Assassin - Complete Rogue Rework v1.8

[rekenner]

alright, ascended. http://te4.org/characters/18364/tome/ff ... fbe6946793

This is definitely way more fun than base rogues and certainly stronger. I wouldn't necessarily say too strong, but they might have a bit too strong defenses. The Trained Reaction + Danger Sense combo is maybe a bit too strong, especially combined with Soothing Darkness giving you insane regen for ~10 turns in a fight (with Snap). They're also maybe slightly too unrestrained in their resources - with a bit of stam gear, I was mostly leaving Blade Flurry just on at all times.

I didn't get the chance to mess with the new Dirty Fighting tree, although I have no idea what I'd take out of my build to use it - probably the Assassination tree? Although, you burn down targets with Marked for Death so, so fast. So many skills in this scale well with points.

[Razakai]

Congratulations Rekenner!

Yeah, Lethality isn't terribly exciting. It fills the role of stuff like Strength of Purpose, Reaving Combat and other talents where you just stick points in there if you want some more damage. I'm kinda thinking about chopping and merging it with Deadly Strikes as that's another fairly dull passive, and giving Lethality tree a slightly more exciting talent. Not sure yet, and Rogue certainly doesn't need more damage.

You're the second person to mention the Danger Sense+Trained Reactions combo. Was hoping that putting the DS cooldown up to 15 would lessen it but perhaps something more fundamental needs changing.

The Soothing Darkness/Shadow Dance/Snap combo probably needs looking at. I wasn't thinking about Snap when I put the numbers on Soothing Darkness so I might nerf that a little - will have the side effect of dropping stamina regen too. Dance/Snap is incredibly powerful but it takes a lot of investment so I'll leave it for now.

I think Exposed/Tempo might be giving a bit too much stamina too, considering it can proc and stack multiple times against fast melee mobs. Might give it a 1 per turn limit.

I'm away at the weekend so will probably do some balancing work next week. Still need to implement new artifacts and traps as well, but have a Berserker rework mod in progress that's taking up time.

[rekenner]

I said this on SA, but not here because... it was super late, I guess. But I don't really think the class is actually OP, in terms of the spectrum of classes available. It feels more like base marauder, in terms of overall power level, but a lot more fun to play (where I find marauder boring as hell to play). They're less strong in a straight up fight, but have more ways to engage and disengage favorably.

I'd say adding more to the rework (and working on berserker, which I also look forward to) is more important (or maybe just more exciting) than working on balance.

[Deis]

Does Soothing Darkness's health regeneration actually work? I have 5/5 in it and am stealthed, yet am not seeing any boost to life regeneration. My life regen is at 0.3, when Soothing Darkness says I should get a 44 point life regen boost while stealthed. I did see it remove a negative mental effect, so I know that portion is working.

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[Radon26]

are you just looking at the healing rate, or did you try to "wait" a few turns, while staring at your health bar?

[Deis]

are you just looking at the healing rate, or did you try to "wait" a few turns, while staring at your health bar?

I probably should have mentioned that. I did wait quite a few turns but didn't see any bonus healing kicking in, just standard very slow healing.

[Razakai]

Are you using the latest version Deis? There was a problem with Soothing Darkness in 1.5 but that ought to be fixed now. If not I'll have a look tonight.

[Deis]

Yep, I'm on the latest version. Re-downloaded from Steam to double check, and fresh file and old file both are 666,313 bytes with a last modified date of 1/15 at 11:15:45PM

[Razakai]

Weird. Seemed to work ok in testing, so I'll create a test char tonight and see if I can replicate it.

e: Can't seem to replicate it. Turning Stealth on/off, using Shadow Dance, all of them still result in the regen working correctly. Do you still get the issue even after disabling/enabling stealth?

[Deis]

Yes, I've tried on that character multiple times, but have had no luck. Neither Stealth or Shadow Dance give health regen. I just leveled a Cornac Rogue to 9 and used Soothing Darkness as well, still no life regen.

If you aren't having the issue on your end it's most likely a conflict with one of the many addons I have. I didn't think I had any that would conflict with or change Rogue talents or Stealth though.

Linked my character if your interested in looking at my buttload of addons and seeing if any jump out at you.

http://te4.org/characters/4547/tome/10e ... c6526bad14

[Razakai]

Might be an addon issue. The Soothing Darkness code works by overloading the Stealth sustain's attributes with new values, so if anyone else is doing anything with Stealth they could interfere with it. I'll have a browse and see if any seem like an obvious cause.

[ghostbuster]

I encountered several problems with the addons.

1/ Fumble is presently a game breaker
a/ when you fail to activate a talent because ot a fumble effect, the effect is NOT removed as it should according to the description.
b/ it also affects instant talents (and it should not, IMHO, this is the purpose of instant talents to be always available for an escape or status removal).
c/ it scales insanely. When you encounter a high level mob (100+ level) with fumble, you can have a fumble with 90% (!!!) chance to fail to use a talent for 10 turns (renewable, of course). It should be capped to something sane (say 50%).
No need to say that a/+b/+c/ = game over.

2/ Poisons do not seem to stack properly. After applying dozens of blows, the damage is still close to the base damage. Similarly after some deaths and poison propagation, the effect is not changed.
By the way, why have you introduced a cap in the poison stacking? Stacking is part of the fun of poisons, and allows to devellop strategies when surrounded by critters to attack the weakest ones to have the poison effect multiply around them when they die. With the stacking cap, it is no longer possible. Leeching poison could become too powerful without this cap, but it can heal a base value that would not stack instead of a percentage of the poison damage.

3/ In some situations, kife throwing become unavailable without any good reason. I have not thrown knives for many turns and, while I can have several detrimental effects, I do no see which one would forbid the use of knives. And of course, the knife throwing talent is still sustained... Sorry not to be not precise, but I have not remarked any correlation with any specific status effect.

Besides that, thanks for your work. This is a very fun class to play.

[Razakai]

I'll look at fumble and cap at 50%.

In vanilla, status poisons don't actually stack at all. Only deadly poison does, to a cap of 4x base value. In this, all poisons do to a max of 3x. This gets split between the poisons if you have Vile, so each will be 1.5x stack. In addition they no longer get decreased proc chance if the target is already poisoned. So unless you used deadly, poisons deal higher total damage in vanilla and stack faster. Not to mention Toxins giving even more power to them.

I'll look at throwing knives too.

[ghostbuster]

In vanilla, status poisons don't actually stack at all. Only deadly poison does, to a cap of 4x base value. In this, all poisons do to a max of 3x. This gets split between the poisons if you have Vile, so each will be 1.5x stack. In addition they no longer get decreased proc chance if the target is already poisoned. So unless you used deadly, poisons deal higher total damage in vanilla and stack faster. Not to mention Toxins giving even more power to them.

I am surprised. I looked at the vanilla code and you seem to be right. But I am 100% certain to have seen large stacking effects, especially on groups of critters thanks to toxic death. Even in this game, I had a weapon with insiduous poison and it happened to have 1000+ damage per turn for insiduous poison, while my "inner" poisons where limited to ~40 per turn.

[Razakai]

I have noticed some really odd behaviour with weapon poisons. Once I got the spider poison from mandible to like 100k+. But yeah I think poisons tree should still be a strong choice if you combo with Toxins.