Doomed/Darkness Tweaks

[Amakthel]

This addon was meant to alter the cursed/Darkness tree so that it's less... wretched, and add a locked tree: cursed/Inner Darkness, that gives some bits of utility and at least one reason to care about darkness damage to the class. It has since become a Doomed rework.

These are my alterations to the cursed/Darkness tree:
Creeping Darkness--does a little more damage, has a shorter cooldown, spreads a little further, lasts a little longer, inherits the blind from Dark Torrent and the pin from Dark Tendrils when the appropriate talent reaches effective talent lvl 4, and deals an insultingly small amount of mind damage when you learn Madness.
Dark Vision--mostly the same, but the maximum vision reaches out to seven so that you can ping things with Agony/Feed(life) at max range through your darkness. The movement speed buff was bumped up.
Dark Torrent--range left alone, chance to leave behind creeping dark and darkness increased.
Dark Tendrils--the exact way that Dark Tendrils moves in the original code was.. odd, and I didn't see a good way to make the talent move any more quickly, so I replaced it with a cone shaped ability that pulls enemies that are more than four tiles away to about four tiles away, and enemies that are fewer than four tiles away in to melee range. Then it pins them and deals damage, much like the old ability. The range, damage, and pin strength should scale with talent level.

EDIT V1.0.1: Dark Tendrils now function like vanilla Dark Tendrils, except faster--much faster, at high talent levels--and got a duration increase so that they can actually hunt down enemies that try to escape, instead of just petering out if they struggle.
EDIT V1.0.3: Creeping Darkness has had it's radius locked at 3, and the number of seeds of darkness, scaled to fill a percentage of the aoe. I removed the Madness effect as well. Dark Tendrils now has an additional tendril at talent level 6 or higher.

and these are my new Talents:

cursed/Inner Darkness:

Veil Walk -- very short range teleport whose range increases with talent levels. Lets you switch with enemies.
Grudge -- gives you health and hate, but inflicts a mental debuff that ultimately deals more damage than it provides, while causing you to seep darkness out of all of your orifices.
Dark Blood -- Dark Blood creates an imaginary pool, in which the damage you take is stored, and then portioned out to you each turn. If it overflows, it stops siphoning away damage to deal to you later. It doesn't decrease the total damage dealt at all, only stretches it out. The pool gets bigger and the rate at which you are dealt damage gets smaller the more talent points you put in.
Heartless -- a sustained ability that gives you a flat amount of darkness damage on top of all the damage you deal, some blind and disease resist, and causes enemies you kill while the sustain is in effect to leave a seed of creeping darkness behind.

EDIT V1.0.3: The Inner Darkness tree has been rearranged to the following order: Grudge, Step(now Veil Walk), Heartless, Dark Blood, based on the way people were investing points into it in the vault. In addition, Veil Walk is now instant if you step into the darkness, and inflicts the veil-touched debuff on enemies that you switch with. The veil-touched debuff is similar to Noctophobia from HousePet's afflicted rework, with the numbers tweaked. It cuts mind save, fear immunity, and dark resist.

This is my first addon, so please--tear it apart! Thank you.

Version 1.0.1--Dark Tendrils now function like vanilla Dark Tendrils, except faster--much faster, at high talent levels--and a duration increase to enable them to actually hunt down enemies that try to escape, instead of just petering out if they struggle.
Version 1.0.2--Grudge was breaking when it bled darkness on the ground, now it does that without breaking.
Version 1.0.3--Creeping Darkness has had its radius decreased, and the number of dark pools set to fill a percentage of the area based on talent level and mindpower, and no longer synergizes with Madness. Dark Tendrils now gives you a second tendril at raw talent level 5. The Inner Darkness tree has been rearranged to the following order: Grudge, Step(now Veil Walk), Heartless, Dark Blood, based on the way people were investing points into it in the vault. In addition, Veil Walk is now instant if you step into the darkness, and inflicts the veil-touched debuff on enemies that you switch with. The veil-touched debuff is similar to Noctophobia from HousePet's afflicted rework, with the numbers tweaked. It cuts mind save, fear immunity, and dark resist. The Fears tree now comes unlocked, and has been altered to be like the version of Fears in HousePet's afflicted rework, with Master of Fear renamed to Tyrant so that the icons load correctly. The fear effects themselves I have altered based on complaints I got off of the forums (damaging fears were unable to crit) and things I noticed myself in the code (several of the fears were locked such that they could not inflict brainlock??)
Version 1.0.4--Fears have been fixed so that you can no longer inflict them on allies, which should remove the sandworm bug entirely, but just in case, heighten fear will now also reset talents that somehow manage to get far into the negatives, hopefully resolving the effect naturally. Gestures have also been altered so as to require empty hands (how can you gesture with your hands full of gemstone?) and significantly buffed to the point of potentially being broken, in the hopes of being any sort of alternative to psiblades. I'll probably have to tune them back in a later version, and I might add range the way kemott11 suggested, but right now I want to see if it's even possible for an empty-hand-based bump damage tree to stand up to psiblades.
Version 1.0.5--Gestures have been made a little less ridiculous, and fears would just... not do anything, silently, a lot of the time. That shouldn't happen anymore. Also, my thumb grew back, and I can type again. Please tear this release apart!
Version 1.0.6--Gestures got pumped back up, and now only requires one hand. Fears no longer break other mind effects, tormented no longer breaks if forced to last more than eight turns, and various talent descriptions have been made clearer.

[kemott11]

Looks cool. I always really liked the theme of the darkness tree but it was pretty lackluster. Now let's hope this won't make the game puke out tons of lua errors.

[nsrr]

Looks cool. I always really liked the theme of the darkness tree but it was pretty lackluster. Now let's hope this won't make the game puke out tons of lua errors.

Totally agree. Shadows are the class's real source of power in the base game, and I find them too passive to make a fun build. I've always wished that Darkness was more viable.

Been testing this out a bit, and, so far, no errors at all. Definitely a boost in power for creeping darkness. Maybe be a bit over-tuned, but it's hard to say for sure because I'm still early in my run. Inner Darkness looks good, too, particularly Dark Blood. Damage smearing is always great.

Dark Tendrils--the exact way that Dark Tendrils moves in the original code was.. odd, and I didn't see a good way to make the talent move any more quickly, so I replaced it with a cone shaped ability that pulls enemies that are more than four tiles away to about four tiles away, and enemies that are fewer than four tiles away in to melee range. Then it pins them and deals damage, much like the old ability. The range, damage, and pin strength should scale with talent level.

I like how the old Dark Tendrils worked, being able to follow an actor if it moves. Watching it chase after a mob is also nice visually. They did move awfully slowly, though.

So, I did a bit of poking around in the engine and figured out how you could make the old dark tendrils move 'faster'. Turns out to be very easy, actually. The tendrils are Objects with a defined 'act' function; inside this function they use energy, which is the game's meter for how many 'actions' can happen in a turn. By default, everything has 1000 energy to use in a turn (this is an over-simplification, but Dark Tendrils are very simple objects, so it works). You will see inside of the createDarkTendrils function that the 'act' field beings with

Code: Select all

"local Map = require "engine.Map"
self:useEnergy()

By default, useEnergy will use up the exact amount of energy that the entity has available in one turn, based on speeds, etc. However, you can pass it a value, and it will use that value instead. So,

Code: Select all

self:useEnergy(500)

would cause the tendrils to only use up 500, or half, of their energy, meaning they can 'move' twice in one turn. Change it to 333 and they could move 3 times per turn, 666 for 3 times every 2 turns, and so on. You could even add a new parameter to createDarkTendrils and add a new scaling value to the Dark Tendrils talent that you pass into it, making it so they could move faster with talent investment. For instance, scaling from 750 to 250 or so, going from 4 moves every 3 turns to 4 moves in 1 turn. At 200, or 5 moves per turn, they could hit a stationary target the turn after they are cast. They could also chase down an actor who has used a Movement Infusion or has otherwise buffed movement speed, who would normally be able to out run the tendrils. Personally, I would go with a scaling value.

Hope that's helpful, and thanks for the work. Nice mod!

Edit: I attached a version of darkness.lua (zipped, because the forum won't let me upload a .lua file) that has a scaling 'speed' component. I did not update the description to reflect the changes, or give them a test run, but it should show you what I meant, in case my explanation wasn't clear.

[Amakthel]

Dark Tendrils--the exact way that Dark Tendrils moves in the original code was.. odd, and I didn't see a good way to make the talent move any more quickly, so I replaced it with a cone shaped ability that pulls enemies that are more than four tiles away to about four tiles away, and enemies that are fewer than four tiles away in to melee range. Then it pins them and deals damage, much like the old ability. The range, damage, and pin strength should scale with talent level.

I like how the old Dark Tendrils worked, being able to follow an actor if it moves. Watching it chase after a mob is also nice visually. They did move awfully slowly, though.

So, I did a bit of poking around in the engine and figured out how you could make the old dark tendrils move 'faster'. Turns out to be very easy, actually. The tendrils are Objects with a defined 'act' function; inside this function they use energy, which is the game's meter for how many 'actions' can happen in a turn. By default, everything has 1000 energy to use in a turn (this is an over-simplification, but Dark Tendrils are very simple objects, so it works). You will see inside of the createDarkTendrils function that the 'act' field beings with

Code: Select all

"local Map = require "engine.Map"
self:useEnergy()

By default, useEnergy will use up the exact amount of energy that the entity has available in one turn, based on speeds, etc. However, you can pass it a value, and it will use that value instead. So,

Code: Select all

self:useEnergy(500)

would cause the tendrils to only use up 500, or half, of their energy, meaning they can 'move' twice in one turn. Change it to 333 and they could move 3 times per turn, 666 for 3 times every 2 turns, and so on. You could even add a new parameter to createDarkTendrils and add a new scaling value to the Dark Tendrils talent that you pass into it, making it so they could move faster with talent investment. For instance, scaling from 750 to 250 or so, going from 4 moves every 3 turns to 4 moves in 1 turn. At 200, or 5 moves per turn, they could hit a stationary target the turn after they are cast. They could also chase down an actor who has used a Movement Infusion or has otherwise buffed movement speed, who would normally be able to out run the tendrils. Personally, I would go with a scaling value.

Thank you! I'll take a look. I legitimately have no idea how things fit together, so explanations like this are extremely helpful. I was trying to find out how to make the tendrils move (whichever way they move) further each turn, instead of making it move more times per turn. This makes much more sense.

When I was looking into making it move faster, I was also considering giving one the ability to send out more (like two or three max) tendrils on a single cast, to lock down multiple targets. Does that sound like too much?

Do alterations to global speed or abilities that "give turns" increase the total amount of energy provided to an Actor each turn?

[Amakthel]

Addon updated with new/old Dark Tendrils.

Dark Tendrils now function like vanilla Dark Tendrils, except faster--much faster, at high talent levels--and a duration increase to enable them to actually hunt down enemies that try to escape, instead of just petering out if they struggle.

[nsrr]

Three might be a tad much, but two as a bonus for investing 5 points might be alright.

I'm still a bit iffy on some speed interactions, but those I do know, and you pretty much got it. An actor with 120% global speed, for example, gets 1200 energy for a turn. A talent or on hit effect that cause you to gain, say, 10% of a turn, will give the player an extra 100 energy, so they would start the next turn with 1100. When an actor uses up less energy than it has total but doesn't have enough left for any more actions in the turn, the extra is carried over, eventually adding up to an extra turn. Things like attack speed or move speed or spell speed buffs and debuffs act as multipliers that affect the amount of energy used when the specific type of action is carried out. All to the best of my understanding, that is, which I admit is not perfect.

[HousePet]

This kinda makes me want to see how much of the complete Afflicted rework I had done before a harddrive died and ate my design doc. :/
I should have just dumped all the info in the thread for review/preservation!

Edit: It looks like the Darkness changes were done. But what really gutted me was losing the whole design for the Depraved Class, which was an Afflicted Assassin.

[Amakthel]

I am suddenly *extremely* interested in seeing what you've made, if you're okay with sharing?

[HousePet]

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=46231
I got that done but was a bit burnt out.

[Jarinex]

Seeing this Addon reminded me of your afflicted changes Housepet. I was wondering what happened to it. That’s a shame that you lost that to a hard drive. I was looking forward to seeing what else you had in store for it (probably also explains why I haven’t seen much to your block Addon you made too)

[HousePet]

Life has been rather unkind to me over the past 2ish years, so I haven't been able to keep up with all the stuff I was working on. (And I was probably trying to do too much, such as rewriting two whole classes and adding an extra one. XD)

That Block stuff was basically done with regards to what I could do. I think DarkGod and Shibari were both interested in what I had done, but had/have been busy with other things. Though perhaps not quite ready for inclusion, perhaps some nudging might be able to get them to have another look at it to finish it off.

[Amakthel]

HousePet, is it okay if I harvest some ideas from livingnightmare while I work on this addon?

[HousePet]

Sure. I think I also tried to clean up some of the code as well which will help you.
Just be aware that messing with such corrupted powers might backfire and if I end up trying to finish the stuff off, your stuff/soul might get into the final product.

[Jarinex]

Aw I’m sorry to hear that HP, hopefully life is gettin better for you.

That would be cool to see block improved, as the ideas I remember in that earlier thread were good.

I definitely look forward to seeing what this Addon does as well

[Amakthel]

Sure. I think I also tried to clean up some of the code as well which will help you.
Just be aware that messing with such corrupted powers might backfire and if I end up trying to finish the stuff off, your stuff/soul might get into the final product.

I'm okay with that. You'll have to talk to my bank about it, it's currently going through debt processing.