Shield Tactics - New Bulwark Talent Category v1.1.3

[nsrr]

v1.1.0
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[General]
Category re-named to 'Shield tactics'. (I forgot that the shield mastery talent in Shield defense is called 'shield expertise' and I don't want confusion.) This is cosmetic only; only the display name has changed.

[Tempered Will]
Physical Resistance scales up with Constitution.

[Relentless Retaliation]
Attack speed scales up with Dexterity.
Talent level 5 bonus has been removed.

[Tactical Defense]
Can now affect the same inscription multiple times in one turn, without any limit per inscription. The number of times this can occur in one turn increases with talent level and scales up with Constitution.
Talent level 3 bonus has been removed.

[Defiant Resolve]
Removed and replaced with:

[Reflexive Block]
"You are unmatched in your ability to react with your shield. If an attack would deal damage greater than your Block value, you raise your shield in an instant, preemptively reducing the damage by X% of your block value and assuming a blocking stance. This bonus block will not check or trigger Block cooldown. Damage reduction improves with Constitution. This talent has a cooldown."
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After getting some time to play with the finished tree, instead of just bug testing talents individually, I made a fair number of changes, as detailed above. I never unlocked the bonus on either talent that had one, and they felt perfectly useful and worth investment. Defiant Resolve really was not achieving the result I was going for and the best thing about it was the free block. Reflexive Block reduces damage from big hits and triggers block, which lets you trigger the bonuses from the previous talents, as well as further mitigate the damage. Note the damage reduction occurs before resistances and such are applied. Currently the talent is passive and has cooldown of 8. I like the way the effect works, but I think I may need to tweak the values, possibly scale the cooldown, or change it to a sustain.

[Chronosplit]

Update, I've been able to get Tempered Will to 97% after a merchant randart cloak and too much investment in Spell Shield. Spell Save is at 87 (once again, dorf only). With resilience or something like a Pride aura I get 100%.

So yeah, it's doable in the endgame if you go nuts with your saves. Is it worth it to shoot for if you're not a Dwarf? It may not be possible; it may not be worth it even if you are the right race, depending on your build choices. But it's definitely very good to have!

[nsrr]

Update, I've been able to get Tempered Will to 97% after a merchant randart cloak and too much investment in Spell Shield. Spell Save is at 87 (once again, dorf only). With resilience or something like a Pride aura I get 100%.

So yeah, it's doable in the endgame if you go nuts with your saves. Is it worth it to shoot for if you're not a Dwarf? It may not be possible; it may not be worth it even if you are the right race, depending on your build choices. But it's definitely very good to have!

Thanks again for the feedback! This is the kind of real-game testing that takes a lot of time, and I really, really appreciate it

Interestingly, that is about the level of 'possible' that I was shooting for, but I was pretty sure that I had over-tuned the talent scaling a bit and it would take a fair bit less effective save, and a lot less raw save, to reach 100% conversion. The talent scales from 15% to 45%, which should give you about 59% at 1.3 mastery and talent level 5, meaning you only need to make up 41% from Spell Save. The Spell Save scaling is really simple; it's just your effective save times one-half percent. So, I figured you would need around 80 or so effective save to hit 100% conversion, or something like 200 raw save. Which I figured was a fairly high number, but might not be that hard to reach if you were really trying. From your experience, it looks like it actually takes a decent bit more than that, which means I'm probably miscalculating something somewhere. Either way, if you can reach it near the end game when really trying for it, that seems pretty reasonable to me.

I'd be interested in your thoughts and experience with the other talents and how you think this tree affects a Bulwark's ability overall, if you're interested in sharing.

Personally, I feel that Tempered Will is a decent talent that makes Block a semi-viable damage mitigation option. On it's own, it's still not that great because Block has a high opportunity cost. Taking a whole turn just to reduce the damage you take on that turn is not a very effective use of turns. Relentless Retaliation helps mitigate the opportunity cost a fair amount by boosting your attack speed on the next turn (assuming you have Riposte, and something hit you). I like that this talent naturally favors the player by gaining stacks based on the number of enemies hit with Counterstrike. It's never going to be as good for NPCs as it is for a player. Tactical Defense further reduces the opportunity cost of Blocking by allowing it to lower the cooldown of inscriptions, letting you use them more often in an extended encounter. Reflexive Block does double-duty, reducing damage from large hits and giving you another free block. I still find it a bit awkward at the moment, as increasing Block value is incentivised in that it will reduce damage more when this triggers, but also somewhat disincentivised because the higher your block is, the higher the initial damage has to be to trigger the effect at all. On my current run, for instance, I found Titanic in the rich merchant's shop around level 25. While it's great for the enormous Block value, it also means that Reflexive Block almost never triggers for me, at least at this point. I'm considering a number of ways it could be tweaked, but I want to play it out a little more and not make any changes for a while to see if I get any more feedback.

[Chronosplit]

Welp, I got a win in Normal Adventure and cleared the Room of Death so here's my character for data (a couple notes: I only really used the vault for storing and selecting an escort wasn't actually used, just left at random. Also my Ring of the Dead went boom right before the end, which provided 10 Spell Save): https://te4.org/characters/160392/tome/ ... 07fb42c02e

Here's what I have about the others, since I ended up putting heavy investment in there:

-Relentless Retaliation is bonkers. Not only does it cancel out the Percise Strikes nerf which is great already, I can end up with sky-high attack speed just by using block. It was even better when I obtained Eternal Guard; between that, resetting Rush with Repulsion, and Step Up I was clearing whole mobs like nothing. Unfortunately this also meant Turn Back The Clock didn't get much use as the projectile was too slow. Any build can attain this level of RR, so maybe a nerf is necessary?
-Tactical Defense is good, but I only saw 2 was the maximum I needed. I honestly never found a need for a second regen with it though... wonder what would happen if you were an Ogre or had Fungus?
-Reflexive Block honestly didn't get as much use thanks to other talents and high Block. When I did get it going it was really good, however it was completely written off for the most part when I got Eternal Guard.

Also, I didn't run into a Lua error the entire playthrough.

EDIT: I finally died to Atamathon.

[nsrr]

Welp, I got a win in Normal Adventure and cleared the Room of Death so here's my character for data (a couple notes: I only really used the vault for storing and selecting an escort wasn't actually used, just left at random. Also my Ring of the Dead went boom right before the end, which provided 10 Spell Save): https://te4.org/characters/160392/tome/ ... 07fb42c02e

Here's what I have about the others, since I ended up putting heavy investment in there:

-Relentless Retaliation is bonkers. Not only does it cancel out the Percise Strikes nerf which is great already, I can end up with sky-high attack speed just by using block. It was even better when I obtained Eternal Guard; between that, resetting Rush with Repulsion, and Step Up I was clearing whole mobs like nothing. Unfortunately this also meant Turn Back The Clock didn't get much use as the projectile was too slow. Any build can attain this level of RR, so maybe a nerf is necessary?
-Tactical Defense is good, but I only saw 2 was the maximum I needed. I honestly never found a need for a second regen with it though... wonder what would happen if you were an Ogre or had Fungus?
-Reflexive Block honestly didn't get as much use thanks to other talents and high Block. When I did get it going it was really good, however it was completely written off for the most part when I got Eternal Guard.

Also, I didn't run into a Lua error the entire playthrough.

Grats on the win!

Good to hear you didn't run into any LUA errors

I've got another run going, last one ended in Dreadfel. I'm up to Dreadfel again, but this time I haven't died at all. Looking like this one might take a while to finish. I'll take all of your feedback into consideration, but I'm going to hold off a bit on adjusting anything. Your feedback basically lines up with my experience so far, though I have yet to get to Eternal Guard and Reflexive Block is preforming a bit better on this run with a shield that has a bit lower block value. One big difference in my experience is that I have invested heavily in Tactical Defense and have found it to have paid off quite well. There have been a few encounters so far that I likely would not have survived without being able to use my inscriptions as much as I did. Relentless Retaliation could probably use a bit of a nerf, though I do really like the way it can combo with Step Up to let you clear out a small pack of mobs even when they are a bit scattered. Reflexive Block could use a different trigger value, but I'm still considering options for that.

Thanks again for all the feedback!

[nsrr]

v1.1.1
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[General]
The tree now starts unlocked for Bulwarks.

Slightly increased maximum stat scaling on all talents.

[Relentless Retaliation]
Reduced scaling on speed bonus.

[Reflexive Block]
Now triggers on damage values over 65% of total block value.

[nsrr]

v1.1.2
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[Tempered Will]
Fixed an error from v1.1.1 in the stat scaling portion of the physical resistance formula which effectively stopped it from gaining any benefit from Constitution.

[Calodine]

Just won with this, admittedly only on normal - https://te4.org/characters/9893/tome/89 ... ad55fe3b54

It makes the class waaaay more fun to play - I went full on save stacking to replace spectral shield, got it up to 100% conversion, it was awesome. Relentless retaliation got A BIT DUMB at times, fairly reliably giving 999% in the prides (And I think at one point in high peak, over 2000%) but I think it's less a problem of scaling so much as it being uncapped.

Reflexive block I wound up being disappointed in - because the high end shields have such high block values, it was really rare that it'd trigger. When it DID, it was amazing though - I took 12 damage the turn after opening the room of death.

With it enabled, it's easily one of bulwark's best trees, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, what with bulwarks not exactly being amazing atm, and even going pretty heavy investment in it I still had a ton of generics sitting around unused so it being generic is real nice.

But it makes actually focusing on blocking as bulwark not a horrific mistake so good job 10/10 would get smashed into the ground by linaniil again

[nsrr]

I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for the feedback!

I agree with your points about both Relentless Retaliation and Reflexive Block. Relentless Retaliation should probably have a stack limit that scales with talent level. I think my mistake with Reflexive Block was trying to base the trigger value on block value. My thinking was something like 'Most damage reduction skills that protect against big hits trigger on a max life value, I should try something different'. Looking back, I realize there's a very good reason for this and it was silly to not just use a max life based trigger. Block values scale up in a fairly static way with big jumps between tiers and regardless of difficulty, whereas life builds much more gradually and scales better with difficulty (due to gear for players and just do to game mechanics for NPCs). Also, a player can usually hit bigger damage numbers than NPCs, so using a block value based trigger actually makes Reflexive Block better for NPcs than for players. IMO all talents should be less optimal for mobs than for players, and I've even gone out of my way to make that the case with some other talents I've coded. That's part of the reason I was OK with Relentless Retaliation attack speed being able to get so high; it's never going to be anywhere near as good for a mob. Still, if it's hitting numbers that make players feel like it's unfair or removes too much challenge, then that is not good either.

I've made notes and will take this into consideration when I get back to this. Still trying to find some unlocks in Cults and feel out High Guard at the moment. Plus I have some things I've been meaning to fix in some of my older mods that just keep getting pushed back...

[nsrr]

v1.1.3
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[General]
Cleaner method for adding the talent tree.

[Relentless Retaliation]
Mildly reworked. Now triggers when damage is fully blocked, rather than when Counterstrike is applied.
The effect can now stack to a maximum of 8 times, rather than allowing unlimited stacking.
Each target can only proc the effect once per turn (the old check was not working). If you learn Eternal Guard, this limit is removed.

[Reflexive Block]
Mildly reworked. Now triggers based on a percent of maximum life (12%) rather than based on block value.
Damage reduction scaling increased.

[thechaoscard]

This is my fav addon, finally I can tank without relying on spell shields. Here's my character sheet: https://te4.org/characters/238327/tome/ ... d45e436cf2


This is my first time beating the game ever, and taking on Atamathon!

[nsrr]

I'm really glad you enjoyed it. Congrats on the win