Fungus tree - overpowered?

[BFrost]

Do you remember the times when almost no one picked antimagic because it wasn't really useful? Well, now I pick it on all of my non-arcane characters (unless there is absolutely no chance that they will be in melee). The reason is - Fungus tree, that at mid-to-late game gives you continious 100+ hp regen and constantly lowers your equilibrium. Playing with it and playing without it with any kind of melee character is like two different difficulty settings.
What do you think?

[HousePet]

I think Wild Growth is too powerful.
Duration increase of 1+half of effective talent level would be less OP.

[AlexanderR]

What do you think?

The problem is not there. It is just that allying yourself with Zigur gives you access to some sidegrades (including pretty powerful ones), but not doing so gives you very little. AM brawlers may be unhappy about lack of some arcane egos on merchant gloves, rogues are similar, but less affected, everyone, boosting Wil, is just happy to get some free goodies to use against mages (who are way too common for someone formally being "in hiding"). The alternative (going along with Angolwen & Grand Corruptor) gives you underwhelming Staff Combat (staffs are generally underwhelming for non-magical characters now) and access to underwhelming Hexes (locked). Magical escort trees are neat, but true counterpart of Fungus - Aegis - is not here. Needless to say, choosing middle road does not give you anything except feeling of satisfaction, when seeing Thalerion's cruel death.
Fortunately, nearby topics are filled with description of new arcane runes, quests, balancing measures etc. IMO, implementing any of those and changing staff damage (or better damage of all 2-handlers - with appropriate balancing) to scale better with physical power should do the trick.

I think Wild Growth is too powerful.

It is not. All it does is doubling amount of slots for regeneration infusions, which means giving you (at most) 2 more virtual slots. Pretty sane balance with giving up on arcane stuff (including shielding runes!) and heavily investing in Willpower-based tree. Ancestral Life is the OP one. Making ~0.2 of turns free is a notable speed buff, and it is always habitually taken by every AM character with Fungus. Solution, you proposed, would just make investing category point into Fungus more of no-brainer. Greatly lowering turn gain of Ancestral Life at lower talent levels & low-to-moderate mindpower, while preserving existing values at higher mindpower would make tree much less attractive for Str-based classes without breaking Wilders.

[BFrost]

I agree that the problematic talent is not Wild Growth - it's Ancestral Life.
But what I really wanted to hear is this: is having 100+ regen every turn OP or not? The arcane option is shield runes, which take up infusion slots and are probably worse in other aspects.
So do we really need to buff arcane options or nerf the Fungus Tree?

[AlexanderR]

The arcane option is shield runes, which take up infusion slots and are probably worse in other aspects.

Arcane option is shielding in general, not just shielding runes. Have you played a Skeleton Archmage with heavy focus on Aegis? It can chain-use those runes and recharge percentage of multiple shields (regardless of their strength!) while firing spells with crazy cooldown reduction, fully protected by almost permanent Disruption Shield. Isn't this overpowered???

[jotwebe]

That comparison is totally off. With skeleton AM you're talking one very synergistic combo. Even if you compare Aegis with Fungus, there is the little difference that going arcane doesn't give you access to that, not even via escorts.

[BFrost]

The arcane option is shield runes, which take up infusion slots and are probably worse in other aspects.

Arcane option is shielding in general, not just shielding runes. Have you played a Skeleton Archmage with heavy focus on Aegis? It can chain-use those runes and recharge percentage of multiple shields (regardless of their strength!) while firing spells with crazy cooldown reduction, fully protected by almost permanent Disruption Shield. Isn't this overpowered???

To answer your question - yes, it probably is. I've never played archmage personally, though.
But it is a specific class-race-skill tree combo. Fungus tree can be obtained by any non-arcane character and it is so powerful IMO that every character who can, should get it.

[AlexanderR]

That comparison is totally off. With skeleton AM you're talking one very synergistic combo.

Yeah, magic is quite unfair in the Eyal. Probably the reason, why Zigur still exists and prospers Back to the topic - saying that Fungus is overpowered is pointless as long as it is on par with Aegis. If asymmetric design is bad, Aegis should be accessible to everyone. If it is good, but Fungus is still OP, Aegis should be buffed and reworked to resemble Fungus less. If both design patterns are good and should be used together (which is how it is currently happens in ToME), there should be more viable options for non-AM bulwarks, archers etc.

[SageAcrin]

The arcane option is shield runes, which take up infusion slots and are probably worse in other aspects.

No, they really aren't.

Shielding are instant, and count above your normal HP total-they can be used as preemptive defense as well as an effective "temporary heal". Did I mention they're instant?

Fungus makes regeneration better than shielding, true, but on base I will take a Shielding Rune, assuming similar life values and cooldown, over any Healing or Regeneration on base, and Fungus takes quite a lot of investment(a category point and Antimagic) to reach.

The only replacement most classes(Not Solipsist or Oozemancer) get for Teleport is Psychoportation, too, and this is a pretty questionable replace-Psychoportations have no minimum teleport range, and the best of them can sometimes put you two squares away. Dream Walk exists on escorts, but it's possible not to get a specific one.

I'm not entirely happy with Antimagic vs non-Antimagic balance either-I agree that it's mostly biased towards AM, though that's very much not always so(Clear rates of various characters show how few Rogue types or Brawlers or Archers tend to pick it up, out of those that clear). I still think that flat-rating AM Shield to not scale with anything but talent level would be a good idea, so that the impact on the best classes with it(Classes like Oozemancer and Solipsist) isn't even better. And giving Fungal Growth TL/2 mult and giving it a small regen impact multiplier would make it parallel Shielding better as well as nerfing it a bit.

But all told, I think it's better if Antimagic dominate the spectrum than the alternative. It was a pretty bad shame when I literally couldn't justify the investment on any character, even though I wanted to try it out.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

I'm not entirely happy with Antimagic vs non-Antimagic balance either-I agree that it's mostly biased towards AM, though that's very much not always so(Clear rates of various characters show how few Rogue types or Brawlers or Archers tend to pick it up, out of those that clear.

Clearly, the issue here is that we have a situation where people are choosing a particular path, always because it always offers a benefit to them. So what we need is a tempting but different benefit to force a decision on the character. Ideally, something that helps those same melee/ranged classes that aren't magic in some way, similar to how fungus does. People will always take the easiest path to power, instead of the correct moral decision (which is Angolwen). So we need a counterbalance. Something that isn't 'comparable mirror image of antimagic', but a completely different sidegrade that does completely different things. Ideally, we want a situation where 90% of characters can successfully use EITHER possibility. (There will always be combos that lean more toward one then the other, regardless.)

Question is, what could we offer? Most of the magic trees wouldn't really help non-mag pumping characters (same as antimagic offers minimal help to non-will pumping characters), and most of the 'physical' support trees wouldn't make much sense.

Also, hexes need a real buff for characters going that route to really consider it, though that's a separate issue.

[SageAcrin]

Unlocked Divination 1.0 reward from killing Urkis the arcane way, 0.5 Mana regen granted at the same time.

Weaker, less unique effect, lower required investment, easily granted by Angolwen, sidegrade effect, has a good set of magical abilities that still benefit physical fighters.

Locked Conveyance 1.0 instead of unlocked Divination 1.0 is an interesting option, too.

Edit: Actually, the more I think on it, the more I like locked Conveyance. It isn't incredibly powerful for most mages-almost all of them have some non-locked teleport option. It grants you two powerful mobility options that aren't really reproduceable, which is good for everyone, and Probability Travel is a neat/good skill as long as you aren't running Mana. And all of these effects are good for physical fighters-the only thing they can't leverage heavily is Displacement Shield, and the fighter/mages can.

[Mewtarthio]

I am, and always have been, 100% in favor of making Aegis (locked) somehow available to everyone who doesn't go antimagic. Heck, we do that with Hexes, which is nowhere near as generally useful. It probably wouldn't be as powerful as Fungus (Aegis requires Mag and all its effects run on Spellpower, while Fungus requires the more generally useful Wil and has a couple of good effects that scale by talent level alone), but you still get to use arcane items, so it's probably balanced. I'm not saying it should be the Angolwen reward for killing Urkis (though getting something would be nice), but having it somewhere would be generally helpful enough that I imagine we'd start seeing some interesting builds.

[SageAcrin]

Shielding's scaling is pretty bad on physical builds, honestly. 25% or so without spellpower backing it up, with very little benefit from levels besides the bonus turn, if I recall rightly. It uses a (20+(5, 400 spellpower/10)) mechanic.

Even pumping Magic wouldn't change that too much, because you wouldn't have the supporting Spellpower boost from equipment. It uses a formula that has a high baseline, then relies heavily on you getting Spellpower-the reason it works so well is because everyone that has it has lots of Spellpower. Arcane Shield is less extreme, but similar.

And in the end, physical fighters could always have accessed Celestial/Light. That's a perfectly valid sidegrade build that takes the same amount of stat building/category points as getting to Fungus, and it works surprisingly decently due to Arcane Might(I ran a Bulwark like this). But it's not attractive, because it's going off in such a strange direction. I think this'd be similar.

What we'd see is mages getting way more powerful, without helping the people that could access AM at all, I suspect. It wouldn't really produce an interesting choice.

Conveyance has different benefits from Celestial/Light, so there's no direct comparison issue, and the skills have very little Spellpower scaling, outside of Displacement Shield. I think it works better.

[wobbly]

I dislike conveyance just from the standpoint that a melee character has no reason to ever switch probability travel off. Bulwarks & Berserkers constantly walking through walls seems a little off thematically in my books. You could pick up arcane eye off an escort to. Would we see melees rushing through walls the way shadowblades shadowstep? (not sure it would work mechanically). I'd prefer divination unlocked.

[SageAcrin]

Would we see melees rushing through walls the way shadowblades shadowstep? (not sure it would work mechanically).

It doesn't.

Also, Probability Travel has a cooldown based on the amount of squares you travel through-few people pick it up as anything but an emergency teleport, since that got implemented, since it can take quite a while for your next wallhack.

Someone actually leaving Probability Travel on and utilizing it would be a neat change, to be honest.