Reworking Chronomancy ver 2

[Parcae2]

Kiba, I agree with your comments in isolation, but one also has to consider the class as a whole. Right now, most of their defense options are on the underwhelming side, but they have a lot of them. I am waiting to give feedback on numbers tweaking until the class is feature complete, and particularly until the clone-enemies talent (which is their strongest defensive AND offensive option right now) has been changed or replaced.

[edge2054]

Alright, I have see the threads restoring the timeline to the base and canceling if you die. Best I can do without generating a bunch of clones. If it makes a bunch of bugs I'll have to revert it.

[edge2054]

I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with Temporal Clone. If anyone has any ideas for a replacement talent let me know.

[edge2054]

Alright, thinking of turning Braided Blades into a ball effect called Braid Lifelines for timeline threading. Should be fun with Shear

[0player]

I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with Temporal Clone. If anyone has any ideas for a replacement talent let me know.

Thematically the tree is about working with multiple threads at once, right? What about a talent that "biases probability", searching for the thread where the outcome was the most favourable?

You adjust your movements through the timeline, choosing the thread where the chance favoured you. For X turns, gain Y% critical chance and Z effective Spellpower to overcome Spell Saves. At talent level 5, you also disregard Continuum Destabilization while under this effect.

[edge2054]

I was toying with a similar idea yesterday and gaining spellpower just for spellsaves is a pita

[Kiba333]

Kiba, I agree with your comments in isolation, but one also has to consider the class as a whole. Right now, most of their defense options are on the underwhelming side, but they have a lot of them. I am waiting to give feedback on numbers tweaking until the class is feature complete, and particularly until the clone-enemies talent (which is their strongest defensive AND offensive option right now) has been changed or replaced.

You are right, i had the impression that the number tweaking was more or less finished on the talents i mentioned and that they were considered "done". Maybe my critique was a bit premature.
But i personally do not favour/ am a bit afraid of the prospect of having many underwhelming defense options, because this could result in starving the class of talent points by making it a necessity to skill heavily in many different trees just to get a decent defense running. Having to spent so many talent points so spread out across the board (Energy/Fate Threading/Induced Phenomena/Spell Binding/Time Travel) could also prevent many from playing with the more gimmicky/fun spells and unique synergies that this class offers.

The other side of the problem that arises with having many less powerful defense options is that they offer no realistic choice competition when an actually powerful defense alternative is present, like for example Temporal Clone. In such a case the more powerful option will become a staple choice which could hurt the diversity of the class.
As an example it is like being presented with 10 options each of which is weak and only has a power of "1", in order to stay alive/deal enough damage though you simply have to reach a value of "10" which leaves you with no other option other than choosing to take all 10, this would be no real choice. If then suddenly a power "3" option gets thrown in it would become a mandatory staple choice and either completely erase the meaning of another option or add on to the others and potentially create a situtation of becoming overpowered. But i would much rather be presented with for example two options to choose from, both options should have a power of "10" making them each respectively powerful and unique in their implementation/playstyle/impact. Of course i would not be able to choose both at the same time since they would have some creative form of anti synergy or respectively require a different playstyle each in order to function. This would inspire a meaningful choice in my opinion, especially if there are many such powerful choices which in their overall combination can make the playstyle take many different shapes. I would prefer this rather than the usual approach of finding out all the options with the highest "power" and stacking those, which is just nothing other than solving a formula, whose result is always the same if you know all the variables.

I may be getting a bit derailed in my rant about balance though... so please don't take it as more than that if you think it's to far from what is realistically achievable in the character system of Tome4.

To get back on track, you are right about Temporal Clone being overpowered. An idea that would alter temporal clone into something more meek while preserving it's "pattern" (ha):
"Creates a clone of the enemy for X turns. The clone is hostile to the player just like the monster it was cloned from. damage dealt by the monster and it's clone are reduced by 55% and saving throws made against them is increased by X% as long as the clone exists. The monster and the clone split all damage they recieve among each other (like paradox twin). All damage the monster and the clone recieve is increased by 10-33% as long as the clone exists. Once the clones duration runs out all life lost by the clone will be subtracted from the monsters life."
Basically this creates a identical clone of the monster that is hostile to you. Then it waters down both the monster and the clone so that their combined threat is a bit less or at most equal to what the monster would be alone. both take slight extra damage and all the damage dealt will in the end transfer to the original monster once the time runs out.... Though i wonder what the point of the cloning itself would be if it could just as well be replaced with a debuff "reduce damage dealt by 10%, increase damage taken by 33% for X turns". Well it was just a flimsy idea anyway, maybe you can squeeze something good out of it edge.

Alright, I have see the threads restoring the timeline to the base and canceling if you die. Best I can do without generating a bunch of clones. If it makes a bunch of bugs I'll have to revert it.

Nice to hear. I was aware that the per zone restriction was necessary in order to adress the loot cheating issue but my point was more on the question whether the spells continued existence itself is justified given the dubious nature of it's usefulness, the tedium of it's execution (having to replay 20+ turns 2 times) and the absurd restriction (infinite cooldown) imposed on it by flaws in the games core design. I may stand alone with this opinion though, maybe i just fail to see the spells strong points.

On a final note and a little bit in regard to my balance rant from before: In my opinion you did a decent job with paradox mage so far, there are a lot of very cool spells and spell trees. But i can't help but see the overall talent constellation as a little bit of a mess. To me it feels more like a jumbled up bunch of individual spell trees, they all stand their ground on their own but the synergy between them is lacking and some spells are strewn in that do not fit the theme/synergy of their own tree. That said i must compliment you on the warp tree, i love how you knitted such a nice synergy between Spacetime Folding/Spacetime Weaving and Warp together with a single stroke. I'm usualy not a fan of split damage but i cannot help but look forward to trying out a madly teleporting pure warp chronomancer.

[edge2054]

That said i must compliment you on the warp tree, i love how you knitted such a nice synergy between Spacetime Folding/Spacetime Weaving and Warp together with a single stroke. I'm usualy not a fan of split damage but i cannot help but look forward to trying out a madly teleporting pure warp chronomancer.

I'm looking forward to this too As to synergy for other trees I'm still planning to do a Matter tree, which will give Gravity lovers some strong options for a second pure physical tree. Still working out the details but I'm leaning towards making another tree based around a primary sustain, similar to Induced Phenomena but in a completely different direction.

I'm not happy with how Induced Phenomena turned out and plan to do some heavy tweaking there. If I can get it balanced right it should synergize well with Paradox and some form of Threading to juggle Paradox back and forth.

Temporal Clone I replaced with a Braid effect. Which will have strong synergy with pretty much any AoE (but especially Gravity Spike).

Otherwise there's synergies there, they're just spread out a bit. Trim Threads has some nice combos. Entropy is a big one. Shear is another. I like Reduxing it and then dropping Shear. Dimensional Anchor + Banish is nice and nicer still if you're using the Warp tree.

Gravity of course has it's own internal synergy and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

But yeah, I'm always open to suggestions. I like synergy

As for defense stacking (the stat), I'm not completely happy with how the chronomancy tree panned out. I'm pretty happy with Fate Spinning though. I know defense isn't anyone's favorite stat but I felt like that tree has some solid internal balance and even if defense isn't great for PMs, Fateweaver is, and saves are nice, at least on normal.

[0player]

A little nit-picking on the flavor text:
Paradox Twin talks about pulling your future self into the fight (a remnant of the old talent, I assume?), but the description and the name otherwise sound like pulling your alternate self. Like those PM/TW escorts you meet.

I was toying with a similar idea yesterday and gaining spellpower just for spellsaves is a pita

Well, that's a shame .
What about temporarily reducing Spell Save on targets for one turn "just before" they're being hit by an effect, kind of like the Premonition works? PITA too?

[Kiba333]

Oh applying multiple instances of trim threads stacks?

[Parcae2]

Maybe gain X spellpower but reduce damage by Y%? Would have pretty much the same impact as gaining spellpower just for spell saves.

Also, an idea that occurred to me:

Pastscape - Mechanically similar to Dream- or Fearscape. Travel to the past and fight an ancestor of the target. The ancestor is a randomly generated foe of the same rank as the original target. If you kill the ancestor, you return to the present and the original target dies, unless it is a fixed boss (immune to instakilling) in which case it takes X% of its life as damage.

Also, for See the Threads, since it's basically only used for rerolling loot, perhaps it could be replaced with a talent that allows you to do just that directly? When a boss dies, you get a pop-up window asking you to choose between X sets of loot.

[edge2054]

Assuming the code isn't buggy (which it might be, precog had a lot of issues) See the Threads will let die in one timeline. If you do it will reload the base world (when you cast the spell) and cancel the effect.

I think that's a fairly strong ability and one worth limiting to once per zone level.

I do want to talk about the defense issue that was brought up earlier. Spin Fate I'm pretty happy with, mechanically and the tree as a whole. I don't mind Foresight. But I hear what Kiba is saying about defense being spread too thin. I'm open to suggestions on how to improve the tree a bit. I think Precog is already pretty strong. What if I just buffed Foresight values and dropped the bonus defense and crit modifier off the other two talents?

Time Dilation I'll probably set to a base radius of three and give a bonus radius each time it stacks, then base the power on how far the target is from you. Not sure about Time Stop. I do want to mention though that some of these trees are shared. Stuff that might not be great on a PM can still be good on a TW. Time Stop I used quite a bit on one of my test runs. Granted I nerfed it some (I could Time Stop, use two arrows, and have them hit when Time Stop ended for full damage).

Haste I tied to Celerity and Time Dilation so I could make it instant cast. I'm not a big fan of instant casts if they don't come with some kinda opportunity cost.

[HousePet]

The positioning of Warp Mastery doesn't make sense there, as you only have one source of warp damage and it already does a random status effect.
Have I missed something?

All the teleportation damage in spacetime folding is warp damage. The damage from phase blast too, which will trigger off DS, Swap, Phase Door, etc.

I thought I had missed something.

[0player]

@edge2054: is there any particular reason why Trim Threads instakill isn't applied to targets below 0 health? This is strange and works unlike (mechanically very similar) Steak Sauce... er, I mean Swallow.

[Kiba333]

I noticed that energy drain actually deals a nice chunk of damage on occasion even though the damage portrayed in it's description is fairly low. Is the displayed damage actually multiplied by the amount of talents of the enemy that you put on cooldown?

*edit* also it would be nice if dropped items would preserve in the temporal reprieve, like they do inside opened vaults or the sher tul fortress.