Nerf Rod of Spydric Poison

[bricks]

There's actual doubt that the Rod of Spydric Poison is overpowered?

[SageAcrin]

Apparently, yes.

Or at least, that it is inherently overpowered even after removing LoS issues.

If you abuse pin+LoS, yeah, it's pretty overpowered. So is every Pinning effect in the game.

[donkatsu]

You can't get 18 consecutive turns of pinning with Pinning Shot, and non-consecutive pinning is not really the issue because as you noted, it's not complete lockdown. Huge difference between complete and partial lockdown. I would consider the rod massively nerfed if, say, it had 15 max power but only cost 10 power to activate. As you noted, the closest thing to the rod of Spydric Poison in terms of complete lockdown right now is Gravity Well, for 10 consecutive turns of pinning (I haven't looked at the numbers recently but what you said sounds about right). Doesn't it strike you as odd that there exists an artifact with no resource cost, that doesn't even consume an equipment slot, which has nearly double the pinning duration of a tier 4 talent with 5 class points invested? And you can get this on any class, just by doing one piss easy quest?

Even without LOS abuse, it makes avoiding melee even easier than it is already. Yes, there are other pinning effects, but it is a matter of degree. Just like the majority of things that are unbalanced and cheesy.

[ohioastro]

You can't get 18 consecutive turns of pinning with Pinning Shot, and non-consecutive pinning is not really the issue because as you noted, it's not complete lockdown. Huge difference between complete and partial lockdown. I would consider the rod massively nerfed if, say, it had 15 max power but only cost 10 power to activate. As you noted, the closest thing to the rod of Spydric Poison in terms of complete lockdown right now is Gravity Well, for 10 consecutive turns of pinning (I haven't looked at the numbers recently but what you said sounds about right). Doesn't it strike you as odd that there exists an artifact with no resource cost, that doesn't even consume an equipment slot, which has nearly double the pinning duration of a tier 4 talent with 5 class points invested? And you can get this on any class, just by doing one piss easy quest?

Even without LOS abuse, it makes avoiding melee even easier than it is already. Yes, there are other pinning effects, but it is a matter of degree. Just like the majority of things that are unbalanced and cheesy.

Why is making it useless a solution? Because that's what you're advocating. People can still cheese it out - there are entire classes, like alchemist, that can do this routinely with normal class skills.
Making it slower just makes silly things tedious, it doesn't stop them. But crippling this will remove something currently situationally useful (and, yes, slashing the damage by 2x does count as crippling it for any purpose but tedious cheeswork.)

[SageAcrin]

As you noted, the closest thing to the rod of Spydric Poison in terms of complete lockdown right now is Gravity Well, for 10 consecutive turns of pinning (I haven't looked at the numbers recently but what you said sounds about right). Doesn't it strike you as odd that there exists an artifact with no resource cost, that doesn't even consume an equipment slot, which has nearly double the pinning duration of a tier 4 talent with 5 class points invested? And you can get this on any class, just by doing one piss easy quest?

Considering that Gravity Well does it over Radius 5 with a damage well over 1000 total, in an element that's not really resistable, with chain applied attempts that get around status cures?

Not really something I've questioned, no.

Pinning Shot attaches a better than normal physical to it, and Bone Grab is theoretically more about keeping enemies in melee range on a poor mobility class than it is about pinning-all three have added excellent roles.

Spydric Poison mostly just pins someone. I mean, there's a DoT there but it's so small by DoT standards by that point(Look at Hurricane, Heat or Gravity Well) that even chaining it three times just makes a decent DoT and takes 18 turns. Even relatively weak DoTs, like Slow, provide just as good of effects and exchange the raw damage that three very-slow-to-kill Spydric Poison hits would have for having more damage, faster, and having an AoE-still probably better overall.

Pin is, LoS abuse aside, kinda a lousy status in many ways. You don't exactly see players saying "I need to resist pins to deal with Dreadfell" despite having enemies specifically and nastily designed to counter it. That's because they can use other escapes or status cures to fairly reliably not die during its duration. Enemies actually do the same thing, often.

I mean, don't get me wrong, as a universal option it's quite good, but so are most of the game's universal options. Maybe it's odd that everyone reliably gets it and that it's quite useful without investment...but there's another skill that's probably better, that is like this(Relentless Pursuit). I don't see a problem with this, as long as there aren't a ton of them-and there aren't.

[bricks]

If something is so hard to balance that any sort of nerf would take it from overpowered to useless, it should be removed entirely, and replaced with something more reasonable. Edge did that with a lot of the chronomancer talents, and it's been a great improvement to those classes, even if it killed someone's favorite exploit.

One idea - change the rod to a random effect, either inflicting insidious poison, pinning enemies in a radius for a few turns (maybe an enhanced pin that also blinds, so it's more generally useful), or summoning a handful of spiders at the target location. The pin/blind shouldn't affect the player. It's still useful, but the randomness keeps it from being a complete lock. It also incorporates more "spider" themes.

[SageAcrin]

If something is so hard to balance that any sort of nerf would take it from overpowered to useless, it should be removed entirely, and replaced with something more reasonable.

Actually the problem is, if it's overpowered right now, lowering the power won't make it less overpowered.

Which implies that the problem is a system one, not one with the item. Holding a single target in place but not preventing its attacks should be only a reasonably good effect, even chained. If there's times it's more than reasonably good, something has gone odd, strategic situations aside.

(That is to say, pinning someone between you and a strong enemy so they're less likely to fire through them at you should be good. Strategic abilities should be good.)

I'm not actually against that change listed, mind. An Insidious Poison effect would have to be pretty strong to be reasonable, and we already have an artifact that summons spiders when used from the inventory, though.

But making it fire Spydric/Crippling/Stoning Poison blasts(30% fail on the Crippling) is easily as good-then you have one poison blast that benefits melee, one that benefits ranged, and one that's general use, all good enough at what they do to fight with the RNG for. I'm okay with that.

[donkatsu]

Why is making it useless a solution? Because that's what you're advocating.

One cast of Spydric Poison every 10 turns is useless?

(and, yes, slashing the damage by 2x does count as crippling it for any purpose but tedious cheeswork.)

Nobody ever said anything about the damage. Its damage is already tiny, and not even worth mentioning. Heck, double the damage if you want.

Pin is, LoS abuse aside, kinda a lousy status in many ways. You don't exactly see players saying "I need to resist pins to deal with Dreadfell" despite having enemies specifically and nastily designed to counter it. That's because they can use other escapes or status cures to fairly reliably not die during its duration. Enemies actually do the same thing, often.

Well, I'm going off of the assumption that LOS abuse will never be fixed because it has been ignored for so long and nobody really talks about it. Tiger_eye made those excellent field of view addons which I thought for sure would make it into the main build, but never did. And even if it is fixed, 18 turns of denying a melee opponent use of melee talents is hardly lousy. If I didn't have a teleport or heals (like most NPCs) and I was a melee class, you can bet your butt I'd be worried about pinning in Dreadfell. No one worries about pin resistance because players can leverage pinning much better than NPCs can.

[SageAcrin]

Well, I'm going off of the assumption that LOS abuse will never be fixed because it has been ignored for so long and nobody really talks about it.

I'm not sure that's a valid assumption.

Granted, it's probably in part due to this discussion, if it's not. So there's that.

If I didn't have a teleport or heals (like most NPCs) and I was a melee class, you can bet your butt I'd be worried about pinning in Dreadfell.

By the prides, most NPCs do have status heals and teleports.

Teleports are standard on most of the denizens of two prides, and all of the Orcs in the game have a racial status heal.

And only one pride has pure melee fighters.

I suppose you could toss Unflinching Resolve on a few of the elites there if having one area where a status is actually pretty useful is, in fact, a horrible thing.

Compare this to, say, other forms of poison, though(which outside of standard Poison and Insidious have much stronger overall impacts, and Insidious has some pretty strong niche impacts), or good strong Slows(To say nothing of effects like Impending Doom/Curses and Hexes.). Just because something's fairly versatile and works in a lot of situations doesn't mean it has to instantly be bad.