Nullpack 2019-02-21: Gravitic Infantry

[Doctornull]

Fixes:
- Blood Spear staff effects only trigger for actual staves.
- Some numbers tweaked for balance.

New Exciting Stuff:
- Tweaked Fire Alchemy: now Body of Fire does not cost mana to sustain, and when Body of Fire and Fire Infusion are sustained, your bombs clear magical and physical debuffs from your golem.
- Toxic Alchemy: physical explosions which inflict poison, and buff your golem with resistances and speed.
- Solar Alchemy: light explosions which blind and buff your golem with healing and shields.
- War Alchemy: ally-friendly attacks which synergize with many different Alchemical Infusions.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
All the new Alchemist stuff is hidden behind an option in the Gameplay section. Enable it when you are ready to start a new game, and not in the middle of a game.

Changing the option in the middle of a game can and will crash ToME.

[Doctornull]

Just pushed some fixes to the Alchemy stuff.

Notably now the 4th Toxic Alchemy talent is an area effect which inflicts Acid damage and poisons on enemies, and removes Magical and Physical effects from allies.

Hopefully I didn't break anything.

[daed4]

Whenever I mouse over the 5/5 it blows up.
The trigger was leveling to 13, opening the level up after opening staff combat at 10.
I went to level up the 4th thunderstrike to level 2 and the 3rd staff combat went crazy and shown in golden borders with 0/5 and error was given (pic, the same) then when I opened again, I got pic related.

[Doctornull]

Whenever I mouse over the 5/5 it blows up.
The trigger was leveling to 13, opening the level up after opening staff combat at 10.
I went to level up the 4th thunderstrike to level 2 and the 3rd staff combat went crazy and shown in golden borders with 0/5 and error was given (pic, the same) then when I opened again, I got pic related.

Can you link to your character?

The talent is trying to describe your staff's current elemental damage type and it's failing, so I need to know what kind of staff you have.

[daed4]

Penitence, the artifact one.
Makes normal strikes before 100% physical too.

[Doctornull]

Penitence, the artifact one.
Makes normal strikes before 100% physical too.

Back in 1.2 they changed how Staff damage works, but some artifacts didn't get updated to use the new system. Penitence is an example of the old system.

I've added a work-around so even bad old code like Penitence should work now.

Thanks for the report!

[daed4]

Great (still faulted for the heck of it) and discovered another bug, if you died with pestilence on, the game would bug out, leaving you in a infi-time loop where you can't exit (terminate the process), not relevant, but hilarious.

And a last thing, can you use both postures? Relentless and defensive, if not it should be said (for the deaf, like moi)

[Doctornull]

Great (still faulted for the heck of it) and discovered another bug, if you died with pestilence on, the game would bug out, leaving you in a infi-time loop where you can't exit (terminate the process), not relevant, but hilarious.

"Pestilence"? You mean Penitence the staff?

If you have your te4_log.txt from that game, and you post it, I could take a look.

And a last thing, can you use both postures? Relentless and defensive, if not it should be said (for the deaf, like moi)

You can.

In 1.3 there's a better mechanism for making postures auto-cancel each other, so I'll be improving both postures and making them cancel each other.

Thanks!

[ProfessorCirno]

A general question for anyone who's played with it; what classes have you enjoyed and where do you feel they sat balance wise? I tried out PSI-PUNCHER for a bit and found it was, as previously mentioned, extremely OP, with my only deaths really coming at Ata due in part to my own carelessness.

[Doctornull]

A general question for anyone who's played with it; what classes have you enjoyed and where do you feel they sat balance wise? I tried out PSI-PUNCHER for a bit and found it was, as previously mentioned, extremely OP, with my only deaths really coming at Ata due in part to my own carelessness.

Yeah the PSIPUNCHER was written before the huge 1.2 Mindslayer and Brawler buffs, and it shows.

Right now for balance and fun I'd suggest:
- Flenser
- Creep
- Striker
- Stormwarden
- Heavy

[Doctornull]

Updates: Changed the Blood Mage trees
- Replaced Woe Pyre with Pyre Gate: teleport to burning or diseased foe and cause an explosion (fire and/or diseased blood)
- Replaced Plague Gate with Reaping Strike: melee attack at range which deals more damage per disease on your foe, lowered the CD and the cost and removed the teleportation effect. If you kill your foe, it explodes; if not, you extend the duration of all diseases and poisons on the target.
- Reduced the Vim cost of Balefire to 4 (was 10).

[marshmallowpeep]

Pyre Gate tooltip says it does X damage per turn for 10 turns, but instead it does 5X damage when you cast it and then .5X per turn for 10 turns. It's better that way than if it actually did what the tooltip says; I'm not sure I'd bother burning enemies before using it for just the relatively weak DoT.

Other than that little bug, I was loving both of the new skills. Just having the one extra semi-reliable source of disease from pyre gate makes the "more damage per disease" component on reaping strike much easier to use than the previous version.

[Doctornull]

Pyre Gate tooltip says it does X damage per turn for 10 turns, but instead it does 5X damage when you cast it and then .5X per turn for 10 turns. It's better that way than if it actually did what the tooltip says; I'm not sure I'd bother burning enemies before using it for just the relatively weak DoT.

Thanks for finding that! Yeah I changed the fire explosion to deal more up-front damage because the Blight explosion seemed relatively too much better otherwise, but I forgot to change the info text.

Fix posted.

Other than that little bug, I was loving both of the new skills. Just having the one extra semi-reliable source of disease from pyre gate makes the "more damage per disease" component on reaping strike much easier to use than the previous version.

Excellent.

[daed4]

Right now for balance and fun I'd suggest:
- Flenser
- Creep
- Striker
- Stormwarden
- Heavy

Questions galore about this (personally I think the new defilers are bland to the point of shity, SPECIALLY flenser)

My questions as it follows:
1. How you play or supposed to play flenser and creep, since I think flenser should get a way to use his cun or his mag or even con instead of str (4-5 stats is spreading just too thin for what he does and some more personalized abilities to heal and up and etc... since I feel it's just too bland to only have 1 personal tree, but that's me)
2. Some synergy between life-paying for stuff and the bloodguys like the barbarian thing has, it would make the worst and most awful resource usage less awful (maybe life for vim passive)
3. Maybe a buff to the various staff weapon users since after the staff nerf they feel like hitting with wet noodles covered in love
Well, not galore just that for now.

[Doctornull]

1. How you play or supposed to play flenser and creep, since I think flenser should get a way to use his cun or his mag or even con instead of str (4-5 stats is spreading just too thin for what he does and some more personalized abilities to heal and up and etc... since I feel it's just too bland to only have 1 personal tree, but that's me)

Flenser benefits from Crits, so Cunning is rewarded there.

Daggers are half Dex, half Str, so you're able to deal decent damage even if you ignore Strength... but as a Flenser you're expected to be double or even triple moving your opponent thanks to stacking Momentum, Slow, Stun and Cripple.

Creep can stack a lot of damage buffs, especially Creeping Darkness.

But yeah, if you do build Strength (maybe through gear), that will also be rewarded for both classes, but people have won the game with a Flenser without buffing Strength much.

2. Some synergy between life-paying for stuff and the bloodguys like the barbarian thing has, it would make the worst and most awful resource usage less awful (maybe life for vim passive)

Not sure what you're asking about here.

3. Maybe a buff to the various staff weapon users since after the staff nerf they feel like hitting with wet noodles covered in love
Well, not galore just that for now.

Blood Mage will get a staff buff when the hook appears in 1.3, the code is in place already for that. You'll get +20% Con added to the current 80% Mag, so you'll get 100% total.

When 1.3 drops I may increase that to 40% Con for 120% total, to be equal to other two-handed weapons.

I'm planning to re-write Ascetic to have some new trees now that multiple Mastery talents are viable.