New Afflicted class: Fallen

[Delmuir]

This is a class of fallen Celestials. They've lost their control of sun power and are left only with darkness. Their gameplay feature is damage-absortion and return…

Their skills are designed to absorb huge amounts of damage which is then converted to darkness over time and then returned to enemy. The drawback is that the damage will hurt you as well as the conversion is incomplete… but it can be improved. More so, your damage-dealing capacity is directly linked to your damage-enduring capacity.

Thus, incoming damage does zero (in theory and maxed) and after "x" turns, the damage can be returned at some percent to the enemy. At any "x - 1" turn, only some of the damage can be returned and some will be immediately incurred by the hero. More so, if you hold on to the damage too long, it'll degrade and leak back to you over time. You can't unleash the stored damage without a target.

Thus, this character is mostly a tank… everything it does is oriented around being able to take damage. Not reducing the damage so much but rather, surviving it.

Their weakness should be status-effects, especially sleep (!!!)… just put them to sleep and stop hitting them and watch them die. Also, anything that preemptively sets off their sustains could be crippling.

Example skill:

Absortion category:

1. Absorb Damage
Sustain: turn off to unleash in a nova.

Allows hero to absorb unlimited damage to be converted to melee darkness damage at a rate of 10% per turn up to 50%. Remaining damage is returned to hero in one burst. After 8 turns, damage starts leaking out at a rate of 10% per turn.

*** See the trick? You can absorb as much as you want but you suffer a penalty while unleashing it that might kill you instantly.

There'd be other skills that could be activated off of this one without de-activating the sustain. Each skill would cause you to take "x" damage while inflicting some… the damage of the skills would be based off of how much damage you've endured NOT your level or stats. Thus, this character could, in theory, dish out more damage at an early stage (or any stage) than any other class.

Everything about the class would be designed to increase damage capacity… that means more life to start but also other means. Heroism infusions, and neat tactical plays like putting up a damage shield AFTER you've been hit not before.

Another feature is that for every skill that you have on cool-down at any given moment, every addition damage incurred (hit, not amount) would cause a small chance for your absorb sustain to collapse and maybe kill you. Thus, eliminating cool-downs, increasing damage capacity, etc., would be the trick to this class.

Thoughts?

[Red]

Two things I think immediately. Sleep is broken by taking enough damage, and I'm pretty sure the enemy is too stupid to wait for you to die even if it wasn't. (And who actually uses sleep? I can't name any time I've actually had sleep on me.) High level slows, though, would be murder.

The other thing is that is the damage you take resistance penetrating? Because if it's not, you've become nigh invulnerable. One of the huge advantages of a Temporal Warden's damage smearing is that it smears damage into TEMPORAL damage, so they only need temporal resistance to survive it. Likewise, if this darkness damage can be resisted, darkness resistance is the only thing that matters on this class. If you somehow manage to raise it to 100%, you've literally become unkillable.

[jaumito]

That's a very interesting concept, but I suspect it might be a bit too open to exploits and abuses. Like running on lava, using collapsing tunnels in the Sandworm Lair,... and what's supposed to happen if you use yourself as a target to "empty the tank"?

You could make this a fallen Chronomancer instead. Absorbed damage wouldn't kill you straight away but would raise your Paradox (which could still get you killed through backfires and such), and your damage absorption would only be fully effective when your Paradox failure rate is at 0%.

[Red]

Not sure that'd work thematically, since this is a celestial and not a chronomancer, but what if this class used negative energy as a resource and had positive energy as a sort of damage? So the more full your positive energy gets, the higher the failure chance, the more damage, etc. since the Fallen can no longer use positive energy.

[Delmuir]

I'm not sure about theme and honestly, my idea is clearly very rough but let me see if I can address some questions:

1. Resistances… this shouldn't be a problem in theory as if you resist the damage then you have no "fuel" to use attack abilities. You have to take damage in order to absorb it and to have any to spend.

2. Sleep and the AI… the enemy AI would probably have to be tweaked a bit I suppose. However, confuse and other status-effects that delay you from making a conscious action would have the same effect.

3. On the question of using yourself as a damage source… that suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Each time you use it, you'd have less and less and less. Ultimately, it would always be a waste to attack yourself.

4. On using negative and positive energy… I was hoping to stick with using Hate as it's an afflicted class, although I haven't addressed how I would use hate (mostly as a limiting principle that affects the ratio of conversion).

Basically, if you could absorb huge amounts of damage then it becomes a race against time to spend it in such a way that you can survive the cost. Thus, absorb-prepare to take the damage- spend on attacking and hope to survive. Rinse and repeat. Other wrinkles would be nice but I haven't figured it out yet.

[jaumito]

3. On the question of using yourself as a damage source… that suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Each time you use it, you'd have less and less and less. Ultimately, it would always be a waste to attack yourself.

Always? I don't think so. Consider this situation:
1) You start "empty", in front of a closed door. There might be hostile critters behind.
2) Fire a wand of conjuration at yourself to "fill the tank".
3) (Optional) If you want to use that wand in combat, you can still wait for it to come off CD - 5 turns IIRC, so you have a few turns left before the tank starts leaking out.
4) Open the door, kill critters. If there aren't any, you can still pop a shield rune (or any other kind of damage shield) and fire at yourself to avoid the leaking damage (since shield runes last ~5 turns, and assuming the leak lasts 10 turns since its rate is 10%/turn, it would be more effective to use runes this way to avoid leaking damage.)

[Red]

Delmuir, what I'm saying is that all damage you would take is converted into darkness. So you take 200 fire and 400 physical damage. According to your description, that would all be negated and you would have 600 points of damage stored up. If you didn't manage to spend it fast enough, it would then be returned to you as darkness damage. That's what I want to know about-am I misreading what you wrote? Did you write something wrong? Or is basically damage you take resistable darkness damage?

[jaumito]

Thinking about it, I think the whole concept would be better encapsulated within a resource.

Let's call that resource "pain". At zero pain, your offense would be insignificant (or even nil if you're adamant about it.) As you take damage, your pain increases, and so does your offense (a la The Hulk.) You manage all this with a passive low-level skill (it should be a mandatory skill like the afflicted's Unnatural Body) that converts part of the damage you take into pain (according to talent level, make the conversion 100% at 5/5 if you wish, although myself I think it should be capped and work more like Energy Decomposition - convert X%, up to a fixed amount depending on talent level.) Optionally, high pain could also have a positive effect on the damage/pain conversion rate.

The catch would be one (or even both) of these things:
(a) pain also proportionally reduces your healing factor, making it negative at high pain levels.
(b) pain would fade to zero over time, dealing unconvertible damage according to the decrease.

It would give the class most of what you want, in (I think) a more natural, more progressive and more hassle-free way.

[Delmuir]

Good questions and points…

I'm generally disinclined (but not opposed) to a new resource but clearly there's something to consider about the nature of the damage, etc. I'll have to think on this but you're all making good points…

[grayswandir]

Bleh, solipsist gets their own, you can too.

[Delmuir]

Delmuir, what I'm saying is that all damage you would take is converted into darkness. So you take 200 fire and 400 physical damage. According to your description, that would all be negated and you would have 600 points of damage stored up. If you didn't manage to spend it fast enough, it would then be returned to you as darkness damage. That's what I want to know about-am I misreading what you wrote? Did you write something wrong? Or is basically damage you take resistable darkness damage?

After giving it some thought, yes, that is how it would work in theory. You would take the damage normally and only then would it be converted to darkness damage. After all, the damage would already have been affected by your resistances, affinities, and enemy resistance penetration.

Jaumito,
Nifty points.

So, I propose a sustain shield akin to the Necro's necrotic aura. It's automatic with the class and allows for the receiving of PAIN.

I would suggest that a small skill exist to manage it and what that skill does it increase the duration of the damage smearing. Thus, at lvl 0, damage is returned to the character over 1 turn. At lvl 5, it would return the damage over… let's say 10 turns.

Now, there should also be (I think constitution based) a low "safe" level. That would be pain that you can maintain. Thus, pain wouldn't degrade to zero but rather to whatever that limit is.

Also, you would need a skill to increase the conversion rate. I would say it's the inverse of the damage smearing so at lvl 0, it converts over 10 turns and 5 turns at lvl 5. These are just examples of skills and not hard-set ideas.

So, if this works, it should work like this:

Character has 0 pain and max of 50. They're lvl 5 on both skills.

They get hit with 150 damage. Thus, they take 0 damage on that turn and pain grows at 30 per turn. Thus, on turn 2 after receiving damage, they start bleeding out at 1 per turn (they absorbed 60 pain but can only safely hold 50 so the difference is bled out at 1 per turn) for one turn but, assuming they don't spend any pain or receive additional damage, but then 4 on the next turn and 7 on the one after that and so on.

They could use damage shields to mitigate both incoming damage and the damage absorbed.

Now, offensive skills would consume "x" pain to use the skill and I would like for pain to represent damage at 1:1, according to how much damage the skill does. Then, based on the level of said skill (and probably other factors), you take "x%" direct damage of the skill being used, which also depletes your pain.

Thus, it would work this way:

You have 500 pain (and bleeding at "x" rate) and the skill does 150 damage and the cost is 10% of the damage. You would spend 165 pain, deal 150 damage, and take 15 damage. Your bleeding rate would decline accordingly.

In essence, you would only be able to deal as much damage as you could endure. More so, the damage would check against your life before it's absorbed. Thus, if you take more damage than you have life, you absorb nothing and just die.

Also, should your sustain be shut off… ALL damage is immediately suffered.

As to your point about heal mod… I think that's a good point but I would suggest it more like this:

So long as your pain is below your safe level, your heal mod is fine. For every "x" damage over the safe level, your heal mod decreases. I imagine a skill would need to exist to manage this as well.

Thus, the virtue of the class is incredible durability, especially to being one-shot. However, the accumulated damage when combined with potentially disastrous negative heal mod could make death inevitable, albeit somewhat slow.

As noted, slow effects, stuns (that removes skills and lower speed), confuse, sleep, etc. could all be potentially incredibly destructive. Large doses of damage though would be easy for this class to handle, especially with the fungus tree and regeneration infusions or even large shields. It would have good synergy with either anti-magic or the Celestial/Light tree.

This would also be a class that would benefit from having LOTS of skills that consume pain because the more skills you have, the more pain you can spend. However, I would encourage a very high scaling with the skills to provide a strategic option: lots of small skills consuming small amounts of pain which runs the risk of being killed slowly as you accumulate damage OR a small number of high-investment skills which runs the risk of being stunned (or whatnot) to death as everything would be on cool-down.

On top of that, I think there should be a small penalty for the number of and duration of skills on cool-down… this would make doing things like investing in the cool-down reduction of racials useful and maybe important. I'm not sure what an optimal penalty would be.

Anyway, thoughts?

[Red]

I am looking at this and I see what could be a pretty major issue.

The Master: 2,500 HP
Aluin the Fallen: 3,400 HP
Kor's Fury: 3,000 HP
Spellblaze Simalacrum: 3,600 HP
The Abomination: 3,500 HP
Lithfengel: 3,800 HP
Nimisil: 3,700 HP
Massok: 4,800 HP
Corrupted Sand Wyrm 5,100 HP
Snaproot: 9,000 HP
And let's not forget the big guy himself...
Atamathon: 14,000 HP
(All stats taken from the wiki)

You'll have to take at least that much damage from each boss to kill them. (Potentially less, since basic attacks/attack runes/attack infusions etc. all do not require pain, but probably more since each class talent will require damage dealt+extra cost to use.)

The only character (a Brawler) I managed to get real far into the game, enough to get his own prodigy, had a little under 700 HP. It was a bit of a fragile build and I imagine the Fallen will be a high life class, but if you quadruple the life I had, then by the time you're in the Pride's of the east will you have enough HP to successfully beat the Master. (Once. Then he ressurects.)

You will have to seriously go over the numbers and find a way to balance this class so that way there's enough damage mitigation, absorption, and dispersal to take out high HP foes (and running away doesn't seem to be an option since your pain will just bleed you to death) without making everything else in the game pathetically easy.

And, as a minor side note, I do still want to know exactly what kind of damage this bleeding is. If I may make a suggestion, just make it a special, typeless damage that totally ignores resistances, affinities, you name it.

[Delmuir]

Here's an example of my idea with five categories. More offensive ones would be needed in order to flesh out the style of play but I haven't given much thought to it… I'd prefer if it were not a mindstar class because I hate mindstars, ha ha. Anyway, here it is in rough form:

Pain Management:

1. Passive skill that improves conversion rate of damage to pain. At lvl 1, it converts 200% of damage over 10 turns to pain and 125% of damage at lvl 5 over 5 turns. Note, you gain more damage but it's smeared over time...

2. Active skill that consumes "x" pain to eliminate one status effect and suffers " 100% of x" life at lvl 1. At lvl 5, it eliminates up to 1 status effect of each type, reduces cool down, consumes x" pain and suffers "20% of x" life. X is some predetermined amount.

3. Active shield skill that, for "x" turns, reduces the conversion rate of pain. Thus, you might absorb 100 damage and absorb only 50 pain. Costs "x" pain and some amount of life in relation to pain cost.

4. Passive skill that improves damage smearing effect by increases the duration of the damage bleeding. At lvl 1, damage from pain over minimum is suffered over 5 turns but at lvl 5, it's suffered over 10 turns.

To spite the face:

1. Active skill that costs "x" pain to inflict "y" damage to enemy and some % of "y" to you.

2. Active skill that costs " x" pain for each enemy in the target range to inflict "y" damage to each enemy (enemy total is T) and some % of "y times T" to you.

3. Additional damage skill...

4. Active skill that costs "x%" of current pain amount deal damage at 1:1 ratio at lvl 1. At lvl 5, it deals pain at a 1:2 ratio (deals more damage than pain it consumes).

ALL active skills that cost pain include some % of direct cost to your life in ratio to the pain cost. In other words, you can't escape paying for the pain.

Pain Inversion:

1. Active skill that increases attack speed at cost of "x" pain and life.

2. Sustain skill that lowers pain safe level "x" amount and increases evasion rate in direct relation to how high your pain is above safe level. However, this skill also decreases damage smearing duration by "x" turns.

3. Cruel Empathy: Active skill that multiplies pain and sends it out into the world in the form of an aura covering "x" range. All damage smearing for the duration of this skill is shared with every enemy in range at some % in the form of darkness damage.

4. Wrath: Active skill that lets you double the amount of damage (and thus pain) you endure for the benefit of returning 100% of original damage back onto the enemy in its original form (i.e., not converted to darkness) AND bypassing their natural affinities and resistances.

Collective Madness:

1. Mass Confusion: Active skill that causes confusion to all enemies in "x" range at cost of life and pain as per usual. However, you're included in the range but get a bonus to save against it according to how many talent points you have in this category.

2. Hysterical Madness: Active skill that causes one enemy to ONLY attack itself of "x" turns with regular "bump" attacks, places "x" number of random skills on cool down. Costs pain and life but also runs the risk of affecting you as well. You get a bonus to save against it according to how many talent points you have in this category.

3. Vile Mind: Causes random Fear effect on every enemy in "x" range at cost of pain/life, including yourself. You get a bonus to save against it according to how many talent points you have in this category.

4. Clever Insanity: passive skill that gives a small regeneration effect for each and every enemy suffering from a mental status effect, fear, etc. The amount of healing increases with Willpower and the duration increases with talent level. Should you suffer from one of those mental effects, your regeneration increases… double-edged sword (?!).

Strength from Suffering:

1. Active skill that consumes pain/life in order to cause damage reflection for "x" turns.

2. Passive skill that improves your life per lvl rate.

3. Active skill that stops all regen in "x" range at cost of pain/life, including yours. However, any enemy that you kill will provide you a direct heal equal to "x%" of their max life.

4. Sustain that lowers pain safe level: every time an enemy lands a successful attack of any kind, they suffer a stackable reduction to their regen rate and heal mod. The effect lasts for five turns and can reduce their healing to negative.

Other Category, maybe Generic (?):

1. Passive skill that increases saves.

2. Active skill that costs pain (and thus a small amount of damage bleeding) but for "x" turns increases resistances to some status effects.

3. Sustain that lowers pain safe level but converts damage for "x" turns to whatever the first damage type you're hit with while it is active. Immediately goes on cool down after it's triggered.

4. Sustain shield that lowers pain safe level but allows character to take the damage directly (like a normal character) but gives them absolute immunity to that damage type for "x" turns. Immediately goes on cool-down after it's triggered.

I think this class should also have the option of the Cursed Aura tree.

Thoughts?

[Delmuir]

I am looking at this and I see what could be a pretty major issue.

The Master: 2,500 HP
Aluin the Fallen: 3,400 HP
Kor's Fury: 3,000 HP

And, as a minor side note, I do still want to know exactly what kind of damage this bleeding is. If I may make a suggestion, just make it a special, typeless damage that totally ignores resistances, affinities, you name it.

All good questions… I tried to add some ideas in the form of categories but I haven't thought it all out, clearly.

I would suggest that because the damage has already been acted on before you absorb it, resistances and affinities would be bypassed (as otherwise it would be double-dipping on defense). Thus, the damage type shouldn't matter as they'd all affect you the same. I think.

As for the hit-point issue… yeah, you're right. You would have to absorb at least that much damage and the math would be tricky. I haven't really addressed that yet and I need to… however, I did add some neat (imho) status effects that would allow you to do more damage.

The trick to this class is that you can dish out tons of damage (although I haven't thought of enough offense weapons yet) and you can also use weapons. However, most of the class is oriented around health-regen or shielding situationally to block to big bursts of damage. This is a class that would use a LOT of means of regen or shielding in order to mitigate taking the damage through the bleed OR trying to dish it out as fast as possible in order to avoid the bleed.

Still, very good questions… a lot I haven't thought of yet. I'm hoping the idea is fun enough that people will help… and you are, which is a good sign, and I appreciate it.

[Red]

Other category, 3: Seems lacking use. In any given area, you won't really know what type of damage to expect unless that area features mostly one kind of damage (lightning at Tempest Peak, for instance) and in that case it will only pick up outlier damage, the bulk already being of the element. Maybe just a Premonition style ability, but with damage affinity instead?

Other category, 4: Seems a bit OP. Could be balanced by low duration, high cost, etc. but as it looks right now, a bit OP. Most enemies tend to attack with one element (or one element for 85% of their damage and a few others for the rest), and the ones that do have mutliple often have an even split, so you're still negating half the damage. Just pop this ability in the middle of the fight, and boom, X turns of safety. (Multi-hued wyrms, though. They'll kill you dead.)

Something to try, maybe, is that as a sustain perhaps it requires a certain number of turns to charge? So for the first 5 turns, it does nothing, 6-10 it lasts .2X turns, 11-15 it lasts .4X turns, all the way up to X turns. This way, you have to decide before a battle whether or not to use it. This would make it a good choice if you've got a lot of escort abilities, offense inscriptions, powerful bump attacks, and all the rest that doesn't need pain. It is, in effect, a tradeoff between whether to use pain abilities or gain a nice big ol' defense buff.

As it stands now, you could basically treat it like an active ability instead of a sustain.

And one last thing with ability 4 (One With The Pain?). Make the sustain last until the buff it gives ends. Otherwise, you'll start taking pain damage instead of normal damage as soon as you get hit. (Alternatively, make the buff "Immunity to [damage type] and you take damage like normal peoples for X turns.")