Wyrmic tunning

[Laerte]

I was thinking about reshaping the wyrmic trees: right now there are 4 drake aspect trees and they have a mix of both offensive and defensive skills.

In my propose, I took the breaths out of the trees and divided the rest (with some modifications) in defensive and offensive skills. Some skills (roar, static field, quake and wing buffet) where left out, but they could be reunited in a Drake something tree. I personally like quake, but it have maybe 1 or 2 uses per game.

The breaths where put in Wyrmic Essence, an advanced (level 10) tree, but turned in a single skill: breath mastery, were each point gives a new breath (like trap mastery). The rest of the tree strengths both the breaths and the normal attacks of the wyrmics.

The trees:

Drake Defenses
Lightning Speed - As is, or passive, increases movement speed by 10->25%.
Ice Skin - As is, may be lower its equilibrium cost.
Burrow - As is.
Magma Trench - Fire version of Ice wall (just to avoid 2 ice skills), except all projectiles can pass by.

Each point in one of the drake defenses also gives 0.5% to physical and 1% to fire, cold and lightning resistances.

Drake Combat
Ice claw - As is.
Swallow - As is.
Tornado - As is, except it stuns everyone when the tornado ball hits, no knockback and no friendly fire.
Devouring Flame - As is, except no friendly fire, shorter cooldown and lowers enemy accuracy and damage. Alternatively, it may become player centered and renamed to Flame Circle or Fire Storm (kind of temporary debuff aura).

Wyrmic Essence (Level 10)
Breath Mastery - Passive - Like trap mastery, gives a new breath each raw level: Sand, Fire, Cold, Lightning and Poison. Breath damage based on mind power?
Invasive - Passive - Elemental and physical resistence piercing (based on mindpower).
Wyrmic Mind - Passive - Adds mental power and critical chance (based on Wilpower).
Shards - Passive - Adds shards to breaths. Breathing with shards have a chance to stun enemies or make them bleed (chances and damage based on mental power).

May be I can make a mod to try this out. What you think?

[James LaBrie]

I like the idea....but I also think it's a tad bit underdeveloped. I really, really like the reorganization thought you have, but it also ends up being slightly less options than we have right now (even if those options are considered lackluster by most Wyrmic players). I think this idea really makes it possible to extend the options of Wyrmics, and add a tree or two more. As for ideas, I've got none at the moment, but Wyrmics are my favorite class and I could think of them in time.

[Laerte]

Well, I already made a dual wield wyrmic tree here. But I didn't update the addon to b39/b40.

But yes, more (class) trees would be good.

[Sirrocco]

If breath mastery is passive, where is the active skill for breath weapon?

Also, getting 4 breaths off of 4-5 skill points seems a bit much. Part of the point of breath weapons is that they're at the top of the tree so that they can be awesome - like the breath weapons of Dragons *should* be. I'd be more interested to keep the same structure of skill/skill/skill/breath that we have now, and maybe tweak around the elements a bit and swap out skills to make the various drake trees more internally coherent.

Examples:
- Make fire the pure attack tree. Turn Ice Claw into fire claw, give them swallow (possibly with a bit of fire damage), and the modified Devouring Flame.
-- Make frost the defensive tree. leave them with Icy Skin, throw in something like the mindslayer Thermal Leech that inflicts Frozen on everyone in an area, but does little to no damage, and then have an area effect "Icy Ground" that has a (moderate) chance to do any one of a variety of things (slow, stun, slide in random direction, freeze, cold damage, etc) to anyone in the area each turn (or perhaps a small chance of each thing)
-- Make Thunder the crowd control/debuff/positioning tree. Stuns, dazes, knockbacks, and so forth. Include Lightning Speed, include a (possibly upgraded/altered) tornado, include a new skill - wind buffet. wind buffet has you target a point within, say, range 3. Then, everyone within 3 squares of you is teleported/slid/something 3 squares towards the point, and then stun them (or some other appropriate debuff). The idea is that you take everyone around you and you bunch them around a point near you so that you can hit the all that much mroe easily with a breath weapon.
-- Make sand the wall manipulation tree. Keep burrow, give them Sand Wall (stealing Icy Wall from Frost) and give them a nice, high-cooldown power that surrounds them with temporary walls.

If we then wanted to have a Drake Mastery tree, that could be cool (unlocked with a cat point)
- Draconic Resilience boosts the per-skill resist you get.
- Draconic Power give you resist penetration in each of the four base damage types, based on the number of skills in each tree.
- Draconic Fury gives you bonus damage on each hit based on the number fo skills in each tree
- Breath Mastery: boosts all dragonbreath powers, in some way that adding points to the breath weapons doesn't. Cooldown? Range? Chance for special effect? I admit, I haven't played wyrmics enough recently to know off the top of my head what shoudl go here.

...or something. I'm not saying this is perfect, just...

- Having a set of four trees, one for each dragon type, with the breath weapon as the peak skill for each tree is cool, and I'd hate to see it go. Instead, I would suggest looking for ways to make it cooler.
- The skill trees for each drake type *are* kind of random right now, and don't seem to show a lot of tactical coherence (as an example, lightning speed, static field, and tornado don't really have a whole lot to do with one another other than the storm connection). Tightening that up a bit, and shifting stuff around so that they're a bit more complementary would probably be a good thing
- Some of the skills are odd and/or kind of useless. Swapping them out for skills that are less useless would be a good thing.
- There is a definite build that wants to throw around all four breath weapons. It would be nice to be able to do that without buying active skills that you'll never use (and with that many active skills, I guarantee you won't be using all of them - especially the ones intended primarily as damage-dealers when you're a melee-capable breath weapon specialist). Perhaps the drake trees could be given a few more passives and/or sustains?
- Going really heavy into all four drake trees is a kind of cool build idea, and I think that having an unlockable tree that rewards that would be nifty. At the same time, it should be possible to build effective wyrmics that only grab one or two trees and spend the rest of their points elsewhere. This would likely require a few more wyrmic-specific class skill trees. I remember we talked about a Brood Mother-themed summoning tree a while back, and I'm sure there's other ideas out there. I'd love to see a wyrmic mindstar tree. Perhaps a transforming tree? You'd start out with a sustain that did some good things and had some limitations, and then the other skills would either be passives that kicked in only when the sustain was on or actives that could only be used when transformed. Perhaps even a set of mutually exclusive transformation trees that would emphasize different things (and, indeed, Brood Mother might fit in quite well as one of those - starting out as a tree that would trade speed for durability, and then getting the summons later in the tree).

[James LaBrie]

Little idea in addition to what was posted above (which I thought made a lot of good points); Spire Dragons are played on very little, but that idea could be awesome if carefully handled. Obviously we'd need to jump around the existence of chronomancy as magic, and the fact that a lot of chronomatic ideas exist already in the game. However, it'd be a cool excuse to put in a really awesome advanced tree, focusing on perhaps some utility?

[Sirrocco]

Okay... so what's the explanation behind Spire Dragons? Wyrmics work on the theory that Dragons are using natural power to do their impressive draconic things, and a wyrmic can pretend to be a dragon well enough to tap into those same powers. Are Spire Dragons working off of natural power like all the other dragons, or are they using paradox? If it's the latter, it might not work so well thematically.

Also, I have to say, every time I see the title of this thread, I have the image of someone cramming wyrmics into wine casks.

[lukep]

Spire Dragons use Psi, not Paradox, so they are still natural. Blinkwyrms, on the other hand, use mana and Psi, so they are slightly unnatural.

[Laerte]

If breath mastery is passive, where is the active skill for breath weapon?

Breath mastery being passive gives 1 active skill (breath) each point it receives. Just like trap or poison masteries of rogues.

Having a set of four trees, one for each dragon type, with the breath weapon as the peak skill for each tree is cool, and I'd hate to see it go

I do not like the skill, skill, skill, breath model: it uses a lot of class points and make you invest in every single skill to reach the breaths, but initially I was just thinking in adding a breath modifying / increasing tree. Then it made no sense, because I couldn't be sure the character would have the breaths in the first place, and a tree must to be useful by itself, being just a synergy to skills a player may not even buy would not be enough. Then the solution was to made the breaths part of the tree and the breath mastery idea was born. But now, without the breaths, the other trees would become hollow, so I took some of the skills and create the offensive / defensive trees.

There is a definite build that wants to throw around all four breath weapons. It would be nice to be able to do that without buying active skills that you'll never use

That is just the oppose of what you said in the above quote, and is just what the proposed breath mastery gives.

If a level 10 skill isn't great enough, we can put Breath Mastery at tier 3 of the tree, thats level 18 and I think it is fine enough, as Invasive and Wyrmic Mind are enhancements to the offensive / defensive skills. Only the breath enhancement Shards should be after the mastery on the tree.

Coming back to the separated drake aspects trees with the breath weapon as last skill means I cannot have a breath modifier tree, at least in my vision, because a tree should not modify what it do not supply (that would be like giving stealth in a tree and unseen actions in another). But I could make Wyrmic Essence a general combat enhancement tree (resistance piercing, increased mental power and critical chance, maybe global speed), useful to any form of combat: melee or ranged.

According to the birth screen "Wyrmics are fighters who have learnt how to mimic some of the aspects of the dragons", I do not see why they should learn all the draconic powers (at least of the basic dragons, great multi-hued wyrms have some tricks a wyrmic didn't copy) and in the separated trees per dragon kind. I would just take some aspects and combine them in specialized trees, independent from what drake it was copied. I think that a wyrmic, who can dominate the aspects of various kinds of dragons, can also develop some new powers based on the natural ones.

[Sirrocco]

Having a set of four trees, one for each dragon type, with the breath weapon as the peak skill for each tree is cool, and I'd hate to see it go

I do not like the skill, skill, skill, breath model: it uses a lot of class points and make you invest in every single skill to reach the breaths

...and that was the point I was making - the fact that it's costly is what allows it to be powerful. It takes a lot of points to heavily invest in breaths. It should take a lot of points to heavily invest in breaths.

There is a definite build that wants to throw around all four breath weapons. It would be nice to be able to do that without buying active skills that you'll never use

That is just the oppose of what you said in the above quote, and is just what the proposed breath mastery gives.

Incorrect. It is a caveat on what I said in the earlier post. Yes, your proposed breath mastery does solve this, but it goes way, way too far. I acknowledge here that you had a point, and that that point is worth considering. Thus, my suggestion that some of the actives be swapped out for passives and/or sustains - still requiring the same level of investment to get to the breath weapons, but allowing the results of that investment to be more broadly useful.

Coming back to the separated drake aspects trees with the breath weapon as last skill means I cannot have a breath modifier tree, at least in my vision, because a tree should not modify what it do not supply (that would be like giving stealth in a tree and unseen actions in another). But I could make Wyrmic Essence a general combat enhancement tree (resistance piercing, increased mental power and critical chance, maybe global speed), useful to any form of combat: melee or ranged.

Stuff like this works just fine for other classes. The mindslayer has a number of skills that only exist to modify skills from other trees, and the Alchemist does as well. They have to be either unlockable trees, based around something that's core to the class, or both, but they're totally doable, and they do work.

[bricks]

The current investment model isn't really costly, though, you just need three class points to start investing in a breath attack. The current setup just makes the early levels less interesting. Frankly, I think the breath attacks feel poorly balanced, as there is nothing stopping me from spamming them (apart from equilibrium failures). I think they would be more interesting if 1) they could be a little more powerful, especially if the damage scaled downwards with range so they could be balanced for single-target melee range and AoE use, and 2) using one breath attack put the others on (full or partial) cooldown. Then other talents could make using multiple breath attacks more feasible, if you wanted to play a "breath" wyrmic. It'd also be nice to see a little more variety between the breath attacks - different cone shapes, for example.

[Sirrocco]

bricks - my point on cost was that it takes a fairly sizable cost to get significant numbers of breath weapons. Yes, you can play a just-spamming-the-breath-weapon wyrmic, but if you want full investment in that, that's 8 per tree. 32 points is about half the class points you'll get in the game.

It might be interesting to fold your two ideas together - on the one side, let breath weapons share a cooldown or partial cooldown, and on the other side, let investment in each breath weapon type provide passive bonuses for all other breath weapon uses. something like... fire cranks damage overall a bit, lightning trims the cooldown a bit (down to 1 every 2-3 turns at max level), sand gives a damage bonus to closer squares, and frost ups the percentage chance of causing effect. If you do it the other way - have them share a cooldown but not reinforce each other - you make it so that people aren't going to invest in more than one or two of the breaths. Sure, you could do that - but then you'd have to rebuild the class from the ground up to find some other way to make them cool.

[bricks]

Yeah, I wouldn't go the route I suggested without also providing synergies or some talents that provide other bonuses. I tend to dislike synergies like "every point invested in fire breath increases the damage of all of your breath attacks" because it makes 20/20 investment in a category a no-brainer build, and Wyrmics could use some talents that simply tie the class together. Active/passive hybrid talents are a little more difficult to keep track of, too.

[Sirrocco]

If they're on a shared cooldown, it's less of a no-brainer. It gets to be more like the alchemist bombs. Sure, you can take all fo the bomb-boosting skills there are and walk away with some really powerful bombs... but that's still only usable one third of the time, and you're going to need points spent elsewhere to handle what's going on the rest of the time. Mindslayers have a similar thing with mindlash. You can sink 5 points in mindlash, and 5 points in conduit, and 5 points in two auras (which you will then push into the conduit) and 5 points in the skill that gives a boost to all your auras and all your shields, and a few points here and there for unlocks, and then take the grip tree and dump 5 points + 3 qualification + a cat point into being able to pretend that your TK gem/mindstar is a tier higher than it is... but most people don't bother, because it turns out that the overall benefits from conduit aren't *all* that high, and they'd rather save the 17 points from the conduit+auras and put them somewhere else. It's a matter of tweaking how much of a benefit you get from the passives.