1.3 Chrono Feedback and todo list

[edge2054]

Figured I'd start a thread that people could contribute their suggestions, balance or otherwise. I'll be adding to this list as things come up.

Balance

Energy is too strong. Specifically Energy Decomposition and Redux.

Dimensional Shift may be too strong.

Preferred Paradox can be abused a bit.

Hound damage might be to high (how is this when fighting rares?)

Wormhole + Movement Infusions

Defenses too strong! Too easy to layer! (definately raise Paradox costs)

Time Stop and Temporal Reprieve probably too awesome (probably raise Paradox costs on these)

Too easy to cheese instant talent costs by setting paradox low (not sure, debating duration scaling on everything based on paradox)

Bugs

Command Breathe sometimes bugs out when an NPC swaps places with the player (which swap talent? Is this consistent?)

Wheel of Fate can be abused badly with See the Threads.

Chronomancers can still squish the Apprentice Mage

Skeleton's Re-assemble behaves oddly with Warden Clones (investigate)

Warden's Focus slows the game down badly overtime (garbage collection, ongoing)

Shantiz should have friendly fire turned off?

Temporal Bolt reduces cooldown on all eligible talents (fixed)

Feature Requests

Maybe shoot should be bound by default again for TWs?

Graphical effect for Warden clones.

[Velorien]

More bugs:

- Chronomancers can still squish the Apprentice Mage
- Temporal Bolt reduces cooldown on all eligible talents

[Tykk]

Balance:

- Temporal Reprieve may be too good of a panic button > 7+ free turns to heal up; cooldown spells and infusions; buff up seems a little excessive.
- Time Stop may also be too good in the same vein as Temporal Reprieve, but with an added offensive benefit > Projectiles and debuffs stacking up and waiting for it to end.

Shorter Durations and fixed cooldowns should balance them out?

-Hounds deal too much damage? > Clearing out the Halfing Complex and the Conclave, riding on their backs, is effortless even at low levels.

[edge2054]

Balance

Wormhole + Phase Pulse + Movement Infusions

[Dekar]

I'm not sure about Contingency health% values.

As it doesn't prevent damage you want to trigger it as early as possible to prevent big nukes from killing you. Yet it has a 50 turn cooldown, so you don't want to trigger it too early when you don't even need it.

Investing skill points makes it trigger earlier but also increases the potential talent level, which makes me really torn about putting more skills into it.

Anybody got thoughts on that? Is an early additional talent just as useful as one when you are about to die? Are there better trigger conditions that don't result in an improved version of cauterize?

[donkatsu]

Any one Paradox Mage defense is not too strong, but it's easy to combine all of them for nigh invulnerability. Splitting them into category points was a good idea, but players get 4 category points to work with so they'll still get all of them. Instead, use paradox as a limiting factor. Decrease the base value, sharply increase the spellpower scaling, and raise the paradox cost of all Paradox Mage defenses. More spellpower scaling makes starting with 0 paradox risky, as your defenses are weakened. This is probably not enough, but it's a start.

Energy Decomposition: 72 paradox. Equivalent to 36 Wil, compare to Antimagic Shield costing 30 Wil and consuming more resources whenever it absorbs damage.
Time Shield: 50 paradox. Similar paradox/cd cost to Dust to Dust or Repulsion Blast. Cost doesn't actually matter as much since it's not a sustain.
Reality Smearing: Give it back its anomaly check. As a bonus this also makes it more thematic within its tree.
Temporal Fugue: Haven't used it since it was bugfixed, so I'm not sure what to make of it yet.

Redux: I liked the old Redux, can we just have that back?

Dimensional Shift: Reduce the duration of all detrimental effects by X%, rounded down. Even with Wormhole/movement infusion teleport spam, you have to take at least 1 turn of every effect. Intended to work less well with Time Shield. Should be similar in effectiveness to Unflinching Resolve, in that it doesn't take care of your status right away but at least you won't be stunned for 18 turns. In general, I think that's a good model for status removal. This improves on that model by removing the RNG factor.

[edge2054]

I think the formula doesn't penalize low paradox enough.

Right now we're getting 70% spellpower at 150 Paradox. I think I'm going to change to a formula that would drop that down to 50% at 150 and bottom out at 0% at 0 Paradox.

That's not going to fix prebuffing making instant essentially free. The simplest fix would be to penalize spell durations though I think it would be counter intuitive if I did this without giving duration increases over 300 Paradox which I'm not sure how I feel about.

I agree that Paradox costs need to be looked at and I think taxing the defenses is a good idea. Should encourage more reliance on offense and less on layering as many defenses as possible.

I'll probably try to recode Redux so it's more like its old self.

The Dimensional Shift change is a good idea.

Related to all of this: I'll probably make Spacetime Tuning a set 10 Paradox a turn so you don't get more out of it by setting preferred Paradox very low.

[malboro_urchin]

Any one Paradox Mage defense is not too strong, but it's easy to combine all of them for nigh invulnerability. Splitting them into category points was a good idea, but players get 4 category points to work with so they'll still get all of them. Instead, use paradox as a limiting factor. Decrease the base value, sharply increase the spellpower scaling, and raise the paradox cost of all Paradox Mage defenses. More spellpower scaling makes starting with 0 paradox risky, as your defenses are weakened. This is probably not enough, but it's a start.

I think it's enough to have the various defenses across multiple categories, because the player has spent cat points to access those trees. If players want to go for all of these defenses, I don't see why not, because they're spending resources to get to the talents.

[Effigy]

Having 0% spellpower at 0 paradox seems too extreme. No one would ever use that, so you might as well reduce the max paradox by 150 and you'd get the same effect.

[donkatsu]

I think it's enough to have the various defenses across multiple categories, because the player has spent cat points to access those trees. If players want to go for all of these defenses, I don't see why not, because they're spending resources to get to the talents.

Because the payoff ends up being too high for the resources spent. These defenses multiply with each other. Paradox constraints should help counteract this multiplicative effect.

Having 0% spellpower at 0 paradox seems too extreme. No one would ever use that, so you might as well reduce the max paradox by 150 and you'd get the same effect.

300 is a nice, round number though.

[Thasero]

0 is an even rounder number. Why let the player set a preferred paradox? For any given build, there is a mathematically best point, and figuring it out is a problem of math and rules-lawyering, not a strategic decision.

"Setting your preferred paradox to X is better than setting it to Y, and that's unbalanced. We should make X only as good as Y." Solution: X == Y == 0. All preferred paradox balance problems are solved forever!

After all, if setting a preferred paradox is actually a supported mechanic, then "X is better than Y" is a feature, not a bug. It's gameplay, and the people who choose X are better at playing the game than the people who choose Y, and knowing the values of X and Y is part of the skill of playing ToME.

The fact that we're treating "X is better than Y" as a bug and not a feature suggests that it isn't actually a good mechanic. Nobody's gushing about how much fun it was to calculate the value of X that is better; instead, we're complaining that it feels cheap and exploitable that there is an X which is better than Y.

And you pretty much have to source-dive and really brush up on your ToME rules-lawyering to figure out what the hell the value of X should be. If you're not in the source code or the wiki, you'll never get it right. You have to read tooltips very closely just to realize that you CAN set a preferred paradox and that there might be a concrete benefit to doing so.

Make the baseline 0, with 100% spellpower at 0 paradox, and no ability to change the tuning point. End result: There is no way to exploit the system, and you don't need to do any math to figure out what the "right" paradox is for your character. I would not mind at all to have the correct paradox chosen for me, automatically, on every character every time, and for that paradox to be 0.

[donkatsu]

0 is an even rounder number.

If 300 = 100% spellpower, then it makes sense for 0 = 0% spellpower. If 0 = 100% spellpower, then it's not obvious how to get 0% spellpower. I wouldn't mind if all paradox numbers were divided by 3 to get 100 = 100% spellpower, but that sounds like a lot of work.

[edge2054]

Moving away from 300 == base isn't a bad idea, rather dividing by 3 or setting 0 as 100%.

Not letting the player set preferred paradox sounds like the simplest change which may make it the best bet since we're out of beta.

[themuffinthief]

I like the idea for redux being more akin to the old redux. My only problem with the old redux is it forced you to immediately use the second spell, which sometimes caused double turn damage spikes from enemies. Here's some of my ideas:
1. Make it only able to redux each spell once (aka, if a spell is reduxed, the second cast doesn't reduce the cd to 1)
2. Make it instant cast, but only affect one spell, and reduce its cooldown to 0 instead of 1 (old redux could let you double dim step) (most akin to the old redux, without the weird double turning issue)
3. Make it not affect instant cast spells. No more banish/dimstep/echoes/time shield in one turn.
4. Make echoes a fixed cd (this is a redux nerf as much as an echoes nerf, as then echoes cant be reduxed)

I don't have any great ideas to balance the defensive aspect of paradox mage, other than to say it's really strong. I'm not even sure temporal reprieve needs a nerf. Compared to stone wall, stone wall is better 9 times out of 10, as it lasts longer, and you can dig out the back to safety. Stone wall is op, but if we're not nerfing stone wall (and we haven't), I don't see a need to nerf temporal reprieve.

As for temporal warden...I honestly don't think they are that op. I think they're comparable to sun paladin's rework, which is strong, but that hasn't been nerfed either. A few things that probably need nerfs though:

1. Hounds. At level 26, with a mere 1 point in the sustain, they do 80 damage each, and tank shots. Definitely need some nerfs to hounds damage (or tankiness, depending on what route you want)
2. Dimstep (specifically the debuff removal). This applies to paradox mage as well. I don't think dimensional step on it's own is op, but the fact that both classes have a ton of teleports and drop 3 debuffs per teleport, both are near immune to debuffs. I suggest capping it at 2 debuffs per teleport at most, maybe even 1 (but 2 as a starting point makes sense, I don't think it should be overnerfed)

Will post back when my Temporal warden gets farther or dies.

[Velorien]

2. Dimstep (specifically the debuff removal). This applies to paradox mage as well. I don't think dimensional step on it's own is op, but the fact that both classes have a ton of teleports and drop 3 debuffs per teleport, both are near immune to debuffs. I suggest capping it at 2 debuffs per teleport at most, maybe even 1 (but 2 as a starting point makes sense, I don't think it should be overnerfed)

What teleports does PM have other than Dimstep and Wormhole? Wormhole as a debuff remover is limited by the fact that it takes two turns and a free space to use, and is shut down by pin. As for Dimstep, it's undeniably powerful, but this also means that it gets used a lot for positioning (at least for TW), and for me it's often on cooldown from that when I need emergency debuff removal.

Additionally, TW has Blink Blade, which is godly but will put you next to enemies when that's presumably the last thing you want in an emergency, and gets shut down by blindness, and Thread Walk, which has no weaknesses that I can see.