Arcanum Class Pack v2.3

[FruitAndGarbage]

I just started using the Arcanum pack, and I'm really enjoying it so far! It's a lot of fun, and it makes mages feel a lot more involved and interesting. A bit of feedback, although I hope I'm not retreading any ground here (since I haven't read through an entire year's worth of this thread yet, sorry):

-Fire infusion is listed as a sustain now, and investing in it gives it to me as a talent, and I can even activate it to lower my max mana by thirty... But I get the bonus to my bombs' damage whether or not I have the sustain active. Is this intentional, a workaround, or a bug?
-Wardstones seem pretty cool conceptually and I'd love to give them a shot, but there's so little incentive for a caster to wield something one-handed (since short staves are rare and generally not the best ones available to you) that I haven't really gotten to do much with them. Like nuk said, other classes are generally better served with a shield or dagger or mindstar in the offhand, so there's just not much reason for anyone to do much with them right now. I'd suggest making them a tool-slot item, but even then I think the existing tools would be more useful than wardstones. Maybe any talent with a Mana/Vim/Positive/Paradox cost should grant a talent that lets you wield a wardstone in a dedicated slot (in the same way that Absorption grants the Grasp and Beyond the Flesh talents and Chronomancy talents grant Spacetime Tuning)? I don't know, just spitballing.
-Wardstones currently weigh more than greatmauls, and this makes me laugh because I've got the world's stupidest sense of humor.
-I tried equipping a wardstone to play around with it and see what I liked and didn't to give more thorough feedback, and then everything went to hell. I equipped an un-ego'd sandstone wardstone in my off-hand (with nothing equipped in the main hand); mousing over the talent on my hotbar gave one error, attempting to use it gave another. I assume this is because I got the talent but no max wards, but I'm reporting it just in case that's not it. My current addons are addon-dev, arcanum_20, faerierace_10, infinitefarportal_2, items-vault, necromancy+_2, stone-wardens, and taint_1. I took the wardstone off to get rid of the problem, then thought of a couple of other things I wanted to test and re-equipped it. After so doing, doing anything that involved opening a popup window became impossible, with the exception of viewing the game log and accessing the level-up screen: I couldn't access my talents screen, my inventory, my golem's inventory, my refit golem screen, or even the game menu. I had to force-quit the game because I couldn't even save and exit it. Rather unfortunate.
-A ceremonial dagger weapon type would be cool! It'd give an incentive to use a wardstone in the offhand and potentially give some extra options to shadowblades. They'd have to give decent spellcasting bonuses to be worth using instead of a staff... Maybe focused more on spellpower and spellcrit than elemental damage boosts? More on-wield talents granted? Something to differentiate them, but also give them a decent reason to pick over a staff.
-I miss my stupid-overpowered Aegis tree, but haven't given Force and Restoration enough of a chance yet to say whether I like the change.

[HousePet]

Fire Infusion: Derp.

Wardstone mass is an error, they aren't supposed to be that heavy!

There is a problem with basic wardstones granting Ward when they don't give any max wards. Will be corrected.

So has anyone used Ward yet? Is it better as a permanent effect? Or should I revert the changes?

[Orangeflame]

A few more observations about wardstones:


Wards just aren't that useful to begin with. They only have a couple good uses that I can think of:

1) To abuse damage smearing; which is near invulnerability so long as your foes don't have temporal damage
2) One-shot protection; but only against physical/dark/blight which tend to be single big-damage attacks, and you have to know that they are coming so you can put up the right ward.

. . .

Wardstones have poor egos. I can get a lot better armor, resistances, defense, and abilities (ex. time shield) from a conventional shield.

I think some more spell-themed egos could make them a bit more useful for casters, like 'Eldritch-'

. . .

They can be used for shield-bash talents, but the tooltips don't give any clues as to their damage.

. . .

They have the same sprites as mindstars

[HousePet]

Knowing what damage type is coming isn't too hard. Since the effect never times out you can just set it when you enter a zone. eg. Lightning wards for Tempest Peak.
You could also use Wards to plug a resistance hole.

I put together the egos fairly quickly, so they definately could use some work.
Next version will greatly increase the ego chance.
What would people like on their Wardstones?

They shouldn't be usable for shield bash talents, and they have no damage on them.

I thought mindstar sprites would be safer than exposing people to my abyssmal drawing skills. Will definately need an artist.

[FruitAndGarbage]

I've been having a nice time with wards granted to me by the Chromatic Wand. The regeneration makes them a nice, low-effort failsafe against large burst melee attacks that might otherwise one-shot my Elementist (also, I like Elementalist as a name better than Elementist). They're not a cornerstone of my strategy, but they certainly made the sandworm tunnels even easier since I didn't have to worry about caves collapsing on me while I was fighting things. Your tweaks have taken them from "totally worthless" to "a nice little side-bonus on items that happen to have them that I would have been using anyway". Although an ego that gave me 10 nature wards would become part of my permanent ensemble ;P

They're nice for when you're going into places you know are theme levels or you just can't reliably boost your resistances to a specific type. I like 'em.

Suggestions for wardstone egos... Will largely depend on what you want wardstones to be for. Do you want them to be companions for your hypothetical ceremonial daggers? A useful offhand for a shortstaff wielder? An alternate to mindstars? A possible choice for classes that already use one-handed weapons? A situational backup you keep handy only for when you need them? What's the concept here is I guess what I'm asking.

Edit: It might be neat to grant the ability to wield all staves one-handed to the staff combat/staff magic trees. Maybe for level five in Staff Mastery? It doesn't seem like it'd be too broken, given that casters don't really have a lot of options for offhand wields anyway, but I could well be missing something.

[HousePet]

There is at least one crazily awesome dagger that frequently gets used in the offhand by mages.

Wardstones are sort of like a caster version of a shield. Sort of like a defensive mindstar. Sort of like a lucky charm of warding. Sort of like a crucifix in a cheesy vampire movie.

The hypothetical daggers are also up for discussion. They would be a tool that is designed more for magical rituals that cutting throats. Though they would still have a good edge, for cutting reagents and the occasional living sacrifice type thing. I'm intending for them to use dexterity and magic for requirements and damage modifiers. They will likely do a little less damage that a typical dagger, but will also have an innate spellcrit bonus.

[Orangeflame]

How about egos for specifically against certain types of enemies?
Ex) Undead Hunter's - +X% damage against undead, +X% undead resistance, +X% fear immunity
Ex) Delver's - +X% horror resistance, +1 light radius, +strength

Or telepathy?
Ex) Naturalist's - Telepathy:Animal, +X% nature damage, +X% nature resistance, +X% poison immunity

Sort of like a crucifix in a cheesy vampire movie.

First artifact wardstone, right there.

[loimprevisto]

Magic missile can be fun, but I keep hitting myself with it. Is there a way to make so it won't hurt the player who fired it?

[HousePet]

Well not walking into its path would help...
However I can't edit the player AI.
I'm increasing its projectile speed to attempt to stop npcs hitting themselves with it.

Wardstone egos against specific enemy types is a good idea.

[loimprevisto]

I found a "Hating Granite Wardstone" that gives +.2 positive hate regeneration. That sounds quite powerful, I'm not aware of any other items that give PCs positive hate regen... was that intentional?

[loimprevisto]

Odd LUA error after getting caught in collapsing sand:

Lua Error: /hooks/arcanum/load.lua:124: attempt to call method 'isTalentActive' (a nil value)
At [C]:-1 isTalentActive
At /hooks/arcanum/load.lua:124
At [string "return function(l, self, data) local ok=false..."]:1 triggerHook
At /data-Infinite500/damage_typesI500.lua:381 projector
At /data/general/grids/sand.lua:71 act
At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:126 tickLevel
At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:62 tick
At /engine/GameTurnBased.lua:46 tick
At /mod/class/Game.lua:1141

[HousePet]

Doesn't seem likely to be an accident.
If it turns out to be unbalancing, I can change it.

I'll patch this weekend to deal with naughty bugs.

[HousePet]

Patched to fix some bugs.
Also adds prototype ritual daggers.

[StarKeep]

Upon leveling Aegis to Raw TL 5, getting this lua error upon use:

Code: Select all

stack traceback:
	[C]: in function 'error'
	/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:152: in function </engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:134>
Lua Error: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:174: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:152: /data-arcanum/talents/spells/force.lua:167: attempt to perform arithmetic on field 'dur' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
	/data-arcanum/talents/spells/force.lua:167: in function </data-arcanum/talents/spells/force.lua:148>
	[C]: in function 'xpcall'
	/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:147: in function </engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:134>
	At [C]:-1 
	At [C]:-1 error
	At /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:174 useTalent
	At /engine/interface/PlayerHotkeys.lua:169 
	At /engine/interface/PlayerHotkeys.lua:161 activateHotkey
	At /engine/HotkeysIconsDisplay.lua:334 onMouse
	At /mod/class/uiset/Minimalist.lua:1842 fct
	At /engine/Mouse.lua:52 

[joebobjoe]

Playing as an Alchemist, rescued an Alchemist escort, chose to get channel staff +1 level. I now have a second skill channel staff at 0.80 proficiency and lowered damage but otherwise identical. This is utterly useless to me as it is a 0 cooldown skill. I am playing with some other mods but none of them edit escorts as far as I know (nullpack, nulltweaks, nullgems, Necro+, Draconians, and Verdant class pack.) If you could look into fixing the Alchemist escorts it would be appreciated.