Reworking Chronomancy ver 2

[edge2054]

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.

Empower appears to be bugged. I'll dig into it.

*edit* Apparently I wasn't passing t in the anomaly code. Time to update 20+ talents. Yay gruntwork!

[edge2054]

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.

haha.. yeah, I don't either. It's a neat idea. I might play around with it if I remember but it probably won't be until I start getting serious about particles and other graphical polish.

[Parcae2]

I don't like to compare anything to Archmages; they're too OP. That said, assuming that half of Induced Phenomena winds up being defensive/utility-oriented, that's 20 PM talents. For Archmages, the 16 includes the largely useless Stone Skin and Blur Sight, one of Phantasmal Shield or Illuminate (I can't tell which one you're describing as non-damage), and also Arcane Power, which is only taken on extremely specific builds that forfeit access to many other talents; so 12 would be a better number. That's between 4 and 8 talents that need to be removed to get down to Archmage levels.

So, having thought about it, here are some ideas for reducing the number of non-damage talents:

REMOVE:

Phase Shift

MOVE TO GENERIC:

Bias Weave
Disentangle

CONSOLIDATE:

Gravity Locus/Gravity Well
Carbon Growth/the first damage skill in that tree
Celerity/Speed Dilation/Haste
Warp Mines/Wormhole

That's 8 talents if you decide to remove two trees, or you could just take half the suggestions and remove one tree.

(Think of this as a testimony to the fact that none of your talents are Blur Sight-style placeholders).

[Parcae2]

You know, I'm struggling a lot with the language of my posts. I don't want to come off as condescending ("You made some nice talents, well done! Now here's 15 things I think you should change,") or as overly criticizing. So here's your daily reminder that you are awesome and we should all worship at your feet.

[edge2054]

You know, I'm struggling a lot with the language of my posts. I don't want to come off as condescending ("You made some nice talents, well done! Now here's 15 things I think you should change,") or as overly criticizing. So here's your daily reminder that you are awesome and we should all worship at your feet.

Haha.. . well thanks. I couldn't do it without input from all of you guys though. I try to set my ego aside when doing creative work. Note the keyword is 'try'. I get wrapped up in things and get my feelings hurt but when I get things back in perspective I'm happy for the feedback and constructive criticism.

As for Bias Weave/Disentangle. I'm not sure what I would drop in Fate-Weaving at this point to accommodate them (Webs of Fate maybe?). Additionally I'm of the philosophy that heavy resource management belongs in class trees (see Drain for instance). There's also the issue of brevity. Merging these two talents into one would make for a really long talent description.

That said I've considered the same myself (merging Bias/Disentangle). But I also kinda miss the internal synergy Fate-Weaving used to have. It's starting to feel more like a mishmash of ideas to me and less like the Spin Fate tree. So I don't know. I'll have to think about it.

*edit* I'd be more prone to keeping Bias/Disentangle separate and replacing Webs of Fate and Seal Fate if I moved these talents too generic. One could argue that Disentangle makes Bias worthwhile. I don't know though. The question is, would this tree be worth taking on a class that doesn't use Paradox?

Fate-Weaving
Spin Fate
Disentangle
Preserve Pattern
Bias Weave

At this point Spin Fate would become a stand alone talent (I don't think I'd bother working bonuses based on Spin back in and would probably strip them from Preserve Pattern). Seal Fate would be gone (which is an effect I kinda like). Braid Lifelines could probably be moved back into Fate-Threading. We'd still be short a talent in Fate-Threading and I don't have any ideas for a replacement (Seal Fate maybe?)

And still the question, is this a generic tree that's worth it on other classes?

[Parcae2]

Just to clarify, I wasn't suggesting merging Bias Weave and Disentangle, just moving one or both of them to a generic tree.

Here are some suggestions organized around trees instead of talents, designed to parallel the structure of Archmage.

BASIC PHYSICAL TREE: Basically just Matter, but merge Carbon Spikes and Repulsion Blast.
ADVANCED PHYSICAL TREE (locked): Gravity Spike, Gravity Locus/Well (with some non-resistible physical resist reduction thrown in), and the merged remnants of Speed Control.
BASIC TEMPORAL TREE: Paradox Bolt, Temporal Fugue, Temporal Reprieve, Rethread
ADVANCED TEMPORAL TREE (locked): Trim Threads, Time Skip, Echoes from the Past, Cease to Exist (non-resistible, but reduces only temporal resist, not all resistances)
BASIC WARP TREE: Warp, Paradox Shield, Warp Mines/Wormhole, Temporal Anchor
ADVANCED WARP TREE (locked): Damage Smearing, Temporal Wake, Webs of Fate, Phase Pulse/Warp Mastery
BASIC UTILITY TREE: Induced Phenomena
ADVANCED UTILITY TREE (locked): Energy

That's four basic trees and four advanced trees. For generics:

Chronomancy: Foresight, Contingency, Bias Weave, Disentangle
Fate Weaving: Precognition (See Fate?), See the Threads (Choose Fate?), Seal Fate, Fateweaver
Spacetime Weaving: Unchanged
Spellbinding (locked): Renamed to ... something, moved to generic, can affect any talent except prodigies

...

So there you are. The idea is to have the advanced damage trees offer just enough to encourage people to take them if they want to deal significant damage in the late game, without including so much utility/defense that people take them just for that (like the current Time Travel). The average player will spend 1-2 category points on the damage trees and 1-2 on utility. Class and generic points will be tight, but not so tight that players can't invest in damage talents.

[donkatsu]

Let's talk a bit about Temporal Fugue.

First, another... bug? Fugue clone summon timers go down with each action, not with each turn. If I teleport as a fugue clone and then switch control, the teleported clone's timer is paused until I take control of it again. If I use a movement infusion, the clone's timer goes down with each step. I recall this happening with Ambuscade as well, so maybe that's just how the summon timer works? You could just keep it but it would be weird to explain in the talent description, or to anyone who doesn't realize what's happening.

Temporal Fugue is, as Parcae pointed out, incredibly strong. It's invulnerability plus full status immunity plus a complete cooldown reset. Even if it had a 100% damage penalty it would be really powerful utility, but with a ~60% damage penalty it's also a beastly damage dealer. Just dropping the numbers won't be enough, some mechanic has to change here. I'd say the main thing is to remove the invulnerability. Make it so that the user can somehow be damaged during Fugue, keeping in mind that chronomancer uniques are going to have temporal clones with massive amounts of life. Those clones are probably not going to be dying, so a Dreamscape-like life loss mechanic is out of the question. Maybe you could lose life equal to the average of the life lost by all of your clones? That would in effect bring back the Paradox Twin mechanic of sharing damage, which I really liked. Maybe also drop down the max number of clones to a more manageable five, or four, or maybe even three.

And Temporal Fugue is bugging out in all sorts of exciting ways with Contingency, so for now I'm just not going to use them together for the sake of isolating other bugs. Maybe if it's too much of a headache to debug, you could just add the targeted teleport back in and call it a day. Honestly the teleport doesn't make much difference when you can already use a fugue clone's Dimensional Step for free.

[Parcae2]

It also obviously needs to be renamed to Send In the Clones.

Edit: Also, when I complained about it being overpowered ... that was before I had playtested it significantly. Yeah.

How about having one "real" you that the other ones merge back into, Harkor'Zun-style? (If "you" "die," another clone dies and you absorb their power). Then you lose the ridiculous cooldown reset and invulnerability,

[edge2054]

@donkatsu

Yeah, that's just how summons work. I don't see how Temporal Fugue is a full cooldown reset either as cooldowns don't tick if you're not on the map. What bugs does Contingency still have with Temporal Fugue? I thought I got them all last night.

As for the mechanics I know it needs a balance pass but I'm not there yet.

@parcae
Six is about my minimum of unlocked class trees. Five is okay. Four is really sparse in my opinion and getting into summoner territory.

Spellbinding will get scrapped before it ever becomes generic. It took half an hour just to update the Warden trees to make it work and every other chronomancy talent was built from the ground up with Spellbinding in mind. It's not modular.

That said I'm not dismissing your merge ideas outright. But I'm leaning more towards making the current trees more workable rather than cutting them.

[Parcae2]

Wow, that's a lot of work. Thank you.

I'm not actually suggesting scrapping any of your ideas outright (except Phase Shift), just moving them around. If there aren't enough unlocked trees in the schema I proposed, I would suggest unlocking the advanced warp tree. That said, it's your baby and you know what's best for it.

[donkatsu]

I open the fight with Temporal Fugue, pop all my instant buffs, my shield rune, use Temporal Wake and Swap for 8 turns of stun/confuse, Dimensional Step to reposition, cast Entropy, bump those debuffs up to like 14 turns with Timeless Seal Fate, and then Temporal Fugue expires. Now all of my talents are off cooldown again.

I haven't played with last night's fixes yet; I'll try that out today.

[Kiba333]

Since my latest pull fugue does not bug out with contingency anymore as far as i noticed.

regarding parcae's suggestion.
I can't really argue about the balance or lack of balance of the overall structure you suggested since it would require reworking so many spells, synergies and the talent structure itself nearly from scratch. The intricate effects and problems that would arise from this are very hard to predict though and most often only come to light after playtesting (like availability of defense during early game, synergy within respective trees etc.). That said i personally really don't want to see paradox mage becoming archmage 2.0.


I'm more in favour of a wait and see policy about what induced phenomena will bring into the mix. Then actually looking at how the class plays itself and based on that methodically polishing up the overall balance by adding and/or removing some debuffs/synergies/whatever and maybe swapping a few talents that are reasonably similar in theme and or the role they fill. But well in the end it's all up to edge anyway. xP

[edge2054]

Yeah, it's starting to feel like another rewrite to me and I'm not sure I have the energy. I'm going to finish up Induced Phenomena before I do anything else and take it from there.

[jotwebe]

Feature request: could anomalies get differently colored names in the combat log, depending on their type? Say physical pale yellow, teleport pale purple/pink, temporal the trademarked silvery grey? It'd help deciding which one you want with Biased Weave and to determine whether it's time to put another point in it...

[donkatsu]

Post patch I still got a persistent clone from Temporal Fugue, although it may just be that my character is permanently buggy from previous Fugue/Contingency bugs. Also I'm not really sure what's going on with Fateweaver, as I'm dying in situations where it looks like Fateweaver should be saving me.



Did Fateweaver heal me before the damage that triggered Fateweaver? Even so, that means I would be at full health before taking 351+75=426, which is less than my full health, even if there was a con drop from the disease. And if it's healing me after I take the damage like it should be then I definitely shouldn't be dead.

I'm going to scrap this character and start over just to be sure it's not lingering bugs from the previous version.