Luminosity Anorithil Rework: feedback appreciated.

[Red]

Perhaps if you programmed a tooltip that pops up when coding a tooltip to remind you to doublecheck your work on it...

Little errors aside, this is fantastic.

[donkatsu]

-Shadow Simulacrum seems to get more damage with more luminosity, even though the tooltip says it benefits from negative luminosity.
-Every once in a while when I level up, before I even spend my stat/class/generic points, my luminosity capacity seems to go down by 20 from both sides. Sometimes it comes back, sometimes it stays and stacks with the -20 from the next levelup. I have only Hymn of Shadows sustained.
-Design wise this looks really really good! I especially like Blinding Blast.

[0player]

Completely not sure about the last thing. Are you sure it doesn't just jump back and forth for a moment? Can you post your levels/maximums?

[donkatsu]

I stopped when it stacked. Level 11, +/-56 without sustains and 1/5 Blood Red Moon. +/-36 with a Chant and a Hymn.

I'll do another run to level 10, watching my levels more closely next time.

[0player]

This is indeed 20 less than it should be. Peculiar, I'll look into it. Shouldn't really happen, to be honest.

[donkatsu]

I leveled up to 9 with 1/5 Blood Red Moon and not activating any sustains. Luminosity increase happened normally, going up 1 per level, except when I got 2 due to Blood Red Moon and rounding. At level 9, I activated Hymn of Perseverance and kept it on. Upon leveling up to 10, I had +70/70 luminosity, and it stayed there. Upon leveling up to level 11, I had +66/66 luminosity, and it also stayed.

[0player]

Unable to reproduce. Any other addons you have enabled?

[donkatsu]

Nope.

[0player]

Er, were you perchance witnessing the bar just switch between positive/negative mode, thus displaying different maxima?
Sorry for throwing silly suggestions, but I'm trying really hard to reproduce this, yet not succeeding.
Edit: also, your numbers seem weird. With sustain, you should have around 54 max negative lumi at level 9 and 55 at level 10, definitely not 70.
If you could post per-level values, I would be utmost grateful.

[donkatsu]

Don't worry about it, this is just how the troubleshooting process goes. Nah, whenever it happened, I verified a couple of things:

-Rest
-Tried every setting on Heavenly Attunement
-Sustaining and unsustaining all talents
-Restart the game
-Put points into and remove points from sustains
-Recall

I vaguely remember some of these having some sort of effect on the temporary fluctuation before I started getting scientific and recording everything I was doing.

Just completed fourth run to level 10, and nothing happened. Ended with 75 max on both ends. This time, I turned on both a chant and a hymn at level 1, chose Higher instead of Shalore, and stayed attuned to the Moons instead of the Sun.

Edit to your edit: Yeah, I've only been posting the unusual numbers until now.

[0player]

Nevermind, I'm an idiot, it was an issue with Twilight.
New release:
- Twilight can no longer cause your luminosity rating to go below zero.
- You no longer are reset to your attunement on level up, it proved frustrating at times.

[donkatsu]

Bugs:

-Starfall says it can do negative damage when I'm at max positive luminosity, although it's positive by the time I get down to where I can actually use it. Maybe doesn't need to be changed.
-Shadow Simulacrum still scales backwards (stronger at high luminosity, weaker at low luminosity)
-Blazing Blast and Lunacy are missing level requirements
-Jumpgate Two: Teleport to throws Lua error "attempt to perform arithmetic on local x (a nil value)"
-Hitting escape to cancel out of Lunacy throws Lua error "bad argument"

At this point I would say that the resource works perfectly. It's interesting, not tedious, and -completely- different from any other resource. A couple of things that are awkward about the current set of talents:

-Moonlight Ray's range 10 is sort of wasted because it is the only thing an Anorithil can actually do at range 10. Would be nice to have at least one more range 10 spell, preferably a suite of them, since everything else is range 2-5.
-Positive luminosity is far easier to maintain than negative luminosity due to the Light tree and no equivalent tree (scales with neg, lowers luminosity, and is cast fairly often) for the negative side.
-The positive side gets two free always-on sustains, Jumpgate and a Hymn. The negative side only gets a Chant. There is Darkest Light but it's something that is only on for a couple of turns, not something that stays on.
-Defensively, the negative side mainly gets three things to make up for a weakened, costly Light tree: practically permanent confuse, practically permanent stun, and more defense from Circle of Shifting Shadows. None of these are universally applicable like Bathe in Light. I would ask for some form of universally helpful damage-reducing debuff that scales with negative luminosity and doesn't check any immunities or saves, like how two-handed Sun Paladins have Absorption Strike to make up for lacking Shield of Light and Retribution. This could replace either the confusion on Lunacy or the stun on Starfall.

Concrete suggestions:

Range 7 Shadow Blast, Lunacy, and Starfall (reaches range 9 and 10 with radius 3)
Sustain luminosity cost -10 on each Jumpgate (adds up to -20 when you sustain both)
+Resist and -effect duration for 5 turns when using Jumpgate: Teleport to. Scales with negative luminosity.
Jumpgate: Teleport to decreases luminosity instead of increasing it. Makes Jumpgate a sort of negative counterpart to Light, and gives the negative side an admittedly Chronomancer-ish playstyle of jumping back and forth and tossing out long range spells.
Instead of stun, Starfall inflicts Numbing Darkness, reducing damage by 40%. Same duration, doesn't check saves.

[0player]

Sorry about the range, but: most AoE things have effective range more than 5 already, and Moonlight Ray being the only range 10 is completely intended. It's so that you don't have to kite dangerous enemies with wands alone, since you're quite soft and squishy.
Don't worry, jumpgate is getting reworked anyway, so all concerns about it will be in vain soon.
I'll think about Numbing Darkness, good point.

[donkatsu]

Currently, without other range 10 spells to support it, casting Moonlight Ray at range 10 is not a significant benefit outside of kiting situations (and if you're successfully kiting then damage does not matter that much anyway). With range out of the picture, the important difference that remains between Moonlight Ray and Searing Light is area: Moonlight Ray is a beam, Searing Light gets a DoT instead. The thing is that the DoT is huge, more than the base damage of the spell, and once you get Spydric Poison and/or Circle of Warding it's pretty easy to leverage. I think it's a lot better than Moonlight Ray's beam. If you want to hit a lot of things at once, both the Sun and the Moons have better options.

I don't think perfect symmetry is required, but between Searing Light being better in most situations, and the Light tree, the Moons are handily outclassed right now.

By the way, while we're on the subject, I'd like to get the lore of Maj'Eyal's astronomy straight. Anorithil tree descriptions mention a singular Moon. The Pendant of the Sun and Moons mention, obviously, multiple moons, as does Heavenly Attunement. The question is, do Anorithils worship more than one moon? How many moons orbit Maj'Eyal? These are important questions.

[0player]

There are two moons orbiting Maj'Eyal, their highest points in the sky almost coinciding with solstices (Summertide and Wintertide). They are called Altia and Felia, or Summertide and Wintertide sometimes too, apparently.
Anorithils channel whatever's in the sky.
However, singular "moon" occurs a lot, and is used a lot. Since two moons never meet, one might assume that this just means "the current moon".
I will point out that Moonlight Ray is still solid damage, and is crazy useful in early game.
I really don't think it's bad.