Reworking Chronomancy ver 2

[Parcae2]

Yeah, it looks much, much stronger now.

[Parcae2]

OK, my very very preliminary thoughts are that this is a very powerful class right now, mainly because of Spellbinding, which is incredible. I don't know that Spellbinding itself needs to be nerfed, but some of the more exploitable combos definitely do. For example, right now you can extend Temporal Reprieve and shorten the cooldown of Contingency for basically infinite Reprieve. Contingency could be set as having an unalterable cooldown to avoid this, while Reprieve's cooldown probably needs to be extended, say to an unalterable 50. Reprieve could also use talent level rather than effective talent level for duration, and maybe be given a hard cap on duration. These changes would nerf TWs a bit, but the last I saw, they were a bit too strong anyway.

Edit: Actually, I'm thinking maybe all spells that affect cooldowns should just be non-selectable for Contingency. Otherwise it's just always going to be an infinite health exploit waiting to happen. That probably goes for Extension and Matrix as well.

On the other hand, Extension and Matrix probably shouldn't be limited to chronomancy, and should have a minimum duration. That might help narrow the shalore vs. everything else gap a little bit.

[Kiba333]

Could you also look into the starter quest of chronomancers if you have time? I don't know if you changed it yet but last time i tried it was literally impossible to complete on insane or madness.
I know these difficulties are meant to be unfair and unbalanced but a zero success chance is too much in my opinion.

[Parcae2]

Yeah, it would be nice if that quest could be delayed. I hate missing out on the XP but it's a suicide mission on higher difficulties.

[edge2054]

Could you also look into the starter quest of chronomancers if you have time? I don't know if you changed it yet but last time i tried it was literally impossible to complete on insane or madness.
I know these difficulties are meant to be unfair and unbalanced but a zero success chance is too much in my opinion.

Have you guys tried it since I nerfed rethread and lowered the talent levels on the monsters? I did it on nightmare before the rethread nerf on a TW and it was doable.

re: Contingency. I'll probably have it start ignoring talents with fixed cooldowns. Kinda sad to do it, temporal reprieve + contingency is a really nice use for it but I flagged temporal reprieve with a fixed cooldown for a reason. Getting around those values with contingency is asking for problems.

[edge2054]

zip uploaded

http://www.mediafire.com/download/vhtvr ... ngine4.zip

[jotwebe]

Having a blast with this!

I love the Gravity Spike damage system, and so does the arena crowd, let me tell you.

Trying out Induced Phenomena in the arena. Not trained it very high so far, but I noticed a bug with the shields from the expanding cycle. If you have a shield already up when your cycle expands, the new shield gets applied with the minimum duration of 2 turns, even though, at talent 3.9, I'm getting 5 turn shields.

Also the time projectiles are super slow, they rarely manage to reach their targets before they are dead and instead form travel hazards for myself. Maybe they shouldn't do friendly fire or possibly even heal yourself.

The tooltip for the Cosmic Cycle sustain should say whether it's currently expanding or contracting - actually it would be good for it to have a different icon, I think. The one I made as an alternative to the Reverse Causality you went with should do, but I'd like to adjust the shading on it so it's either the same or the opposite of the main Cosmic Cycle icon.

EDIT: And here it is:

[edge2054]

Cosmic Cycle will have two particles once I get around to making particles. I'm going to playtest this a bit and then push a merge request, then start a new branch for that stuff.

Anyway it will have two particles, as I was saying. One for expanding and one for contracting. Blue and red respectively like the game log messages.

The projectiles already have friendly fire turned off, or should. Are you sure they're hitting you? I'll bump the projectile speed up a bit (I think I may have put it at one for testing).

As for the damage shield it doesn't apply a new one if it would overwrite a larger shield. So if you have one proc at 300 Paradox and don't get hit a new one won't proc at 200 Paradox (due to Paradox spellpower scaling).

I put this in so people don't accidentally overwrite a big shielding rune.

I'm open for suggestions on a better way to handle it.

[jotwebe]

Anyway it will have two particles, as I was saying. One for expanding and one for contracting. Blue and red respectively like the game log messages.

Oh, I didn't notice they were. And it's even the colors from the icons, nice touch.

The projectiles already have friendly fire turned off, or should. Are you sure they're hitting you? I'll bump the projectile speed up a bit (I think I may have put it at one for testing).

Umm, I've been avoiding them successfully. The tooltip said "affect origin chance: 100%" - I guess that means something else then. You're right, they don't seem to actually do anything to me. And speed 1 is what they're doing, so if that's going to increase, it'll probably be okay.

As for the damage shield it doesn't apply a new one if it would overwrite a larger shield. So if you have one proc at 300 Paradox and don't get hit a new one won't proc at 200 Paradox (due to Paradox spellpower scaling).

I think it was a case of dancing back and forth around the 300 mark. A surging staff might have accounted for the spellpower difference then (it does overwrite same strength shields, right?)

In principle it's a good idea, but it might want to accept a 5% weaker per double the duration the new one would have, there'd be a bit more flex.

Speaking of surging staffs: wielding one made me notice that I kept getting crits, even when just standing around doing nothing. I think it's due to Time Dilation?

[edge2054]

Probably Cosmic Cycle contractions.

Maybe I could have Cosmic Cycle buff the current shield if one is present. Add half to the duration and half to the max absorb. Like a mini-Aegis.

[donkatsu]

Let's say I decide to use all four Spellbinding sustains. I'm having trouble thinking of a situation where you wouldn't use them all on the same spell. Maybe in order to make the decision for which spell to bind be a little more interesting, each spell can only be affected by one Spellbinding sustain at a time? I think it would also make it a little more interesting to play, rather than taking the tree and then just turning into "Paradox Mage who casts Temporal Clone all the time" or "Paradox Mage who casts Paradox Twin all the time". On the other hand the way it's set up now allows for extreme variance in playstyles, which is pretty cool, it's just that once you decide which one to use it on for one, the decision for the rest of them becomes obvious. Should I empower this one talent, or the other talent which I have already deemed my best one, with half cooldown, increased duration, and super fast cast time on top of that?

[Parcae2]

Actually, I can definitely see myself using Empower Spell on an offensive spell and the others on defensive spells, since, generally speaking, spellpower matters more for offensive spells. That said, I do like your suggestion.

[jotwebe]

This, and also I'd probably take the casting speed on a really low cooldown, bread and butter spell, even if I'd used the cooldown reduction on a big nuke.

[donkatsu]

Fair points both.

[edge2054]

I'll probably just leave it for now. There's some other things with it that I think will discourage stacking. For instance Temporal Reprieve is one of the best places to put the duration increase but can't be affected by the cooldown one (due to having a fixed cooldown), gets little out of the cast speed one (you're leaving at the end of the game tick anyway), and doesn't scale at all with spellpower.

I hear what you're saying but for now it's one of those things that's probably more trouble than it's worth when I'm staring at a pile of particle effects I've yet to do.

Today I want to fix Frayed Threads and give Temporal Hounds a blighted summoning effect. Let me know if there's any thing else I need to look at before I create a merge request for Darkgod.