Reworking Chronomancy ver 2

[0player]

Also, Gravity tree doesn't seem to do any additional damage to pinned/immovable things, which makes it a pain to clear Scintillating Caves. You just cannot run those things into a wall!

[donkatsu]

I think the teleport trees are pretty solid, yeah. Phase Shift might still be too strong but I'd want to test it in more live combat situations first before giving a real opinion. Minor wishlist, based more on preference than anything, and only because you asked:

-Buff the Banish/Dimensional Anchor combo. Maybe when Banish fails to teleport, instead of cooldown being halved, it takes no energy, a la Dirty Fighting. Dimensional Anchor is already great, it's just the Banish side that needed a little help. To compensate, take away targeted Dimensional Step, as Dimensional Step is already good, and I don't want too much instant Dimensional Anchor damage on chronomancer uniques.
-Give Warp Mastery a lower base value and higher scaling. In general I think zero-opportunity-cost passives can be less frontloaded in their scaling compared to actives. Think Thick Skin scaling.
-Swap's confusion scales too much with talent points. Either have the duration scale or the power scale, but not both.

[Kiba333]

As far as your changes to the pure temporal offense spells go that you just wrote, i can't give a clear opinion until i tested them i think.

@Everyone
We haven't talked a lot about Spacetime Folding/Weaving/Warp. Can I assume these trees are feeling pretty solid by the lack of discussion?

I really love playing "Warpmancer", the cross-synergy is exquisite and by the time you have maxed out those three trees, you have the option to add any kind of temporal or physical spell since you are playing split damage anyway. The only gripe that i can imagine is, it being hard getting a warpmancer started. The "real" warp gameplay only begins once you have phase pulse which comes last in an unlocked tree which probably also has to be gotten by a quest beforehand. But i wouldn't like seeing phase pulse getting weaker in exchange for earlier access. I would call the whole warp thing solid overall though.

[edge2054]

Just pushed a bunch of changes to temporal trees. I'll need some new icons for Temporal Fugue and Rethread.

[donkatsu]

I just noticed that Foresight and Phase Shift both apply to the same first hit, rendering Foresight useless if you have Phase Shift. They overlap from a mechanics standpoint anyway. I liked it better when it was crit evasion, or basically anything else that isn't negated by Phase Shift, as well as Precognition being a useful combat buff instead of just being out-of-combat utility.

[Kiba333]

It would be nice if paradox bolt could be kept flying indefinitely by juggling high movement speed, gravity locus and teleports, of course the damage bonus should then be capped at +50%. The way it is now though the bolt disappears after moving 9 tiles. Would be really awesome to drag 3 or 4 paradox bolds behind you into combat. Maybe the number of simultaneously active bolts would need to be capped as well. I don't think it would be too overpowered in general since it requires you to spend your turns moving and teleporting in order to get the damage to where it needs to go and the bolts will be somewhat slow (150% with locus).

edit*

With paradox shield i sometimes get into situations where i end up at over 1000 paradox. This results in my death afterwards most of the time since it is near impossible to survive the onslaught of my own major anomalies before getting below 100% anomaly chance. Getting such high bursts of paradox damage is probably just a result of madness and insane difficulty being unbalanced but i still don't like how it plays out combined with the paradox soft-cap of 600. At level 50 with end-game equip i manage to get my willpower up to around 90-110, that's a paradox modifier of -200. With that i can comfortably sit around at 0% anomaly chance with 500 paradox, which is not at all far from the 600 threshhold. But once the threshold is passed your best resource managing passive (you only have 2) ceases to funktion and anomalies suddenly become suicidal. I think the major anomaly threshold should scale with your willpower paradox modifier (from equip included). That would mean for example when you have 60 willpower the threshold would be 720.

This would also fix the issue of Temporal Form being too dangerous to use right now. Since Temporal Form raises paradox by 400 all subsequent fails will become major anomalies. Getting a major anomaly at 5% anomaly chance is kind of meh. Especially if you actually bothered to put 5 points into bias weave.
In addition it wouldn't hurt the class balance at levels greater than 50 (infinite dungeon). Imagine being level 100 and having 0% anomaly chance at 600 paradox, whats the point of bias weave then? xD

[0player]

To be quite honest, if you're getting bursted like that, there's no real reason to tune for 500. You can just tune for 300, and several turns into combat you'll already be well-spellpowered by your paradox shield.

[donkatsu]

I agree with the major anomalies thing; that cap needs to scale with willpower as well. Non-scaling resources just don't make sense when they're being converted from a scaling resource (life).

[Kiba333]

To be quite honest, if you're getting bursted like that, there's no real reason to tune for 500. You can just tune for 300, and several turns into combat you'll already be well-spellpowered by your paradox shield.

Which is not that different from tuning for 500 in the first place. The point is that the margin of usefulness in which bias weave applies gets exceedingly smaller as you stack more willpower. Until the theoretical point where ALL of your anomalies will be major anomalies, making bias weave obsolete and giving the RNG a free ticket to kill you in the near future (multiple cloned rare/uniques or other nasty happenings).
This point can even be reached outside of ID, either with a somewhat dedicated setup: High willpower and willpower for paradox modifiers on all equipment plus running two low cooldown/WIL scaling heroism infusions on autocast. Or simply by using Temporal Form.

@edge
I got a new bug for you:

error = "Lua Error: /engine/Actor.lua:238: attempt to perform arithmetic on field 'x' (a nil value)\
At [C]:-1 __add\
At /engine/Actor.lua:238 moveDir\
At /mod/class/Game.lua:1637 \
At /engine/KeyBind.lua:229 "
seen = true
reported = false

The following happened: I tried out the new Temporal Fugue. It worked fine several times at first but on approximately the 20th Fugue as the last clone died i got these massages
"Your summoned Michiru disappears."
"Can not switch control to this creature."
"Character control switched to Michiru."
"Michiru the level 50 yeek paradox mage was battered to death by an unknown on level 40 of infinite dungeon."

In that instant where i should have been reverted to my normal self i instead died to an "unkown". Then i ressurrected as usual (debugging ressurrect) but all tiles remained unlit, my own character didn't exist anwhere on the map, trying to move resulted in the lua error and as i tried to cast a spell the whole screen started rapidly flashing black and then the game crashed. I'd say this was a "major anomaly".

[donkatsu]

By the way, with indefinite paradox bolts I'd just drag them all around the map, killing everything without even entering their line of sight. Which honestly isn't that different from Fireflash sniping as an Archmage, but I still think indefinite paradox bolts would be a Very Bad Thing, both from a balance perspective and from a fun perspective. The way it is right now is fine.

Temporal Fugue is my new favorite Contingency spell. I get nuked and blow up into a dozen mini-mes. I imagine them all running around with squeaky voices, tripping over each other.

[0player]

To be quite honest, if you're getting bursted like that, there's no real reason to tune for 500. You can just tune for 300, and several turns into combat you'll already be well-spellpowered by your paradox shield.

Which is not that different from tuning for 500 in the first place. The point is that the margin of usefulness in which bias weave applies gets exceedingly smaller as you stack more willpower. Until the theoretical point where ALL of your anomalies will be major anomalies, making bias weave obsolete and giving the RNG a free ticket to kill you in the near future (multiple cloned rare/uniques or other nasty happenings).
This point can even be reached outside of ID, either with a somewhat dedicated setup: High willpower and willpower for paradox modifiers on all equipment plus running two low cooldown/WIL scaling heroism infusions on autocast. Or simply by using Temporal Form.

@edge
I got a new bug for you:

error = "Lua Error: /engine/Actor.lua:238: attempt to perform arithmetic on field 'x' (a nil value)\
At [C]:-1 __add\
At /engine/Actor.lua:238 moveDir\
At /mod/class/Game.lua:1637 \
At /engine/KeyBind.lua:229 "
seen = true
reported = false

The following happened: I tried out the new Temporal Fugue. It worked fine several times at first but on approximately the 20th Fugue as the last clone died i got these massages
"Your summoned Michiru disappears."
"Can not switch control to this creature."
"Character control switched to Michiru."
"Michiru the level 50 yeek paradox mage was battered to death by an unknown on level 40 of infinite dungeon."

In that instant where i should have been reverted to my normal self i instead died to an "unkown". Then i ressurrected as usual (debugging ressurrect) but all tiles remained unlit, my own character didn't exist anwhere on the map, trying to move resulted in the lua error and as i tried to cast a spell the whole screen started rapidly flashing black and then the game crashed. I'd say this was a "major anomaly".

...Still not sure what you're aiming at, as high WIL itself doesn't increase either your tuning setting (not directly, anyway) or the amount of damage your Paradox Shield has to tank. I'd indicate the problem as "Paradox shield sends me to death-margin Paradox, which I have no way to get out of" (if you say it's indifferent about where to tune).
The solutions may be:
- increase Paradox recovery on major anomalies;
- count Paradox Shield deactivation as it popping and make it start refunding Paradox (also make deactivating instant?)
- maybe something else.
I would be cautious about increasing major margin with WIL, as this may allow one to more or less forgo MAG and just use spellpower increase from Paradox to be safe and powerful. You're supposed to be making a tradeoff when you're tuning for realy high or low Paradox.

[edge2054]

On my mobile so I'll make a longer reply when I get the chance. But are you guys sure the major anomaly threshold isn't using modified paradox? Trying to figure out if it's a bug or poorly communicated.

[donkatsu]

You're going to be maxing both Mag and Wil anyway. You can't forgo one to get more of the other.

I'm not sure major anomaly threshold isn't using modified paradox, I was just going off of what Kiba said. Will test it shortly.

Edit: Major anomaly threshold confirmed to be using modified paradox. False alarm, guys.

[Kiba333]

You're going to be maxing both Mag and Wil anyway. You can't forgo one to get more of the other.

I'm not sure major anomaly threshold isn't using modified paradox, I was just going off of what Kiba said. Will test it shortly.

Edit: Major anomaly threshold confirmed to be using modified paradox. False alarm, guys.

You are completely right, sorry about the whole fuss. I went with what was written in all the talent descriptions and confused "preferred Paradox" and "modified Paradox". I thought the threshold was fixed at 600 without actually bothering to test it.

Another bug i found though: Contingency does not go into cooldown when it triggers Temporal Fugue. Basically invincibility by infinite self dividing ^^
I don't know if this one is a bug: If you cast temporal fugue via contingency your fugue clones will have the "Temporal Fugue" spell at level 0,5. This one is useless though as it "divides" that clone into 1 super weak clone (since it divides into 1 it actually just replaces your clone), the total count of clones doesn't increase, you just exchange a strong one for a super tiny squishy weak one. This could be problematic if your clones use this by an act of their ai.

[donkatsu]

So even with the scaling major anomaly threshold, I do worry about the situation Kiba was describing where a single 3k hit suddenly catapults you into 1k paradox, without the player being able to do anything about it. What I like about Paradox Shield is that it turns a short term problem (getting splatted) into a long term problem (anomalies). But 100% major anomaly rate IS a short term problem, potentially even worse than getting hit for 3k.

I think one way to address the problem would be to have Paradox Shield's absorption rate scale with modified paradox. And yes, I actually did test to make sure that Paradox Shield doesn't use modified paradox. Currently, if you have 1000 Wil and you're running around at 300 modified paradox (a reasonable decision for everything else), Paradox Shield's absorption rate is going to be 100%, since it's going off of 2300 paradox. But 100% absorption rate is a bad thing; that means a huge damage number is going to put you into 100% major anomaly certain death land. You actually want to hover at around 50% absorption, or whatever you think the balance is between life and paradox. It doesn't make sense to get screwed at high Wil but not low Wil. This way, your risk-reward balance for anomalies lines up with your risk-reward balance for Paradox Shield.