Now You See Me: Illusionist and Arcane Trickster

[Mister_Vimes]

Okay, thanks! I actually just uploaded the first fix- now to do the second.

EDIT: Both talents are now renamed in the latest version.

[Arcvasti]

re: Name changes. It's good practice to define shortnames for all addon talent names. Something like adding a _ILLUSION to all of your talents will avoid talent name conflicts. For an example of how that works, look at the code for the Berserker/Bulwark Warshouts and how they have the same displayed talent name but different shortnames.

Basically the only places that linear scaling is used in the base game is for powers/saves, since those get rescaled later down the line. There are some exceptions, but they're mostly either artifacts from before standardized scalings or products from developers who don't understand scaling at all. As a general rule, 5/5 on a talent should be twice as good as 1/5 in a talent.

Hmm, I'm still not convinced about Cun vs Cun checking for images. I'll have to test how well that works out lategame. It's also kind of weird that it uses an actual roll instead of checkHit.

I don't see what's nonsensical about having a tree about darkness damage be bad against enemies with darkness resistance. That's like, the entire point of darkness resistance.

Hmm, I must have missed that amongst all the callbacks. I still think that it's pretty bad to have even minor pieces of information hidden from the player and that the different talents and effects for the different images are too complicated. If there really isn't much of a difference beyond appearance between most of the images, then why is there anything beyond a cosmetic difference at all?

I mean, basically all classes don't have the versatility of Archmage, which is a good thing. The thing is, even Archmage doesn't deal three damage types. They pick one and mostly deal that damage. Since they're guaranteed a ton of resistance penetration, they don't need to care about resistance to their chosen element past like level 25. Illusionist, in contrast, is legitimately split between three damage types since they don't have enough attack spells in a single element to use that exclusively. That's more similar to Wyrmic then anything else.

Basically, a focused class is a class where all of the talents proceed logically from capabilities that the class needs and the class has clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. I think that Arcane Trickster is more focused then I thought it was if you ignore Street Golems completely.

Also, uh, I just noticed that Arcane Trickster doesn't have the dual-wielding trees or any analog to them. I'm pretty sure this will lead to every Arcane Trickster using a 2H weapon.

[Mister_Vimes]

Good thought on the shortnames. I did define shortnames for some of my talents, but using an addon-specific tag is something that hadn't occurred to me.

On the dual-wielding: My thought was that Deadly Poison, Scoundrel, and Void Blades would provide enough incentive to dual-wield if a player wanted to engage in direct combat with the Arcane Trickster.

The AT's playstyle focuses on ranged incapacitation, target isolation, and damage-by-proxy, so melee power is not necessarily a core strength of the class, but should someone want to play that way, do you think they'd get more out of a 2H than a dual-wield, given those particular talents?

[PseudoLoneWolf]

Well, the issue at hand there is that none of those actually require dual wielding. In fact, Lethality is the only talent that I can find in the whole class talent tree that even pushes the player towards daggers, let alone dual wielding daggers. Deadly Poison, Scoundrel, and Void Blades can all benefit a 2h weapon just as well as they benefit dual daggers, and you lose out on an extra melee attack per attack using a 2H but that's more than compensated by the damage increase.

That being said though, the REAL thing that pushes the player towards daggers rather than 2H is the STR requirement. The class is already split three ways with DEX/CUN/MAG and if you stick with that, there's no real room to get STR. Daggers benefit from your stats that you'll be building up anyway, to get your talents, doubly so due to Lethality. But that STR "soft-lock" seems to be the only thing ACTUALLY preventing an Arcane Trickster from wielding a greatmaul.

[Mister_Vimes]

Okay, so a question then... I don't have a personal issue with "soft-locks" as far as a class goes as long as it doesn't arbitrarily steer the player away from an otherwise-legitimate character build. So if someone wants to make a greatmaul-wielding AT and they can pull it off stat-wise, that just sounds like a fun playstyle to me.

But there's a lot I don't know. So my question is: Do you all think it would be better to more directly encourage dual-wielding via the talent trees, or just let the implicit fact that Cun, Dex, and Mag are all pretty much required for the AT be enough? My personal feeling is the latter, but I'd be curious what others think.

[Arcvasti]

I'm not convinced that they even need Dex though. The only category they have that scales on it is Mobility and I'd rather have more weapon damage then better evasion/trained reactions.

Using 2H instead of dual-wielding also weakens Expose Weakness by a fair bit though, which is a better argument for using two daggers. I totally missed that they had expose weakness earlier. They really shouldn't have expose weakness, for a couple reasons:

1) Expose weakness is bugged so that it counts all attacks that proc during the attack functions as probing strikes.

2) Expose weakness breaks scaling by adding base weapon damage and effective accuracy.

This leads to ridiculous stuff like this:



Arcane Trickster can't exploit it quite as much as Rogue can, but they still have blade flurry and projection weapons exist, so you can still get stupid numbers.

[Mister_Vimes]

Although higher Dex does increase the effectiveness of four talents in the Arcane Tricks and Arcane Gadgetry trees. (That was intentional in order to encourage investment in Dex and keep the AT more rogue-ish.) Also, higher Dex opens up light armor mastery, which is desirable since heavy armor nullifies stealth.

Also. Wow. I had no idea Expose Weakness was broken like that. Do you know if there are plans to patch that anytime soon? Or was it intentional?

[nsrr]

It was not intended and I believe it's been fixed for 1.6, which will surely be released some day. I wouldn't put money on any reasonable definition of 'soon', though.

[Arcvasti]

Right now you can just use Shadow Dance to stealth even in heavy armour. I didn't notice that those talents scaled with Dex, which certainly makes dual wielding more appealing.

[Arcvasti]

I don't think I've mentioned it before, so I'll do it now: The class icon for Illusionist looks very neat.

I played a Yeek Illusionist on Insane Roguelike, Age of Ascendency campaign with no other addons turned on. I played until about level 15, which was long enough to finish Trollmire and Kor'Pul.

-Shadow Cast has really high damage, with combatTalentSpellDamage(35,300). The highest damage normal vanilla spell talent is blood grasp, which uses combatTalentSpellDamage(10,290). I can understand dealing higher damage to make up for lower range, but why does it need to deal more damage then any other spell?
-I spawned an Image on Blighted Soil and its illusory damage gave an enemy a disease. The disease did no damage, but still debuffed stats. Probably not a big deal, but still amusing.
-You forgot to make the NYSM classes unavailable on NPCs. An especially annoying consequence of this is that the player can't swap with images the way enemies can, so you can easily be hemmed in by unkillable walls.
-Actually, after I encountered an enemy with Create Image, images stopped being able to be swapped with at all and instead got melee attacked like anyone else.
-Shadow Draw heals you for a lot, although that might just be because Shadow Cast deals tons of damage early on.
-Veil of Illusions scales way too well. I think that the evasion per illusion should decrease as you get more illusions[Flavourwise: You trade quality for quantity] and that the evasion should approach 50% at infinite talent level while being ~33% at TL 5. Illusionist is fairly durable even without their images drawing fire and is very hard to kill with that.
-Staff Combat seems like an odd choice for being unlocked, especially when Combat Training is still locked for some reason.

[Mister_Vimes]

Hey thanks! I'm not much of a graphics guy, but I did like the way that icon turned out.

[EDIT: fixed typos]
I'm open to lowering Shadow Cast's damage- I really struggled with balancing its power with its range. This will definitely effect Shadow Draw's healing power as well (also a thought: since you were playing a Yeek Illusionist, the healing numbers were even higher, percentage-wise).

Ugh. I was intentional about keeping the images from inflicting any actual physical harm, but Blighted Soil never even occurred to me.

I did deliberately allow the NPCs several of the NYSM trees, but I never ran into that particular issue with their created images- it sounds like I have a bug in the image swap code somewhere (although do you remember if you were pinned at the time? An attacker with the never_move flag set to true will not swap with images; otherwise, they would gain de facto mobility.)
ETA: Also, did you check if you were actually making contact with your attacks? Misses do not (currently) trigger the swap.

Good thoughts on scaling Veil of Illusion. I was so concerned about it being underpowered that I think I made it overpowered instead.

I gave the Illusionist Staff Combat to open up more actual damage opportunities should the player invest heavily in the Image trees. Up until Illusory Insanity, there's no damage in those trees, just buff/debuff/utility.

[martinvillarreal]

Hi, i have the same problem , but in my case enemies cant swap with my images too

-You forgot to make the NYSM classes unavailable on NPCs. An especially annoying consequence of this is that the player can't swap with images the way enemies can, so you can easily be hemmed in by unkillable walls.
-Actually, after I encountered an enemy with Create Image, images stopped being able to be swapped with at all and instead got melee attacked like anyone else.
.