Make me want to flaunt my corruptions

[HousePet]

I do occasionally drop a negation.

You only get a limited number of points, so adding more viable options doesn't necessarily increase the power of a class.
Especially if these extra options are different elements, then you don't have the +damage synergy to worry about.

A new Defiler class would be interesting, as Corruptor is currently a mashup of different Corrupt sources and talents.
But Archmage has 5 different elements in one class, so different elements doesn't justify a new class in itself.

[Razakai]

Yes, I'd rather have a Archmage-like Corruptor that can focus on Acid, or Shadowflame, and so on, rather than 'Acid Corruptor' or 'Darkness Corruptor' as seperate classes.
I don't think making their non-blight elements stronger would buff the class massively simply due to the dual limitations of points and cooldowns. A Blight Corruptor already has a bunch of skills to get and buttons to press, so a Shadowflame Corruptor would simply take entirely different skills. They don't have to be perfectly balanced with eachother - look at how for Archmage Wildfire is incredibly strong, yet plenty of people still go for other elements just for the variety and playstyle.
The main thing would be to make sure new trees don't have too many amazing 1 point wonder talents that a Blight Corruptor could dip into to get a big advantage. Some of these are ok, but requiring a heavy investment helps keep builds more distinct.

[bpat]

Yes, I'd rather have a Archmage-like Corruptor that can focus on Acid, or Shadowflame, and so on, rather than 'Acid Corruptor' or 'Darkness Corruptor' as seperate classes.
I don't think making their non-blight elements stronger would buff the class massively simply due to the dual limitations of points and cooldowns. A Blight Corruptor already has a bunch of skills to get and buttons to press, so a Shadowflame Corruptor would simply take entirely different skills. They don't have to be perfectly balanced with eachother - look at how for Archmage Wildfire is incredibly strong, yet plenty of people still go for other elements just for the variety and playstyle.
The main thing would be to make sure new trees don't have too many amazing 1 point wonder talents that a Blight Corruptor could dip into to get a big advantage. Some of these are ok, but requiring a heavy investment helps keep builds more distinct.

The issue with giving Corruptors strong non-blight damage is that either the damage will be way worse than Plague/Blood/Vim and no one will use it, or the damage will be comparable to those categories and Corruptors with Temporal Form will become very powerful.

The difference between Archmage and Corruptor in this regard is that Corruptor has much higher damage than Archmage thanks to Plague and Vimsense, so other Corruptor elements would have to be far stronger than any Archmage build to be viable alternatives to blight. Also Temporal Form on Archmages isn't that good because it messes up Wildfire, so it'd be more appealing on Corruptors than Archmages allowing Corruptors to more easily abuse powerful attacks of another element. Additionally, unlike Corruptors, Archmages just don't have the talent points to invest heavily in multiple elements since Meta and Temporal are too good to pass up and they both cost a category point and significant point investment, while Corruptor only has one important category to unlock (Bone is essential but Shadowflame and Torment aren't that great).

[Nagyhal]

Cool thread! Wow, I forgot to refresh and a lot happened since I first saw this.

HousePet, something like your Rust tree would be excellent for the upcoming steampunk orc campaign. Hold that thought! Death and Decay, or something like it (with an effect per debuff on every enemy you kill) seems like practically a necessity to make Plague builds interesting on Normal.

parcel, making curses more difficult than usual to dispel is really, really cool thematically. So is to weep a radius 1 ball of corrupted blood.

And Razakai, I do think it would be nice (if you'll excuse my blatant comparison to that other roguelike) if even spell, even the simple beam spells were designed with enough detail to give them a set of particular special use cases, if there were a lot that could be "sussed out" about them, so to speak. Consolidation... is always good, and I love the lean classes like the Cursed, as they tend to have exciting talent category formats. As for Darkfire healing demons in the case of Demonolgists—I'd be very disappointed if that weren't in place already

Well, I have a really wacky idea that I'm going to code for the Bone tree and release in addon format, assuming it actually proves feasible. I'll report back if I make any progress.

[HousePet]

HousePet, something like your Rust tree would be excellent for the upcoming steampunk orc campaign.

*cough*

Temporal Form being quite powerful should not be influencing the design of Corruptor, and I don't base my talent choices purely on raw damage output, I enjoy variety.

Outside of the huge damage that can be done with Catalepsy (which takes a few turns to set up, so you don't have time to use other talents to make it more powerful), Corruptor is on par with Archmage as far as damage goes. Vimsense is actually weaker than the equivalent Archmage talents as far as damage goes.

Your point about Archmages not investing in multiple elements suggests that adding more elements to Corruptor wouldn't necessarily cause the class to become more powerful, because one good element and certain side abilities are better than the alternatives. We can do the same with Corruptor.

[bpat]

HousePet, something like your Rust tree would be excellent for the upcoming steampunk orc campaign.

*cough*

Temporal Form being quite powerful should not be influencing the design of Corruptor, and I don't base my talent choices purely on raw damage output, I enjoy variety.

Outside of the huge damage that can be done with Catalepsy (which takes a few turns to set up, so you don't have time to use other talents to make it more powerful), Corruptor is on par with Archmage as far as damage goes. Vimsense is actually weaker than the equivalent Archmage talents as far as damage goes.

Your point about Archmages not investing in multiple elements suggests that adding more elements to Corruptor wouldn't necessarily cause the class to become more powerful, because one good element and certain side abilities are better than the alternatives. We can do the same with Corruptor.

Even ignoring Plague, Corruptor still has considerably stronger damage than Archmage since their useful talents all have very low cooldowns and the combination of Vimsense, Blood Fury, and Dark Ritual easily outclasses Archmage's damage/resistance penetration sustains (Vimsense can drop resistances below 0%, resistance penetration cannot). Also, Catalepsy doesn't more than a turn to unload two Virulent Diseases worth of damage (I've done over 9,000 damage without spending turns setting up) if built right, so it is very hard to compete with that.

In buffing Corruptor, we'd have to be very careful to not make something as strong as Plague since Corruptor's are already very strong as they are, but if the new non-blight damage isn't comparable to Plague, it won't be an appealing option. Because it would be very hard to balance if even possible, I think it'd be better to take the ideas here and add them to a new Defiler class rather than adding them to Corruptor.

[HousePet]

But then you have the same situation between Corruptor and the new class, as you are suggesting we would have with Plague and a new category.

We could always nerf Plague.

[Doctornull]

I like Plague. What I want to see out of Corruptors is less Blight focus for all the other early categories.

For example: Blood
- Blood Spray: make it Acid + disease
- Blood Grasp: make it Darkness, since it's a vampiric life-drain effect
- Blood Boil: make it Fire damage + slow
- Poison Storm: move it here from the Blight tree, leave it Nature damage

For Blight damage, you've still got Sanguisuge's Drain, Vim's Soul Rot, Blight's Corrupted Negation, and Plague's everything.

This allows room for high-level trees focused on Acid, Darkness, Fire and Blight. These could be separate (like how an Archmage or Wyrmic would do it), or they could be combined:
- Fire / Darkness
- Acid / Fire
- Blight / Darkness
- Blight / Acid

[Razakai]

Even if these new talents weren't as strong as Plague, I'd still use them if they were fun. I've done Archmage runs as Earth and Water and other 'weak' builds simply due to the playstyle being different to the standard Wildfire murder machine. A benefit of a single player game like this is that talents don't need to be perfectly balanced, having overpowered outliers is fine as long as it's not too extreme. After all, if power was the only concern, all you'd see people doing is playing Oozemancers and the like all day.
Also, I like the idea of having Blood be a mixed element tree if we were going to add more varied options. That still leaves Corruptors with a pure Blight tree in the form of Plague in addition to their primary nuke. Would feel a little bit weird having the commonly used Corrupted Blood damage type no longer actually exist in the Blood tree though. Then for high level trees, you could have the Shadowflame nuking tree for Dark/Fire, and then a high level Blight/Acid tree to cover all elements pretty equally. Perhaps give that one a focus on potent single target damage and debilitating effects to contrast with the big Darkfire AoEs of Shadowflame.

[overgoat]

Corrupter is one of my favorite classes and there are some great ideas in here. I also think this would be prime to plug an older class idea I had that fits in with many of the suggestions here: The Plague Bearer! http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=39380 It is a class with much more focus one one aspect of Corruption.

[EatThisShoe]

While corruptor has some issues, perhaps it would be better to suggest smaller changes that specifically solve existing problems with the class. OP brought up a few specific spells and that they were lackluster, and fixes could be specific to those spells without needing to cause a whole upheaval of the class and its balance.

On that front I'd like to discuss the specific spells, corrosive worm, poison storm, and dark fire, and if/how they can be improved. Bone is also it's own isssue, but I don't have much to say on it. I'll say this now though, my central point is this: The issue is not that corrupters stack blight damage over acid, it's that these spells are not useful, and being off element just makes them obviously totally useless, instead of debatable, alternative playstyles for characters on normal difficulty.

Poison Storm: Fundamentally poison doesn't work for corrupters. More than any other spell this is the one that makes no sense because of the damage type. Turning it into Acid Storm is a simple and obvious solution, but I still don't think many people would use it. There is at least two other problems with this spell. First off it's a point blank AE, which makes it inherently dangerous and kinda weak, it's not good against long range threats, it's not good for softening targets as they approach, it dictates a playstyle of stalling and retreating that the corrupter isn't designed for. This kind of spell is fitting for a class like the Wyrmic who gets close and regens consistently for longer fights, which is why Corrosive Mist works for a wyrmic no matter how divided on damage types they are. While I never used Poison Storm on my corrupter, I found similar issues with short range character centered AEs on ranged casters with skills like Ice Storm on my cold Archmage, and Ashes to Ashes on Paradox Mage, in most cases where you get that close it makes more sense to use an escape skill. The second issue I think Parcel already mentioned in his first post, DoTs are inherently kinda weak, and this spells is the worst of the worst, a stacking DoT, at low range. This spell may already deal absurd damage, but it doesn't matter when corrupters can kill their target in 1/10th the time at a longer range.

Corrosive Worm: I'm less certain on this one, but the DoT issue still remains equally relevant to the acid damage issue if not more. Another issue that occurs to me is that I believe this skill can damage the caster, which makes it not worth the risk. I've killed (well triggered cauterize on) my paradox mage with their similar, on-element skill Destabilize, even with the temporal resist of pardox mastery. Self kill is already dangerous, and DoT is too slow for this class, even before you address the issue of acid vs. blight damage it's not that good. But for this skill, unlike Poison Storm, there is an easy solution, if the damage doesn't hit the caster then the explosion is useful, it could even make a good opener.

Dark Flame: Ok I sort of disagree here. This spell is actually quite good, just situationally. The spell excels at hitting targets around corners without granting them LoS, which on difficulties above normal can become pretty important. This is the one spell where I feel the off element damage really hurts it; It makes more sense to swing points from other skills into Dark Flame for the specific enemies that you cannot risk giving LoS to, rather than running it at 5/5 all the time. Beyond just being off element it's 2 types and has a slow projectile speed, those both hurt it.

I'm curious to hear some thoughts on the non-damage-type aspects of these skills, because I think them being off element masks the fact that they already aren't great. They could already attract new players thematically, but I doubt experienced players would really value these skills much even if they were blight based. Maybe for an alternative playstyle.

[Orangeflame]

IMHO, dark just isn't the corruptors' area. Necromancers, Doomed and Shadowblades all use dark significantly more than the defiler types, and there is enough room between Blight, Acid, and Fire for defilers to get a fair bit of variety. Likewise, poison isn't a corruptor's gig either.

The way I see it, (gimmick builds aside) it should be viable for corrupters to be able to go pure Blight, Blight/Acid, or Blight/Fire.

[bpat]

The issue with Corrosive Worm, Poison Storm, and Darkfire as that they try to be damage abilities while Corruptors have no reason to build their damage type, so they end up being a waste of a turn. I'd support converting these into minor damage + utility/control spells from pure damage spells. For instance, Corrosive Worm could reduce the target's resistances, Poison Storm could apply a random poison effect like Oozemancer's Poisonous Spores does, and Darkfire could do demon fire damage instead of dark/fire so it would heal you if you're using Flame of Urh'Rok.

[parcel]

Also, I'd to add my two cents about theme and style. I'd like it if archmage were further refined to emphasize the hierarchy and order of the elements, particularly by making each of the 5 pure elemental builds all about equally playable. I don't want to see corrupters being so hierarchical and ordered, so am fine with the idea that there should be on-type blight-based damage that hits very hard, and off-type damage spells that contain utility. Basically, corrupter utility looks like a weak attack spell, and often has some negative effects on the caster himself, because that's what corruption is all about. Further, the encroachment of blight into an arcane-governed world does not produce an ordered and hierarchical system. For one, the system is still being developed and a lot of the magic is not yet perfectly refined. For another, the magical power that corrupters use is itself an evolving system, as blight continues to blight the world and alter the optimal ways for one to use blight.

Rather than being hierarchical and ordered and harmonic, a biological metaphor is appropriate for corrupters. Human organs have different specialties but are not equally proportioned, and they all drink the same blood. Slit open the abdominal cavity and the guts will spill out, melding in new and interesting ways. This is corruption at its essence; this is the work of blight in a virginal world.

[The Revanchist]

Well said, parcel.

I'm inclined to agree with that reasoning, I think.