Celestial Resource Final Thread

[Red]

Luminosity, by Donkatsu

Luminosity: (n) The relative quantity of radiation emitted by a celestial source (as a star)
Might need a different name due to Sun infusion's Luminosity effect, but honestly that effect is pretty lame anyway. That's a whole different can of worms though. Let's just consider this a working name for now. Obviously there are a lot of Anorithil talents that could use some work, to make them more useful or interesting, but these are just minimal changes that would be necessary to make the new resource system work.

New resource: Luminosity.
-New name for positive energy
-Negative energy costs are changed to actual negative luminosity costs.
-Former negative energy sustains now increase your luminosity floor; former positive energy sustains still decrease your luminosity ceiling.
-Everyone with a luminosity bar regains +0.5 per turn, instead of decaying. Sun Paladins no longer need to autocast outside of combat to keep a full bar but otherwise stay the same. Taking Chants or Light escort trees makes you vulnerable to manaburn damage, if you weren't already. Former positive energy sustains can now be shut down with manaburn.
-You can't use spells that cost luminosity if your luminosity is at its minimum, but you can still use spells that cost negative luminosity (ie generate it) if your luminosity is at its maximum.

Complete rewrite: Twilight
Use mode: Sustain
Talent description: Passively allows your luminosity to become negative, with the same negative capacity as your current positive capacity (before sustains). The effects of Chants, Light, Glyphs and Sun talents receive a bonus or penalty proportional to your current luminosity, while the effects of Hymns, Eclipse, Star Fury, and other Twilight talents receive a bonus or penalty proportional to your current negative luminosity. Activate the sustain to set your resting luminosity level and prevent the natural luminosity gain. Further points in Twilight increase your luminosity-based bonuses by X%.

Comments: The sustain part is like Spacetime Tuning, but most of the effects are passive. The bonus/penalty is a multiplier that scales with current luminosity divided by max luminosity. The final bonus or penalty from Twilight is capped at a certain percentage (50%? 100%? Something in between?), or at least give it severely diminishing returns so you don't end up with NPCs with Moonlight Rays that deal a million damage. It would be nice if the talent descriptions for the affected talents took Twilight and the user's current luminosity into account, like Shield Expertise.

Minor tweak: Jumpgate
No longer has a maximum range, instead has an accuracy radius that scales with talent level. Starts out rather large, like on the order of 50 (pretty much the entire map). No more constantly sustaining and unsustaining Jumpgate as you autoexplore, just set it at the start of the level. I promised minimal changes but man is Jumpgate such a hassle to use right now.

Minor tweak: Twilight Surge
Luminosity cost: -20
If your luminosity is negative, Twilight Surge's luminosity cost becomes positive.

Minor tweak: Corona
Generates only shadow bolts at negative luminosity, and light bolts at positive luminosity. Only activates if your luminosity is between -X and +X, where X increases with talent level. Coronas are intersections of darkness and light, and this mechanic thematically encourages balance.

Minor tweak: Circle of Sanctity
Luminosity cost: 10

Minor tweak: Circle of Warding
Luminosity cost: -10

Minor tweak: Darkest Light
Generates luminosity each turn. When your luminosity reaches its maximum or you deactivate the talent, your luminosity is lowered to its minimum and does damage based on the luminosity lost. Does not disable your sustains. Replaces the old Twilight as a way to recover a large amount of negative energy all at once.

Minor tweak: Searing Light
Luminosity cost: 10
Cooldown: 3
Increase damage so that the initial hit matches Moonlight Ray. The DoT is Searing Light's advantage. Range and beam coverage is Moonlight Ray's.

Minor tweak: Sun Flare
Luminosity cost: 15
Cooldown: 18
Blind duration matches Flameshock's duration, to compensate for lower cooldown. Deals damage at all talent levels instead of requiring level 3.

Minor tweak: Firebeam
Luminosity Cost: 20
Cooldown: 7
Deals half fireburn and half light damage. Rolls for crit twice, like Dust to Dust. Increase damage to match Flame.

Minor tweak: Sunburst
Luminosity Cost: 40
Cooldown: 15
Increase damage to match Flame. Cost is doubled, giving it a niche as a quick way to shift from positive to negative, when desired.

Minor tweak: Starfall
Luminosity Cost: -40
Cooldown: 12
Cost is doubled, giving it an additional niche as a quick way to shift from negative to positive when desired.

Final comments:
Ultimately, you have three choices. 1.) Specialize in darkness damage, setting your Twilight level to its minimum and only using Sun spells to keep your darkness spells powered up. This also gives you better utility from the Eclipse tree. 2.) Specialize in light damage, in which case you don't need to sustain Twilight at all (but you can still benefit from its passive effects). Only use Star fury spells to keep your light spells powered up. This has the utility benefit of powering up your Light tree. 3.) Specialize in a balance, setting your Twilight level to 0, bouncing back and forth between positive and negative, allowing your light and dark spells to power each other up. This choice is supported by Corona, which only works within a certain range centered at 0.

Luminosity has someone coding it at this point, so let's focus on it exclusively. Thank you to 0player for taking up the programming, and thank you to donkatsu for the idea.

[sarracht]

To be clear, I only offered my system as a very general outline. I think donkatsu's Luminosity system is a much more concrete implementation of the basic idea I was going for, so I would suggest that my option be removed from the poll, or that any votes for my system be counted toward donkatsu's tally. At this point we're largely voting on general frameworks that can be filled out and refined, not complete implementations.

[Red]

Right you are. Poll has been changed (and erased your vote, so you'll need to recast it).

I'm well aware none of these systems are a finished design, but because they're all rather different directions, it will hopefully direct all these creative efforts towards a more focused goal.

[Davion Fuxa]

I haven't really bothered to follow any of these topics but donkatsu's proposal looks the best. Having a single resource for Celestial Energy and having it slide with casting looks like a cool idea. Keeping a ceiling in place means that eventually you can't cast your spells anymore after a certain point - which keeps it separate from the likes of Equilibrium.

I would however that in the case of Barrier from Celestial/Light that it may need a slight rework with this change. As it is now, one gameplay advantage of that talent when picking up the Celestial/Light category from Escorts is that you can autocast Barrier specifically so that you can walk into some of your fights with a Damage Shield active. Something that might be done to address this though is simply turning Barrier into a Sustain - and when you lose your Damage Shield it goes on Cooldown.

[Red]

That would be a bit of a buff to Barrier and by extension the Light tree, which I think we can agree doesn't need it. As it stands, the Barrier disadvantage is that it takes a turn to cast, so putting it on as a sustain gets rid of that.

In addition, it also hurts its utility. As a Sun Paladin, it can be really beneficial to pop Barrier in the middle of a fight. You get extra positive energy to run Shield of Light and heal, as well as being able to power up Barrier itself with your Weapon of Light. While Anorithils might not have that functionality, I think Barrier works fine as it is under any new system. It's a powerful, energy restoring shield that takes a turn to cast.

[MalReynolds]

Just want this settled. I played an anorithil quite a while back, and swore never to again until something changed.

One idea on Jumpgate, to make the usage both interesting and non-hasslesome: can it be a sort of Jumpbackgate? Every six turns, it turnlessly puts a jumpspot exactly where you *were* standing X turns ago. That way you are constantly setting up a retreat to a place which is putatively better than where you are now. There may be some sub-talents ((i) delay putting down jumpgate; (ii) put down jumpgate now) or something to fine tune where you want it in critical situations. Or it may just be a forced drop point every X turns. Just a thought.

[Red]

In Luminosity, the idea was that instead of a maximum range, Jumpgate now has an accuracy radius. So you can plop it down and explore as much as you want without sustaining/unsustaining all the time. I think that'd work a bit better than just six turns back, especially because there's a chance you could stand still for six turns and then you're just screwed.

To clarify what I think would work best (Donkatsu didn't put down a ton of detail), Jumpgate would work like this: You place down a Jumpgate by activating the sustain. This has infinite range, but accuracy is dependent on range. At talent level 1, it has an accuracy radius equal to the distance you are from it (1 square away means radius 1 accuracy, 50 squares away means 50 radius accuracy. Basically a teleport in that case) and it scales down with level, to something like 20% of the (distance-10) you are from the Jumpgate. This gives you perfect accuracy between 0 and 10 squares away, and even at 50 squares away it's only a radius 8 accuracy teleport. This would let you have a totally reliable escape just by sustaining at the start of each level.

[Doctornull]

Did someone agree to actually code up whatever gets the most votes?

Or is this one of those "entertainment value only" polls?

[Red]

I set this up to try to figure out which one was thought of as best, and if the margin was big enough then everyone who's been working on several separate systems in the threads can focus their efforts towards one system. I cannot code, so I can't handle whichever one wins, but if you'd be willing to volunteer to code up the winner that'd be fantastic.

So it's not an official coding poll and it's not entertainment. It's to try to get everyone working together on one goal instead of many.

[HousePet]

My opinion is that all of these system make effectively cosmetic changes to the resources which provide no significant improvement. They all have pretty much the same topology as the current system (You can produce the same mechanics with the current system by altering the talent costs and decay rates).
There are however, a lot of good ideas for improving the talents and making the resources do interesting things.
Resource bars are a tiny fraction of the overall class mechanics and all the interesting stuff happens in the talents.
I think we are wasting effort trying to alter something with is really only governed by a few numbers somewhere, when we should be focussing on the talents.

Also, I'm mildly sad my suggestion for keeping the original system but nuking Twilight wasn't mentioned in the thread.

[Doctornull]

Also, I'm mildly sad my suggestion for keeping the original system but nuking Twilight wasn't mentioned in the thread.

The obvious solution is to just make another thread with your own poll in it.

[Davion Fuxa]

Really, I thought the obvious solution is for Housepet to make a new thread with a link to his associated addon.

[HousePet]

I've been at a conference all week, I haven't had time to code.

[Red]

Updated with HousePet's changes. Votes have been reset, so make sure to cast your vote again.

[malboro_urchin]

A question for HousePet: how would your ideas for talent changes affect current Anorithil (read: Corona) builds?