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Revamped Skirmisher

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2019 6:14 pm
by nsrr
Revamps the Skirmisher class. Get it here or on the Steam Workshop.

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All talents have been re-coded to remove artificial break points in scaling. New scaling should approximately match the same values at the same talent levels.
Talent costs have been adjusted to be more in line with other stamina users with respect to the damage and utility of the talent.
Many talent damage formuals have been adjusted to increase the minimum value and bring them somewhat more in line with other weapon damage talents, although in some cases even considerable adjustment has left them with larger scaling variation than many other weapon damage scaling formulas. Maximum values remain the same, giving better returns at lower talent levels as a result.

Trapping mastery reduced to 1.0.

Poisons mastery is bumped up to 1.3 (from 1.2; still locked)

Stealth is granted, locked at 1.0 mastery.

'Buckler Expertise' has had the description updated to reflect what it actually does (i.e. it now notes that melee attack deflection does not work in heavy armor) and grants armor and hardiness while wearing light armor.
'Bash and Smash' now scales in the second shield hit as a chance to occur (50-100%). Moved to teir 3.
'Buckler Mastery' no longer has scaling projectile spread radius (projectiles will always be deflected in a radius of 1). Buckler Mastery now grants immunity to damage from your own projectiles. The critical strike for Bash and Smash now scales in as increased crit chance (50-100%) for the shield hit(s). Moved to teir 4.
'Counter Shot' has been replaced with 'Dash and Crash', a new teir 2 talent which will rush toward a targeted foe, strike with your shield, and activate Block for free. If the shield strike hits, the target may be confused.

'Breathing Room' is reworked. It now adds stacks of the new 'Breathing Room' effect each turn their are no enemies adjacent to you. The effect increases life and stamina regen and can stack up to 4 times. You will lose one stack per turn if an enemy is adjacent to you.
'Dauntless Challanger' has been reworked. Rather than passively granting regen based on enemies in sight, you now activate the talent to consume all stacks of Breathing Room and gain the Dauntless Challenger effect for X turns. The effect grants 200% of the stamina regen and 400% of the life regen granted by Breathing Room, multiplied by the number of stacks consumed. You cannot gain stacks of Breathing Room while under this effect, but the regeneration from Dauntless Challenger will persist regardless of enemy location, etc.
'The Eternal Warrior' now scales in the 'Breathing Room' regeneration bonus from 10%-20% (which also improves 'Dauntless Challenger' as a result).

'Sling Supremacy' now allows you to reload when using Block.
'Swift Shot' will completely reset Hurricane Shot, rather than reducing the cooldown by one. Cooldown increased to 6 from 5. Fixed a bug from vanilla in Swift Shot's cooldown by movement handling from.
'Hurricane Shot' now always hits targets only once, but the damage scaling is doubled. Projectiles from this attack now travel instantly. Cooldown reduced to 6 from 7.
'Bombardment' has been totally reworked. The sustain now costs 20 stamina and increases fatigue by 65% and causes Shoot to cost 5 stamina. While active, all archery attacks will trigger an instant shot for [20-40]% weapon damage, up to twice per target per turn.

'Called Shots' projectiles now travel effectively instantly.
'Kneecapper' has improved pin/slow duration scaling.
'Noggin Knocker' now scales the stun/increase duration from 1 (at tl1) to 2 (at ~tl5).
'Sling Sniper' scales in all bonuses from the first point.

Thoughts, suggestions, comments, feedback, and (most especially) bug reports, are welcome as always. Enjoy!

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.0

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2019 8:15 pm
by Doctornull
Tireless Combatant with Cunning prereq might be nice (+ moving it to Cunning meta-category).

It could be a useful category for other Rogue meta classes -- or a Gladiator class, hell your re-work just looks awesome overall.

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.0

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:26 pm
by nsrr
I considered Cunning, but Tireless Combatant is changing to Dex in 1.6 anyway, and it didn't require changing it from tech, so I went with that.

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.0

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2019 10:12 pm
by Doctornull
nsrr wrote:I considered Cunning, but Tireless Combatant is changing to Dex in 1.6 anyway, and it didn't require changing it from tech, so I went with that.
That's solid reasoning, and certainly an improvement over having a Willpower technique.

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.1

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2019 3:28 am
by nsrr
v1.0.1
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[Called Shots]
Further increased projectile speed. (Snakes be damned.)

[Kill Shot]
Un-borked. Kill Shot will now deal appropriate bonus damage again. (Sorry about that. Called Shots code is... something else :roll: )

[Breathing Room]
Stacks diminish by one per turn when there are no longer enemies in sight, instead of all at once. (I didn't really think that through; pulling mobs around corners and losing all stacks was obnoxious. Also, stealth mobs.)

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.1

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2019 7:26 am
by minmay
For the record, enemies will be able to dodge called shots no matter how high their projectile speed is. This is because sometimes the enemies get to act before the projectile does. If you want to make a truly instant projectile, do this upon creating it:

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projectile.energy.value = game.energy_to_act*1000000000
projectile:act()

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.1

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2019 11:39 am
by nsrr
Thank you, that's good to know. I'll probably look into doing just that.

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.2

Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2019 11:37 pm
by nsrr
v1.0.2
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[Poisons]
Mastery increased to 1.3 (from 1.2).

[Dash and Crash]
Tweaked numbers a bit.

[Sling Sniper]
All bonuses now scale in from talent level 1.
Added talent level scaling to the res pen bonus (i.e. you will only reach the previous value at ~tl 5, but it will scale up to that level from tl 1).
Cooldown reduction is introduced as a scaling value. The previous value (2 turns) is reached at about ~tl5(4 with 1.3 mastery), 1 turn at ~tl3 (3 with 1.3 mastery). It is possible to reach 3 turn reduction at ~ tl 7 (i.e. 5/5 with 1.5 or higher mastery).

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Still considering making Called Shots projectiles move instantly, but that's going take quite a bit of code diving for me to figure out, so it might be a while on that one.

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.2

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 5:14 am
by scul
I am a long time player of the game and of your mods in particular (white monk :-) ). I have been playing this for the last few days and really like the changes, does not feel too powerful while still feeling like it should be able to get to those ridiculous power levels that skirmishers should be able to get to with good equipment and proper play. I have not found any real bugs and no error codes so far. I did just die though due to the "people being able to walk right through my shots given that they are not instant". Personally I think it should basically be instant for all shots. But the called shots are kind of definitely needed to be instant. You need to be able to land the stun in particular to do well against ranged caster/archer rares/bosses in nightmare+. I realize you might not be balancing for that, but I think you can run into the same with decently powerful caster and archers in normal mode. I wish I could offer a code solution. Though I CAN say that I have been playing another mod a while back called Zephyr by minmay. Lightning archer/caster. Fun. I think they solved it by making all shots hit instantly but still have to check accuracy/defense. So looking at the shoot talent in the mod may give some ideas. It is just kind of disheartening to use big, powerful attacks and I would say somewhere close to 25% of the time they do not land and there is no miss or deflect just because of movement. I know this is game code and not yours.

Just throwing out an idea. Really enjoying it overall though!

Edit: I am doing a bit of code diving and I think the solution is as previously mentioned. Probably could get away with just modifying the base sling talent and not have to apply it only to the 3 skills. That may not be the direction you want to go. I am just hoping you go there. Just makes sense I guess to me, if someone fires a high speed projectile at someone else in my experience with high speed projectile usage, the method to avoid getting hit has never been "walk forward towards the person firing at you" ;-)

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.2

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 6:27 am
by Doctornull
A possible alternative to the instant-travel shooting might be a way to paint the target creature with an informational status effect instantly, and then your next shot which hits it has the talent effect. So even if it moves out of the way, you still may have a chance to get the talent effect.

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.2

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 7:31 am
by scul
Yea, that would be cool, but I have been playing a bit more and I notice that normal shots often "miss" and even the hurricane shot (multi target attack) can often "miss" if something moves at the right time, and it happens often enough for me to notice it. I am thinking that the speed de-buff (which I think is totally fair and makes sense) only exacerbates this, though if how I understand how speed and energy works is correct, more speed would not solve the issue, at least not entirely.

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.2

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 7:42 pm
by nsrr
scul wrote:I am a long time player of the game and of your mods in particular (white monk :-) ).
You gave me a lot of good feedback on White Monk. I remember, and I still appreciate it :)

I'd rather not do something that changes all projectiles, or even all Skirmisher talents, necessarily. Called Shots are the class's only really high-impact talents, and the fact that they behave differently from other projectiles is unintuitive and especially irksome when that altered behaviour causes the attack to miss via a mechanism you may not even be aware of, and could never predict even if you were. The same mechanic that causes these 'misses' is what allows the shot to bypass other actors, which is definitely behavior I want to keep. So, I'm inclined to just work out a way to make them behave more the way you would expect. If the only way I can eliminate the missing-when-moving-toward-you thing is by making the shots act instantly , then I'll go that route, but I'd prefer to apply that to as few talents as needed.

You mentioned Hurricane Shot, and now that I think about it, that must use a similar mechanic for firing shots (otherwise you could hit a target right in front of you with up to the maximum number of shots allowed by the talent as long as there were enough other targets in the cone behind them). I will look into adjusting the projectiles from that talent as well.

I appreciate the feedback, once again :)

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.3

Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 10:03 pm
by nsrr
v1.0.3 a.k.a. "I See Your Snake Gunslinger and Raise You Instantaneous Called Shots"
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[Called Shots]
Projectiles now travel effectively instantly.

[Hurricane Shot]
Projectiles now travel effectively instantly.

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I was getting nowhere digging through archery and combat and projectile code trying to work out where to add energy to make the projectiles 'instant'... so I decided to dig into Zephyr, as scul helpfully suggested. Of course what I was looking for was in actor code all along. Also, good code is good code, so I 'borrowed' some of minmay's (thanks!) and adapted it a teensy bit for my purposes. That probably saved me several hours :)

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.3

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 9:48 am
by scul
I have a 5 day weekend coming up, I have them often (yes, I know I am fortunate :D). So in another day I will give this a try after I get done with work. The more I think about it the more I think all shots for all ranged classes should be instant. Or at least a decent percentage. Casters often have aoe or ways to disable that cannot miss so it is fine for them to have projectiles that are not instant. But this goes beyond the scope of this addon of course. Updates sound great. Looking forward to giving it another try!

Re: Revamped Skirmisher v1.0.3

Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 4:53 pm
by nsrr
As you say, a change like that is beyond the scope of this addon. I think minmay has actually already made an add-on which changes all projectiles (maybe only from the player?) to act effectively instantly.

I kind of agree that weapon projectiles, at least, should always be instant, but I do like that slow projectiles exist, even if they are not used really well in very many cases (Wyrmic hurricane or whatever it's called is cool at least in the way it uses this mechanic, as an example).