Reworking Chronomancy ver 2

[Kiba333]

Donkatsu voices the concern i may have failed to communicate properly in my last post

100% major anomaly certain death land

Your naming is spot on. I've been there a few times, believe me it's not a place you want to be.

It's like Paradox shield is an airplane carrying you higher and higher in order to escape the enemies flak. But once they start throwing seeker missiles at you the plane will simply drop you off....from the stratosphere.

[Parcae2]

Checked out the latest version, and I have to say that it is a vast improvement - lots of consolidation and several overpowered combos removed. Some thoughts:

1. Temporal Fugue is the class's best defensive talent. It might need a touch of nerfing down the road.
2. I agree that Paradox Shield's absorb ratio should scale inversely with Paradox. Maybe also add a hard cap to the absorption percentage.
3. Phase Shift might need some kind of nerf or change. It's really, really strong right now. With Contingency, Timeless, Extend Spell and Matrix, you can get to basically infinite Phase Shift. This is problematic for two reasons: a. it encourages unfun Shift-monitoring to manage the cooldown; b. it's way too powerful.

I'm inclined to suggest getting rid of the talent and finding some kind of thematic excuse to move Damage Smearing into the Warp tree. Warp does need some kind of defensive talent to encourage people to take it, but Phase Shift is probably the least thematically interesting of the remaining PM defensive talents, and I think they still have too many. An alternative would be to find a way to differentiate the talent from lightning runes, e.g. by making it negate the SECOND largest single hit during a round.

4. There are fewer defensive/cooldown manipulation talents, but maybe still a tad too many. Currently you've got about 7 class talents in this category (not counting Induced Phenomena), which is far more reasonable than before, but still encourages players to put more than half their class points into defense/manipulating other talents. Removing Phase Shift would help.

5. Has Redux been nerfed yet? Maybe by making it apply to offensive talents only?

[donkatsu]

It's like Paradox shield is an airplane carrying you higher and higher in order to escape the enemies flak. But once they start throwing seeker missiles at you the plane will simply drop you off....from the stratosphere.

Another way to put it is, think of it like Solipsism. Lose too much psi, you die. Gain too much paradox, you die. Lose too much life, you die. Just like you don't want to take 100% of your damage as psi, you don't want to take 100% of your damage as paradox. But you don't want to take 100% of your damage as life either. The ideal is somewhere in the middle. The difference is that Solipsists automatically have their resources perfectly balanced at all times. Healing heals their psi, and psi:damage absorption is always the same. But Paradox Mages have different ways of recovering paradox and life, and their paradox:damage absorption fluctuates based on their current paradox level. So even if Paradox Shield uses modified paradox, if you get "lucky" and your Shield doesn't break until you reach a high absorption rate, then you're screwed unless you abort mission and unsustain Paradox Shield, which uses a turn and deprives you of paradox recovery.

So I'd incorporate 0player's suggestions as well. This way you're not stuck in a lose-lose situation where keeping Paradox Shield on means you go to 100% major anomaly certain death land, but shutting it off manually means you lose a turn and all that paradox recovery you would have gotten if it had tripped on its own. Or, in Kiba's terms, give the player the option to get off the plane without penalizing them for it. They still have to decide when to get off, and the plane might suddenly jump a few hundred feet out of nowhere, so there should still be plenty of... excitement to be had. >:)

[Parcae2]

Additional random thought: I still think that Foresight should not scale with Spellpower. Doing so risks being too weak early on and too strong in the late game.

[edge2054]

I ended up spending most of the night debugging Temporal Fugue, but it's mostly fixed. Can't figure out why you don't unlearn it when it's triggered off contingency but I put in a sanity check to keep the clones from casting it and fixed the not swapping back to the player when all the clones die thing (hopefully).

I'll look at Paradox Shield and Carbon Spikes tomorrow morning.

[HousePet]

Some thoughts about a new Paradox display:

Bar starts off with the left half red, representing the past, and the right half blue, representing the future.
As you get a fail chance, a purple section appears in the middle of the bar. Its width scales between 0 for no fail chance to one third of the bar for when you start to get anomaly chance.
As your anomaly chance grows, red/blue/purple blotches start appearing on the bar outside of where they should be.
Backfire chance is represented by black blotches appearing on the bar.

Nope, I have no idea how to code/draw that.

[Kiba333]

How about making phase shift ignore only the second hit you recieve every turn? This way it's interaction would not clash with foresight, turning it into a nice combined defense. At the same time you would still be bound to get damaged every turn if an enemy hits you (the first hit of the turn), making phase shift less of an invincibility. Right now fighting a single or few enemies at the same time turns phase shift into a sustainable invincibility. And if too many enemies appear you have the capabilities of crowd controling/kiting them through all of your self and enemy teleports and things like time skip with which you can turn most of every group fight into one on one.

@Housepet
Fail chance and backfire chance do not exist anymore as far as i know. But i like the concept of having a purple/red line appear in the middle that grows to both sides as your anomaly chance increases. The color of the bar to the left and right of anomaly chance could signal your spellpower bonus.
Maybe something along the lines of this:

(This is just an example,I don't think i got the paradox/anomaly numbers right xD. Also the doppler effect design of the anomaly bar was just a whim, i am sure somebody can come up with something better.)

The line in the middle actually could start appearing very vaintly (or in a different color) even before your anomaly chance gets over 0%, this way you'd have an indication that you are close to the breakpoint where your anomaly chance will be >0%.
The color of the blue bar would turn darker (or lighter) in relationship to your spellpower bonus regardless of anomaly chance. This way, even if you manage to get anomaly chance down to 0% at a paradox of 500, you would still have a visual indication that you are right now getting a huge spellpower bonus.
The color of the middle anomaly bar could also change depending on which type of anomaly you chose with bias weave. Yellow for physical anomalies, light purple-ish for teleport, gray-ish for temporal. And once you hit the treshold of major anomalies the bar would turn black or some other stark color signaling danger.

[Kiba333]

I am getting a bug on some characters i make, after playing and testing for a while all anomalies suddenly cease to funktion and an error message pops up instead everytime one triggers. After canceling the error message the players actions take up nearly no time of the turn, as if the effect of bias weave is applied to every action.

error = "Lua Error: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:175: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:153: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:175: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:153: /data/talents/chronomancy/other.lua:44: attempt to index local 't' (a nil value)\
stack traceback:\
\9/data/talents/chronomancy/other.lua:44: in function 'getParadoxSpellpower'\
\9/data/talents/chronomancy/anomalies.lua:58: in function 'getTalentRadius'\
\9/data/talents/chronomancy/anomalies.lua:143: in function 'getTalentTarget'\
\9/data/talents/chronomancy/anomalies.lua:147: in function </data/talents/chronomancy/anomalies.lua:146>\
\9[C]: in function 'xpcall'\
\9/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:148: in function </engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:135>\
stack traceback:\
\9[C]: in function 'error'\
\9/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:175: in function 'useTalent'\
\9/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:285: in function 'forceUseTalent'\
\9/mod/class/Actor.lua:5130: in function 'forceUseTalent'\
\9/mod/class/Actor.lua:4440: in function 'paradoxDoAnomaly'\
\9/data/talents/chronomancy/fate-threading.lua:125: in function </data/talents/chronomancy/fate-threading.lua:123>\
\9[C]: in function 'xpcall'\
\9/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:148: in function </engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:135>\
At [C]:-1 \
At [C]:-1 error\
At /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:175 useTalent\
At /engine/interface/PlayerHotkeys.lua:169 \
At /engine/interface/PlayerHotkeys.lua:161 activateHotkey\
At /mod/class/Game.lua:1969 f\
At /mod/class/Game.lua:1564 fct\
At /engine/interface/PlayerHotkeys.lua:316 \
At /engine/KeyBind.lua:229 "
seen = true
reported = false

[0player]

Apparently Fteweaver's healing can attain critical power.
It was very nice to NOT die from that worm that walks in a Lake Nur, thank you very much. I really like the new Fateweaver now.

[donkatsu]

You can build up Celerity charges without spending a turn by bumping into a wall.

[0player]

Those high-Paradox anomalies are really, really frightening. Having to battle Ultimate Teluvorta alongside Blood Master? Ugh.
This time, however, it turned out for good, as I have called forth the forces of temporal horrors to execute swift justice upon those who came to view blood.

Edit: turns out they don't unsummon, so I led them around the circle (as they were, naturally, following me), slaughtering each and every helpless spectator. I wanted to do this for so, so long.

[Parcae2]

Additional thoughts:

Currently, the class has two class talents that only affect resource management (Bias Weave and Disentangle), in addition to several that affect resource management in addition to having other effects. Most classes have only one class talent devoted primarily to resources management, and it usually has important secondary effects: Drain, Disruption Shield, Mucus ... Methinks these talents are ripe for consolidation with Fate Weaving.

Celerity and Time Dilation could also be consolidated, and Dimensional Anchor moved to Speed Control. Consolidate Carbon Spikes and Carbon Growth, and move another talent (Warp Mines?) to Matter. That would enable you to get rid of another talent tree, leaving the class with a more reasonable 9.

Also, some minor thematic suggestions:

Warp Mines strikes me as a weird term for a fantasy class. Wormhole Cluster?

Carbon strikes me as a concept very tenuously linked with the rest of the class. It's supposed to be the advanced gravity tree, right? How about: "You increase your local gravity, attracting small shards of matter to yourself." Then the resource name is Matter instead of Carbon, which also fits with the name of the tree.

Edit: So here's a list of all the non-damage class talents:

Disentangle
Bias Weave
Gravity Locus (some damage, but not its primary purpose)
Carbon Growth
Temporal Fugue
Paradox Shield
Cease to Exist (again, some damage, but not its primary purpose)
The entire Speed Control tree
Wormhole
Some of Induced Phenomena? Ignoring this because it is still a WIP.
The entire Spellbinding tree
Damage Smearing
Temporal Reprieve
Phase Shift
Warp Mastery

That's 20 talents, plus whatever happens to Induced Phenomena (but including two offensive debuffs, so let's say 18).

Now let's look at Doomed. Disregarding Fears for the same reason that we disregarded Induced Phenomena, they have:

Deflection
The One with Shadows tree
Madness (offensive debuff)
Shadows (mixed-use)
Darkness (mixed-use)

That's five pure defensive/utility talents, eight mixed-use talents and one offensive debuff.

Mindslayers have:

The Absorption tree
Augmentation (slated for change/removal)
Iron Will
Psi Tap
Kinetic Leech
Insatiable
The three Transcendent talents (mixed-use)
Deflect Projectiles
Thought Sense
Heartstart

That's 15 talents, including one WIP and three mixed-use. We probably shouldn't be counting mixed-use talents for the same reason that we didn't count Temporal Wake for PMs, so let's say 11.

[edge2054]

I'll take what you're saying into consideration Parcae but I don't follow what you're saying about Bias Weave/Disentangle being consolidated with Fate Weaving.

That said a better comparison would be Archmages (another high utility class and the one that PMs are most modeled after).

Meta (4)
Temporal (4)
Arcane (2)
Earth (2)
Air(1)
Phantasm(3)
Wildfire(1)
Stone(1)

18 total.

[edge2054]

Those high-Paradox anomalies are really, really frightening. Having to battle Ultimate Teluvorta alongside Blood Master? Ugh.
This time, however, it turned out for good, as I have called forth the forces of temporal horrors to execute swift justice upon those who came to view blood.

Edit: turns out they don't unsummon, so I led them around the circle (as they were, naturally, following me), slaughtering each and every helpless spectator. I wanted to do this for so, so long.

Haha.. that's awesome. I want to talk with Darkgod and figure out if I can make Temporal Horrors have their own faction. I want them to start killing everything every time they show up on a map

[edge2054]

You can build up Celerity charges without spending a turn by bumping into a wall.

Fixed thanks.