Buff antimagic

[ZyZ]

If we want Antimagic Shield to be equally useful for all races and classes, why not tie its absorption rate to character level ? Say, 1 point of damage per character level at level 1, 0,5 point of damage per character level at level 2-3, and 0,25 point of damage per character level at level 4-5 ? Or, in short, 1/1,5/2/2,25/2,5 per character level.

That is just boring and it would not scale with difficulty settings. OP on normal, ok on insane.

In perfect world passive def should block % of damage based on stats (cun / will / mindpower / mindcrit etc). Ooze mitosis, mindslayer shields are imho good design. Solipsism is ok just because talent itself is not just about mitigating damage otherwise it could be turned into pure passive skill like brawler striking stance.

Most interesting talents usually depends heavily on your gear / other talents and when you focus on those talents you can build whole character around it (dream smith, slumber, ooze, projection). Standalone talents that depends only on your character level (+ talent multiplier) doesn't add any depth and make character progression less rewarding.

I would gradually add antimagic / fungus mastery to antimagic powered egos till it becomes good enough. Right now we have multiple options to improve antimagic / fungus mastery (artifacts, slings, gaunlets) but for some reason mindstars do not improve antimagic skills. Basically all classes except solipsist has one ego with talent multiplier bonus. Why do not add +0.1 (or more if needed) talent to antimagic egos on mindstars ? Bonuses would work best on characters that do not have antimagic tree by default and it would scale with difficulty levels (just because all items are simply more powerful on high difficulty)

[anonymous000]

Agreed. There is nothing wrong about having a char invest in mindpower/spell save to make antimagic work. My point has always been that the antimagic tree isn't any good even if you invest in mindpower, especially for non-wilder classes. So for me the problem with antimagic is not really about the scaling. Scaling antimagic with mindpower/spell save would make the tree better, but it is still not very worthwhile

Not sure about how +mastery ego would help though. As long as the tree works like it does now it is still very underwhelming:

-Resolve should provide more support to other talents (especially Antimagic Shield) than it currently does
-Aura of Silence is fine
-Antimagic Shield does not work when you do not have Fungus
-Mana Clash simply never works as it is intended. Mostly it works like a long range attack with a random element, you could never drain the mana bar of a rare or above enemy with Mana Clash. You can change the damage element to lightning/nature and I won't notice any difference.

On a side note, besides antimagic there should be a rework for manaburn damage as well, the all-or-nothing mechanism in manaburn damage just make it work like a random element instead of something for mage killing

[HousePet]

As being Manaclashed generally sucks as a player, I'd suggest the problem isn't Manaclash itself, but that rares can have unrealistic resource pools?

[bpat]

One big issue with Antimagic is it requires a lot of generic points as well as a category point. Most classes cannot afford this, so talents must be useful at low ranks to make Antimagic good. Spending over 15 generic points on Antimagic stuff is very hard to justify on almost all classes.

[stinkstink]

Having Mana Clash remove a percentage of the targets' resource pools would make it both less brutal and more useful to players. Alternatively, have it scale up with target rank.

[bpat]

The problem with doing percentage amounts of mana is it will oneshot a lot of randbosses and regular bosses. Elandar has upwards of 10,000 mana iirc and point of it was that he would never run out of mana. The only way to do percentages for Mana Clash would be to divide the manaburn by rank like Echos of the Past or to just cap the amount.

[Atarlost]

Capping the amount of mana drain would defeat the purpose of making it a percentage.

I'd suggest doing fixed manadrain damage as currently with a percentage floor on the mana loss but not the damage.

Or getting rid of inflated resources on NPCs. NPCs already have the advantages of always being fully rested when encountering the player and never getting ganged up on. They don't need to also have more resource endurance.

Well, except maybe hate and vim users. Because NPCs can't regen hate or vim by killing people. But manaburn doesn't effect hate and vim should still work without an inflated pool if NPCs have drain.

[bpat]

Some enemies need to have effectively infinite resource pools, like Elandar and Vor. Imagine how silly it would be if you could destroy all of Vor's mana and then he just sits there and waits for you to kill him. Randbosses and such sure they don't need infinite resource pools (Darkest Light gets really silly) but at least regular bosses should not get completely shut down by this. I prefer having it do a fair percentage or a significantly higher base value, whichever is lower. So you can't oneshot random trash but you can do reasonable damage to bosses without making them completely helpless.

[HousePet]

I'm pretty sure the AI knows to use resource restoring talents when they need them. So some decent mana surge runes would give them some manaclash resistance.

[Nagyhal]

I like the idea of Mana Clash regenerating equilibrium, as it ties all the talents into a neat dynamic of expending and regenerating resources while remaining a powerful bookend damaging talent. The EQ regen should scale with talent level.

Antimagic talents scaling with spell save is aaaaawesome. It could be optional, so that spell save is used only if it provides an improvement to the mindpower-calculated numbers.

(Also, it makes it possible to pump Magic from equipment to get anti-magic power increase, which REALLY does not make sense.)

Yep. Totally cool with that!

[Nagyhal]

Some enemies need to have effectively infinite resource pools, like Elandar and Vor. Imagine how silly it would be if you could destroy all of Vor's mana and then he just sits there and waits for you to kill him. Randbosses and such sure they don't need infinite resource pools (Darkest Light gets really silly) but at least regular bosses should not get completely shut down by this. I prefer having it do a fair percentage or a significantly higher base value, whichever is lower. So you can't oneshot random trash but you can do reasonable damage to bosses without making them completely helpless.

It makes resource drain into such a gimpy mechanic though.

There are so many other ways to achieve this effect without making resource drain completely useless as a tactic in so many fights! For example, you could give important bosses a new, passive talent that provides the super-fast resource regen, but only after 5 turns at near-empty resource levels. So you could drain all of Vor's mana to get a few easy hits in over those 5 turns, and then the talent kicks in and boosts him back up to 30% mana in a couple of turns. It'd probably still not be worth the effort, but at least bosses would be subject in some way to the same sort of attrition dynamics that players are.

Please chip in if you have any better alternatives!

[HammyHamster]

Antimagic shield can get up to around 120 with ~110 MP and 1.4 modifier. That's out of reach for most builds, but my point is that it can be pretty strong, stronger than most dedicated fighter armor/hardness deductions. There is also the wonder prodigy I've been hearing about -PES(Embers) - and I'd think one could get even higher WP values, since it seems to be common. So ... AM shield is not a trivial skill, when maxed. It's also not exceedingly rare to see 0.2+ modifiers for AM on items.

But the real problem is that the power of antimagic is mostly the Fungus tree, which is a little too strong in terms of regen and free turns. It'd probably need to be slightly nerfed if AM was boosted. Even if it requires an unlock.

Also, while the mana impact on rares+ is rather insignificant, the current value of Mana Clash is wiping vim/pos/neg. Enemies rarely have much of this and even at 1/5 it can reduce the danger of corrupters, necros, luminant horrors, etc to nothing fairly often. A 5/5 can wipe 300+ vim. Next time, note just how much vim/pos/neg most enemies have.

The AI seems confused when it has both mana and another talent type resource, and when a resource is gone, it often tries and fails to use talents from that insufficient pool (ie, insane Elandar trying to use vim talents). That's been my experience. (Is there some kind of AI check where it checks a skill resource and if it's too low moves to another skill? )

*Seems to me that evolving Block into something more useful would go much further to help str/dex melee and such, rather than tweaking the AM tree.

That's my 2 cents.

[grobblewobble]

Also, while the mana impact on rares+ is rather insignificant, the current value of Mana Clash is wiping vim/pos/neg.

That's the problem. The ability is called Mana Clash, so it is weird that it is good for many things, but not for anything to do with mana..

I like the simple solution best: give bosses / rares a much more realistic (smaller) mana reserve, so that Mana Clash can actually drain it. And then give them a mana surge rune, to give them a way to recover.

Regarding fungus: honestly, I dislike Fungal Growth. By itself, it has a purely negative effect, because it will trigger a weak regeneration effect when you heal, which you have to remove, because it blocks your real regeneration (infusion).
In combination with Ancestral Life, it has an effect that is both annoying and overpowered: free turns (OP), but you still have to cancel the weak regeneration every time (annoying). Add Fungal blood and it becomes even more annoying and even more overpowered.

And worse yet, it plainly makes no sense. Free turns because you trigger some minor regeneration effect??

So could we please put an end to that? If we replace Fungal Growth with another ability (boost to healmod? improvement to heal infusions?), it will make fungus more balanced, and easier to use at the same time.

[Delmuir]

Why not do this:

Tie in Resolve with Manaclash such that when Manaclash is at level 5, Resolve gains a resource burn feedback ability such that all magic attacks drain additional resources equal to (depending on level of resolve) up to... say 150% added of resource cost of that spell.

Have it take effect only after the first strike and hits the target AFTER the attack hits, i.e. turn 1, caster attacks normally. Turn 2, caster attacks normally but resolve takes effect and reduces damage and then sends a feedback which burns extra resources.

This would make Manaclash a finishing-move and not a standalone attack... get them low and then finish them off. This would also encourage using it at the right moment instead of opening with it to negligible effect or total-shutdown, which are the two current options.

This would justify points into Manaclash and Resolve, and would notably increase the resource drain... plus, if it scaled infinitely then added points could bump it up to maybe 200% or 250% even.

Perhaps even add a crit-effect to Manaclash such that when it crits, it drains an additional % of CURRENT resource. The current versus max distinction is important as the lower the the enemy is on said resource, the less effective the bonus would be. You could still finish someone off with the base amount if they were low enough and the bonus would allow you to take big chunks off of a fully-powered enemy. Neither would allow you to burn-through massive amounts especially quickly but it would eventually add up in a long fight.

Lastly, you can finish off the utility of the anti-magic tree this way: each skill point added (obviously up to 20) in the category grants anti-magic shield a 1% chance of absorbing ALL damage from a magic attack without the shield going down but still increasing the equilibrium.

The increase in equilibrium would make the next turn more fragile and thus, prevent it from being over-powered.

[HousePet]

Adding an effect when hit by a spell, when Resolve has already activated, could be getting a bit complex for the player to understand. Adding it to the Resolve timed effect would be easy.
Retaliatory manaburn does sound cool though. I'd consider taking Tricky Defense if it added that to Antimagic Shield.