sustain, but once per turn when your melee attack hits a foe who is suffering a Blind, Poison, Slow or Fear effect, you regain 1.3 to 6.5 Hate.

This ought to do several things:
1/ Reinforce how awesome it is to Slow your enemies
2/ Make Poisons slightly more interesting for this class
3/ Make the Darkness beam attack more interesting
4/ Make extended boss-fights less painful
and maybe
5/ When the Fears category stops sucking, make Fears super interesting as an unlock.

I have tested this and it seems to work but as always, bugs are possible, so please do report any!

Cheers!

[malboro_urchin]

Doesn't your fix still render Hate a huge problem until later on? Most of my gameplay difficulties arise in the early game, where characters don't yet have the toolkit to deal with various situations.

[Doctornull]

Doesn't your fix still render Hate a huge problem until later on? Most of my gameplay difficulties arise in the early game, where characters don't yet have the toolkit to deal with various situations.

The very early game has nothing to spend Hate on:
- Sloth is better-than-free
- Dual Strike costs Stamina
- Gloom is free
- Darkness is worthless in the early game
- Stealth is both free and worthless in the early game

What level in specific are you dying horribly and hopelessly?

[joebobjoe]

Playing the Embers of Gerlyk finding it rather annoying that they have nothing for closing distance without expending combo points until level 8 barring use of Cornac category point to unlock combat techniques. Having quite a bit of fun with them otherwise and for one on one combat will frequently burn an enemy so that they'll die in a couple turns and do the full Fist of the North Star diesengage and utter "you are already dead" followed by waiting a couple turns for them to burn to death. This pack is quite fun and have enjoyed playing the classes I've tried so far.

[Doctornull]

Playing the Embers of Gerlyk finding it rather annoying that they have nothing for closing distance without expending combo points until level 8 barring use of Cornac category point to unlock combat techniques. Having quite a bit of fun with them otherwise and for one on one combat will frequently burn an enemy so that they'll die in a couple turns and do the full Fist of the North Star diesengage and utter "you are already dead" followed by waiting a couple turns for them to burn to death. This pack is quite fun and have enjoyed playing the classes I've tried so far.

Cool, glad you're mostly liking it!

The idea behind the current Ember was that you'd use the Fire talents as your ranged options, so you wouldn't need to close the distance as desperately as a class which is restricted to melee, but maybe that's not synergistic enough.

[malboro_urchin]

Nvm, I think I kept dying earlygame because I didn't know how to handle anything that used stealth. iirc, the Creep was the first class I played that used stealth

[Doctornull]

Nvm, I think I kept dying earlygame because I didn't know how to handle anything that used stealth. iirc, the Creep was the first class I played that used stealth

Stealth is NOT easy in the early game, do try out a Rogue out and see if you like the Stealth playstyle.

I hope that compared to a Rogue, the Creep is solid... but I don't promise to be far from the Rogue's early game, which can be difficult.

Cheers!

[malboro_urchin]

Just beat Prox on a Halfling Creep, and Sloth is very helpful. Having a free, low-CD, gap-closing, Hate-replenishing, relatively-high-damage ability that can't miss is extremely useful on a melee character.

[Doctornull]

Update: tweaked some of the new Chronomancy talent costs.

Also added code to compensate for the new Nulltweaks option to use Magic instead of Willpower for Temporal Warden talent trees, and to compensate for upcoming changes to Brawler talents.

Finally, I moved all the options into the Gameplay tab instead of taking up a tab of my own. My options all look like "Nullpack: ..." or "Nulltweaks: ..." and are grouped together.

[Doctornull]

Uploaded a minor bug fix in a Storm Warden talent. If you get a Lua error when using Flame Surge, please update. The update should be transparent (i.e. won't invalidate existing characters).

[marshmallowpeep]

The Heavy's Pull of Gravity has a tendency to pull enemies to the opposite side of your character and therefore, apparently, outside of it's own damage area. I still get the shield bash, but not the spell damage portion. It's very annoying.

[Zaive]

Winter Wrath doesn't appear to trigger reaving combat. It's a spell that takes a turn so it should... but it doesn't.

[Doctornull]

The Heavy's Pull of Gravity has a tendency to pull enemies to the opposite side of your character and therefore, apparently, outside of it's own damage area. I still get the shield bash, but not the spell damage portion. It's very annoying.

Hmm. I could add damage to the ring around the character, or damage everyone who got moved, or try to keep them in the cone. Which is preferable?

Winter Wrath doesn't appear to trigger reaving combat. It's a spell that takes a turn so it should... but it doesn't.

Ah that's a bug in Corrupted Strength.

Wintery Wrath uses no_energy='fake' because it uses whatever turn length your weapons require, the same as a lot of Technique talents. Corrupted Strength ought to check "no_energy==true" instead of what it does now. (What it does now is put the Corrupted Strength check inside the use_energy code, so if you do anything other than use 1 unit of standard spell energy, you will trick Corrupted Strength into failing.)

Bug report here: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=40850 feel free to chime in.

[marshmallowpeep]

Hmm. I could add damage to the ring around the character, or damage everyone who got moved, or try to keep them in the cone. Which is preferable?

Well, keeping them in the cone would increase the synergy with Repulsion Blast, which had been my intended strategy. Heavy doesn't really have any 360 degree AoEs to take advantage of having the enemies surrounding you, although if they do stay in the cone that makes the shield bash component hit fewer enemies. Really, any of those solutions would work, there's pros and cons, but for the particular way I was building that character (he's dead now) keeping them in the cone would be most effective.

On another note, I think it would be fun and thematically appropriate if Striker got Voidwalker, and maybe Ascetic got Arcane Surge in place of Enhancement.