Remove AB cooldown penalties

[bricks]

It's a shame that the only distinguishing feature of ABs is a confusing, hacky spell-on-melee effect.

In the spirit of a larger class revamp: separate the spells and the melee talents entirely. Make the "beam spell on melee attack" occur independent of any other spell talents, as it were a "cast spell on melee attack" ego with a mana cost. The current setup uses a level of coordination between talent trees that is unprecedented in other parts of the game, especially when you tack on the cooldown penalties. It also promotes a lot of counterintuitive behavior and metagaming.

Taking it a little further; the standard spell trees could be locked, the spell cooldowns removed, and ABs could get new, more thematic talent trees.

[NEHZ]

Ehn... if it helps any, dirty fighting's stun chance seems to scale off accuracy, not dexterity, at least if I was reading the code right. Like a lot of the "scales with Magic" ones (that actually scale with spellpower), the talent's description lies. Dexterity boosts th'chance, yeah, because it boosts accuracy, but your dex stat is not actually what's being checked against.

That changes a whole lot. Means you can use it combined with the +100 acc talent. If that makes it a reliable stun, the skill that gives bonus crit chance against stunned targets becomes a whole lot more atractive. Next time I take an AB, I'm going to try that.

It's a shame that the only distinguishing feature of ABs is a confusing, hacky spell-on-melee effect.

To me, the last skill in the tree that works on crits is just as defining for the class, if not more so. It's that skill that determines a lot of the choises I make when choosing other skills.

[Frumple]

Someone could take up and finish Hirumakai's AB rework, maybe? If Hiru's left it be, anyway. I like ABs as-is, but Hiru's work was impressive and much more enjoyable Just needed a bit more polish to be ready for main version inclusion.

[SageAcrin]

I think the coordination between trees is on purpose. It's a fighter/mage.

I keep repeating that because, in part, IIRC DarkGod basically said that he didn't feel like Hirumakai's work on AB really fit what he wanted AB to be...which was a fighter/mage and not a merger of the two. If you look at Arcane Blade, that makes sense-neither half can really survive very optimally without the other, which is the design intention.

(I don't think he was against Hiruma's class, though, IIRC he just suggested retheming it as a new class.)

[Grey]

Yeah, he said Hirumakai's thing should just be made into something new. Which would make a lot of sense - his whole thing was much more magey than the Arcane Blade, and if anything felt broken because it was sticking with trying to be like the current AB instead of branching out to do its own thing.