Verdant Class Pack: v2.3

[HousePet]

I don't recall coding in a "you will die at level 13" fate...

You are correct about the Ritch's Command Attack effect. Correcting...
As for Hydra, the poison breath does damage over time, so it will appear to do less damage.

I'll give the Ritch some armour, defence and melee ability. I'm pondering upping its ranged damage or giving it another talent.
I probably need to nerf the Porcupine a little more.
Will ponder about the Spider too.

The screen blinking is a lua error, but its occurred in the interface code, which messes up the ability to display it. The error will still be in the log file (about 100 times). But I've found the issue anyway.
I'll just tell it to add the stamina pool manually since it didn't work out to do it.

Would you prefer Spit Poison for the Spider Essence or something else?

[marshmallowpeep]

Yeah, that's just when I happened to die on both of the summoners. I just brought it up so you have some idea of where I am in the game when I'm making these comments. Level 13 is a reasonably average place for me to die-- I'm not that great at this game. I've only got one win, with a vanilla summoner on adventure mode, a long time ago. I suppose for testing purposes it might make more sense for me not to play on roguelike.

I know the poison breath does different damage, I was talking about the lightning and acid breaths. At first I thought the lightning damage was highly variable like it often is, but then it happened with acid too. It only happened a couple times -- it's possible it was something normal like an enemy blocking with an acid/lightning resist shield or something -- but I think it's better to mention it than not. If I had to guess what was happening I might say the damage was somehow getting resisted for half in the way that a solipsist's mind damage abilities can be.

Spit poison would probably be good for the spider essence.

I got a woodsman to 18 or so. No major errors, although I didn't quite try every new skill. The sustain where you get a free move when you shoot doesn't work if you shoot by having it bound to left click. It worked when I activated a shot in any other way.

Woodsman demands very high willpower, cunning, and dex and wants strength for the bow scaling. I was really feeling the multiple attribute dependence. The class is reasonably powerful anyway, so I don't know how big of a problem it is.

It would make more sense to me to get summon/utility instead of summon/range. It just seems like an archer could really make good use of those tanky and immobile minions. A little less offense that way, but that's okay because you get your offense from your bow.

I think woodsman should maybe have access to cunning/poison? The total lack of unlockable trees is unfortunate, and it would work pretty well.

[HousePet]

No idea about the Hydra then.

NFI how shooting via mouse could break Shootstep.

Woodsman is only supposed to need high cunning/dexterity and medium strength/willpower.

Summon-Utility might be better for a Woodsman, yes.

I'll give Woodsman Cunning/Poisons, Technique/Achery-Utility and Wild-Gift/Summon-Commands as locked categories.

[marshmallowpeep]

I haven't made a ton more progress (getting up to level ~18 and daikara with summoner now) or found any new bugs, but I figured out what was going on with the hydra. When I do command: attack and it does, say, lightning breath, and then it follows up on the next turn with it's native lightning breath, the higher damage from the commanded one gets pushed up in the log so I can't see it, and I just see the lower damage from the native breath. So that was just an error on my part.

Seems to me summon talents require too much willpower for woodsman to be a medium willpower class. In terms of talent requirements, you need the most willpower out of any stat. I know by the time you're getting to the talents that require 60 willpower you'll have willpower gear stashed, but it's still a lot. Early on, there simply aren't enough stat points to keep current on all three (archer, rogue, summoner) aspects of the class. You basically have to just chose between investing in cunning and having stealth or investing in willpower and having useful summons. This may not be a problem (I was doing fine mostly ignoring cunning) but the point I was making is that I kind of *needed* to mostly ignore cunning, or if I had invested in cunning, I would have needed to mostly ignore summons. This creates a situation where you have two sort of subclasses (stealthy archer and summony archer), you pick one at the start, and then once you have enough points you mix in the other.

[HousePet]

That isn't a problem though. I like classes that give you some flexibility on how you play it.

[kitemay]

i think he is saying it takes flexibity away, forcing you to choose between two absolute paths

best to limit the required stat spread from alll the skill to just two, leaving others a bit of flexiblity with the remaining stats.

[kitemay]

though a summoner/traper sounds interesting

[marshmallowpeep]

Well, first I was trying to say that I felt like I didn't have enough stat points to make use of all of my core abilities, but that I did fine just ignoring one set of them.

Then housepet replied that it is supposed to need medium, rather than high, willpower, so I explained that it does in fact need high willpower. More willpower than any other stat, unless you get quite lucky with gear.

If it's not supposed to require high willpower, but it does, well then that sounds like a problem to me. There is a thing about the class that is not the way it's creator said it was intended to be.

If it's not a problem, that's cool too. As I said, I did fine ignoring cunning.

[HousePet]

You don't need to have a Stone Golem/Fire Drake hunting pet asap, so what else would you need high willpower for? Have I missed something?

Anyway, has anyone tried the new Wyrmic categories? Would be good to try them before I lock them behind quest requirements.

[marshmallowpeep]

What you seem to be missing is that you need high willpower (relative to the level at which they unlock) to actually put points into summon talents and also possibly that summon talents scale almost exclusively with talent points, meaning you really want to cap the ones you use if you want them to be any good.

Let's say I'm a cornac, for simplicity's sake. I want to have a hydra at level 12. I have 10 base will, so I need to spend 26 points to get that. I've gained 11 levels, so I have 33 points to spend. That leaves me with 7 points left over to split between cunning and dexterity. Now, I'll probably find some willpower gear. Maybe save 5 or 10 points that way. Even with 10 points of will from gear (which is a lot at level 12), I need to spend 16/33, or just under half of my stat points on willpower to have access to the hydra.

Let's say I'm just distributing one each in cunning, dex, and will (in other words, treating them as equally important). I started at 10. I need 36. That means I'm level 26 (more than halfway to the level cap) before I can unlock my hydra, and 34 before I can cap it. If I treat will as less important than cun or dex, maybe every few levels I put the will point in dex or cun instead, I'll be in the 40s by the time I cap my hydra and I'll certainly never see the fire drake. Yeah, I know, the gear you find mitigates this. The fact remains, however, that you need a lot of stat.

Now, if you decide to just ignore the 60 requirement talents you don't need more than 44 willpower. I'll grant that 44 of a stat in the mid-late game is a medium investment. But there's a lot of game before that, and the amount of willpower you need for your summons to be useful before you reach the far east is large relative to your total available stat points.

The 68 stat to cap the tier 4 talents is a significant investment at any level.

If I'm playing it wrong by trying to cap my summons (which seems to be what you're implying when you say you don't need the golem and drake ASAP), and thus prioritizing will and making it a high-value stat, then that is *most* *certainly* a problem with the class design.

Honestly, you asked for feedback and I gave it to you. It's frustrating that I have to argue about this. My experience was that I needed to cap willpower to play the class as a summoner/archer hybrid, like I wanted to do, and, therefore, I felt like I didn't have enough stat points. If you make the changes you talked about earlier, I might have a different experience. I can tell you for 100% sure that the version of the class I played is a high willpower class at least until level 18 (unless you don't want to use summons), because that's as far as I got. Beyond that I'm just speculating.

[HousePet]

I'm not intending to argue with you; I really do want to know your opinion and more importantly your reasoning.
My point is that you don't need to max out the higher level summon talents asap.
Of course you can if you want, but if you also want to max out archery asap you aren't trying to play the class as a summoner/archer hybrid, you are trying to play the class as a summoner + archer. That would be an unbalanced class.

[HousePet]

New version: http://www.users.on.net/~curtisnd/tome-verdant.zip

Been at a conference most of the week so my head is a bit scrambled. This change list may be wrong and is likely incomplete:
Unnerfed Ritch Flamespitter spit speed.
Standardised summoning costs.
Upped Summoner's Call of the Wild mastery to 1.3.
Giant Ant given some Willpower so its abilities should actually do something.
Corrected Command Attack on the Ritch.
Ritch now has some defensive stats and is not entirely useless in melee.
Hydra Essence shouldn't break things anymore.
Spider Essence now gives Spit Poison instead of Spider Web.
Summon Essence effects which grant stamina using talents should grant a stamina bar.
Some summoned critters that have some armour also have armour hardiness.
Woodsman gets Summon-Utility instead of Summon-Distance.
Woodsman now has Cunning/Poisons, Technique/Archery-Utility and Wild-Gift/Summon-Commands as locked categories.

I think we are close enough to beta to get some icons made, so if anyone thinks any categories need rewriting please say something now.
When this addon goes beta, Summon-Techinques will be locked for Summoner and the three advanced Wyrmic Categories will have questy type requirements. So try those out now.
Oh and someone please remind me that alternative unlocks for Wyrmic categories will be needed for the ID. I'm sure I will forget.

Thanks for testing.

[Jarinex]

So I was testing some of the changes you made to the Summoner, and I got this error when I tried to use "Command: Attack with a Ritch Flamespitter:

[C]: in function 'error'
/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:148: in function </engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:138>
Lua Error: /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:118: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:148: /data/damage_types.lua attempt to perform arithmetic on field 'dur' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
/data/damage_types.lua in function 'projector'
/engine/interface/ActorProject.lua:218: in function 'project'
/data-verdant/talents/gifts/alter-gifts.lua:991: in function </data-verdant/talents/gifts/alter-gifts.lua:987>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:145: in function </engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:138>
At [C]:-1
At [C]:-1 error
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:118 fct
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:124 targetMode
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:253 targetMouse
At /mod/class/Game.lua:2113 fct
At /engine/Mouse.lua:56

It seemed to do that with any enemy I had the Ritch attack.

Edit: I'm using the verdant pack that was just uploaded.

[HousePet]

Derp.
Reuploaded.

[Jarinex]

So I was playing a the Woodsman a little, and it's a pretty awesome class. However, I think there is one thing missing from it.

When I think of a ranger/hunter character, I always think of a Hunter's Mark skill. Perhaps that might be an active skill that might spice this class up a little bit? I would do it myself, but I have little skill in editing lua (other than changing a couple values here and there ).

I know Astralinterno mentioned the Woodscraft tree felt a little more like a generic tree, so maybe that could be added to it instead (or the skills moved around)? Just a few thoughts I had.