There's really no way to call teleport prior to the hit. Dimensional Anchor could tank continuum_destabilization. Basically making the save terrible. I think it'd still have a small chance of missing though.
I hear what you're saying about banish. I'll give it some thought. Not sure how soon DG wants to release though. May have to wait until 1.31. We'll see.
Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
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Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
If the problem is that enemies save against Banish, so there's no reason to put more points in it, then how about solving the problem directly - you get a bonus to the spellpower check that scales with the Banish talent level.
A problem with Webs of Fate: If damage is displaced onto a target that also has Webs of Fate active, the damage is reflected recursively until it eventually rounds down to zero. The game doesn't crash but it does take a few seconds to crunch through the math.
Also, a minor exploit with paradox tuning and instant-cast spells is to pick the actual paradox level you want, then subtract the cost of Haste, Webs of Fate, and Seal Fate from that as your actual tuning point. All three spells are instant-cast and don't depend on spellpower, so you can cast them at the start of every battle and enter combat with buffs active and no net paradox.
A problem with Webs of Fate: If damage is displaced onto a target that also has Webs of Fate active, the damage is reflected recursively until it eventually rounds down to zero. The game doesn't crash but it does take a few seconds to crunch through the math.
Also, a minor exploit with paradox tuning and instant-cast spells is to pick the actual paradox level you want, then subtract the cost of Haste, Webs of Fate, and Seal Fate from that as your actual tuning point. All three spells are instant-cast and don't depend on spellpower, so you can cast them at the start of every battle and enter combat with buffs active and no net paradox.
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
Fixed Webs of Fate, thanks 
I'll goof around with Banish and Dimensional Anchor tomorrow probably.
I'll goof around with Banish and Dimensional Anchor tomorrow probably.
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
A good idea, but Banish + Dimensional Anchor only is not worth using; you would be doing more damage spamming stuff like Dust to Dust, and that's assuming Banish has a 100% success rate. Warp Mines and Spatial Tether's teleports are integral components of the whole Spacetime Folding machine. You could have Banish increase the spellpower check for the entire tree, like how Warp Mines increases the range for the entire tree, but that basically doubles the class point cost of Dimensional Anchor, which is the only thing that needs to pass that check in the first place-- Mines and Tether both do great damage even if they fail every check.Thasero wrote:If the problem is that enemies save against Banish, so there's no reason to put more points in it, then how about solving the problem directly - you get a bonus to the spellpower check that scales with the Banish talent level.
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
I should add that although I suggested a bonus vs. saves, I almost never see monsters successfully save against my PM. The new paradox scaling makes your spellpower rocket upwards during combat. Testing a Flux PM, I used Attenuate as a main damage dealer because enemies save against it. You don't get to inflict spellshock unless your spell checks a save.
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
I would suggest making warden's focus an attack in the same way as breach is. It's not necessary to have a bonus on it - it can stay 100%. It takes a decent number of shots to pay off the cost of using that one turn in LOS for buffing your attacks against one specific target, making the ability extremely situational. Making it an attack would solve this problem.
While I understand the idea behind blended threads - reward combining ranged and melee attacks - in practice you end up making sure that you at least start combat with the wrong weapon equipped, which is tedious. It gets worse with swift hands which allows you to do this all the time, making it tedious squared. Not to mention that it's dangerously OP, since you get +60% weapon damage for the cost of picking a good prodigy. If combining attacks is the idea, maybe give damage bonus to ranged attacks after using melee and damage bonus to melee after using a bow?
Thread walk in melee form suffers from the same problem as hack and back - it's a disengage that doesn't work if you miss. Thread walk in ranged form is a rush without the benefit of daze or shadowstep without the benefit of , well, doing disgusting amounts of damage. It's very situational and I don't see ever putting more than 1 point in it.
From what I've seen so far it doesn't seem like TWs have the defensive resources to stay in melee combat for long. A number of their defensive abilities - hounds, spatial tether, warp mines - are good for an archery build, not so much for melee. Guardian unity, webs of fate and time shield are neutral, and str as a tertiary stat means that higher levels of heavy armor will be out of reach for a long time. Given how attacking from distance is already inherently safer, this balance means that I just don't see an incentive to pick melee talents at all. If the damage bonus from blended threads is supposed to be the incentive I don't think that's going to work, since I prefer doing less damage to being dead.
While I understand the idea behind blended threads - reward combining ranged and melee attacks - in practice you end up making sure that you at least start combat with the wrong weapon equipped, which is tedious. It gets worse with swift hands which allows you to do this all the time, making it tedious squared. Not to mention that it's dangerously OP, since you get +60% weapon damage for the cost of picking a good prodigy. If combining attacks is the idea, maybe give damage bonus to ranged attacks after using melee and damage bonus to melee after using a bow?
Thread walk in melee form suffers from the same problem as hack and back - it's a disengage that doesn't work if you miss. Thread walk in ranged form is a rush without the benefit of daze or shadowstep without the benefit of , well, doing disgusting amounts of damage. It's very situational and I don't see ever putting more than 1 point in it.
From what I've seen so far it doesn't seem like TWs have the defensive resources to stay in melee combat for long. A number of their defensive abilities - hounds, spatial tether, warp mines - are good for an archery build, not so much for melee. Guardian unity, webs of fate and time shield are neutral, and str as a tertiary stat means that higher levels of heavy armor will be out of reach for a long time. Given how attacking from distance is already inherently safer, this balance means that I just don't see an incentive to pick melee talents at all. If the damage bonus from blended threads is supposed to be the incentive I don't think that's going to work, since I prefer doing less damage to being dead.
<darkgod> all this fine balancing talk is boring
<darkgod> brb buffing boulder throwers
<darkgod> brb buffing boulder throwers
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
I'm going to take a moment to explain myself here because this is a big factor that I take for granted when I talk about useful talents and the things I say about ToME often don't make sense outside of this context.Thasero wrote:I should add that although I suggested a bonus vs. saves, I almost never see monsters successfully save against my PM. The new paradox scaling makes your spellpower rocket upwards during combat. Testing a Flux PM, I used Attenuate as a main damage dealer because enemies save against it. You don't get to inflict spellshock unless your spell checks a save.
Rats vs. Elandars
On any given run, your enemies run a spectrum. On one end, you have your rats, on the other end, you have your Elandars. Basically a scale of lethality. Rat-slaying talents are useless, no matter how good they are at slaying rats, because the Elandars are what kill you, not the rats. How well you can kill rats has no bearing on your run's odds of success. A talent's usefulness is instead determined by its ability to slay Elandars. What are the characteristics of Elandars? High damage, hp, resistance, resistance penetration, stun immunity... and saves. Not all Elandars have all of these traits, but any given Elandar is likely to have quite a few of them. If you're spellshocking something, it is more likely that you are fighting a rat. Thus, talents that require you to pass a save check, or talents that only work well against small amounts of damage per turn, are not as good as talents that ignore saves, or work well against large amounts of damage per turn. They can be good on Normal difficulty, where even Elandar, the literal actual endgame sorcerer boss, is more of a rat than a proper Elandar, but you can't judge a talent's usefulness by that because Normal is a test of basic player knowledge rather than the strength of their build. On Normal your two considerations are is it convenient, and is it cool, and that's pretty much it. The higher in difficulty you go, the more Elandars you face and the stronger the Elandars get, until on Madness, most classes can't beat the Elandars even with their strongest possible build. But even on Nightmare you can run into an Elandar every once in a while.
That's the key. Every once in a while. 99% of the time you're fighting rats, and it's easy to forget to cater your build to Elandars and not to rats because on lower difficulties you're fighting rats pretty much all of the time. Anyway, keeping in mind that you need to build for your Elandar encounters, you'll need a way to damage them. Now, what are you going to pick? A damage skill that hits some Elandars pretty well, but other Elandars not at all depending on their saves, or a damage skill that hits all Elandars no matter what they've got? The former can be useful after you've gotten all of your core talents, but if you want to maximize your chances of winning then you have to focus on the latter. That's not to say that there's no room in a build for any talent that checks saves. Some things are so good when they work, that it's okay for it to be unreliable. Having one stun is useful to all classes, because even though it hits very few Elandars, it shuts them down so incredibly hard that everything else becomes a non-factor. Dimensional Anchor does nothing like this. It does damage. You have lots of other ways of doing damage.
Paradox Mages are almost an interesting case because they're in the unique position of being able to reasonably pump their power to triple digits, but like, Madness Gorbat has 130 spell save and you're just not going to be able to reliably brute force that. Even on Insane, once in a while you'll run into stuff with very, very high saves, and even though these things comprise a tiny fraction of the enemies you run into over the course of the game, they comprise a significant portion of your Elandars.
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
Thanks for this post superminisupermini wrote:I would suggest making warden's focus an attack in the same way as breach is. It's not necessary to have a bonus on it - it can stay 100%. It takes a decent number of shots to pay off the cost of using that one turn in LOS for buffing your attacks against one specific target, making the ability extremely situational. Making it an attack would solve this problem.
While I understand the idea behind blended threads - reward combining ranged and melee attacks - in practice you end up making sure that you at least start combat with the wrong weapon equipped, which is tedious. It gets worse with swift hands which allows you to do this all the time, making it tedious squared. Not to mention that it's dangerously OP, since you get +60% weapon damage for the cost of picking a good prodigy. If combining attacks is the idea, maybe give damage bonus to ranged attacks after using melee and damage bonus to melee after using a bow?
Thread walk in melee form suffers from the same problem as hack and back - it's a disengage that doesn't work if you miss. Thread walk in ranged form is a rush without the benefit of daze or shadowstep without the benefit of , well, doing disgusting amounts of damage. It's very situational and I don't see ever putting more than 1 point in it.
From what I've seen so far it doesn't seem like TWs have the defensive resources to stay in melee combat for long. A number of their defensive abilities - hounds, spatial tether, warp mines - are good for an archery build, not so much for melee. Guardian unity, webs of fate and time shield are neutral, and str as a tertiary stat means that higher levels of heavy armor will be out of reach for a long time. Given how attacking from distance is already inherently safer, this balance means that I just don't see an incentive to pick melee talents at all. If the damage bonus from blended threads is supposed to be the incentive I don't think that's going to work, since I prefer doing less damage to being dead.
It sounds like the biggest issue is melee/ranged disparity.Warden's Focus can be made an attack sure. I also could change the type of bonuses you get based on what weapon you use (atk and crit for the bow, chance to parry for melee?).
Thread Walk I could put a random warp effect on.
Blended Threads we can look at doing something new with. Maybe reduced damage from nearby attackers for two turns when you use a bow-threading talent and bonus damage against distant targets when you use a blade-threading talent?
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
Alright, got a new branch going. Not sure if these changes will make it into 1.3. I'll have to talk to Darkgod.
Anyway I put Out of Phase on Thread-Walk. It still teleports but the cooldown and range are now flat 10s. The main draw for putting points in is the Out of Phase bonuses, which are passive and will apply to all teleports. Voidwalkers rejoice!
Anyway I put Out of Phase on Thread-Walk. It still teleports but the cooldown and range are now flat 10s. The main draw for putting points in is the Out of Phase bonuses, which are passive and will apply to all teleports. Voidwalkers rejoice!
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
I just noticed that Induce Anomaly's paradox reduction can crit. It probably shouldn't crit. Critting is for damage, things with numbers that compare directly against damage (damage shields, healing), and things that need to scale really high in the lategame because of some counteracting diminishing returns factor. Paradox expenditure, however, doesn't really scale at all, and while paradox is sort of compared against damage via Reality Smearing, crit Induce Anomaly restoring hundreds of paradox feels a little over the top. I guess it's good that Flux definitively has the resource management thing on lockdown, giving it a niche compared to Stasis, but in that case it would be better for its power to be shifted from late game to early game, since that is where Time Shield dominates. You can accomplish this by increasing the base paradox recovery on Induce Anomaly, but making it unable to crit.
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
Okay, so banish can now cause a random warp effect. The cooldown is a flat 4 (no more reduced cooldowns when you don't teleport things, it applies continuum destabilization so you can't abuse it forever anyway). Also made it instant. Dimensional Anchor no longer causes a warp effect and just prevents teleport and deals damage. Reduced the cooldown on it to 10. It still dazes and also applies the Anchor immediately on cast so you don't have to wait for the map effect to tick if you're really fast. It also reduces continuum destabilization by 1000 while active (which will tank saves).
Rewrote Blended Threads this morning. Gives bonus damage for two turns to all targets more than two tiles away from you when you hit with melee attacks and reduces damage from enemies that are close to you when you hit with your bow. I decoupled it from Blade Threading/Bow Threading so it will work on any type of hit. My goal here is for the player to be able to Thread Walk in with the bow and be relatively tanky for a couple of turns or Thread Walk out and finish something off.
Thread Walk, as I said above, gives you passive void walker bonuses. The teleport away is set to a flat 10. Cooldown is a flat 10 too. The main scaler here is voidwalk/out of phase and weapon damage. The void walker stuff works on all teleports.
Warden's Focus I also rewrote. It's an attack that deals 120% of weapon damage (no scaling). It now gives +crit and +crit power vs. the target if you're using your bow and chance to parry (repel) if you're using your melee weapons. You get these bonuses regardless of rather or not the attack hits.
Hopefully this will make melee a lot more viable. I can't see giving the class more defense at this point and I'm already worried that I'll have to pull out the nerf bat. But I'll try to focus the nerfs on stuff that's more neutral rather than the new melee buffs. I may have overbuffed Guardian Unity for instance last time I changed it.
Anyway, looking forward to more feedback
Rewrote Blended Threads this morning. Gives bonus damage for two turns to all targets more than two tiles away from you when you hit with melee attacks and reduces damage from enemies that are close to you when you hit with your bow. I decoupled it from Blade Threading/Bow Threading so it will work on any type of hit. My goal here is for the player to be able to Thread Walk in with the bow and be relatively tanky for a couple of turns or Thread Walk out and finish something off.
Thread Walk, as I said above, gives you passive void walker bonuses. The teleport away is set to a flat 10. Cooldown is a flat 10 too. The main scaler here is voidwalk/out of phase and weapon damage. The void walker stuff works on all teleports.
Warden's Focus I also rewrote. It's an attack that deals 120% of weapon damage (no scaling). It now gives +crit and +crit power vs. the target if you're using your bow and chance to parry (repel) if you're using your melee weapons. You get these bonuses regardless of rather or not the attack hits.
Hopefully this will make melee a lot more viable. I can't see giving the class more defense at this point and I'm already worried that I'll have to pull out the nerf bat. But I'll try to focus the nerfs on stuff that's more neutral rather than the new melee buffs. I may have overbuffed Guardian Unity for instance last time I changed it.
Anyway, looking forward to more feedback
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
donkatsu, I should explain a bit about my own context:
I only play on Normal, and I consider a build strong if it can win the post-Dreadfell orc ambush easily.
That's because most actual players of ToME play on Normal, and most actual players of ToME will die in the ambush - indeed, that's the intention of the ambush and the reason you get an achievement for surviving.
You've used Elandar as an example, but most players don't finish the game and wouldn't know who Elandar is unless they searched the wiki So the other 99% of the game is the actual film, and Elandar is bonus content - the deleted scenes in the special edition of the 5th-anniversary re-release of the movie. It doesn't count as part of the game at all for most people, never mind a critical and important part of the game that your character should be built around.
If you find this hard to believe, try watching the death and achievement announcements in chat for a while. The message "So-and-so the level 1 character asked the Eidolon to let him die in peace" will come up more often than the message "So-and-so just earned the achievement for winning the game for the first time!"
It is more common for a player on Normal to die to a rat and quit because the game stopped being fun than it is for a player to even learn that Elandar exists in the game.
Sure, you're using Elandar as an example and you mean the general class of tough monsters that are in the game... but your examples of tough monsters are from high difficulties that most people don't play.
I play on Normal because that is actually the context that's usually missing from discussions on an internal development board of a roguelike - the context of people who aren't supreme experts on the game and who don't min-max everything to the Nth degree. A forum is a collection of the most dedicated and hardcore players, and people who post about a beta are the elite of the elite when it comes to player skill. Skilled min-maxers often take it for granted that the hardest part of the game is the "real" part, and a mechanic that works for the non-hard parts of the game is bad and should be removed.
But that's an argument about tactics, not about fun - and ultimately ToME is a entertainment software for people to enjoy. If it's fun to spellshock rats for 99% of the time but you have to do something else against Elandar... well, so what? A talent that's fun 99% of the time is a great talent. Almost every monster in the game isn't a boss with ridiculously high saves, and yet people enjoy the game, which means, statistically speaking, that they probably enjoy the easy fights.
I would certainly like for the game to work well on Insane/Madness/etc., because crazy players are players too, but I'm OK with not making it a priority. I suspect that some high-difficulty players actually enjoy the way that many tactics break down on higher difficulty; it lets them feel elite and special that they know which builds "really" work against the "real" enemies in the game.
I only play on Normal, and I consider a build strong if it can win the post-Dreadfell orc ambush easily.
That's because most actual players of ToME play on Normal, and most actual players of ToME will die in the ambush - indeed, that's the intention of the ambush and the reason you get an achievement for surviving.
You've used Elandar as an example, but most players don't finish the game and wouldn't know who Elandar is unless they searched the wiki So the other 99% of the game is the actual film, and Elandar is bonus content - the deleted scenes in the special edition of the 5th-anniversary re-release of the movie. It doesn't count as part of the game at all for most people, never mind a critical and important part of the game that your character should be built around.
If you find this hard to believe, try watching the death and achievement announcements in chat for a while. The message "So-and-so the level 1 character asked the Eidolon to let him die in peace" will come up more often than the message "So-and-so just earned the achievement for winning the game for the first time!"
It is more common for a player on Normal to die to a rat and quit because the game stopped being fun than it is for a player to even learn that Elandar exists in the game.
Sure, you're using Elandar as an example and you mean the general class of tough monsters that are in the game... but your examples of tough monsters are from high difficulties that most people don't play.
I play on Normal because that is actually the context that's usually missing from discussions on an internal development board of a roguelike - the context of people who aren't supreme experts on the game and who don't min-max everything to the Nth degree. A forum is a collection of the most dedicated and hardcore players, and people who post about a beta are the elite of the elite when it comes to player skill. Skilled min-maxers often take it for granted that the hardest part of the game is the "real" part, and a mechanic that works for the non-hard parts of the game is bad and should be removed.
But that's an argument about tactics, not about fun - and ultimately ToME is a entertainment software for people to enjoy. If it's fun to spellshock rats for 99% of the time but you have to do something else against Elandar... well, so what? A talent that's fun 99% of the time is a great talent. Almost every monster in the game isn't a boss with ridiculously high saves, and yet people enjoy the game, which means, statistically speaking, that they probably enjoy the easy fights.
I would certainly like for the game to work well on Insane/Madness/etc., because crazy players are players too, but I'm OK with not making it a priority. I suspect that some high-difficulty players actually enjoy the way that many tactics break down on higher difficulty; it lets them feel elite and special that they know which builds "really" work against the "real" enemies in the game.
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
Most of those level 1 guys asking the eidolon to let them die are prob from the higher difficulties, I wound up doing that at least 20 times earlier today trying to get rogue/marauder off the ground before I caved and bought a mindblast torque 
20:23 DarkGod: googina .. hum
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
One of my design goals is to make the classes viable on nightmare+ without introducing super dangerous rares into the game.
I also play on normal and love Attenuate. I'll probably put some instakill on it so it kills popcorn mobs even better and justifies the spellsave a bit more. I don't intend to start pulling saves off of everything for the sake of higher difficulties but in the case of Dimensional Anchor, they've already failed one save against the Anchor, requiring another one on top of that to deal damage (and one that factors in continuum destabilization at that) really wasn't helping Banish out.
And I really want Banish/Anchor to shine.
Anyway I value both of your inputs and perspectives Thasero and Donkatsu
Now go play beta3! (Unless you're attached to your character, because I may have broken your saves)
I also play on normal and love Attenuate. I'll probably put some instakill on it so it kills popcorn mobs even better and justifies the spellsave a bit more. I don't intend to start pulling saves off of everything for the sake of higher difficulties but in the case of Dimensional Anchor, they've already failed one save against the Anchor, requiring another one on top of that to deal damage (and one that factors in continuum destabilization at that) really wasn't helping Banish out.
And I really want Banish/Anchor to shine.
Anyway I value both of your inputs and perspectives Thasero and Donkatsu
Now go play beta3! (Unless you're attached to your character, because I may have broken your saves)
Re: Playtesters needed! (1.3 Chronomancers)
Having given it some thought, I would like to petition for the damage cap on Matter Weaving to be removed altogether. Anything with stunres is pretty good anyway, and there's no way to make the damage cap useful on Normal without making it imbalanced on higher difficulties.