Comprehensive Mindslayer rework

[Parcae2]

I don't think that people were complaining that shields were OP. They were complaining that the winning strategy was to spike them in every battle, ESPECIALLY on higher difficulties. That's six keystrokes at the start of every combat, and I can say from experience that it got really, really boring.

Forcefield is a partial answer to this problem. Right now, though, the conversion ratio on psi isn't very good. Leech skills restore the equivalent of about 400 health in the late game - not even enough to keep your psi stable in a dangerous battle even for the turn you use them. (Also, range of 2 isn't enough to ensure hitting multiple opponents, even if you happen to be fighting multiple opponents and not a single boss).

Suggestions:

1. Increase Forcefield sustain cost to 20%/turn, capped at 35. Eliminate psi drain per damage point absorbed. Have it reduce incoming melee damage. Deactivate to push enemies away violently, damaging/pinning them if they hit a wall. (Wait, is the other talent that does that still in the game or did it get eliminated? If it's still in the game, ignore the pinning part). Damage should be significant (to encourage positioning use) and scale with life (to avoid one-shotting players).
2. Agree Mindlash is boring. Change to beam attack that does X% TK weapon damage (unless you're wielding a gem, in which case, uh ... damage based on tier of gem? I kind of miss scaling with item tier.)
3. Shibari's suggestion, especially valuable now that all weapons scale with wil/cun for mindslayers: Reverse how Augmentation works - have Strength generate Wil and Dex generate Cun.
4. Have leeches generate significantly more psi per target, but cap total psi gained.

Also, if you're upset about getting contradictory feedback now, never do a doctoral dissertation. Half the committee will say that the only valuable part of your dissertation is X, and the other half will say that X is terrible and should be removed.

[Suslik]

> They were complaining that the winning strategy was to spike them in every battle, ESPECIALLY on higher difficulties.
nope. even on insane there are plenty of folks you can faceroll over with bump attack. and even if you do have to spike all 3 shields that's only 3 keystrokes. Shadowblades have about 10 buffs they cast Every battle. From the top of my head i have following bindings for them:
alt+1: hidden resources
alt+2: time shield
alt+3: combat accuracy
alt+4: blinding speed
alt+5: shield rune
alt+6, 7, 8: dont remember
alt+9: timeless
Same goes to temporal wardens, solipsists and a lot of other classes and somehow no one complains about it. Actually I like pre-battle buffing, why are several persons so thorougly offended by the neccessity of hitting 3 keys before dangerous battles?

If you make forcefield only reduce melee damage taken it'll become totally worthless against the main threat - rays, ranged criticals. Making it melee offensive spell loses its point entirely for me.

To balance forcefield maybe it's viable to increase its cost with time. Like 10% psi/turn the first turn increase to, say 30%/turn during 5th turn and so forth.

> Reverse how Augmentation works - have Strength generate Wil and Dex generate Cun.
and force mindslayers to dump stat points into all stats except for spellpower instead of 3?

[Parcae2]

I didn't suggest that Forcefield should ONLY reduce melee damage, but that it should ALSO reduce melee damage by an additional amount. On reflection, that is probably unnecessary. I like the idea of costs that increase with time in theory, but I feel that a careful, geared-up, level 50 slayer should be able to keep up Forcefield through most or all of the final fight, since the likely alternative is becoming a greasy splotch on the floor.

For what it's worth, by the way, Bpat and I both play on Insane. I've gotten to the final fight on Insane/Roguelike, and Bpat has beaten the difficulty a couple of times.

The difference between spiked shields and other "cast every battle" abilities is that you can't autocast spiked shields. Also, the shields all do basically the same thing. Shield rune - one keypress; spiked shields - six keypresses.

I do like the "spike everything" idea. Maybe give Skate a cooldown and have it spike for Flight (300% movement speed at 5/5 and tunnel through (read: fly over) walls)?

I understand that you liked the old mindslayer but most people did not. They had an incredible number of passives, their defense amounted to an entire tree (plus quite a few generics) dedicated to casting the equivalent of one powerful shield rune, and their offense was basically spamming Mindlash until victory. That is why the ideas forum has so many "when are you going to revamp Mindslayer" threads.

[Suslik]

About "all sustains spikeable". I think activation of any sustain should not cost a turn while spiking should cost one. Auras are already made that way in git.

Another suggestion. If the major problem is that ppl get tired of spiking all 3 shields, maybe combine all of them into 1? Lvlling shield ability increases absorb% and max absorb value, while having a separate ability allows shield spiking and lvlling it increases spiking efficiency?

And the first talents in trascendent trees can be swapped for abilities spamming melee attacks and gaining psi. What do you guys think?

Upd: just encountered a rare minslayer being lvl1 brawler. Outcome is just as expected: the dude reduced my damage to about 1-3 and recovered hp faster than i damaged him. That's what you call imbalanced: extremely strong against weak attacks, useless against strong ones.

[edge2054]

Mindslayer Auras don't deactivate when you unlearn them.

[donkatsu]

I expect you've been caught by the weird scaling it does. The tooltip value only apply if your psi is exactly half your maximum.

Ah, for some reason I assumed the scaling on leeches only applied to the psi gain.

For reasons Suslik has already outlined, Transcendents miss the point of the old spiking mechanism, which were good for, well, spikes of damage. Right now Transcendent shields have fundamentally the exact same mechanic as regular shields, which is reducing a fixed value from every single damage number. Old spiked shields were cool because they raised your survivability in a way that was totally different (and objectively way better, but that could be fixed just by adjusting values) from regular shields. Forcefield could take over that niche with some tweaking but I don't like how shield talents have just been reduced to a passive, always on, toggle and forget kind of deal.

I do like the Transcendent tree setup though, it's very Archmage-y.

[Melkhior]

1.2.0 test 11 - Auras don't add damage to telekinetically wielded conventional weapon.

[edge2054]

The bolt on Frenzied Focus is showing the default *

[Suslik]

For reasons Suslik has already outlined, Transcendents miss the point of the old spiking mechanism, which were good for, well, spikes of damage. Right now Transcendent shields have fundamentally the exact same mechanic as regular shields, which is reducing a fixed value from every single damage number. Old spiked shields were cool because they raised your survivability in a way that was totally different (and objectively way better, but that could be fixed just by adjusting values) from regular shields. Forcefield could take over that niche with some tweaking but I don't like how shield talents have just been reduced to a passive, always on, toggle and forget kind of deal.

I totally agree with every word. Glad someone stated more clearly what I failed to explain.

[edge2054]

I've been enjoying a lightning mindslayer.

My biggest complaints are shields (I put one in physical and two in lightning for blight). They don't scale enough with talent level and the transcendent shields push the absorption ratio up to 100% anyway. I'll probably sink two more points in the tree for fire/cold for the east but I can't see investing more in it.

My second complaint is talent scaling in general. Voracity could use some radius gain as you invest points into the talents. Brain Storm too. Not sure about the rest. Those are just the ones I used.

Third complaint is electrical mastery or whatever it's called. The second talent is basically a generic talent buried in a tier 2 tree. The last talent looks okay but again it could be generic. I thought the other mastery trees looked like more fun.

Anyway, I do like the changes overall. So please take this as constructive feedback rather than nitpicking.

[Parcae2]

The original design goal for shields was to make users choose between "a little protection all the time" and "lots of protection for a short time." This was a fundamentally flawed concept, because most battles don't last that long and the ones that do involve foes dangerous enough that lots of protection is mandatory. It was therefore very difficult to find a downside for spiked shields that outweighed the enormous upside. However, removing the effect completely makes shields a bit boring.

I have a suggestion for spiked shields that I hope might satisfy both parties: Deactivate shields to cure specific status effects (physical for one, magical for another, mental for the third). Nerf Realign to just heal damage. That maintains the original "deactivate shields to get yourself out of a pickle, at the cost of reducing your defenses" design goal.

This could be either an alternative to, or an addition to, rolling shields back to an earlier version of this mod, where you could still spike shields in the old way but only one at a time.

[Doctornull]

@Doctornull
Sorry, don't like your absorption idea either. Having an ability that protects you 9/10 times does not look like a good design to me. You'll walk 9/10 fights like a breeze but 10th will 1-shot you. That's why I don't like shields that cannot protect you against some damage types until you dump 15 points in them(current state) or at all(your proposal).

My proposal will protect you from ALL damage* with 4 points total. Putting one point in each skill is a viable and valid strategy. More points are better, of course, but that will carry an opportunity cost. Finding the balance is your problem as a player.

Seriously, look at the fourth skill. It gives you a damage shield. That's going to cover all damage types, period.

I guess you're just skimming?

*) terms and conditions may apply

[Parcae2]

Bonus gem stats don't work, either from the talent or from the base bonus.

[HousePet]

I don't think that trying to get the shields to work as a shield rune is going to produce anything good.
Nobody considered them OP, just tedious and a bit cheesy. The effect was fine, the implementation wasn't.
The shield talents haven't been reduced to a passive always on with no tweaking, you still have to juggle which of the two you had active at once.

I'll go throw the talents and add some level scaling to the ranges/radii that was lost when Reach was removed.

Mindlash shouldn't scale with psionic weapon damage as it is supposed to be a bread and butter for caster mindslayer. Beam could work, but it will still be boring.

I'm not happy with all weapons using wil/cun if you have a conventional weapon being psiweilded. It makes the str/dex you need to get for equipping weapons useless and the best sources of wil/cun from weapons are mindstars, so its self defeating.

DG has tweak leeches.

(I'm currently doing a masters, and my two supervisors have been pushing in opposite directions at times. )

Mindslayer Auras not deactivating when unlearnt is a bug with the base code. I'll post it in bugs if it isn't there yet.

Frenzied Focus isn't supposed to fire a bolt :/

Okay, I'm puzzled by several of these bugs. I'm wondering if DG merged things wrong.

[donkatsu]

The original design goal for shields was to make users choose between "a little protection all the time" and "lots of protection for a short time." This was a fundamentally flawed concept, because most battles don't last that long and the ones that do involve foes dangerous enough that lots of protection is mandatory. It was therefore very difficult to find a downside for spiked shields that outweighed the enormous upside. However, removing the effect completely makes shields a bit boring.

I have a suggestion for spiked shields that I hope might satisfy both parties: Deactivate shields to cure specific status effects (physical for one, magical for another, mental for the third). Nerf Realign to just heal damage. That maintains the original "deactivate shields to get yourself out of a pickle, at the cost of reducing your defenses" design goal.

This could be either an alternative to, or an addition to, rolling shields back to an earlier version of this mod, where you could still spike shields in the old way but only one at a time.

Well, I wouldn't call it "fundamentally flawed". Suppose sustained shields blocked 100 damage on every hit, and spiked shields blocked 200 damage total, on a 20 turn cooldown. Would you spike your shields at the start of every battle? Of course not, in fact you would probably never spike. And yet the fundamental mechanic remains the same, it's just the numbers that are tweaked. There's got to be a balance somewhere in there that makes for an interesting decision to be made, and hitting that balance would be better than just completely lopping off the part that made mindslayer shields interesting.