Reworking Chronomancy ver 2

[edge2054]

Alright, everything's pushed. I haven't started on the balance pass yet but trees, talents, and placement should be fairly set. You guys will have Phase Shift and Preserve Pattern available at level 2 as well as a bunch of offensive spells. Unlockable trees are looking a bit sparse but I don't want to push anything just for the sake of having it.

jotwebe, if you feel up to it, I could use a new icon for Temporal Bolt (it's a time travel spell, functionally Paradox Bolt), Warp Mines (the parent icon, not the actual mines), and Cease To Exist, which is now in Timeline Threading along with Rethread, Braid Lifelines, and Temporal Fugue (using the aqua blue icons).

[edge2054]

Honestly, I have to say I liked the old structure more. I thought it was pretty close to being done. What were the factors that made you think it was such a mess?

Spacetime Folding, in particular, doesn't seem like the kind of tree that should be locked. It doesn't have any talents that seem like they're worth unlocking.

Why did you think Induced Phenomena and Antimatter were beyond saving?

I do like the proposed change to Redux. I think it might have some problems with Temporal Fugue though.

I had writers block for a solid week and it felt like I was trying to put square pegs into round holes. The class didn't feel at all how I was envisioning them and the further I got away from the vision the less I cared. At some points I was feeling like giving up. I was also liking Temporal Wardens less and less the more shared trees (like Fate-Threading) got tweaked. Last night I started to think about what it was I liked about Temporal Wardens so I decided to go more in that direction.

Antimatter may come back but I didn't really like how it felt at the end. This is a gut thing. Like if you're writing a story and a character starts doing something out of character for the sake of the plot. In this case though it was for the sake of a second physical damage tree.

Induced Phenomena is a neat concept and if I figure out how to salvage it I'll think about reintroducing it. In practice it turned out clumsy and for now I feel it's best to set it aside.

Spacetime Folding was written for Temporal Wardens. It's always been a Warden tree. Again it's a square peg in a round hole. If Paradox Mages want to pick it up, they can. But it's just not a tree that belongs to them.

[jotwebe]

Temporal Bolt - Cease to Exist - Warp Mines

[edge2054]

I missed you on IRC. Thanks jotwebe, those look great

[donkatsu]

Do you have plans to make the Gravity tree, and by extension physical PMs, viable? Adding -resist all back to Cease to Exist would be a start, but they just don't have enough buttons to press. Is Carbon coming back?

[edge2054]

Is the main issue with Gravity the lack of resist pen? Supporting damage talents? Or a combination of both?

I'm not opposed to Antimatter or Spatial Tears as themes for physical trees. In the end I think those telling me that Carbon didn't feel right were right. It was a fun tree to code and play around with but I'd like to do something different and I'm just not sure what yet.

I'm open to ideas.

[donkatsu]

Resist pen, but also cooldown. Temporal has four damage spells with cooldown 4 or less. Physical has only one. You cast Repulsion Blast, Gravity Spike, and Gravity Well, and now you're already out of damage spells to cast and your first one hasn't even come off of cooldown yet.

[edge2054]

What if Gravity Locus lost the slow projectiles and melee_project and instead gave physical resist penetration and reduced the cooldown of one gravity talent on cooldown by a turn when you're hit by gravity damage?

[donkatsu]

I do really like knockback resistance reduction on Gravity Locus though, and you wouldn't have to cram in physical resist pen if Cease to Exist got back its -resist all (and physical PMs only have to drop a single point into Braid Lifelines to access it, since you were going to get Temporal Fugue anyway). The cooldown thing would definitely help once you get Gravity Well, but they need help before level 12 too.

Here's your rotation until Gravity Locus:
Repulsion Blast, Gravity Spike, wait, wait, Repulsion Blast, wait, wait, Gravity Spike, Repulsion Blast, wait, wait, wait

As you can see, over one 12-turn cycle, you have a damage spell ready less than half of the time. Gravity Locus's cooldown reduction wouldn't help all that much until you got Gravity Well to tick it every turn.

Here's an example temporal rotation at the same level, assuming Time Skip fails its check (if it succeeds then it's even easier to have spells off cooldown):
Temporal Bolt, Rethread, Time Skip, Temporal Bolt, wait, Rethread, Temporal Bolt, Time Skip, wait, Temporal Bolt, Rethread, Time Skip

10 attacks over the course of 12 turns compared to physical's 5. You can use Warp to fill in the holes to a certain extent, but either build can make equally good use of it so I'm not counting it. What if Repulsion Blast and Gravity Spike's cooldowns were dropped to 3 and 4, respectively? Then physical would look like:

Repulsion Blast, Gravity Spike, wait, Repulsion Blast, wait, Gravity Spike, Repulsion Blast, wait, wait

5 attacks over the course of 9 turns, instead of 5 attacks over the course of 12 turns.

[edge2054]

Done donkatsu

[HousePet]

I'm open to ideas.

I can tackle that, where can I find the current talent layout and effects? Git?

[edge2054]

http://git.net-core.org/edge2054/t-engine4

I'm looking at some way to balance Temporal Fugue. This talent's pretty nuts haha.

I'm thinking something along the lines of passing a percentage of Paradox back to the summoner.

[Parcae2]

Maybe don't give the clones a HP value at all, and just allow them to take X hits of any magnitude.

Or treat them as summons, and have a "main" clone that regains HP and damage whenever a clone is killed. Which one is "main" transfers if the main one dies.

[tylor]

http://git.net-core.org/edge2054/t-engine4

I'm looking at some way to balance Temporal Fugue. This talent's pretty nuts haha.

I'm thinking something along the lines of passing a percentage of Paradox back to the summoner.

Btw, how can I download it? When I try to download zip, it says "403 forbidden"

[HousePet]

Tweak for Gravity.

Gravity
Repulsion Blast: As is.
Repulsive Field: Sustain that increases your defense and protects from gravity damage, while reducing nearby enemy knockback resistance.
Crushing Force: Renamed Gravity Well.
Singularity: Altered version of Gravity Spike. Draws all creatures towards the center point, doing damage based on how close to the center they end up.

You don't really need physical damage penetration as physical resistance is rare and I wouldn't put it in a starting category.

Here is a Matter/Antimatter remix category:
Spatial Tears
Cracked Space: Either fires warp damage bolts at X nearby enemies, or fires up to three bolts at a single enemy.
Discontinuity: Nasty warp damage wall. Possibly teleport enemies trying to cross it? Or is that too similar to Wormhole?
Shielding Fragments: sustain. Casting Spatial Tears talents creates defensive charges. Works like Bone Shield, but charges decay instead of regenerate. Also grants resistance penetration to all Spatial Tear talents.
Sphere of Destruction: Storm of warp damage. Targetable at high levels.

Will look into Warp, Spacetime Folding and Spacetime Weaving tomorrow. Three separate categories for warping space seems a bit excessive. I'll see if that can be tidied up and compacted.

In other news, I was thinking that Dinosaur Summoning would be cool, though likely not in keeping with the lore of Eyal. I was later thinking that Cosmic Cycle was a bit nature and then it hit me...
I have a vague design for an equilibrium/paradox class that could use both those categories!