Exotic mastery rework

[AlexMdle]

PureQuestion: and there are like 10 whips that no one ever uses
Micro_skills: Can I quote that?
PureQuestion: why bother
PureQuestion: everyone is aware
Micro_skills: Can I quote THAT?

Exotic weapons are, in general, never worth considering, except like, late-game tridents.(Source: Pure's infinite wisdom)
Exotic mastery eats extra points for something that it really shouldn't.

My proporsal is to replace the exotic mastery as a mastery, with exotic mastery as a prerequisite to use exotic items, same way you are required to know the 'shoot' talent to be able to use bows and slings.

How is it aquired?

Maybe as an alchemist potion?

Trained?

My favourite would be if it was an additional reward for the Derth arena, or maybe the Derth Arena could have a Round 2, after you clear out Derth, with a stronger lineup of enemies.

What do you think?

[cctobias]

Exotic Weapons Mastery needs to be obtainable in some non-random, non-prodigy way. Right now it only obtainable via a warrior escort and you can only put points in it that way or taking Legacy of Naloren.

It clearly needs to work more like staff/mindstar.

As for the require to use this seems backwards to me. Almost no one uses exotic weapon right now, this would make them used less. I don't see how that is good, especially since whips can be somewhat nice offhands in some cases.

Also you would need to rework legacy of Naloren, one of its main advantages is 5 "free" mastery points so that the trident is actually comparable in damage (or better if you get some warrior escorts).

The only problem I have with exotic weapons, atm, is that unless you get super "lucky" or blow a prodigy you will almost certainly suck at them and this game really doesn't work that way. This isn't DCSS where if you happen to get some skill by some special means you can then develop it on your own by using it. A trident is not much different than a two handed axe but 99% of the time vastly inferior simply because you don't have as good of a mastery and may have no real recourse to obtain such a thing. So people just dismiss the option entirely because its simply impractical, not ineffective.

Whereas on SB staff builds I have juggled points into and out of daggers/acc until I could buy staff and it all worked out fine and I didn't "waste" points on dagger OR accuracy (channel staff needs no acc).

[Doctornull]

How do you feel about the solution I implemented in Nulltweaks?

[cctobias]

How do you feel about the solution I implemented in Nulltweaks?

Specifically commenting on:

"Adds Agile Mastery - full effectiveness mastery of Knives and Whips; requires Dexterity.
Adds Greatweapon Mastery - full effectiveness mastery of Axes, Maces, Swords and Tridents; requires Strength. This talent is granted by the Warrior Escort and the prodigy Legacy of the Naloren in place of Exotic Weapons Mastery."


I haven't used it in game, but conceptually its better. Whips and tridents are in no way related. Exotic weapons as a class are a poor leftover from old D&D proficiency system that sucked to begin with, IMO. It pissed me off to no end that a Katana was "exotic", give me a frigging break. If I can wield a sabre and a bastard sword I can damn well use a katana, maybe I won't be doing it in a "kendo" style, but I can damn well slice with a curved blade just fine thank you.

These classification systems for weapon are always very imperfect. Whips really fit with nothing else. Using a whip is unique even compared to its closest cousin; a flail. Dagger skill in no way transfers to whips. Similarly using a greatsword is just not the same as a pole arm, the methods used to guard are quite different and the consequences of grip are always very important.

One way of another you basically wind up with either two many categories or some silly associations. But certainly dagger and whips together makes more sense than tridents and whips (without some sort of cultural argument rather than pure body mechanics).

Game mechanics wise, I don't really know the reasoning behind the existence of exotic. It could pretty obviously be taken out and folded into lines. They don't actually seem special though. Whips are mostly just some funky artifacts with some novel abilties. But there are plenty of swords and daggers that fit that bill (silent blade for example or morrigan). And tridents are just another two handers, I believe they have the same str based multiplier even. Maybe its just there for some flavor and just for the hell of it. And these few exotic artifacts are just there to troll us. I dunno. I mean its sort of the nature of the game to get trolled by equipment drops, I only get Ebon blade dagger on non-stealth characters.

I think the least intrusive thing to do is to simply add an exotic weapon trainer somewhere that is the same as staff (two mopney based unlocks etc) and I would say it should be in the west (with possible duplicate in east) so that people can get it early enough to not have to juggle points for 30 levels.

But even here when we really think about it, the only way I have truly though of being able to take advanatage of this on a character that was not a throw away lark, would be to vault artifact whips and then take legacy of naloren later. It is super super unlikely you will get the exotic weapons you want on some random run. And if you just happen to find say a nice tier 3 whip like stormlash (I think I have the tier right) at level 15 (which has happened to me). You still may never get another decent exotic weapon, although you can certainly get some tridents by going to naga area.

I mean in the end exotic weapons are really just one gigantic extremely unlikely corner case as it stands.

My initial take is to always go with the least intrusive thing. But in reality when you look at how it plays out its better to do your solution, because the itemization for exotic just backs a character into a rather bad corner.

However it would also make Legacy of the Naloren really good because I believe that adds onto your current skill amount and you you most likely wind up with 10 talent in great weapon. Right now the relative inability to get exotic outside of lucky escorts is a dampening factor on that.

[grayswandir]

I'd like to see masteries that bleed into other categories. Like, for instance, let tridents use weapons mastery at 70% effectiveness, and let normal weapons use exotic mastery at 70% as well. That'd let you specialize in one category, but using weapons from the other category would still be viable if you had to.

[HousePet]

Well I don't like the whole weapon type based masteries at all.

[Razakai]

Imo exotic weapons are rare enough that they shouldn't really need a special mastery. Except for Legacy, it's pretty difficult to guarantee finding a good artifact whip/trident so having to juggle around points or leaving yourself with a useless mastery is bad.
Then again, I don't like weapon mastery stuff in general. Another reason the new Temporal Warden is great.

[Galax, the Trashman]

Bow and sling mastery are the first talent in their respective category tree.

Perhaps the same could be done with exotic weapons?
Add 3 more skills to form the tree and make it unlockable at 1.00 mastery via some mean, like the Arena.

Or even better! A trainer in Shatur! It has nothing of interest, unlike Derth, Elvala and Last Hope which have the alchemist quests.
I'm even surprised I know the name of that town.

[Delmuir]

Or even better! A trainer in Shatur! It has nothing of interest, unlike Derth, Elvala and Last Hope which have the alchemist quests.
I'm even surprised I know the name of that town.

I couldn't agree more about Shatur, although I actually think that to some degree, Exotic Weapons mastery is bloat. What's the point? Why not just eliminate it and move it into weapon's mastery?

That's just my opinion...

Now, about Shatur having something of interest… I think that's a fantastic idea!

[Zonk]

Bump/necro, but I agree having Exotic mastery does not really add much to the game so I don't see how removing it would be a significant loss. While the gain would be obvious (more weapons that are useful to more characters!)

[Effigy]

Bump. I really want to use whips, but it's not practical in the current state of the game. Basically, two things need to happen:
1. Either make Exotic Mastery buyable from an NPC somewhere, or (better yet) just get rid of Exotic Mastery and make the exotic weapons affected by the standard masteries.
2. Make exotic weapons spawn as random drops, albeit less commonly than standard weapons. Right now you have to kill naga to get tridents, and as far as I know there's no way to get whips apart from fixedart drops. You should be able to purchase randart exotics from the merchant as well.

These weapons are really cool and would add more flavor to the game if you could actually use them without bending over backwards.

[Dracos]

http://te4.org/characters/129906/tome/8 ... 9cf16cb925

I wish I had known this. It may have been game changing

Joking aside though, I do agree Exotic Weapons are done poorly, even though I've done a winning run with Whips and with Tridents, both builds were a little luck and enabled by knowing I could vault myself the equipment needed (And tridents don't even have to.)

Both benefitted quite a bit from the massive exotic weapons modifier, which is pretty neat and a cool benefit to working your build around it.

Issues in simple:
1)It's entirely random whether you can get exotic weapons without a strength prodigy (or a giant stack of magic str boosters). As one of them is primarily dex based, that's unfortunate.
2)While tridents can randomly be gotten, whips are effectively non-present outside of standarts. Early whips especially go maligned since its very unlikely to have the proficiency to use them by the time at T1 whip art shows up.
3)Waiting for it requires playing a pretty aggressive shuffling game for much of the early game.
4)Technically, the reward for pulling it off is kinda huge. I like since it makes for an exciting 'it comes together', but it's the only way you start seeing skill levels in the 15-25 range on a character, and you totally do see them.

A trainer in Shatur would be great (poor town has nothing).