Spellsword (formerly Addon reworking Arcane Blade Class)

[bricks]

Since the player can reinvest talent points, the player needn't start with a point in every elemental strike. I'd pick the two most generally useful strikes, maybe Water Strike and Earth Strike, and start the player with two one-handed weapons and a shield in the inventory.

[Hirumakai]

Since the player can reinvest talent points, the player needn't start with a point in every elemental strike. I'd pick the two most generally useful strikes, maybe Water Strike and Earth Strike, and start the player with two one-handed weapons and a shield in the inventory.

I will point out to make that shield useful would require 3 points in the Armor Training Talent. Providing the shield but no way to use it immediately seems odd.

I've been leaning towards Air Strike, because the Air Stance Accuracy bonus is useful at low levels, and Water Strike, since it has the freeze effect. I could provide a 2 handed sword, and 1 longsword and dagger pair in inventory without any trouble though.

[bricks]

Ah, armour training. I have to wonder at the adventurers who take off their leather gloves and can't figure out how to put on gauntlets. "These go... on my feet, right?"

[Hirumakai]

I modified the starting talents to be Air Strike, Water Strike, Arcane Combat, and Combat Accuracy.

Starting Arcane blades are now provided with an iron longsword and iron dagger in their inventory, in addition to their iron greatsword that starts equipped. Also changed some info box wording. The .teaa (rename from the .zip) has been updated in the first post.

Thoughts:

1) I'm considering removing the AoE 20/25% chance at tier 4 and 5 of the elemental strikes, and replacing it with restoring 1/2/3/4/5 mana when used. The AoE deals no damage, and a 20/25% chance to do something seems a bit to random to warrant the point investment. A consistently increasing reward with points might be desirable. On the plus side, it would let me remove the 0 mana sustain requirement from Arcane combat so that the character actually starts with a mana bar.

2) In my analysis of Arcane Combat triggers earlier, I forgot characters generally had a 1.2 modifier in the spell/fire tree, compared to the current flat 1.0 I've been using for all my new trees, which means there's another 10% or so reduction in damage when compared to the old Arcane Blade's damage per trigger, which means the old style did 26% to roughly 60% more damage per trigger, for 20% more mana cost. I may need to increase the damage on the triggers up a bit.

[NEHZ]

1) I'm considering removing the AoE 20/25% chance at tier 4 and 5 of the elemental strikes, and replacing it with restoring 1/2/3/4/5 mana when used. The AoE deals no damage, and a 20/25% chance to do something seems a bit to random to warrant the point investment. A consistently increasing reward with points might be desirable. On the plus side, it would let me remove the 0 mana sustain requirement from Arcane combat so that the character actually starts with a mana bar.

I'd never put in an additional skill point for +1 point of mana once every so many turns. Or does this effect increase with Manasurge runes?
Also, it would make all elemental strikes very similair. Though I suppose you could somewhat change this by having different restore effects per strike. (mana, life, stamina, ..to bad for the fourth strike?)
If you want to make it less random, you can just increase the chance (or remove the chance) and decrease the effect.

[Hirumakai]

I'd never put in an additional skill point for +1 point of mana once every so many turns. Or does this effect increase with Manasurge runes?
Also, it would make all elemental strikes very similar. Though I suppose you could somewhat change this by having different restore effects per strike. (mana, life, stamina, ..to bad for the fourth strike?)
If you want to make it less random, you can just increase the chance (or remove the chance) and decrease the effect.

That is not a bad suggestion. Rather than 25% chance of a full duration effect, 100% chance of a 25% duration effect ,or the like.

AoE with 2 turns of silence, pinning, 1 turn of purifying fire for example. Although in the case of Water Stike, 1 turn of ice block is just about as good as two, and half a turn of ice block is hard to do.

The rainbow of restoration effects could also work. The fourth effect could be the removal of a currently existing negative effect.

Although upon further reflection, Darkgod clearly wanted Arcane Blades (and similarly Shadowblades) to have significantly less access to mana than full casting types like the Archmage. I think limiting the class to the originally envisioned 0.1/0.2/0.3/0.4/0.5 mana regen talents is probably for the best. The class still certainly relies on its sustains and passives, although the offensive sustain list seems to have shrunk.


Launching into some analysis here on passive and sustain damage output now.

Originally Arcane blades increased their offense with (first number at level 1, second number at 50 with 60 str/60 dex/60 mag and no equipment):

Arcane Combat (12 mana, 55-231 damage over 3 turns,22-62% chance)
Arcane Dexterity (22-48% of one stat to spell power)
Arcane Destruction (+2 to +36 weapon power)
Fiery Hands (3.9-25.5 fire damage, +1-9% fire)
Frost Hands (2-12 ice damage, +1-9% cold)
Precise Strikes (-10% attack speed, +5-26 acc, +5-17% crit)
Inner Power (+1 to +5 to all stats)
Crystalline Focus (+2-10% physical damage, +10-50% physical penetration)

Now the directly offensive sustains/passives options are:

Arcane Combat (10 mana, 26-188 damage, 22-52%)
Arcane Prowess (10-30% of two stats to spellpower)
Arcane Destruction (2-10% damage bonus, 10-50% damage penetration)
Air Stance (2-32 acc, 1.3-31.2 lightning) OR Fire stance (2-32 phys power, 0.33-7.8% crit)
Aura of Fire (3.66 - 29.9 damage to all adjacent enemies)


The reason Arcane Combat has a lower trigger % is because of the 1.0 tree multiplier instead of 1.3, and the fact that I didn't change the trigger formula. Anyone know why already existing classes seem to prefer using 1.3 instead of 1.0 for core class trees?

So Arcane Combat in its current for is significantly less damage, especially for dual wielding builds (since it only triggers on mainhand now). At level 1, 12.1 dpt vs 5.72 dpt (dpt = damage per turn). At level 50, no equipment, its 143 dpt vs 97 dpt assuming one of the arcane-elemental trees is fully talent pointed out.

Fire Stance/Air Stance are similar to Arcane Destruction and Precise Strikes mixed together, but you can only have 1 stance up, so greater talent efficiency for less overall effect.

Aura of Fire damage output is similar to fiery hands + frost hands, performing better in AoE situations and significantly worse in dual-wielding single target situations.

New Arcane Destruction is directly comparable to the old Crystalline Focus.

Arcane Prowess, depending on stat distribution, equal to or slightly better than Arcane Dexterity at high levels.

That leaves Inner power, which provides a lot of different bonuses but very large ones. 5 Phys power, improves weapon damage by about 5-10% due to statmod, 5 Accuracy, 5 Defense, 7.5 spell power, 3.5 to all saves, 1.5% crit chance.

So mid-game (level 50 with no equipment kind of stats), we're looking at 46 dpt (arcane combat) + 5 dpt (inner power) = 51 dpt difference in favor of the old Arcane blade, although it depends on situation. In that ballpark (using Dwarven weapons say), its roughly 100-120 dpt from the bump attack. Total dpt for a new style Arcane blade should be around 250. Total dpt for an old style Arcane blade should be around 300, roughly a 20% difference.

Of the people who have tried the addon, do they feel the Arcane blade is doing the right amount of damage? Also, do people have a feel for where the class should come in on the offensive spectrum? More damage than what types of classes? Less damage than what types of classes?

[yufra]

Sorry about that. I had fixed Tornado strike, then unfixed it by not using a version control system, and now its fixed it again. I swear.

Hey Hirumakai, if you are interested in using a DVCS most of the developers on IRC have started using Git and Gitorious to work on stuff. For example, you can find the b37 bugfix addon here. If this is something you are interested in drop me a PM here or on IRC and I'll get you set up in the Gitorious te4 team.

[jacobdm]

Of the people who have tried the addon, do they feel the Arcane blade is doing the right amount of damage? Also, do people have a feel for where the class should come in on the offensive spectrum? More damage than what types of classes? Less damage than what types of classes?

Disclaimer: I've only gotten the new version of the arcane blade up to lvl 19, and have opened no new category trees (I used my cat point on an inscription slot). I've always had trouble creating a good arcane blade, as I have trouble figuring out what stats/skills to invest in. I either focused too heavily in str/mag and got one-shotted by something, or I focused on str/con which leads to boss fights being a war of attrition, which I eventually lose (usually to the weirlding beast). So I've never gotten an arcane blade past the Master. With that in mind:

The original arcane blade felt like it was trying to be halfway between a berserker (pre-bloodthirst tree) and archmage. This was thrown off by the (unintended) synergy with dual-wielding, which made it do even better damage w/ bumps. But it always felt like it was very much a high damage class w/ some decent healing/shielding for a panic button. The new version doesn't seem to do nearly as much damage. On the other hand, the new version seems to be taking the arcane blade in a different direction. It doesn't try to shoe-horn the player into a specific build (two-handed). It also feels like it has more staying power (though this may be because I've invested heavily in the earth and water trees), but this may not be the case once the aegis tree is removed. I also like that I have easy access to various potent debuffs with the different elemental strikes (though the lack of a decent stun is very noticable; the rolling earth stun brings enemies into melee range of you, which is often a very bad thing, since the only paoe you have is if earth arcane combat procs). I also like the different stances (though I kinda wish I could just stay in the one I want rather than swap every time I want to debuff an enemy w/ a particular thing).

All in all, the new arcane blade seems to have more utility, but lacks the perma-stun of Stunning Blows that the old had (which is amazing against bosses), so I feel like the damage output should probably be on-par w/ the old. I imagine it should be less damaging than berserkers, but more than bulwark or cursed. Let's say on par w/ an archer that doesn't use arrows? (I never use arrows as an archer, as I don't want to waste them, and end up forgetting to swap them in for tough fights.)

Solutions: Boost the damage and/or proc rate of arcane combat? It'd also be nice if each stance had an offensive buff so you don't lose out on dpr because you wanted to freeze or pin an enemy. Also I'm in favor of the aoe status effects having 100% chance, as 25% in radius 1 just isn't worth 2 skill points. Would adding 25% damage to the splash effect (as appropriate elemental damage) be too much? I also don't feel like I have any way to deal damage to groups of enemies, but this could probably be remedied by opening one of the spell trees, which I haven't done yet.

(edited for typos)

[Hirumakai]

First off, thanks very much for the feedback. Its appreciated.

Disclaimer: I've only gotten the new version of the arcane blade up to lvl 19, and have opened no new category trees (I used my cat point on an inscription slot). I've always had trouble creating a good arcane blade, as I have trouble figuring out what stats/skills to invest in. I either focused too heavily in str/mag and got one-shotted by something, or I focused on str/con which leads to boss fights being a war of attrition, which I eventually lose (usually to the weirlding beast). So I've never gotten an arcane blade past the Master. With that in mind:

With my old Arcane Blade builds, I personally went the Str/Mag route and relied on things other than HP to keep me alive. Conveyance tree comes to mind - I sometimes was running Probability travel as early as level 12. Of course I also played Cornacs alot for that extra generic point and early opening of closed trees.

The original arcane blade felt like it was trying to be halfway between a berserker (pre-bloodthirst tree) and archmage. This was thrown off by the (unintended) synergy with dual-wielding, which made it do even better damage w/ bumps. But it always felt like it was very much a high damage class w/ some decent healing/shielding for a panic button. The new version doesn't seem to do nearly as much damage.

Out of curiosity, was the last time you played an old style Arcane Blade before or after the power and saving throw revamps (i.e. pre-b35 and post-b35)? The Strength focused Arcane Blades (pumping Strength, Arcane Destruction, focusing on raw weapon damage as opposed to focusing just spell power and dex for arcane combat procs) lost quite a bit of damage in the change over. The spell power staff, dual wielding, or brawling ones were less affected.

Certainly though I've been cautious with the damage output, as I wasn't sure how having more attractive active talents with damage boost modifiers on them would make things.

On the other hand, the new version seems to be taking the arcane blade in a different direction. It doesn't try to shoe-horn the player into a specific build (two-handed). It also feels like it has more staying power (though this may be because I've invested heavily in the earth and water trees), but this may not be the case once the aegis tree is removed. I also like that I have easy access to various potent debuffs with the different elemental strikes (though the lack of a decent stun is very noticable; the rolling earth stun brings enemies into melee range of you, which is often a very bad thing, since the only paoe you have is if earth arcane combat procs).

Might I recommend the Whirlwind teleport talent? If you select the character's current location (and say yes, you do really want to target the character), it doesn't actually teleport because you're already there, and just proceeds to attack all adjacent targets. If you have a decent proc rate, you can get multiple triggers off. Its cooldown is also the same as Rolling Earth. Alternatively, you can use it to teleport outside the group and fire inward with a cone type effect.

I also like the different stances (though I kinda wish I could just stay in the one I want rather than swap every time I want to debuff an enemy w/ a particular thing).

If I like being in a certain stance, I often will activate the strike to get my talent effect, and then as the next action activate the old stance strike even if I don't need the debuff. They all have the same 8 turn cooldown, so this can usually be arranged I find.

All in all, the new arcane blade seems to have more utility, but lacks the perma-stun of Stunning Blows that the old had (which is amazing against bosses), so I feel like the damage output should probably be on-par w/ the old. I imagine it should be less damaging than berserkers, but more than bulwark or cursed. Let's say on par w/ an archer that doesn't use arrows? (I never use arrows as an archer, as I don't want to waste them, and end up forgetting to swap them in for tough fights.)

I'll look into Archer damage per turn (although it often feels like NPC archers do more damage than NPC berserkers, but that might just be me).

Solutions: Boost the damage and/or proc rate of arcane combat?

In the next iteration, I'll try boosting arcane combat damage up from a 25,250 scale to 25,300 scale, and increase the base proc rate to 25% from 20%, which combined would be a 20% boost at low level (from proc rate) and a little more than 20% at high level (from increased damage and less from proc).

It'd also be nice if each stance had an offensive buff so you don't lose out on dpr because you wanted to freeze or pin an enemy.

Hmm. In principle, I could add a Fiery Hands/Frost Hands/Lightning Hands/Earth Hands damage type proc to every stance. Air Stance already has one. On the other hand, that pushes things back towards using 2 weapons instead of 1, since dual-wielding benefits twice as much in that case. I personally like having 2 fully defensive stances and 2 fully offensive stances. As noted earlier, I tend to pair up the use of strikes when I want to stay in the same stance, one for the effect, and then next turn one to get back to the original stance. I'll hold off on a change like this, but keep it in the back of my mind as an option.

Also I'm in favor of the aoe status effects having 100% chance, as 25% in radius 1 just isn't worth 2 skill points. Would adding 25% damage to the splash effect (as appropriate elemental damage) be too much? I also don't feel like I have any way to deal damage to groups of enemies, but this could probably be remedied by opening one of the spell trees, which I haven't done yet.

I'll trying coding up a 100% chance, 25% strength debuff ball effect of radius 1/2 at tier level 4/5. I could reduce the primary damage hit to 75% and provide a 25% effectiveness splash damage (compared to current damage being dealt called 100%). This is just so I don't have to worry about making some kind of exception for the target with regards to blast damage.

As it stands, the skills already does far more with their respective debuffs than what Stunning blow does. I'm trying to think of what skills are on low cooldown (8 turns) and have a powerful debuff. Closest things I can think of are:
Blastwave: 12 mana, 5 turn cooldown, AoE 2/3/4/5/6, Knockback plus some damage (scale 28,180 - so about 2/3 of Flame damage)
Nova: 12 mana, 8 turn cooldown, AoE 2/3/4/5/6, 75% chance to daze for 3 turns, plus about 62% of blastwave's damage.
Frozen Ground: 25 mana, 10 turn cooldown, AoE 2/3/4/5/6, pinning for 4 turns plus doing Blastwave's damage as ice.

[belmarduk]

Edit: Ok it appears that i was just hilariously wrong and also crazy.

Hey Hiru is there any way we can get shields to display their damage ala Bulwarks?

[jacobdm]

Out of curiosity, was the last time you played an old style Arcane Blade before or after the power and saving throw revamps (i.e. pre-b35 and post-b35)?

Yeah, I haven't played an arcane blade since the revamp. Partially, that's because your very education post on why arcane blades had been nerfed so hard. (The other part is I've been trying out all of the new changes to the cursed class that have been happening recently.)

Might I recommend the Whirlwind teleport talent? If you select the character's current location (and say yes, you do really want to target the character), it doesn't actually teleport because you're already there, and just proceeds to attack all adjacent targets. If you have a decent proc rate, you can get multiple triggers off. Its cooldown is also the same as Rolling Earth. Alternatively, you can use it to teleport outside the group and fire inward with a cone type effect.

That's a great idea; I'll have to try that out!

I'll trying coding up a 100% chance, 25% strength debuff ball effect of radius 1/2 at tier level 4/5. I could reduce the primary damage hit to 75% and provide a 25% effectiveness splash damage (compared to current damage being dealt called 100%). This is just so I don't have to worry about making some kind of exception for the target with regards to blast damage.

As it stands, the skills already does far more with their respective debuffs than what Stunning blow does. I'm trying to think of what skills are on low cooldown (8 turns) and have a powerful debuff. Closest things I can think of are:
Blastwave: 12 mana, 5 turn cooldown, AoE 2/3/4/5/6, Knockback plus some damage (scale 28,180 - so about 2/3 of Flame damage)
Nova: 12 mana, 8 turn cooldown, AoE 2/3/4/5/6, 75% chance to daze for 3 turns, plus about 62% of blastwave's damage.
Frozen Ground: 25 mana, 10 turn cooldown, AoE 2/3/4/5/6, pinning for 4 turns plus doing Blastwave's damage as ice.

I noticed that all of those skills have quite large AoEs by comparison, but that's probably because they are intended for the archmage, which is a ranged class. That said, I'm excited for the proposed ball radius implementation! Consistently being able to shut down a group of spellcasters is going to be awesome, and I'm sure there will be other great things that I'd be able to do with this as well. I'm curious how you are going to deal w/ the freeze effect....

Lastly, Thank you so much for the work you are putting into this. I'm loving the feel of the new arcane blade a lot!

[edge2054]

Hey Hirumakai, if you are interested in using a DVCS most of the developers on IRC have started using Git and Gitorious to work on stuff. For example, you can find the b37 bugfix addon here. If this is something you are interested in drop me a PM here or on IRC and I'll get you set up in the Gitorious te4 team.

Goblinz and I both recently set up on windows too. So if you're running a windows operating system one of us should be able to help you get things going once yufra adds you to the team.

[Hirumakai]

Hey Hirumakai, if you are interested in using a DVCS most of the developers on IRC have started using Git and Gitorious to work on stuff. For example, you can find the b37 bugfix addon here. If this is something you are interested in drop me a PM here or on IRC and I'll get you set up in the Gitorious te4 team.

I'll take you up on that, and try to catch you on IRC sometime.

Hey Hiru is there any way we can get shields to display their damage ala Bulwarks?

At the moment, its not clear to me where thats done. I should go look at some of the glove info addons and what not to see. Some quick grep'ing for bulwark didn't seem to clarify how thats set. So not this iteration, but possibly a future one.

I'll trying coding up a 100% chance, 25% strength debuff ball effect of radius 1/2 at tier level 4/5. I could reduce the primary damage hit to 75% and provide a 25% effectiveness splash damage (compared to current damage being dealt called 100%). This is just so I don't have to worry about making some kind of exception for the target with regards to blast damage.

Being the lazy person that I am, I'm going to start with the ball effects on the elemental stances being based on just Physical power, with a damage value roughly half of that of Arcane Combat damage triggers (which are based on Spell power though). Mostly because the AttackTarget function doesn't return damage dealt. Which would mean requiring more changes to Combat.lua to produce a ball effect that does a % of damage dealt.

Mid-game that was providing about 80-90 damage a hit, so noticeable, but it won't go up more than twice that even at 100 physical power. This damage is in addition to the main strike and in a ball of 1/2 at 4/5 points. Right now they are 1-2 turn duration Silence or pining. Fire produces a 1 turn dispel effect, and Ice is currently a 100% chance of a 1 turn freeze at half ice block hit points. I could drop that to a 50% chance ice block effect, since half ice block hit points on a 1 turn effect isn't going to matter except in a few unusual situations.

I also bumped up Arcane Combat damage from a scale of 25 to 250 up to a scale of 25 to 300. Chance of proc was also increased by a flat 5%.

Lastly, I did some recoding of the Earthen Shield, hopefully to make it a bit cleaner, and make it easier as a hook later if necessary instead of an overload.

So version 8 is now updated in the opening post.

[Hirumakai]

Updated to version 9 .zip file with a bug fix with Earthen Shield. You couldn't turn it off, and it wouldn't shut off due to a typo regarding the particle effects I added to it.

See first post.

[Hirumakai]

Updated zip file to version 10.

I had a chance to chat with Darkgod on IRC and noted the durations for most of the Elemental strike debuffs were way too long. I had been using Stunning blow as a guide for durations, but apparently that is on the outlier of debuffs. Especially perma-silence would be too much against mage players.

So I've reduced all durations (and in one case improved) them to be 1/2/2/3/3. The 4/5 point AoEs no longer provide debuffs, just damage.

Darkgod also felt the elemental trees were more spell-like than technique like. I've moved the talent trees to spells from techniques, and given them the flags to make them be affected by silence and to consider them spells.

Lastly, he understood what I was trying to do with the 0.7 mastery plus 0.03 mastery increase for the spell/elemental trees, but felt it wasn't appropriate. I have removed the increasing mastery and made it a flat 1.1 for all 4 spell/element trees.

Also, I'm at the point where I start to need better names. Current renaming of the arcane-elmental trees is:
Air -> Windcutter, Fire -> Blazebrand, Water -> Lifetide, Earth -> Stoneshield

However, these aren't necessarily final, and I'm quite open to suggestions. Also, better name suggestions for the elemental stances (i.e. Fire stance, Air stance, etc) are welcome.