Harbinger Class [1.0.6]

[minmay]

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The Harbinger is a melee Wilder class that has mostly passive talents and does not use resources for any of its class talents. It has a lot of "proc" damage and is excellent at killing dense groups of enemies, but doesn't have a lot of debuffs and its mobility isn't the best.
The focus is on positioning tactics and on character building strategy (many competing passive talents). The focus is obviously not on complex talent rotations or resource management.

Unlike Runic Golem, this addon is not a joke. It's a serious class that I think fits in the game.

It has 8 new talent categories, plus Combat Training, Staff Combat, and Mindstar Mastery all unlocked at 1.30, and of course, Survival locked at 1.00.
You can make a reasonable case for all three weapon types on this class; conventional weapons have the best weapon damage as usual, but mindstars let you ignore Strength and staves have the procs damage bonus. Harbinger starts with Staff Combat and Mindstar Mastery unlocked for the purpose of player convenience, even though they use resources. (It does not start with a mana pool, so you can still go antimagic, just don't put points in Channel Staff.)

A sampling of talents:

Channel Cold
A snowstorm follows you wherever you go. Every time you hit with a melee attack, you channel the storm's power through your weapon, creating a range 10 piercing beam of frost dealing X cold damage to all in its path, including the original target. Mental criticals apply.
The beam will only harm hostile creatures.
If you are wielding two weapons, this will only happen on 50% of attacks. Shields do not count as weapons.
The damage will increase with your Mindpower.

Flashover
Every time you critically strike, the fire around you suddenly flares, doing X fire damage to all foes in a radius of 2 around you.
This only harms hostile creatures.
Physical, mental, and spell criticals will all trigger this effect.
The damage will increase with your Mindpower.

Countershock (one of Harbinger's few active talents)
Removes up to X temporary detrimental effects, but also removes an equal number of temporary beneficial effects. If there are no beneficial effects remaining, no more detrimental effects will be removed.
Afterwards, you are healed by Y for each pair of effects that was removed. Mental criticals apply to the healing.
The healing will increase with your Mindpower.
This talent will not deactivate sustains.

Fortress of Ruin
The winds around you are so strong that they interfere with your foes' attacks. Your Defense increases by X, and all critical hits against you have Y% subtracted from their critical multiplier (but always do at least normal damage).
The Defense bonus will increase with your Mindpower.
Note: unlike Indiscernible Anatomy, this talent actually does what it claims to do.

Arc
When you hit with a melee attack, you get similar melee attacks against all foes connected to the one you just hit. This can affect any number of foes as long as there are no gaps between them, but will not hit the same foe twice. Only hostile creatures will be attacked.
Learning this talent grants immunity to melee retaliation damage.
Additionally, all lightning damage you deal is increased by X%.

Changes that may happen
- Obviously: bug fixes, balance tweaks, particle/icon tweaks, etc.
- Maybe slightly more active talents or talent categories.
- Changing/removing/replacing talents
- Somehow opening the class to undead (unlike other Wilder classes there's no thematic reason undead can't be Harbingers, but taking is_nature off of the talents would make the class unable to utilize talent on nature hit, so I don't really want to do that).

Changes that will not happen
- Adding lots of active talents
- Adding resource usage
- Converting the passives into sustains (yes I know radiant horrors exist, no they're not unkillable).

Criticism welcome. I've played a full game with Harbinger so hopefully there are no game-breaking bugs. Balance is very much open to change; in particular the class's single-target damage is likely too high.

[Sinistrality]

Heya, didn't have time to actually play the class yet, but the categories don't show up on Adventurer.

[minmay]

Heya, didn't have time to actually play the class yet, but the categories don't show up on Adventurer.

That's intentional. The class has not_on_random_boss set to true, so that the addon doesn't interfere with non-Harbinger games. Vanilla does the same thing with Skirmisher and Stone Warden.

[Arcvasti]

I've been playing this class and I quite like it. It feels fairly different from vanilla classes and feels incredibly convenient to play. Max light radius, no stat requirements on talents, no accidental friendly fire and no resource management remove a LOT of hassle from the game.

Feedback[Playing on Normal/Adventure with a dual-mindstars build]:

-The weapon damage multipliers for Foreshock and Blazing Barrage are both quite low. Doesn't make much of a difference considering most damage comes from procs, but its still somewhat odd.
-Its a really nice touch that things get pluralized as talents level up. Much different then the traditional ToME style of either hedging with "attack[s]" or incorrectly pluralizing at low/high levels.
-The fire ward effect that Shower gives is classified as a magical effect. Is this intentional?
-Blazing Barrage level 5 does basically nothing, besides give 1% more weapon damage per hit.
-Level 1 Mist gives enough of a spike in life regen to render you nigh-invulnerable in the starting areas, although its effectiveness lessens dramatically afterwards.
-Arc is very, very strong, especially considering how it interacts with Blazing Barrage and dual wielding. The melee retaliation immunity is mostly just a convenience, but the rest of the passive is basically what the projection ego wishes it could be. Notably, you get the vast majority of this talent's capabilities at level 1, with increasing levels only giving +lightning damage. Maybe there should be a level-dependent cap on the number of extra attacks it gives you?
-Cremate is completely and utterly ridiculous. Talent level 5 makes slain enemies explode for 119% of their maximum life in a radius of 7. This wrecks everything even on Normal and is probably enough to faceroll Insane given how inflated enemy healthpools get. I actually took out four points fom 5/5 Cremate because it felt too strong to use in good conscience. To be honest, if the explosion damage/radius at level 5 was equivalent to the current level 1 damage/radius, it'd still be a "Rush to 5/5 this" worthy skill.

Conjecture[I haven't actually tested this, but this is what it seems like from reading the talent description]

-Countershock seems really really situational, enough so that I'd probably only use it a handful of times throughout an entire game.EDIT:Nevermind, see below.
-Mist seems like it'd synergize obscenely well with Fungus+Antimagic, making Fungus heal you to full each turn and making Antimagic shield nigh-unbreakable due to the Equilibrium regen.
-Ditto for Storm Conduit, except in a more offensive sense.
-However, I can't really think of a situation in which Mist's mana regeneration could be similarly useful. I guess its convienient if you get Premonition from Seer escorts, but it otherwise seems pretty extraneous.
-Flashover looks really really strong on paper[Not Cremate strong, but probably Arc strong]. With all three elemental on-hits and dual wielding, Blazing Barrage can trigger Flashover (3*2*3) = 18 times in one turn. With Arc, that becomes another potential extra 18 procs per extra target. Even taking into account the dual wielding penalties for the elemental procs, this is still a lot of damage, especially when considering passive crit sources like Cyclone or Resolve. Maybe there should be a cap on how many times it triggers per turn?

EDIT: Countershock is better then I gave it credit for, since it lets you turn a pure physical Wild Infusion into a ghetto omnicleanse, as long as you don't need the pain suppression allres bonus.

SECONDEDIT:

EDIT:Turns out I forgot sometimes Channel Cold just doesn't proc while dual wielding. Nevermind.

There seems to be something big up with Chill's global speed slow.

Check the bottom right corner

In case its hard to see in the attached image, that's a 4128% global speed debuff. I'm quite certain this is coming from Chill. I removed all other global speed slow equips and then got an unlucky attacking turn where neither of my mindstars triggered Channel Cold and the absurd debuff was not applied. When I levelled down Chill to level 3[And the talent description displayed 33% global slow], the actual slow on enemies was 3272%. This implies to me that the global speed slow for Chill is being inflated by exactly 100 times what its supposed to be, which should probably be fairly trival to fix.

THIRDEDIT:

Also, Channel Cold, despite what the tooltip and ice beam animation would have you believe, only has a range of 1. This means it does absolutely nothing when Arc or Blazing Barrage procs it against a distant foe and doesn't give you any piercing aoe.

FOURTHEDIT:

Remember when I said that if Cremate kept its level 1 explosion damage and radius at level 5 it would be balanced? Turns out I was wrong. One point in Cremate is currently providing the majority of my damage.

[minmay]

Yup, Cremate's brokenly overpowered and is going to be replaced next version.

How did I miss that stuff with Channel Cold =/ Will definitely fix that.

-The weapon damage multipliers for Foreshock and Blazing Barrage are both quite low. Doesn't make much of a difference considering most damage comes from procs, but its still somewhat odd.

This is partially because they use no resources. If Foreshock had a 100%+ multiplier it would always be better than using a regular attack, even against stun immune enemies. (Blazing Barrage, incidentally, is too strong right now even with the tiny damage multiplier, and will be nerfed or replaced).

-Arc is very, very strong, especially considering how it interacts with Blazing Barrage and dual wielding. The melee retaliation immunity is mostly just a convenience, but the rest of the passive is basically what the projection ego wishes it could be. Notably, you get the vast majority of this talent's capabilities at level 1, with increasing levels only giving +lightning damage. Maybe there should be a level-dependent cap on the number of extra attacks it gives you?

I'd rather not saddle Arc with something like that because it's the class's defining feature and should be as simple as possible. I think it will be fine once the class gets nerfed in other ways. (In the worst case, I'll get rid of Blaze etc. so that it doesn't increase the damage against individual targets significantly.)

Other changes I'm going to make:
- Vortex will only attack one enemy at the end (but still pull all enemies in)
- Storm Conduit's physical power bonus will change somehow (currently it's absurd with a good regeneration infusion and almost meaningless otherwise)
- Resistance Disruption will be replaced with something else
- Slight nerfs to Fortress of Ruin, early game Rain, and Stability
- In general, expect the class's damage output to be nerfed

Thanks!

[Frumple]

Minor-ish thing with fault I'm fairly sure isn't intentional: The range limit is being ignored for the swap effect. I.e. at tlvl 1 you can target something ten tiles away, and it'll attempt to swap with it.

Interestingly, the teleport itself does respect the limit, which makes the talent silly good for gap closing, particularly if you leave it at tlvl 1, since that means you can put anything (at least in LoS... don't have access to telepathy or somethin' yet to see if it works without) within 2-3 tiles of you.

Other than that, seems neat so far. Pretty sure a lot of folks won't be terribly appreciative, but I like really passive melee classes so it's more or less right up my alley, heh.

Also kinda' seems hella' weak beyond normal, though, at the absolute least during the early game. Higher difficulty critters just kinda' take a massive crap on you initially. Even just on nightmare the out of gate damage and whatnot seems pretty undertuned. Doesn't do enough damage, doesn't mitigate enough damage, most of the mobility etc. options are a few tiers in... lot of the early game stuff will casually eat you alive. Not sure what to do about it or if it's worth really caring about (even though I'm persisting with the nightmare run, I'm fairly sure I'd be having a bit of a blast on normal), but it's probably worth reporting.

[minmay]

Minor-ish thing with fault I'm fairly sure isn't intentional: The range limit is being ignored for the swap effect. I.e. at tlvl 1 you can target something ten tiles away, and it'll attempt to swap with it.

yikes
i stole the code for this from dimensional step
apparently dimensional step has had the same bug for years

Also kinda' seems hella' weak beyond normal, though, at the absolute least during the early game. Higher difficulty critters just kinda' take a massive crap on you initially. Even just on nightmare the out of gate damage and whatnot seems pretty undertuned. Doesn't do enough damage, doesn't mitigate enough damage, most of the mobility etc. options are a few tiers in... lot of the early game stuff will casually eat you alive. Not sure what to do about it or if it's worth really caring about (even though I'm persisting with the nightmare run, I'm fairly sure I'd be having a bit of a blast on normal), but it's probably worth reporting.

Would it really be a melee class if it wasn't worse than a mindblast torque for the first 10 levels? If it proves to be a problem I could increase the "minimum" damage on the channeling talents, I guess.

I've uploaded version 1.0.1. Changes:
- Bug fix: Chill now applies the correct level of slowing
- Bug fix: Channel Cold now creates a range 10 beam as it's supposed to
- Bug fix: Fault no longer lets you swap with out-of-range actors (but vanilla Dimensional Step still does...)
- Vortex now only attacks one enemy at the end (but still pulls in all enemies), has a slightly different damage multiplier
- Reduced Blaze radius from 2 to 1, and reduced its damage
- Removed physical power bonus from Storm Conduit
- Nerfed Rain healing modifier and mana/equilibrium regen values, and made Rain life generation mindpower-dependent
- Nerfed Stability immunity values
- Nerfed Fortress of Ruin critical multiplier reduction
- Nerfed Diamond Dust slightly
- Replaced Blazing Barrage with Suppressing Fire, which makes your Blaze talent suppress enemies' healing. (Blazing Barrage still exists for old savegames)
- Cremate now heals you when you kill something (limited to once per turn) instead of killing everything
- Replaced Resistance Disruption with Mountain Mover, which increases physical power (boring but works a lot better)
- Clarified Flashover's description

It's compatible with old saves (you'll even keep Blazing Barrage and Resistance Disruption if you've already got them, although you won't be able to put more points in them).

[Arcvasti]

Minor-ish thing with fault I'm fairly sure isn't intentional: The range limit is being ignored for the swap effect. I.e. at tlvl 1 you can target something ten tiles away, and it'll attempt to swap with it.

yikes
i stole the code for this from dimensional step
apparently dimensional step has had the same bug for years

This isn't quite as horrifying as you'd think since dimensional step only lets you swap places at max talent level and thus max range.

Regardless, I've continued playing the same save game, resolving to not use Blazing Barrage. Overall I think that things are more balanced now. I can kill whole rooms of weak monsters in a few turns, but so can a Corrupter/Archmage/Paradox Mage. Channel Cold in particular is probably the strongest elemental proc now. It deals only a little less damage then Channel Lightning while having a better AOE then Channel Flames. It could probably stand to see a bit of a reduction in damage/global speed slow, but its not game-breaking by any means. Don't quite see why Stability was nerfed, though. Cursed have a nearly identical talent that scales up to 50% stun/confuse/whatever immunity and Unflinching Resolve grants arguably better status resistance for a comparable number of points. Once again, minor issue, especially given that I end up initiating with a Movement Infusion much more often now that the class has no ranged options. Currently at level 28 and have just started Dreadfell. One death so far, from forgetting to activate Heroism in an adventurer ambush.

EDIT: Minor note: Cremate's heal-on-kill effect doesn't say where the effect originated from. It just says "Player received 53 healing" as opposed to "Player received 53 healing from Cremate". This makes it a bit more annoying to sort through the[Already pretty tangled] message logs.

DOUBLEEDIT: I somehow didn't notice that my equipment gave about 30% more +cold damage then my other damage elements. Channel Cold's damage is probably just fine.

[Frumple]

Y'know, I think it may be a good thing the exploding cremate was axed. Still playing the initial version 'cause I'm lazy about updating, but in the graveyard boss fight, I had the attached happen. It's an attachment because the chunk of the log file I took it from exceeded the forum's character limit for a single post... by about twenty seven thousand characters. It's just shy of a thousand log lines (988 in N++, of which maybe ten or so are unrelated), half dedicated to will o' wisps taking fire damage, and the other half them dying. And it kinda' looks like that's not all of it, 'cause I just checked the character dump and, well:

Most killed NPC: will o' the wisp (1776)

I'm not entirely sure what happened, and it's entirely possible there's some addon conflict going on, but wow.

Actually, now that I scope back in the log file, yes, yes this would appear to be an addon conflict, specifically with whatever that most recent vampire lord thing is. Also attach -- wait, no, the .txt is about 30 KiB over the forum limit sweet blazes, lemme get this -- linked via pastebin here is the error message involved, which is... also the longest contiguous error message I have ever seen in all my days playing T4. It can only be linked because it's around five times the size of the other one. An error message about 5629 lines long.

... kinda' want to say DG might be interested in seeing it, just for a laugh, tbh. Any of the folks more code inclined folks, really, heh. Questionably relevant to the addon itself, considering it's both an addon conflict and apparently largely because of a reworked talent, but I figured you might like to see it anyway, if only to boggle

[minmay]

The same thing could happen with demon/naga portals. Just another way that talent was broken

[Arcvasti]

Storm Conduit might actually be Cremate-tier broken.

Example

In case the image isn't clear, that's 13k lightning damage in less then one turn. For context, it took me 15 turns of bump attacking to achieve that same damage and Harbinger melee damage is pretty strong.

Relevant Character Stats[Including Heroism]:

Level 39
101 Con
Fungal Blood Prodigy
210% Heal Mod
5/5 Storm Conduit[238% of direct healing received as lightning damage]
+33% Lightning Damage

You could pretty easily top these numbers. I could probably get 100% more heal mod from equipment alone if I was willing to gimp my melee damage and durability. I could boost Con up to obscene levels if I maxxed Str and Con, got PES and critted with Thorn Grab just before/after[Don't know which would be better overall] popping Heroism. And I could probably squeeze out another ~20% lightning damage without compromising my heal mod or Str/Con too much.

Storm Conduit bugs I noticed:

Lifeleech WILL trigger Storm Conduit, but only when it procs off of the lightning damage that Storm Conduit itself does. Lifeleech off of any other form of damage doesn't trigger it at all. This results in the[Already considerable] damage being multiplied by the talent and healing mod again and dealing far more damage then the original Storm Conduit proc did. Theoretically, this could scale upwards to infinity, but lifeleech procs too rarely for this to be much of an issue.

The Sudden Growth talent from the Fungus Tree doesn't seem to interact with Storm Conduit at all, but it would do ~6700 damage if it DID hit, not counting extra damage from the lifeleech bug above. I'd honestly be OK if it was special cased not to trigger off of Sudden Growth, simply because its probably the biggest heal in the game by a significant margin.

Ideas for balancing Storm Conduit:

I don't even know if this is salvageable. My personal idea for a replacement would be some kind of stackable on-hit that reduces resistances, since Harbingers lose so much damage against enemies with high resall.



In sharp contrast to how ridiculous Storm Conduit is, Flashover seems surprisingly reasonable, although it still needs to be nerfed.

Flashover DPS stats[Based on 100 turns of bump attacking a training dummy with Channel Cold/Fire/Lightning, but NOT Cyclone]

0/5 Flashover: 719 damage per turn

4/5 Flashover: 910 damage per turn

Some ideas for balancing Flashover:

-Give it a resource cost each time it procs[Out of the question, but how similar abilities like Corona work]
-Decrease the damage that additional procs in one turn do.
-Put a cap[Fixed or mindpower dependant] on how many times it can proc per turn
-Let it activate once per type of crit[E.G. Once for a physical crit, once for a mental crit, once for a spell crit]
-Split the damage between fire/lightning/cold/physical, making it get reduced more by resistances. Also solves the "problem" that it shares the same damage type as Channel Fire

EDIT:

Electrical Disruption's cooldown REALLY goes down as you level it up. From 23 to 5. Considering it can remove five beneficial effects, has no cost and is range 10, that's kind of a big deal. Also, level 5 does literally nothing at all since max cd and effects removed happens at 4/5.

[Erenion]

Well, since you can (fairly easily) get 65% life leech proc chance, this actually is a bit of an issue (2* 25% from parasitic mindstars, 15% from Bloodcaller).
Add the fact that healing infusions proc Storm Conduit and that both healing infusions and Fungal Blood do not take time to activate and... yeah.

[Arcvasti]

Oh, I forgot about the parasitic ego. Yeah, that could be [even more] ridiculous with the right randart mindstars.

EDIT:

Also, I've somehow managed to get ALL THREE PIECES of Telos' Staff on this game, which is something I've never managed to do EVER[It turns out the trick to getting the Staff Crystal is forgetting to do a Bringer of Doom altar cluster until after you return from the East]. I am very much regretting A) Not playing this on Steam, where I can use the item vault and B) Not trying out a staff Harbinger first.

DOUBLEEDIT:

In Tannen's Tower, I got a crash while fighting through the multihued dragon room. I was blinded, autocasting Regeneration and holding down the down key.

Here's the debug log, if that's any good at all. Doesn't look helpful to me.

TRIPLEEDIT:

Remember what I said about Flashover being balanced? It kind of is, as long as you're not dealing with aoe melee attacks. Now I see why Vortex only attacks one target now. I spawned thirty training dummies, stood in the middle of them and used Windblade. The game hung for a moment, I got the "Well Trained" achievement[Deal over a million damage to training dummies in one session] and then the game crashed. I repeated the experiment with only ten training dummies and well...

This was the result.

I'm not sure if Flashover can proc off of itself, and this might actually be an issue with Arc and AOE melee attacks, but this is a LOT of damage.

[minmay]

Flashover can't proc off itself; Flashover itself can't even crit. (It could proc a talent-on-mind or talent-on-nature, and that could Crit, making Flashover proc again, but talent-on-mind and talent-on-nature are turn procs, so this is very sharply limited.)

Yeah, I took Windblade on the original test character to see how ridiculous it would be - it does let you get a huge number of attacks but ultimately I let it be because spending a prodigy point to make yourself even better at killing packs, on a class that's already great at killing packs, is probably not the best use of a prodigy point. The thing about training dummies is that they basically only die if you one-shot them, so they'll sustain a full Arc grid for every Windblade attack. Against real enemies, the weaker ones in the chain die quickly, which breaks up the Arcs, which greatly reduces the number of attacks you get and the amount of damage you do. The 10 second lag situation only happens against training dummies. (I couldn't get it to crash, even hitting 34 dummies at once with Windblade, but that was without the life leech bug.)

However, the lag is scary, and it's kind of goofy that Windblade+Arc trivially one-shots the final bosses (or anything else you want) as long as you can get a lot of monsters around them. So I'll change the way Arc works a tiny bit, preventing you from using it to stack up damage that way. The point of it is to multiply your number of attacks by [monsters], not by [monsters]^2 as Arc+Windblade did. So I'll change that.

In Tannen's Tower, I got a crash while fighting through the multihued dragon room. I was blinded, autocasting Regeneration and holding down the down key.

This crashlog looks like a chat tooltip bug from what I can tell.

---

I totally forgot about life leech, oops! I blame this on the stupid way the game determines whether something is a "direct heal".
Sudden Growth isn't a "direct heal" (so it doesn't trigger Arcane Shield etc. either), hence it doesn't trigger Storm Conduit. Instant heals triggering Storm conduit is intentional, though. Fungal Blood, again, takes a prodigy point and I'm not convinced it's that great; I'd be more concerned about heals that can crit, like Nature's Touch from Earthen Beads. But I'll definitely keep an eye on it.

I've uploaded 1.0.2 which is just a hotfix for the Storm Conduit life leech issue and the Windblade issue.

[Arcvasti]

In Tannen's Tower, I got a crash while fighting through the multihued dragon room. I was blinded, autocasting Regeneration and holding down the down key.

This crashlog looks like a chat tooltip bug from what I can tell.

Huh, weird. I couldn't reproduce any similar crashes, so I guess its unrelated to this add-on.

.
Instant heals triggering Storm conduit is intentional, though. Fungal Blood, again, takes a prodigy point and I'm not convinced it's that great; I'd be more concerned about heals that can crit, like Nature's Touch from Earthen Beads. But I'll definitely keep an eye on it.

I still think that dealing 238% of any direct heal you receive as damage is a bit much. That's a fair sized multiplier on top of already scaling with stats, healmod and potentially crit multiplier as well.