Wyrmic Tweaks(With addon!)

[SageAcrin]

Moving breaths to T2 makes it impossible to avoid breaths.

This is not, necessarily, bad, but it makes a dedicated Mindpower oriented build far harder to construct without talent point taxes.

This is why I went the other suggested route of powering up breaths somewhat so they make a better tier 4 option.

The other reason I can think of not to move them to T2 is that they feel odd there. T1 makes sense as a draconic basic talent, T4 makes sense as a draconic capstone, but T2 just seems strange. Of course, moving them to T1 is a perfectly viable option as well, but we run into the reason I mentioned before, which is why I didn't do that.

[Suslik]

So your argument is that moving breaths to t2/t1 will force willpower build to spend 1 extra point per tree. But at this time str builds have to spend thrice more points per tree to get breaths. And for me they definitely look like draconic base talent.

Another idea: what if breaths are moved to t1 and scaled with max(will, str) so that they are viable for both will and str builds? Other talents of the same tree may augment breaths in some ways instead of giving general buffs like +saves.

Also I'm still finding ideas from neighbouring threads about breath charge/spam system very interesting but that may be out of scope of this addon.

[SageAcrin]

So your argument is that moving breaths to t2/t1 will force willpower build to spend 1 extra point per tree. But at this time str builds have to spend thrice more points per tree to get breaths. And for me they definitely look like draconic base talent.

Actually, no, my argument is that a physical build does not require all of the breaths, due to the massive buff to their physical damage options and support effects.

They can, say, pick up Sand/Venomous Breath-all of the talents before of which are now associated with physical fighters at least somewhat-and simply move on.

Or a Strength/Willpower mix can pick up Mind and Strength talents that suit the elements they want, grabbing the breaths that suit them, which are hopefully pretty balanced out by now. And a Mindpower build doesn't have to take them.

Another idea: what if breaths are moved to t1 and scaled with max(will, str) so that they are viable for both will and str builds?

I thought making breaths less central was desired? T1 universally scaling breaths would end up incredibly central instead of just a build option.

The idea was that you can pick up multiple breaths and, thanks to Guile, don't have to pick up six to have breaths be viable and useful. This would basically require six breaths.

Other talents of the same tree may augment breaths in some ways instead of giving general buffs like +saves.

Then where would the class get its passive benefits?

This is looking like another total remodel concept, rather than something retaining the character of the class, so far. Not necessarily a bad thing, but...

Also I'm still finding ideas from neighbouring threads about breath charge/spam system very interesting but that may be out of scope of this addon.

Yeah, those look so hard to balance on enemies that I wouldn't even consider trying, to be honest.

[stinkstink]

They can, say, pick up Sand/Venomous Breath-all of the talents before of which are now associated with physical fighters at least somewhat-and simply move on.

This is what I've been doing with mine, but Venomous Breath has reliability issues due to poison immunity in Daikara/nature resistance in Dreadfell/healing and wild infusions/Pride of the Orcs in the East. It's pretty nice now when it does work, though.

[notmiki]

With the additions of powerful weapon damage buttons early in three trees, the most serious 'talent point tax' issue for strength-based wyrmics pretty much goes away. Unless you are bound and determined to use ALL breaths at the expense of any other useful skill. Look at the trees based on what they run off of:

Sand
Weapon Damage/Weapon Damage/Utility skill/Str

Flame
Weapon Damage/Str/Mindpower/Str

Ice
Weapon Damage/Utility/Utility/Str

Lightning
Utility/Mindpower/Mindpower/Str

Acid
Mindpower/Mindpower/Weapon Damage/Str

Chromatic
Weapon Damage/Str/Utility/Utility

So let's look at wasted talent points based on 3 builds: mindpower, strength, and breath-focused.

Mindpower wastes 1 point: Bellowing Roar. Leaving breaths as the capstone talent is very beneficial for them. On the other hand they have a more difficult early game because weapon damage skills are weak for them early, and they don't have decent bump attacks to fall back on.

Strength potentially wastes 5 points, depending how you look at it: Bellowing Flame, Static Field, Tornado, Acidic Spray, Corrosive Mist. Locked behind those wasted points is Fire Breath, Lightning Breath, Dissolve, and Corrosive Breath. Out of those 5 skills Acidic Spray remains very useful early, and Corrosive Mist synergises well with melee builds. And you don't necessarily even have enough points to care if you're going to take 5/5 in things like Quake, Ice Claw, or Bellowing Roar. Unless you're really married to getting Fire or Lightning breath attacks, the talent point waste is low to (depending on your point of view) nonexistent.

Breath-focused builds have it rougher. They waste points on Quake, Wing Buffet, Bellowing Roar, Devouring Flame, Static Field, Tornado, Acidic Spray, Corrosive Mist, and Dissolve. 9 points. Skills with passives that help the effectiveness of breaths obviously are not wasted. And this is assuming dutiful munchkinish divestment of skill points from crutches like bellowing roar and acidic spray. Even assuming that those 9 points are a total loss, however, it's possible for a breath-focused wyrmic to 5/5 each and every breath attack, and each and every support skill that makes breath attacks better. It takes 64 points by my count. It's a very late blooming build. To me, this is not a problem: it's a build that ignores a ton of useful talents that the build has the stats for in order to laser focus on doing one thing very well. And seeing as the whole point of all this talk about breath spamming builds is with the heavy implication of ignoring useful stuff that isn't breathing on people...mission accomplished, right?

[Davion Fuxa]

I wouldn't call Bellowing Roar a Wasted Talent Point, even for a Mindpower build. Even with no Strength it is a debuff talent at it's core with a 3-Turn Confusion affecting enemies that hits EVERYTHING around your character within X radius. It's one of the reasons Yeek Wyrmics are viable - 5/5 Bellowing Roar and you can clear the Yeek starter dungeons in a heartbeat.

[stinkstink]

The new melee talents make Wyrmic an absolute monster with Legacy of the Naloren. The only tunnel bosses that survived long enough to do anything but soil themselves were Crusher/Neverdead due to Evasion and Elandar went down before I even had to refresh my cooldowns. Even an Eternal Bone Giant bulwark stairboss took only two goes to kill.

The only deaths on that character were due to a wyrmic rare in the sandworm lair spawning with a voratun weapon and critting me for more than my max health with Ice Claw and a double-hit Wing Buffet.

[notmiki]

I wouldn't call Bellowing Roar a Wasted Talent Point, even for a Mindpower build. Even with no Strength it is a debuff talent at it's core with a 3-Turn Confusion affecting enemies that hits EVERYTHING around your character within X radius. It's one of the reasons Yeek Wyrmics are viable - 5/5 Bellowing Roar and you can clear the Yeek starter dungeons in a heartbeat.

The addon changes bellowing roar to be a level 4 talent, putting wing buffet in the lvl 0 slot. if it were a talent available from the getgo I'd agree, but yeeks do most of their early dying before even hitting level 4.

[SageAcrin]

Version 1.03 made!

Fixes two small text issues in the descriptions(Prismatic Slash sorta implied it gave its bonus to speeds every level, which would be silly as that would be 60%~ at TL5, so I clarified that. Swallow called its self Devour at one point meanwhile, oops), one quirk where Wing Buffet was doing more damage than it should(not much though, which was why no one noticed), and a tweak where Venomous Breath's disabling rate caps at 50% instead of 100%(Why did I let it go to 100%? That's bad.).

As far as I'm concerned, barring future bugfixes and the like, this is finished.

Also updating the intro post with a full(hopefully, it was made after the addon. I hate it when I don't keep documentation correctly while coding.) changelist of what, exactly, this does.

[jenx]

I'm not sure why Devouring Flame still harms the caster. How many other classes can hit themselves as much as a wyrmic?

I hope this goes into the base code.

And also the cooldowns!!!! Again, other classes have much more favourable cooldowns.

[astreoth]

its so they can trigger the speed boost in that one harmony sustain I forget the name but that combo can give a lot of global speed

[Suslik]

this is already in vanilla game but i do hope DG will fix the numbers. plain increase in every damage talent is not an option.

[SageAcrin]

It isn't every damage talent.

Off the top of my head; Bellowing Roar, Acidic Spray, Dissolve and Tornado did not get boosted on damage, and Roar got nerfed in fact.

Corrosive Mist got a very small upwards tweak at L1 but overall is basically the same.

Icy Skin and Devouring Flame got sidegraded from talentstatdamage Wil to Mindpower; Icy Skin does less damage and Devouring Flame does the same damage over more time, I believe.

There is definitely nothing flat rate or universal about the damage boosts that did happen, either; All of them were thought out, and several of them(Wing Buffet and Quake, probably some others too that I'm forgetting...) were notably lowered over the course of testing.

[Suslik]

I mean breaths. Multi-hued drakes used to hit for 900dmg from a critical now they are certainly going to make it 1100dmg. I think breath scaling was bad(strength, lategame values), not numbers being too low.

[SageAcrin]

In practice, none of the full runthroughs I saw of the game-and this addon had multiple clears on it-had any complaints on dragons.

(The strongest I saw was that enemy fire drakes were noticeably more powerful. But several dragon types I was actually hoping to buff got "ehn" reactions when I pressed the players on them, like Storm Dragons.)

Additionally, a buff to dragons was considered to be a good thing in the Wyrmic discussions I saw.

Finally, the only dragons I can think of that do that damage to start with are the OP Wyrms, and I have no problem with making people have to come back to the Room of Death.

(IIRC I specifically tested the Room of Death and was seeing more like 1000 range damage crits though, not 1100.)