The arrival of 1.6

[visage]

Now that 1.6 is here with all of its changes, it seems to me it'd be useful to have a thread to note changes of potential interest to adventurers, to point out all of the ways existing adventurer builds have been nerfed (without resurrecting old threads to simply say 'this doesn't work anymore'), and to report on less-obvious interactions.

Stuff I've noticed so far:

Tanking strategies: Vines no longer halves movement speed, so Vines+Tarraska is no longer a sustained 50% damage reduction. Flash of the Blade's cooldown has been increased dramatically. ...and for all that baseline Block is more useful, it looks awfully hard to get it to anything near 100% uptime.

Pulverizing Augur is no longer an option for Magical Combat, and Magical Combat skills now treat shield use to a 50% penalty (up from 25%).

The shield bashes on Wyrmic and Cursed skills do not stack with the free shield bash on Stoneshield.

Corona's text lost its note that Corona does not crit... so perhaps Corona can self-sustain. (Positive/Negative energy changes are relevant here: they get passive regeneration, but no fatigue no longer affects them.)

The reworked Predator category makes me wonder what one might accomplish with vast amounts of accuracy and physical power.

The Herald can no longer be summoned via "Seen by Arcane Eye" (or Spellshock, which actually surprises me a bit).

I expect there are invisible changes that may well break existing known adventurer-only interactions.

What else has been broken? What new options look intriguing?

[Snarvid]

Fungus is wildly different. Ancestral life has been nerfed into the floor by tying time gained to heal size (Iirc, something like 8% of a turn per 100 direct heal), there’s no more “get a regen effect when you heal”, and it has a bucket of extra max hp and much longer regen effects.

[St_ranger_er]

3rd talent in Ambush tree was changed entirely, so it is no longer possible to fearscape yourself by controlling your own shadow clone.

[visage]

Ancestral life has been nerfed into the floor by tying time gained to heal size (Iirc, something like 8% of a turn per 100 direct heal)

However, it does work with Osmosis Shield and Suffuse Life, giving 5% of a turn per 100 healed.

[Snarvid]

Hmmm. So no direct heals are excluded now? Do code-savvy people know if it requires hitting the full 100 threshold or would e.g. healing 80 give 4% of a turn?

You could probably get infinite time during a Razorlock Continuous Butchery Suffuse life essence of speed combo, although that’s obviously only single target. (Or just a Yeek in a Saw Butcher body with Dethblyd.)

I think there’s some potential for Frantic Summoning with Healing Nexus and various heal on summon effects as well.

[visage]

Hmmm. So no direct heals are excluded now? Do code-savvy people know if it requires hitting the full 100 threshold or would e.g. healing 80 give 4% of a turn?

Basically, every character-turn it totals up the (non-regen) healing you got and awards you a fraction of a turn. There's even a useful message telling you just how much of a turn you got.

You could probably get infinite time during a Razorlock Continuous Butchery Suffuse life essence of speed combo, although that’s obviously only single target. (Or just a Yeek in a Saw Butcher body with Dethblyd.)

I believe, from looking over the code a few days ago, that it only counts the healing that actually restored lost HP. So in order to get infinite turns you'd need to be dealing 2000 damage to yourself each turn and healing it.

[Snarvid]

Can confirm that belief. Tested with Healing Nexus, Grand Arrival, Ancestral Life, and 14 creatures out. No additional time gained due to lack of injury.

[Arcvasti]

In an earlier version the pro strat for infinite turns via ancestral life was to be thalore, stack nature affinity and hit yourself with mindstars.

[Snarvid]

You can get speed boosts as a Thalore now by standing in a Toxic Canister aoe - with sufficient resists (and/or a very low level AM shield) your Affinity will outpace the damage, but it will do some damage and so you can gain time. It's pretty modest, though it is nice also to be able to bathe in poison and end up healing and gaining a little time while your enemies choke.

This is also temporarily available to anyone with Waters of Life, albeit with more risk.

[helminthauge]

it's really good with Primal Infusion.

[Pisastrish]

Did some testing with shivgoroth form + alchemist bombs and it's not as simple as the amount healed. Ice resist had no effect on turn gain even though it reduces damage taken (and therefore healed), and shrugged off crits had twice the turn gain of non-crit casts even though the damage is the same.

(crits were giving me 42% of a turn with a lvl 50 100 all stat character, with PES+adept but categories and points mostly unspent and almost no equipment, so shivgoroth, ancestral life, alchemist bombs, and 0 spell cooldown is probably another way to get infinite turns)

[Snarvid]

Amount healed definitely counts for something - I had Waters of Life up with mid 200's poison damage, I received essentially the same heal effect two turns in a row but the first turn it all went to correcting damage done and at the start of the second I had only a sliver of missing life remaining so most of it was overheal, I went from something like 8% of a turn gained to 2%.

[Pisastrish]

It's definitely limited by amount healed, but it seems like it calculates it weirdly (at least when healing to max with affinity). In my test for my previous post, I activated PES, then shivgoroth form, then cast alchemist bomb on myself (at full health). When the spell didn't crit, I damaged myself by ~280, healed to max, and received 21% of a turn. When the spell crit, but was shrugged off, I still damaged myself by ~280 and healed to full, but received 42% of a turn. Ice resist affected the damage I took but not the turn amount, ice damage+ affected both.

The heal amount in the log was always 1500+ so it definitely ignores overheal, but the calculation doesn't match the actual amount of health healed either. It does seem to be the correct turn gain for the amount I would have healed if I had no resist and no crit shrug off, so I think somehow it's calculating the heal amount based on incoming damage when you heal to max, ignoring your defenses, but I'd have to test with other forms of damage reduction to be sure

[Snarvid]

The wiki is often out of date, so I’m not swearing by it, but this would help explain some/all of what you’re saying (and matches my previous experience with Temporal Hounds 100% temporal resist essentially comparing incoming respen to their affinity when determining whether the final effect is net positive or negative health).

https://te4.org/wiki/Affinity

“Affinity to an element causes you to heal when you take damage of that type. The heal amount is calculated before resistances and damage reduction apply, but applied after the damage instance is applied. This means that if you do not survive the damage, you won't get the healing. Note this means damage resistance and damage affinity synergize and are stronger together than they are individually.”

[Snarvid]

I wonder if there is some sort of Osmosis Shield / Entropic Gift / Ancestral Life feedback loop that you can get into. Damage creates healing/healing creates damage and time, repeat.