Solipsist (Reality bending Psionicist)

[donkatsu]

If I'm reading this right, Dream Prison lets you reset the cooldown of all of your active talents, and regenerate all resources by putting things to sleep and then just waiting for forever, which seems excessively powerful, not to mention tedious if you have to mash the wait button until your resources are full (since you can't rest while enemies are in sight).

The thing that sticks out to me the most is that right now this class needs most is its own version of Flame/Soul Rot/Turn Back the Clock/Mindlash, which I'm assuming will come with either the Distortions tree or the Psychic Assault tree. To that end, I tried to come up with some ideas for Distortion, but they mostly ended up feeling too much like Chronomancy, where most of the "manipulating the fabric of time and space for offensive purposes" stuff happens, or even like Force of Will, where a bunch of "using your mind to physically toss around your enemies" stuff happens. Here's what I thought of anyway.

Distortion
Smudge - Low cooldown, single target attack, deals physical damage and has a %d%% chance to move the target one space in a random direction and spawn an Afterimage where the target used to be (the Afterimage belongs to the target, not to you).
Twister - Radius 2 ball that deals damage and moves enemies 90 degrees in a clockwise direction from the center. Deals extra damage to whatever is standing on the center of the ball.
Distortion Wave - Slow projectile that passes through enemies, physically damaging each one. Deals more damage to enemies that are farther away from you. The projectile has a chance to dig through walls.
World Eraser - High cooldown, extremely powerful attack that does not require line of sight and has a radius of 30, dealing less damage to things that are further away from you. All targets that were out of line of sight when damaged in this way recover the damage that was dealt to them over 5 turns (not a regeneration effect and not affected by healing mod).

[edge2054]

Good point on Dream Prison.

What do you think of making it a Timed Effect instead then? Still channeled (so it breaks if you do much). And having the effect duration scale rather then the 2 radius thing. Probably could drain a bit of Psi too. Some per target effected.

And yeah....

The class needs some nukage. Psychic Assault and Distortions will fill that role (and Thought Forms to some degree too). But coming up with new and interesting ways to blow monsters up can be difficult :/

[donkatsu]

What if you kept it as a sustain, but included a large amount of psi drain per turn? Then you could still use it to buy time for cooldowns, and maybe also as an interesting form of status effect protection, but you couldn't use it indefinitely and you couldn't use it for psi recovery.

You could turn it into a timed effect instead (in which case I don't think psi drain would be necessary) but then it would just be a straight sleep-extender and, in my opinion, not as interesting.

[Sirrocco]

If you keep the area reasonably small... well, yes it would let you go into pause-and-rest mode as long as all of the enemies that were chasing you both had been slept and were close. I don't really see that as all that abusive. Possibly instead actually let you rest as long as all enemies that could see you are asleep. Basically, dropping enemies into slumber and parking them there is a big part of what these powers are about, to me.

As far as straight nukes... I kind of figured that missing those was part of the idea. It's a kind of weird class, doing kind fo weird things - the lack of a simple nuke would be one of the difficulties the class had to function with. It's an interesting and somewhat challenging design decision, but I dont' think it's an inherently wrong one. The trick is just to make sure that there are three or four other ways that the class can deal a reasonable amount of damage.

- sleep-associated damage (though this would mean that the Nightmare tree really ought to start unlocked - the slumber tree has no base damage. Also, has no effect on enemies immune to sleep and/or with overly high saving throws)
- feedback-associated damage (this would require that the Discharge tree start unlocked. Also, not entirely trivial to use)
- (???) Okay. Clearly, not enough yet.

So, Distortions tree.
- Trapped in a World of My Devising: time-locks foe for a few turns, and does Random Unfortunate Things (various debuffs, mild/moderate/major damage, put powers on cooldown and so forth - basically roll a certain number of times on a Random Unfortunate Things table) on their return to reality.

-- Actually, you could make an entire tree out of that...
1 - Trapped in a World of Illusion: timelocks foe for some time (longer than any of the others) and has a chance to drain resources and/or or put powers on cooldown when they return.
2a - Trapped in a World of Madness: timelocks foe, and deals mind damage and/or insanity-themed debuffs on return
2b - Trapped in a World of Terror: alternate version of above, with fear-themes debuffs
3 - Trapped in a World of My Own Devising: timelocks for a shorter time (a turn or two), deals more damage (though more randomly) and inflicts some number (more at higher skill levels) of unfortunate effects draw off a table of same.
4 - All Horror in an Instant: Deals significant amounts of damage, a number of terrible effects, and has a chance to spawn various horrifying pets, along with a timelock of about half a turn.

Admittedly, giving someone access to that much timelock might be problematic. Perhaps they could both buff each other and share a cooldown, with the more powerful versions having cooldowns that are longer.

Disbelieve: deals significant temporal damage, as you attempt to erase the enemy from existence.
This is the Part of the Story Where You Die: applies a 2-3 turn debuff. When the debuff expires, deals large quantities of damage.

[edge2054]

Dreaming, Slumber, and Nightmares done and OP updated.

By the way, if anyone enjoys making particle effects and has free time I'd love some help with them.

*edit*

Dreamscape screenshots

http://imgur.com/A5b9e,KGvPz#1

[Sirrocco]

Trances... I'd see this tree as bending your mind around so that it's half in communion with your subconscious out in the ether, and half focused on reality. Each sustain would give you some benefit (benefits get better with higher psi, as you'e more grounded in reality and can pull more) and some thematically associated disadvantage (disadvantages get less sever with high dissonance, as your subconscious is closer to reality and you don't have to skew yourself from it as much). I know you don't like overusing dissonance, but this is where my head is and hey - maybe it will be useful anyway. The basic idea of these is that they're not mutually exclusive, necessarily, but that you wouldn't want to activate more than one or two of them - partially because each is built for different situations, and partially because they have fairly high sustain costs, for both psi and dissonance, and also get less useful as your available psi and dissonance go down.

Trances break if your mindpower ever hits 0.

Ignore the Ground: You are free... flying through the air. it is easy to weave away from anything that might wish to harm you, because it is the nature of things to not be hit by what they don't wish to be hit by, but that affects you as well. You ignore traps. Movement speed and defense go up significantly, but costs psi with every step, and every time you hit anything with a damaging or debilitating effect, there is a percentage chance that you it doesn't affect them after all . At high enough level, completely counteracts the move speed debuff from weightlessness,

Ignore the Walls: If it's not alive, it's not important, so why should it trouble you? Physical barriers are meaningless. Only interactions between living things matter - and them you know by their heart's fire. Of course, those are *very* important. You gain line of sight and effect on everything within a given radius. At the same time, you cannot see anything outside of that space, and cannot see or remember walls/water/lava/etc at all. Attacks from foes deal additional damage, and traps deal *significant* additional damage. Also, every time you hit an enemy with an effect there is a chance for that enemy, and for any enemies adjacent to it, to teleport to your location.

Ignore Strife: Pain and suffering suck, and you wish they'd just leave you alone. Gives you some significant boost to both resist and max resist of everything. At the same time, you become unable to detect traps and enemies (or summons). All are invisible, messages are suppressed (though you can see your HP/Psi bar going down, if you look, and cooldown effects are still visible). Bumping into enemies causes you to swap places rather than interacting. You do not have line of sight or line of effect on anything except for yourself, your defense goes to zero, and you may not block. Any debuff you may acquire still has full effect (after resists) but is not visible.

Ignore Weakness: Weakness is for the weak, which you are not. Cranks your mindpower way up, and possibly gives some other nifty combat-related bonuses (probably a few defensive). At the same time, causes you to be unable to see your HP and Psi bars, and suppresses damage messages.

[edge2054]

Thought-Forms written and mostly coded.

OP updated.

Still looking for some fresh ideas on how to murder and maim monsters

[bricks]

Alongside the Thought Forms tree, the Distortions tree could be about unmaking your foes. The name itself makes me think of anomalies, which could make for some nice trade-offs. I imagine "distorting" reality as a process of repeated application; the more distorted a target or area becomes, the more damage it takes, but it also becomes more likely to cause an unintended distortion. For example, "Unmake" could be a single-target nuke that puts they "Distorted" debuff on a target. As the effect builds, it deals more damage to that target, but also begins to trigger other effects. Some might be beneficial, like dealing distortion damage in an area; others could be more dangerous, like creating a bunch of copies of your target. You could have some fun with the engine and replace it with a similar monster, or maybe even give it new abilities like the rare monsters. This might be too like Paradox/anomalies, although it is unique in that it is target-centered, instead of user-centered.

For serious horror value, a Distortion talent could try to mash two enemies together, resulting in an abomination that may possess terrifying abilities but will shortly die due to its malformed body.

Not a nuke, but Distortions could also have a stealth talent, maybe a short-length timed effect that distorts reality around you, making you difficult to see. I suppose there could be a damage aspect to this, too - perhaps in an area on use or while active.

[Sirrocco]

Unfortunately, the best I can come up with for direct damage right now is somethign themed off of the Headcrusher sketches by Kids in the Hall.

Although...

"The world revolves around me": Sustain. Every round, has a random chance to grab any enemies within, say, 5, and teleport them adjacent, dealign damage. Every turn, damages all adjacent enemies with a chance to knock back (immediately after the first).

There are an awful lot of "default attack" spells out there. It would be nice to have somehting a little different. Possibly have one that has no cooldown of its own, but gives enemies a buff that renders them impervious to its power for a period of time? "Shatter your pathetic little worldview" or something - gives them a short term effect "shattered" that debuffs them in some way, reduces their mental resist, and makes them immune to further shatterings. Gives them a buff after the debuff ends of "Enlightened" which renders them immune to shattering and gives them some nice buffs. Alternately, let them try a mental save on being hit, leading to shattering (which would, in this version, allow you to try to shatter them further" or enlightenment (which would not). Additional worldview-shatterings would make the debuff worse, but if he ever manages to save, enlightenment wipes out the lot. asically, it's a great way to wipe out individual standard enemies, but a dangerous choice against bosses

[edge2054]

There are an awful lot of "default attack" spells out there.

Indeed. I really want to do something a bit different with distortions. I'm liking how the class theme is coming together and I don't want to drop the ball on the attack talents.

Bricks, I like your ideas but that is a lot like anomalies. I'll have to think about it some more. Maybe a combination of what you and Sirrocco are talking about (because I also like those ideas).

So rather then a table of random effects each talent might do blah but have a chance to do blah or blah or blah on further application.

To take the Shattering idea.

Shattering Wave

Projects a cone of distortion that shatters targets in the radius, inflicting %d physical damage and rendering them vulnerable to further shatterings. Repeated exposure to this effect causes further distortions in reality and has a chance to shatter your targets mind (brainlocking them), shatter their body (clone!), or shatter their spirit (not sure).

Which effect applies would be random and would clear the shattering debuff. The chance would also get higher the higher the shatter level was.

[grayswandir]

Distortion makes me think of changing the terrain around. This would require some coding, but:
How about an attack, either centered on you or aimed, that goes out in a slow pulse in increments of 1 radius at a time. So the first turn it hits all spaces within a range of 1, second turn all spaces within a range of 2 but not 1, etc. It hits all spaces for moderate physical damage, and rotates the ring of spaces by 180 degrees (to keep the math simple, -x and -y), taking walls and enemies with it. When it finishes, it either sends out another pulse from the center, or starts compressing again from the edge, reversing the terrain change and dealing damage again.


Maybe a pair of abilities, distorted body and distorted mind. They would be single target physical or mind damage, and would apply a debuff that randomized the target's physical or mental stats. Each of the three stats would get from -50% to +50% (and maybe swapped them in the process), with a -4% to the low and high end for each level.

[Sirrocco]

I don't think that Chronomancy should necessarily have a monopoly on "using your powers has a chance of causing random weird things to happen" - especially when one is the result of using too much of your casting resource, and the other is the result of using one of a fairly small set of specific powers. The trick would just be to make sure that the "anomaly" set of random things and the "distortion" set of random things were different enough in flavor and practical effect to be distinct.

For one basic difference, anomalies are reality's way of saying it's fed up with you. Distortions are the waves made in the world by the whimsy of your subconscious. I'd say make Distortions a lot more likely to be to your advantage - like distortions never do direct damage or debuffs to you or any of your allies, and never buff any of your enemies. Obviously, the powers would have to be balanced taking into account the "and then random mostly good stuff sometimes happens" effect, but that's not a bad thing.

...and now I'm imagining whimsical powers, and a whimsy generic tree. Whimsical powers are those that cause distortions (though we might want to come up with a different name at some point if this becomes enough of a part of what makes them go). The whimsy tree cranks up the good stuff on whimsical powers, and cranks down the bad. The idea here is that you should be able to have whimsical powers pretty much be your go-to damage source, which would make the whimsy tree a tree that boosted your attacks across the board in unpredictable but rather nice ways...

...alternately, this might work pretty well just as its own tree.

Tree: Psi/Whimsy
- First ability: "Whimsy" : active (cost and cooldown tuned to be available in endgame as somewhat pricey primary damage-dealer)
- range 5ish, area effect within 1 or 2 of target
- counts enemies in area, then targets enemies in area at random with that many individual attacks, plus a few bonus attacks.
- Additional levels in the skill grant additional bonus hits and increase the base damage of each hit.
Example: If you caught 4 enemies under the template, and had 2 bonus hits, you'd expect to see 6 hits dropping, but you wouldn't know on which of those four would get hit how many times.
- Second ability: "Interest": passive
- chance of increasing area of target zone by one or two
- chance of giving one free hit on all targets in the target zone prior to assigning hits
- chance of adding a random number of additional hits
- Third ability: "Pranking": passive
- chance of each hit dealing additional damage (form a variety of the more interesting damage types)
- chance of each hit applying any of a reasonably wide variety of entertaining debuffs
- chance of each hit past the first swapping the location of its target with the location of the target of the last hit
- relatively small chance of each hit instead targeting someone outside the zone and teleporting them into the zone.
- Fourth ability: "Wackiness": passive
- chance of each hit instead generating a temporary (fragile, but decent damage and/or explodes on hit) summon in the zone
- small chance on each casting to target a random enemy in range with a second casting of whimsy for free
- small chance per cast to give you a one turn buff that allows you to use a different skill without setting it to cooldown, spending resources, or spending time. The buff is skill-specific, and is consumed with the free cast. ("Oh, hey! Use this one. You should totally use this one. I'll help!")

Essentially, it's a bunch of really cool stuff that's balanced by being somewhat rare and completely unpredictable. Maxxing out the tree should mean that basically every cast has *something* nice happen to it, and sometimes you get casts that are just made of pure awesome, but at the same time, even if you have 5 levels in Interest, you shouldn't expect to have an Interest effect kick in more than half the time or so. (Of course, sometimes all three of them kick in, and suddenly life gets much simpler - but it's not *dependable*) The idea of the pricing is that a high-level Solipsist, seeing a pack of reasonably strong enemy coming towards him/her, should be able to fire this thing off three or four or five times in quick succession, but should be feeling pretty woozy by the time it's done.

I'm really not sure whether to assign hits first (thus letting five hits plow through the random mouse that happened to be in the area) or to assign them one at a time (so that after the first hit splatters the mouse, the rest of them still do useful things). My inclination is the latter, just to save frustration, but it could go either way.

[edge2054]

Interesting ideas but I kinda want to stay away from doing something like anomalies again.

For distortions I'm thinking...


Distortion Bolt - Fires a low damage bolt that ignores physical resistance and distorts the target. If the bolt hits a distorted target it will cause an AoE explosion.

Distortion Wave - Cone of physical damage that causes knockback and distorts the target (so distortion bolt can be set off).

Ravage - Stun that strips buffs and deals physical damage over time. Counts as a distortion effect (so distortion bolt will both remove it and create an explosion).

Maelstrom - Creates a map object that deals distortion damage every turn and pulls actors into it.

[Sirrocco]

Might be cool to have a different "on hitting distorted target" effect for each power. The bolt causes an explosion, the wave pins, ravage attacks non-HP resources as well, and Maelstron only does the pull on distorted targets (and damages them more if the pull would have pulled them into the map object). (so Maelstrom actually only pulls every other round - one round to distort, and one to pull)

Edit: also, is the Whimsy tree as described still too much like anomalies? I think it might be cool as a locked tree, at least - and making it locked but lvl 1 would give solipsist cornacs an interesting set of builds to work with.

[edge2054]

It's an alright tree, it just don't know if it fits the feel of the class.

*edit* I'll keep it in mind for a locked tree. I'm on the home stretch and don't really want to add new tree ideas at this point. Going to finish up distortions and psychic assault and get Darkgod a patch and then work on sound effects and particles. After that another locked tree would probably be good.