Had this conversation the last time someone wanted to nerf it heavily-Poisonous Spores is already quite low on the power of DoTs, relatively.
Right now, it does about half the damage of Spit Poison, the previous candidate for worst DoT in the game, give or take. There's literally no reason for that-removing the talent is better than that, as its unreliable status is now far more powerful for enemies than the player, who cannot get consistent effects out of it, making it irritating as hell to be hit by and useless for the player.
Edit: Housepet pointed out to me that I should give the before and after, and mention this is a GIT change. Oops.
Discussion with Shibari that she encouraged me to post; Take it as you will here.
Slight alterations to account for a small disconnect in the middle and some unneeded disconnects/reconnects-sorry if this takes anything out of context, but it's a big post to start.
<SageAcrin> Shibari, what's the logic behind making Poisonous Spores utter garbage for the PC?
<SageAcrin> I went to a lot of trouble to keep that from happening before, and gave some pretty long discussions about it on the forums...
<SageAcrin> (Acidic Skin's change is pretty bad too, but it's a skill that might be best retooled entirely.)
<SageAcrin> (So I don't mind that too much.)
<SageAcrin> I mean, I see the comment, but it only really applies to enemies. The player can't get consistent effects out of the skill, so the status impact should be strong to compensate.
<SageAcrin> And shortening the duration works better as a rebalance for that than lowering the damage, anyways, if a rebalance is needed. I just don't get it.
<Shibari2> the balance was absolutely ludicrous on a hilarious level
<Shibari2> and is still just fine
<Shibari2> If people aren't using this talent in that state thats their mistake, its still too good
<SageAcrin> Okay, taking this to the forums then.
<SageAcrin> Strongly disagree and need to air it in public, I guess.
<SageAcrin> You're aware of how unbelievably bad that damage is relative to DoTs, right?
<SageAcrin> No. Remove that instead if needed. Right now you have made it only useful for unreliable status.
<SageAcrin> That only is useful on Insane and up or when hitting the player.
<SageAcrin> If it needs a rebalance for Insane, fine, but that's an unbelievably bad way to go about it.
<SageAcrin> Lowering the duration would be a far more intelligent way to do it.
<Shibari2> unreliable status+average damage+good AoE
<SageAcrin> I'm rather annoyed, because I had a multiple page discussion on the forums about this talent, and thought I'd hit a good compromise that made a lot of people happy.
<SageAcrin> That was the last time it got nerfed.
<SageAcrin> And basically you just slammed a change through in passing, in a commit that changed a lot of unrelated things, and over halved its power.
<SageAcrin> That's irritating, especially given how much I had to dig through commits to find out about it.
<Shibari2> how on earth is a 30, 200 scale with a huge crit mod bad
<Shibari> it damn well better be low per turn with all those advantages
<SageAcrin> No. That's ridiculous. It's useless for the player to rely on for status. It's damage reduction *some of the time*, pin *some of the time*, and healing reduction(hah) some of the time.
<SageAcrin> A roulette skill should always be assumed to give you the worst possible effect for survival's sake. You should assume it always gives you the best effect when balancing it.
<Shibari> Fortunately they aren't relying on anything to make it worth the cast, thats just a free bonus that is on average significant
<Shibari> .. No
<SageAcrin> "free bonus" to a skill that does utter garbage damage.
<SageAcrin> Yeah, sure.
<Shibari> Completely average damage
<SageAcrin> No.
<SageAcrin> Where are you getting this?
<Sebsebeleb> blood spray is almost twice the damage, disregarding the crit
<SageAcrin> Give me a talent that does CLOSE to this and is a DoT effect.
<Sebsebeleb> and half of that blood spray damage is instant
<Shibari> "Disregarding the crit"
<SageAcrin> The crit is +25% at most. And that's a really crazy most.
<Sebsebeleb> are you saying corruptors have bad crit compared to oozemancers?
<SageAcrin> (Assumes 100% hit rate and 150% crit mod, which no one has.)
<SageAcrin> *100% crit rate
<Shibari> No, I'm saying not factoring crit mod bonuses is silly
<SageAcrin> I am factoring it.
<Shibari> he wasn't
<SageAcrin> Like I said, +25% damage. It's still gameworst.
<Sebsebeleb> I was, I was just saying that the 2x damage was twice if you ignore the crit chance
<Sebsebeleb> and corruptors basically get that crit chance and damage by that other talent
<Shibari> A bit below average at worst, which, again, good AoE no save debuff
<SageAcrin> Gravity Well *can't* crit and is still going to average, stat for stat, like 170% of the damage, over a bigger radius, with a better element, *assuming* the 100% crit rate and 200% crit mod.
<SageAcrin> Off the top of my head.
<SageAcrin> Gravity Well is a pretty good DoT, so I'm not saying it should be that good, but keep in mind Gravity Well doesn't have to pass a status check to deal its *damage*.
<Shibari> Okay. And? If you're arguing that it should do more damage and have no debuff then go for it, I don't particularly care if that happens.
<SageAcrin> Poisonous Spores getting nerfed to a bit under 40% of the damage it used to.
<SageAcrin> That is a better answer than the one you had, yes. I am not convinced any change is necessary.
<SageAcrin> Convince me.
<Shibari> I have no hesitation to adjust huge problems in huge ways
<SageAcrin> What situation caused you to say it was overpowered?
<Shibari> The numbers were ridiculous. That simple. Wide range AoEs with no save debuffs should not do insane damage, they should not even do good damage
<Shibari> It still manages ok damage, its fine.
<SageAcrin> No, they are not, period, I have explained that.
<Shibari> ANY
<Shibari> Yeah, but you were wrong.
<SageAcrin> It was well within established DoT parameters.
<SageAcrin> No, I am not, because then every DoT in the game is OP.
<SageAcrin> Which, given how rarely they get used, is rather crazy!
<SageAcrin> So, I don't accept that.
<Shibari> You can not accept it if you want, I have nothing to add. Damage was ludicrous, if other things had similar damage attached to guaranteed solid debuffs, they are also ludicrous. Blood Spray is obviously pushing.
<SageAcrin> So your argument is "You're wrong".
<SageAcrin> "And all the statistics and the general design of the game's handling of DoTs is wrong."
<Shibari> No, its just the same as it has been. The numbers were huge, 30, 200 with crit mod isn't small.
<SageAcrin> Should I post this in the topic I made on the forum? I think DarkGod would LOVE to hear that argument for your change.
<SageAcrin> Of his game.
<Sebsebeleb> its 30, 200 over 10 turns though
<Sebsebeleb> 10 turns is a loooong time
<Shibari> I certainly encourage you to post this entire log, but I doubt you will.
<Shibari> Keep being insulting all you want.
<Shibari> Its a long for a solid debuff, too
There you have it. "It's overpowered because I say so."
Why should a class with an extremely strong tanking ability and great resistance to bad status have talents that deal damage comparable to other classes like corruptor that kind of lack both and are a bit on the strong end, themselves?
As of 1.1.5:
Cost is 2 Equilibrium.
Damage is combatTalentMindDamage(t, 40, 900).
Damage is done over 10 turns.
Effect radius scales from 1-3ish.
My opinion of the 1.1.5 version:
A cheap, multi target version of Heat with added good(albeit random) debuff.
Damage way too high for a mass disable.
Git appears to have halved the damage, but increased the damage done by a crit.
Then there is a further reduction of the damage which SageAcrin disagrees with.
Personally, I'd have to see it in action, because I'm not how the crit power modifier will affect things.
However, I'd be happy to use the talent with no damage on it. To me, the damage is a conciliation prize if the debuff rolls something unhelpful. Which is about a 1 in 4 chance.
My feedback meter decays into coding. Give me feedback and I make mods.
Why should a class with an extremely strong tanking ability and great resistance to bad status have talents that deal damage comparable to other classes like corruptor that kind of lack both and are a bit on the strong end, themselves?
Yeah, I prefer the Gravity Well/Flameshock comparisons myself. Why shouldn't a -4 HP class have a similar debuff? Paradox Mage and Archmage both have powerful disabling options and defensive options to counterbalance their lack of concrete durability, and while there's no reason it should be as powerful as those two... well, it isn't, with the change that was in SVN before.
I agree that the 900 power version was too good, for the record.
However, I'd be happy to use the talent with no damage on it. To me, the damage is a conciliation prize if the debuff rolls something unhelpful. Which is about a 1 in 4 chance.
If that were such a good effect, why isn't Hexes a more commonly taken Generic category? Almost no one takes it unless it's on the class to start with, despite it having multiple fairly good disabling effects that, while they can be checked with Saves, cannot be resisted with a status immunity.
Yeah if I have high enough Magic / Spellpower to make Hexes not suck, then I've usually got Aegis or Light in competition with Hexes, and frankly Aegis and Light are usually better choices for my survival. If I don't have Aegis or Light, then I may be interested in Staff Combat.
Hexes are not a bad idea on an Alchemist I guess.
Also the 3rd Hexes skill is kind of lame, so I'd probably only go 1/5/0/0 on the tree unless I were really desperate to dump Generic points, in which case I'd probably go 1/5/1/5. That's not terrible, but also not great compared to what I could get from heavy investment in Celestial / Light or Technique / Conditioning or even Cunning / Survival.
Well, the point is mostly that this isn't a highly powerful talent.
If it was highly powerful, then talents that are similar to it in power would be more widely used than they are now.
Hexes, if it was a set of highly powerful talents, should compete with Light, for example. Instead, it tends to be more on the power level of Divination-clearly useful but almost never taken because there's clearly stronger options.
Also I like Hexes on Alchemist. I took it on my very first one to go East and it still strikes me as a good idea.
Keep in mind that part of the thing that makes hexes different from light (besides one giving player buffs that are far better than the current standard of balled debuffs of hexes on creatures that tend to die anyway) is that light talents are 100% free to use. Divination's Premonition sustain is great to take at a point or two on non-mana magic users but you don't want the tree because it's not that great and Premonition sits at the top of a tree of tedious scouting talents. Same reason why people don't take chronomancy from escorts but it can be rational to take spin fate instead of a point or two in an off stat.
parcel wrote:Same reason why people don't take chronomancy from escorts but it can be rational to take spin fate instead of a point or two in an off stat.
In recent versions, which I think includes 1.1.5, you get free Spacetime Tuning with your purchase of anything that costs Paradox.
SageAcrin wrote:If it was highly powerful, then talents that are similar to it in power would be more widely used than they are now.
We have to be careful when using this kind of logic or risk falling into fallacies. This assumes that a competent statistical analysis was performed by the typical gamer, which I highly doubt. Humans, on average, are great at filling in the blanks and coming up with reasonable explanations (true or not), but are downright horrible at statistics and probability. "Random" on a music player cannot be truly random, otherwise users will complain: "It's not random; it just played two songs from the same group in a row!" http://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how- ... fle-songs/
It's hard enough to competently compare straight damage-per-strike to DoT to AoE, and it's even worse when ranges are involved. But over 80% of humans think they perform at an above-average level at any particular task, so I don't have much faith that many will cop to this.
It's human nature to have a gut feel about something and then support that feeling with data after the fact. This seems to be a built-in process, and we are so used to it that it looks to us like the opposite is true. Someone may feel that the talent is OP, and someone else may feel that it is lacking, but it's unlikely that many have done any kind of real analysis on it other than "how does this make me feel?"
parcel wrote:Same reason why people don't take chronomancy from escorts but it can be rational to take spin fate instead of a point or two in an off stat.
In recent versions, which I think includes 1.1.5, you get free Spacetime Tuning with your purchase of anything that costs Paradox.
I was referring to the part about sitting on top of a tree of tedious scouting talents. If you want to spend precious generics in these scouting aspects, you won't take the tree and then unlock it with a precious cat point. You will take a point in precognition and use it a few times per game around vaults and such because it is an irritating talent to use all the time.
Impending Doom, which is 200+(28, 850), might be a relevant comparison. It doesn't crit, is single target, and is an element in which Necros don't specialize, so you can expect the new Poisonous Spores to do maybe two-thirds the damage after adjusting for those differences, and to do it in a wide AoE. Moreover, given how tanky Oozemancers are, their damage should err on the low side.
Impending Doom, which is 200+(28, 850), might be a relevant comparison. It doesn't crit, is single target, and is an element in which Necros don't specialize, so you can expect the new Poisonous Spores to do maybe two-thirds the damage after adjusting for those differences, and to do it in a wide AoE. Moreover, given how tanky Oozemancers are, their damage should err on the low side.
That's a purely endgame assessment, and Impending Doom is not a very useful endgame spell(Based on commentary I've seen from Necromancer players, at any rate, and my own experience. It's not useless, but it's not special.). Early in the game, where the damage bonuses are 10-15% and you have no notable critical hit rate, and where that massive +200 is a huge deal, Impending Doom does something on the order of four to five times as much. This is the main reason I've seen people buy up levels of Impending Doom.
With that added fact in mind, what you just said seems to support my assessment that it doesn't need the nerf. It would function somewhat more strongly than Impending Doom lategame, on damage, while still being much weaker early.
(Of course, Impending Doom costs much more. I am not adverse to raising Spores Equi cost, however.)
