Prodigies tweaks

[anonymous000]

Buffs have been introduced to certain prodigies in 1.5.0, but the utilization of these remains low. What I feel is that certain prodigies, how matter how you try to buff them, would remain underwhelming unless their inherent mechanism is changed.

Taking the Prodigies that are more offense-focused as an example, the most popular prodigies are those that are useful in all circumstances, for example, Flexible Combat and Arcane Might which increase your damage at all times, and Windblade which offers high AOE damage plus disarm is always a good attack. However, talents like Massive Blow, YSBMW and Steamroller cannot be relied upon in most circumstances: Knockback is often undesirable on a melee character, and Steamroller is good for killing trash mobs but not a good option for dealing with rare+. What I feel about these talents is, unless you tweak their damage bonus to game-breaking level, they would remain underused. To make them useful we need to change how they work so that they could be always useful. For example:

Massive Blow: You also learn how to block with your 2hander
Steamroller: Also makes Rush usable at point-blank range, Rush used in this way can still trigger the buffs and cooldown reset, but has vastly increased stamina cost, and cannot daze target

The same comment could apply to all other Prodigies as well.

Another tweak to Prodigies would be to remove the stat requirement for these reasons:
1. It can be largely dealt with by swapping equipments
2. A number of prodigies have their effectiveness naturally scale with a certain stat
3. I consider stat requirement's purpose to be about balancing, but I don't see how this purpose is served. Certain requirements like requiring 50 Mag for Spectral Shield is more like an annoyance for weak classes like Bulwark/Wyrmic

[Davion Fuxa]

I'll stay away from the part of this discussion on how the Prodigies can be buffed (or debuffed) for choosing them. On stat requirements, I agree with Anon that the stat requirements don't work well; though I partially put the blame on the design choice that stat requirements can be met with equipment.

Stat requirements for Talents and Prodigies - the inherent qualities of the player, should not be tied into equipment. As Anon points out, it just results in gimmicky behavior - which obviously the game tries to avoid. While just doing away with requirements is one way around this particular issue, I'll note though that the secondary method of dealing with it is to simply make it so that the only way to get Talent and Prodigies unlocks is with 'base' stats.

By this I mean that stat points you manually invest everytime you level. That would mean if you want something like Massive Blow or Steam Roller, which are set to require 50 Strength, you 'need' to invest, the 40 or so Strength points into your character for that prodigy; 'maybe' reduced by stat rewards from quests which you can't fiddle with upon receiving, though definitely not from talents which you can.

[KLajos]

By this I mean that stat points you manually invest everytime you level. That would mean if you want something like Massive Blow or Steam Roller, which are set to require 50 Strength, you 'need' to invest, the 40 or so Strength points into your character for that prodigy; 'maybe' reduced by stat rewards from quests which you can't fiddle with upon receiving, though definitely not from talents which you can.

+1

[visage]

it just results in gimmicky behavior - which obviously the game tries to avoid.

[citation needed]

More seriously, I'm not sure where you get the idea that this game tries to avoid what you're calling "gimmicky" behavior. As far as I can tell, it's an intentional part of the game design, and prodigy/skill stat requirements are to me Exhibit A on that front -- there's been plenty of time to change how those work if there was any desire to.

[Micbran]

Davion, what's the point of randomly nerfing build variability? Like Anonymous000 said, many prodigies already scale off the stat they require. Things like "lol op" PES are still require strength to have it be effective (just an example there are many others).

[bpat]

I think requiring actual stat point investment for talent and prodigy unlocks has been discussed before and a lot of people were against it. It may add flavor to the game but in reality it's very obnoxious and has no upside since its only effect is making people waste stat points or restricting build variety.

[anonymous000]

Removing stat point requirements was not the main point of my thread but more as an afterthought, and it is very easy to be turned into a slippery slope where we discuss about whether to ditch the stat requirements of talents as well (Not that I object to it). But I object the idea of requiring hard stat investment as it greatly limits build choice, and it doesn't serve any purpose in balancing.

My point is mainly about making the prodigies be a constant value add. Prodigies like Roll With It / Never Stop Running will never be decent unless we change how they work, tweaking numbers don't help much

[Micbran]

bpat had a decent prodigy buff thread somewhere before it was infected by the elitism virus. You could try searching for it and perusing it for ideas.

[anonymous000]

Yes I have read this thread from bpat http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=46112. Actually a number of the proposed changes are incorporated in 1.5.0 in some form (like Massive Blow and Lucky Day), but they are still seldom chosen, this lead me into thinking that simple buffs like tweaking numbers are not enough to salvage certain prodigies, and we need to rework some fundamental things about them. For certain prodigies like Giant Leap number tweaks might work, but for some like YSBMW and Never Stop Running it won't

[Sheila]

the elitism virus

That is most definitely not what happened, let's stop using this line of argument as it is neither constructive nor particularly insightful.

[Aquillion]

One talent I would suggest buffing is Rak'Shor's Cunning. Nobody seems to use it. Granted, it's a talent whose value shifts a lot depending on the game mode (it's obviously more valuable in Roguelike mode than Adventurer mode), but overall it feels like it could be safely buffed at least a little bit, since the change itself is mostly going to be a disadvantage. And while it saves your life once, you could probably have saved your life many times over with a better-chosen Prodigy.

The most basic change would be to have it refund all your racial category points when you die rather than just half of them.

A more interesting (and more dangerous) change would be for it to instead let you keep your old racial talent tree in addition to your new undead one. I like this because it lets you do something genuinely unique with it (which I fee is what Prodigies should be, rather than just a half-assed Blood of Life with a drawback).

Also, I would have it let you select ghoul or skeleton (either when you buy the prodigy or when you die), rather than it being at random. Making such a major decision happen randomly feels a bit off, and letting people choose could lead to more interesting builds in combination with the above.

[Steven Aus]

I feel the community is quite welcoming. Of course, those particular comments don't add to that. But when I chat on the in-game chat, I do feel that overall the community is quite helpful.

Remember, most people don't even win on Normal. So it is an achievement to do just that.

[anonymous000]

I don't want this thread to be derailed into discussing about the state of this community. Looking through the bpat thread again I find Sheila was actually quite supportive and had made a lot of constructive comments. Using emotive language like elitism as an accusation can only lead a meaningful discussion into a catcalling contest, which benefits no one.

Anyway, a lot of the discussions in that thread were focused on how should we balance the Prodigies, which I think were misplaced. Discussion about balance, especially for ToME, should be made on an ex-post basis:

1. Nobody is going to quit ToME because of balance issue. With ToME having so many different classes and diverse build choices, it is rather unlikely that tweaking Prodigies would cause a huge issue in balance leading to only a few classes/builds being viable (in general, not about Madness) and thus making ToME boring.
2. Imbalance is an accepted fact. We have already accepted that certain classes are objectively better than some classes in terms of power gaming (completing Madness), so why do we suddenly worry about Prodigy balance?
3. The most important point of all: Updates can be done relatively easily. If there are significant issue in balance, updates can be pushed

Taking the new archer as an example, yes it does shake up balance a little bit, but the rework makes playing as an archer a worthwhile endeavor now, and indeed we will be seeing a balance fix. If we were to discuss about balance before Razakai actually suggested the archer rework, probably there won't be archer rework at all. It is fine to discuss about balance for a particular prodigy tweak suggestion, but philosophical discussions around balance alone without context leads to nowhere.

To me the Prodigies tweaks have two aim, balance has no place as an immediate aim:
- Increase build diversity
- Increase fun factor. I tend to consider Windtouched Speed / Superpower / etc. as lazy designs, a Prodigy should gives the ommph that makes player feels like you are playing a different character after taking a Prodigy. Numerical buff lacks that.

[Snarvid]

+1 to nearly your entire post, my nameless friend.

Directed to no-one in particular, a possibly useful way to resolve future disagreements: http://lesswrong.com/lw/o6p/double_crux ... agreement/

I do have some concerns about dropping Superpower et. al. from the lineup, as without them many powers that work fine on Normal would never stick on Insane. In a way these Prodigies are TOME's version of "feat taxes", things you simply have to take to compete on the highest difficulties. If you added more Mindpower at base so these weren't required, e.g. Oozemancer would be even more faceroll on Normal, while if you added more Mindpower specifically on higher difficulties you'd be adding difficulty with one hand and taking it away with the other. "My powers stopped failing most of the time!" gives enough oomph for me.

But I also agree that fun factor is important - I think prodigies should be at least one of "powerful" or "hilarious" and give you moments where you think "I did that because I took X prodigy." Which is why Mental Tyranny + Madness works so well as an example. Windtouched Speed, I know, felt the same for at least one Oozemancer player, because he was able to drop the cooldown on Oozebeam and Acidbeam from 3 to 2, which greatly changed the playstyle available to him. So it's not always obvious where the fun is.

But I'd be pleased if a handful of the worst offenders vanished (essentially, nothing worse than or equivalent to a regular item, since Swift Hands exists) and add 6-12 more Prodigies that are as disruptive as, say, the Nimbus of Enlightenment (if it would stop crashing the game, of course).

[Aquillion]

I think requiring actual stat point investment for talent and prodigy unlocks has been discussed before and a lot of people were against it. It may add flavor to the game but in reality it's very obnoxious and has no upside since its only effect is making people waste stat points or restricting build variety.

Isn't that backwards?

Allowing people to meet prerequisites with items leads to very same-y builds, since stats become meaningless as prerequisites. See my thread about it here. Obviously if this change were made, some stat prerequisites would have to be changed (or removed entirely), but eg. everyone taking 5/5 Thick Skin without putting any points in Constitution is silly and clearly adds nothing to build variety; if you couldn't meet the prerequisite with items or heroism infusions or the like, then the stat requirement could be adjusted to the point where it is no longer a no-brainer to take it to 5/5.

Right now stat prerequisites serve no purpose beyond mindless, tedious micromanagement (as well as a trap for new players who don't realize they should be meeting ones outside the stats they use via items and temporary bonuses.) That serves no purpose and helps nobody. If you think high actual-investment stat requirements hurt build diversity, that's fine, but the solution is to reduce or remove stat requirements, not force people to cheat around them by tediously swapping around gear.

Basically, consider these options:

1. Remove all / most stat prerequisites. This means nobody "wastes stat points" and it completely unrestricts builds (although I don't agree that it leads to build variety - it makes strong certain talents that are meant to be gated behind high stat prerequisites, especially Thick Skin, into no-brainers, which decreases build variety. When nearly every single guide for every single build tells you to invest nearly a tenth of your total generic points the exact same way, obviously something is seriously wrong.)

2. Make stat prerequisites require actual stat investments, so they're actually meaningful and have gameplay impact. Adjust their values so they make sense and allow a decent variety of builds while using them to price certain powerful options.

3. Leave stat prerequisites in the game, but make them toothless and meaningless if players are willing to waste time and effort micromanaging their gear whenever they want to equip or learn something with a high prerequisite; and also so new players shoot themselves in the foot by not realizing they're supposed to be cheating around those requirements.

I do not see how anyone can seriously support option 3. What do prerequisites-that-you-can-cheat-around add, in your opinion? It seems to me that the people who want to either remove prerequisites or make them have teeth both care about mechanics and gameplay, whereas leaving prerequisites in but letting people cheat around them means that you want them for "just flavor", so to speak.