[1.7.0] Metaclass - Mage Knight

[Arcvasti]

Been messing around with this some and I have some feedback. So far I've played with Storm Knight and Earth Knight. I also have some general Mage Knight feedback. The gist of it is "oh my god why does every talent need to do five things at once", followed by "please please don't use artificial breakpoints in your talents" with a dash of "why on earth is this enabled on enemies". After some frustrating deaths to enemy Mage Knights, I manually turned them off myself. The classes are very high-powered and that's honestly fine, but they're some bullshit on enemies. Right now I'm in mid T2s with a Phoenix Knight on Insane, doing pretty well. Lost the Blood of Life to the new Assassin Lord hitting me for absurd poison ticks, but otherwise no real problems.

Storm Knight:

I got excited for this class and then saw that they had awful defense and that all their stuff required micromanaging your movement. Noped right out. It could be an interesting concept in a different game, but I don't think weaving movement with your attacks with fiddly free movement buffs that constantly appear and disappear really works in a game the length of tome.

Earth Knight:
-The scaling on Hammer and Anvil means there's zero reason to ever level it past level 3 for the 2 duration on the petrify.
-The whole gem shield thing is gross. All the gem shields clutter up your hotbar something fierce.
-You can cancel the temporary effect of the gem shield, which probably messes things up. The temporary effect names for those are also extremely unhelpful if you can't keep ten types of gem shield straight.
-Do gem shields really need to be targetable? You're only ever going to use them on yourself since the class has no summons.
-This also goes for pretty much every other "utility" talent mage knights have
-Their petrify doesn't check instakill or stoning immunity like it should, which is pretty broken.

Once I learned about the petrify thing I just stopped playing and moved on.

Sea Knight:

Once again I didn't play this too long. The Erosion instakill effect was just so incredibly janky. No message in the log, no particle effect, just them stopping existing. Extremely disconcerting.

Phoenix Knight:
-It's weird how Glory Rising's rejuvenation effect doesn't work with your actual big heal
-I also never managed to catch the death explosion effect from that talent going off

General stuff:
-I feel like I need to reiterate this, but every talent could pretty much be two talents. Given how few trees the classes have, that would be pretty helpful to making it seem less empty.
-It feels like a lot of their generic categories shouldn't really be generic? Usually a tree full of various weapon strikes is a class tree, whereas generic is more for utility.
-Please don't have 0 cooldown instant sustains, either make them cooldown 10 or turn them into passives straight-up.
-The sustains which reserve essence have absolutely brutal costs if you haven't been building willpower.
-The 30% spell CD on that one generic beam talent is an insanely good bonus to have
-Likewise, the respen on the capstone for the rainbow tree is absolutely huge
-The spell speed on the beam would be like that ordinarily but you don't honestly use spell speed that often because of how much essence it costs to cast without Eldritch Combat. You need to save all your essence for escapes/cleanses/heals pretty much.
-I'd be extremely careful with the new "wait" ability's ability to reduce cooldowns. It enables all kinds of crazy stuff and tedious prebuffing routines. And no, making it only work in the presence of enemies wouldn't fix that either. At the very least it should only work on Mage Knight talents and ideally it would be removed entirely. Waiting is already something you do a lot with the new resource system.
-I'm not so sure about essence penalizing damage and essence gain as it gets lower. Your talents already have huge essence costs compared to the size of your pool, so you have to manage it pretty actively already, no need to incentivize keeping it really high.

Things I especially liked:
-The cooldown reset on the dash strike is very fun, lets you jump around clearing summons or whatever like a ninja
-The effects for the Phoenix Knight attacks were very cool and flashy
-The resource system was pretty neat, basically like a more streamlined version of pos/neg energy.

More feedback to come, still haven't messed with a lot of the new locked categories or tried Mind/Arcane Knight yet. And of course I could still have a ways to go on my current Phoenix Knight run.

[Phoenix1]

Thanks for the feedback!

Been messing around with this some and I have some feedback. So far I've played with Storm Knight and Earth Knight. I also have some general Mage Knight feedback. The gist of it is "oh my god why does every talent need to do five things at once", followed by "please please don't use artificial breakpoints in your talents"

I'm not...quite sure how to answer that. Like, I get what you're saying, I just don't perceive the problem in it.

with a dash of "why on earth is this enabled on enemies". After some frustrating deaths to enemy Mage Knights, I manually turned them off myself. The classes are very high-powered and that's honestly fine, but they're some bullshit on enemies. Right now I'm in mid T2s with a Phoenix Knight on Insane, doing pretty well. Lost the Blood of Life to the new Assassin Lord hitting me for absurd poison ticks, but otherwise no real problems.

I'll grant, I make no claims about balance on Insane. I'm not skilled enough to play on there reliably. I've so far been uncertain about their balance on NPCs - I've had some frustrating deaths to Mage Knight enemies, but not really moreso than other classes, enough to allow me to draw the conclusion. That said, removing them should be easy enough. I'll do that next time I update.

Storm Knight:

I got excited for this class and then saw that they had awful defense and that all their stuff required micromanaging your movement. Noped right out. It could be an interesting concept in a different game, but I don't think weaving movement with your attacks with fiddly free movement buffs that constantly appear and disappear really works in a game the length of tome.

I've tended to find the storm knights movement stuff plays relatively smoothly, although I don't really micro-manage things in any case. But when I play storm knights I feel like I'm moving around enough to keep the buffs on pretty reliably in most cases, and an occasional shift when I otherwise wouldn't is usually well enough worth it anyway thanks to Dervish Dance. (Though yes their defense does suck pretty bad, it's one of their weaknesses.)

Earth Knight:
-The scaling on Hammer and Anvil means there's zero reason to ever level it past level 3 for the 2 duration on the petrify.
-The whole gem shield thing is gross. All the gem shields clutter up your hotbar something fierce.
-You can cancel the temporary effect of the gem shield, which probably messes things up. The temporary effect names for those are also extremely unhelpful if you can't keep ten types of gem shield straight.
-Do gem shields really need to be targetable? You're only ever going to use them on yourself since the class has no summons.
-This also goes for pretty much every other "utility" talent mage knights have
-Their petrify doesn't check instakill or stoning immunity like it should, which is pretty broken.

Once I learned about the petrify thing I just stopped playing and moved on.

Didn't realize petrify is supposed to check instakill immunity. And honestly I didn't even know there was such a thing as stoning immunity. I'll add those in next update. And it looks like I forgot to floor the duration on HaA, should be duration 2 at level 3 and 3 at 5. I mean, I dunno if that ends up making it worth going above 3, but whatever.

Gonna be honest I usually just drop the individual shields from my hotbar and let them go randomly. I mean, I made the option of triggering them specifically available for players who like to micromanage stuff like that (or who just have a favored shield or whatever), but I don't think it's particularly necessary for the class to work.

Thematically, yeah, Mage Knights are supposed to be able to use many of their support powers on others. There's actually lore reasons that they're supposed to be kinda good at escort quests.

Sea Knight:

Once again I didn't play this too long. The Erosion instakill effect was just so incredibly janky. No message in the log, no particle effect, just them stopping existing. Extremely disconcerting.

Mm, yeah, I'll add some feedback to that.

Phoenix Knight:
-It's weird how Glory Rising's rejuvenation effect doesn't work with your actual big heal
-I also never managed to catch the death explosion effect from that talent going off

It does if you're already regenerating. Or should, anyway, I'll double-check.

I know I tested it successfully but I'll double check the explosion thing to make sure I didn't mess something up somewhere along the lines.

-It feels like a lot of their generic categories shouldn't really be generic? Usually a tree full of various weapon strikes is a class tree, whereas generic is more for utility.

I basically went with the generic trees were the ones available to the whole metaclass, and the class ones were specific to the individual classes. For the unlocked trees, anyway. The locked trees I think my logic was more about which combos I wanted to be more or less feasible.

-Please don't have 0 cooldown instant sustains, either make them cooldown 10 or turn them into passives straight-up.

I'm pretty sure anything I still have as a sustain is because it's meant to be toggleable (like, Eldritch Combat being a toggle is key to being able to manage certain things like Advanced Energy effects), or because it relies on callbacks that I couldn't seem to get to work as passives.

-The sustains which reserve essence have absolutely brutal costs if you haven't been building willpower.

Well...yeah. Willpower is basically the secondary stat for these guys.

-The 30% spell CD on that one generic beam talent is an insanely good bonus to have

I may tone that down a bit. 25% max probably makes more sense since most of their talents cooldown in multipliers of four anyway.

-Likewise, the respen on the capstone for the rainbow tree is absolutely huge

Pretty much based that on the Archmage locked elemental trees.

-I'd be extremely careful with the new "wait" ability's ability to reduce cooldowns. It enables all kinds of crazy stuff and tedious prebuffing routines. And no, making it only work in the presence of enemies wouldn't fix that either. At the very least it should only work on Mage Knight talents and ideally it would be removed entirely. Waiting is already something you do a lot with the new resource system.

Noted, I'll see if there's a better option to use there.

-I'm not so sure about essence penalizing damage and essence gain as it gets lower. Your talents already have huge essence costs compared to the size of your pool, so you have to manage it pretty actively already, no need to incentivize keeping it really high.

I always kinda wanted resource management to be the main weakness of these guys. If the resource system seems a bit too punitive that's probably good, since they are pretty powerful in other areas.

Things I especially liked:
-The cooldown reset on the dash strike is very fun, lets you jump around clearing summons or whatever like a ninja
-The effects for the Phoenix Knight attacks were very cool and flashy
-The resource system was pretty neat, basically like a more streamlined version of pos/neg energy.

More feedback to come, still haven't messed with a lot of the new locked categories or tried Mind/Arcane Knight yet. And of course I could still have a ways to go on my current Phoenix Knight run.

Thanks a ton! I know there were a few things I didn't agree with but still this is all very helpful!

[Erenion]

So today I discovered that Whirlwind Dervish works on map patrols... and that that can trigger Eldritch Combat.
I'm not sure how Lightning Ride would work when triggered on the world map, but that might lead to awkward or gamebreaking situations.
EDIT: I forgot that a non-manual Lightning Ride doesn't teleport you. It should still be prevented from occurring though.

More bugs/feedback:
- Thunder Charge does not have a maximum range.
- The Wizard Knight tree is (in my opinion) too good to not take, simply due to the spell cooldown reduction affecting everything, including runes.

[Arcvasti]

I'll elaborate on the "artificial breakpoints" and "every talent does five things" points.

The ideal with tome talents is to have clean scaling both in player talent ranges and to a lesser degree in enemy talent ranges. Breakpoints in general violate that ideal, but especially artificial ones. With duration or range breakpoints, you're still getting value for your points in the talent even if you don't hit the break point. Dual Strike's stun duration is a good example of a duration breakpoint: The duration goes from 3->4->6->7->8. The breakpoint there is level 3, because going from 2/5 to 3/5 gives you twice as much benefit as any other level. In my opinion even this kind of breakpoint makes scaling messy, but there are a lot of things that combine to make them hard to avoid. Artificial breakpoints are worse because you get no benefit before the breakpoint is reached and usually no benefit after it is reached. The most extreme example is Demonologist's Suffuse Life, because the alleged benefit it gives before you hit the artificial breakpoint is negligible. Going from 0/5 to 1/5 does nothing, going from 1/5 to 2/5 does nothing, going from 2/5 to 3/5 does nothing and then going from 3/5 to 4/5 gives an absolutely insane boost. Ordinarily I'd say that going from 4/5 to 5/5 did nothing because of diminishing returns, but honestly 1% lifesteal might be worth a talent point.

I'll summarize my argument against artificial breakpoints like this:
-It makes the scaling very uneven, especially with breakpoints that use raw talent level and thus ignore talent mastery
-It encourages annoying floating of points, because you get little to no benefit from the talent until the breakpoint is reached, so you might as well put them in a higher scaling talent until then
-Because of diminishing returns, usually it is not worth it to go any farther past the breakpoint then absolutely needed

As for talents all doing five things, it's mostly a matter of cognitive load on the player. I spent like ten minutes trying to figure out what weapon type I should choose, before eventually giving up and just picking a two-handed weapon once I realized I'd need to cross-reference a dozen talents in order to figure out all the interlocking stuff. Making talents simple to understand also just makes them easier to balance. If a talent does one thing then you can just tune that one thing, instead of needing to adjust it for dual-wielders and for unarmed users and for single one-handed weapon users and for sword and shielders and for elegant parasol users and then also for two-handed weapon users. My general thought is that especially eldritch body/eldritch combat should be simplified, since they're talents you get early on and understanding them is fundamental to how you play the class. Eldritch combat's effect on weapons stat multipliers also feels somewhat out of place now that Mage Knight has a proper tree focused on that stuff.

Something unrelated I just noticed is that the "Advanced Energy" effects aren't well communicated. For example, the Phoenix Knight "Advanced Energy" effect says that it does "one eighth" of the base damage. Couldn't the talent description just automatically calculate that, instead of making the player do it?

I will say though that I actually like the concept of the "Advanced Energy" stuff. Playing a demonologist based around corrosive cone will absolutely level all walls around you with all the procs, and it's nice having Mage Knights' procs not do stuff like that.

Regarding the 0 cooldown sustains it's pretty much just that a sustain having 0 cooldown makes it pretty much impervious to sustain removal effects, which sustains shouldn't really be. Most vanilla 0 cooldown sustains have been changed to cooldown 10 by now. Personally I also don't think that Eldritch Combat super needs to be togglable, the talent it triggers are usually pretty good about not doing friendly fire or other undesirable efects.

[Thexare]

It may be a mod conflict, but Eldritch Body appears to just be adding a Magic requirement, rather than replacing a Strength requirement on items. You can see it on Esmi's armor and the shield in her inventory. (the scepter using mag and con is normal, that's a Midnight thing)

Also, just poked at Sea Knight so far, but a lot of your talent descriptions run extremely long. Like, to the detriment of playability.

I do appreciate the weapon flexibility, though, and the existence of a viable 1h/empty offhand class that doesn't involve becoming an abomination like Writhing One.

[Frumple]

Idle thought: Disable farwield strikes entirely while you have the on guard status -- instead, let it additionally intercept/block projectile attacks or somethin'. At least cut down range, mebbe. Right now, I'm spending quite a lot of turns just turtled up under my 60+ regen and +45% resall from eldritch guard and laughing as farwield murders everything in sight.

Which, uh. Given farwield's description at least sorta' suggests it shouldn't be doing things while you're waiting, might not be desired? It definitely does that, though. I guess it's only not doing it's thing specifically when your recovering essence, but it's just... maybe a bit excessive. As is.

[Reen]

i got a bug to report
every time i click inspect creature on this skeleton in korpul 2 i get this error

[Frumple]

That feeling of sitting in front of the vor armory death room, and clearing basically the entire thing out by... pressing 5 on the numpad. Repeatedly

Seriously though on guard might be somewhat overtuned, or... something. Was only normal difficulty, but a 29th level sea knight literally waiting the overpowered wyrms to death is a little silly. I'm sorta' building to be able to do it -- cloth armor/shield, maxed eldritch body, guard, flexible armor, as with the tides, adept, but... still. Still. I have 80% resall on tap, plus farwield to still murder things while I'm passively turtling. Feels like it might be excessive, I'unno.

[Phoenix1]

Yeah I had noticed a potential issue with Farwield + Eldritch Guard. I'll take a look at that, but disabling it is probably the best solution.

Thanks for the bug report, I'll check it out.

I'll see what I can do in terms of simplifying talent descriptions some as well.

Thanks all!

[Frumple]

So, uh. The farportal fortress event. Where you see the tentacley dude? The damage you can take there, apparently can trigger fading?

Which at least can just. Kill you. As soon as you get back with low health.

Log looks something like this:

Code: Select all

[LOG]	#UID:801870:0#Caldizar hits #fbd578#watwt#LAST# for #09bafd#(17 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(5 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(6 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(6 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(7 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(8 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(9 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(9 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(10 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(12 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(13 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(13 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(14 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(17 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(15 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(16 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(17 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(17 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(21 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(19 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(20 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(20 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(21 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(22 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(20 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(13 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(13 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(13 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(13 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(13 mitigated)#LAST#, #09bafd#(11 mitigated)#LAST# (#RED##{bold}#0#LAST##{normal}# total damage).
stack traceback:
[COROUTINE] error	cannot resume dead coroutine
[COROUTINE] dead	savefilepipe
[CHAT] selected	[done]	nil	nil
[LOG]	#UID:5298:0##fbd578#watwt#LAST# receives #LIGHT_GREEN#85 healing#LAST#.
[Actor:move]	806586	Pumpkin, the little kitty	move from	28	29	to	29	29
[PROFILE] mounted 	online	on /current-profile
[PROFILE] unmounted 	online	from /current-profile
[SPELL CRIT %]	45.1
Cloned shader 106
[SHADER] setting reset param	tick_start	93708976
Cloned shader 107
[SHADER] setting reset param	tick_start	93708976
[PROFILE] mounted 	online	on /current-profile
[PROFILE] unmounted 	online	from /current-profile
[SOUND] loading from	/data/sound/actions/death.ogg	:=:	sound "/data/sound/actions/death.ogg" : <static>
[LOG]	Fading hits #fbd578#watwt#LAST# for 169 damage.
[LOG]	#fbd578#watwt#LAST# receives #LIGHT_GREEN#51 healing#LAST# from Blood Splash.
[LOG]	#{bold}#watwt the level 36 mardrop sea knight ran out of strength on level 1 of Yiilkgur, the Sher'Tul Fortress.#{normal}#

I get the feeling(/hope) that isn't intended behavior

[nsrr]

With the latest version I get this error when trying to choose a Mana Knight on the character creation screen:

Code: Select all

ERROR:
Game version: tome-1.6.7
Addons: addon-dev-1.0.5[O!], faster_rre-1.0.6[X!], mageknight-1.6.0[X], ashes-urhrok-1.6.7[O], quiet-achievements-1.5.5[X!], possessors-1.6.6[O], orcs-1.6.0[O], items-vault-1.6.0[O], cults-1.6.0[O]

Lua Error: /engine/Particles.lua:67: cannot open /data/gfx/particles/aura_mana.lua: No error
  At [C]:-1 
  At [C]:-1 error
  At /engine/Particles.lua:67 loaded
  At /engine/Particles.lua:37 init
  At /engine/class.lua:79 new
  At /data-mageknight/birth/knight.lua:351 getval
  At /mod/dialogs/Birther.lua:1266 setTile
  At /mod/dialogs/Birther.lua:741 setDescriptor
  At /mod/dialogs/Birther.lua:614 classUse
  At /mod/dialogs/Birther.lua:147 fct
  At /engine/ui/TreeList.lua:310 onUse
  At /engine/ui/TreeList.lua:214 
  At /engine/KeyBind.lua:231 receiveKey
  At /engine/ui/Dialog.lua:801 keyEvent
  At /engine/ui/Dialog.lua:510 

After the error pops up the only way to get out is to kill the game from task manager.

EDIT: I should note that this was with all shaders turned off in the video options. Works fine with shaders turned on, and all other MageKnights were fine with the shaders off, it was only Mana Knight that caused an error.

[Frumple]

Just to double check, can eldritch combat triggered talents proc on spell effects? Black robe and such. Currently running around seeing if it does, but it's, uh. Hard to tell. Combat log gets spammed to hilarious degrees by the everything being everything'd at everything. Search of the log file suggests it does work like that, but... confirmation would be nice.

E: In other news, current run's going pretty okay:

[PseudoLoneWolf]

It may be a mod conflict, but Eldritch Body appears to just be adding a Magic requirement, rather than replacing a Strength requirement on items.

I'm having this issue as well, it doesn't appear to be a mod conflict as best I can tell. Daggers are actually converted properly and have only a MAG requirement (interestingly enough, so are whips, or at least Stormlash was), but armors, and all 1h and 2h non-dagger melee weapons all now have a STR requirement as well as a MAG requirement. It's not just cosmetic either, I can't equip them without the requisite STR score. I didn't pay attention to whether bows or ammo were affected.

[nsrr]

As a Sea Knight, I noticed that gloves had 120% magic dam mod and 2% each str, dex and cun.

[tabs]

I really love this addon but have two gripes:

• The tooltips are way too long.
• This is probably mostly confirmation-bias, but rare+ enemies seem to get mageknight classes a lot.