[1.6.7] Bristlebarb - Thorn class

[Cathbald]

Hello all. This addon introduce the Bristlebarb, a very passive class.
You can download the addon here : https://te4.org/games/addons/tome/bristlebarb

Description
This addon adds the Bristlebarb as a playable class.
Bristlebarbs hate everyone with a passion, but refuse to lower themselves to the levels of other by fighting.
Their scorn alone empower them as they cover themselves in spikes and trudge their own path, in blood.

Bristlebarbs use no weapons but are covered in a living bramble that they can control.

They use a special resource : thorns.
Higher thorn count give them bonus damage.
Lower thorn count slow them down but increase their armor, as their thorn become dead wood.
Extremely low thorn will prevent all movement.
Thorns default to 50% on rest and increase in the presence of worthy enemies (rare rank and above).

5 unique class trees (1 locked) :
Scorn : A manifestation of their hate for the outside world
Flow of the thorn : You move like a vine, nothing stopping you from growing wherever you want.
One with the thorn : More and more, your body changes and adapt.
Mutation : your thorns started simple, what are they becoming now ?
Wrath of the thorn : harness your hate to guide your thorns in devastating attacks.

Bristlebarbs can not appear on NPC.

Disclaimer
Please report any bugs you find and I will endeavor to fix them
At this point the talents are finished but have not yet been balanced, as I still need to run through a couple game and see where we stand.
Any input is helpful and appreciated.

If possible, please take discussions and bugs report to the forum thread.

Credits
http://game-icons.net/ for all the talent and effect icons.

https://opengameart.org/content/painter ... ons-part-2 for the class icon and a couple others.

In advance, whoever tries this out and gives me feedback so I can continue to improve it !

Changelog

[Frumple]

Hoo boy, the body of thorn does not seem to like certain environmental damage sources. Flips out hard in the embers sewer at a minimum. Spits out

Code: Select all

 ----------------  Stack Dump ----------------
--------------- Stack Dump Finished ---------------
Lua Error: /data-bristlebarb/talents/cath_one_with_the_thorn.lua:292: attempt to index field 'turn_procs' (a nil value)
	At [C]:-1 __index
	At /data-bristlebarb/talents/cath_one_with_the_thorn.lua:292 
	At /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:1154 callTalent
	At /mod/class/Actor.lua:6117 cb
	At /data-Infinite500/damage_typesI500.lua:481 defaultProjector
	At /data/damage_types.lua:865 projector
	At /data/damage_types.lua:1793 projector
	At /data-orcs/zones/dominion-port/grids.lua:35 check
	At /engine/Map.lua:801 checkEntity
	At /mod/addons/improved-restauto/superload/mod/class/Actor.lua:123 act
	At /mod/class/Player.lua:378 act
	At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:129 tickLevel
	At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:64 tick
	At /engine/GameTurnBased.lua:51 tick
	At /mod/class/Game.lua:1534 

that, dozens and dozens of times. You can sorta' get around it by closing all and moving out of the water, but it's rough and it spams the log file like crazy.

Actually looking at the error message, though, it looks like there might be some addon incompatibility going on. I'll disable 'em and see if it helps any... and nope, still doing it. Error message with those addons nixed reads:

Code: Select all

Lua Error: /data-bristlebarb/talents/cath_one_with_the_thorn.lua:292: attempt to index field 'turn_procs' (a nil value)
	At [C]:-1 __index
	At /data-bristlebarb/talents/cath_one_with_the_thorn.lua:292 
	At /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:1154 callTalent
	At /mod/class/Actor.lua:6117 cb
	At /data/damage_types.lua:523 defaultProjector
	At /data/damage_types.lua:865 projector
	At /data/damage_types.lua:1793 projector
	At /data-orcs/zones/dominion-port/grids.lua:35 check
	At /engine/Map.lua:801 checkEntity
	At /mod/class/Actor.lua:732 act
	At /mod/class/Player.lua:378 act
	At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:129 tickLevel
	At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:64 tick
	At /engine/GameTurnBased.lua:51 tick
	At /mod/class/Game.lua:1534 

Hope that helps. So far it's fairly interesting in a hug-all-the-things sorta' way, which is a gameplay style I tend to enjoy, heh.

E: Also it's kinda' weird to start with heavy armor training? Considering body of thorns eventually deletes any ability for you to wear armor, it can function as essentially making the first point in body of thorns cost both a class and a generic point. Light armor training also seems to actually still work sans armor slot entirely, which may or may not be intentional.

E2: Oh jeez, the error spam seems to actually eat turns, too. That'd be pretty mean if there wasn't as much passive AoE/retaliation going on.

E3: Also, uh. This can't do the ritch quest in embers, can it? No glove to put the sand shredder in. You'd need a super low turn dig to even attempt without that.

E4: Okay, confirmation light armor training just doesn't work, though there's no overt feedback I can notice telling you that. Legit question, why even have combat training on this class at all? Folding the accuracy and resall into class talents or giving it a custom generic tree covering that sort of thing would seem to make more sense, since it gets literally nothing from anything except the accuracy and thick skin, if you go all in on your class talents.

E5: Yeah, it's doing it with the yeti tissue zone lava, too. Body of thorns hates environmental sourced damage right now, yikes.

[Cathbald]

didn't think about environmental damage apparently, gotta work on that fast.

And didn't think of sand shredder at all.... gonna figure something out here too.

Heavy Armor Training is because you most likely want to equip heavy armor until you remove the slots as it's tankier.
LAT does not work if you have no armor, so i never considered making it give bonus.

Accuracy and thick skin are pretty important, i don't see why we'd skip combat training. No classes go full 0 in combat training, thick skin is good and the class has no built-in acc.

[Cathbald]

OK, sand shredder fixed (thorn fists grants you the power to shred sand walls in ritch hive).
And environmental damage interaction with body of thorns fixed.

[Frumple]

OK, sand shredder fixed (thorn fists grants you the power to shred sand walls in ritch hive).
And environmental damage interaction with body of thorns fixed.

Cheers! I'll fire up another run this afternoon, heh, hopefully.

Heavy Armor Training is because you most likely want to equip heavy armor until you remove the slots as it's tankier.
LAT does not work if you have no armor, so i never considered making it give bonus.

Maybe set up something to refund generics and/or disable investment once you put points in body of thorns? Or at least have some kind of significant warning any investment in body of thorns will invalidate your investment in the armor training talents. My first go cheerfully sunk an extra point into heavy, since you start with a point and heavy armor equipped, without realizing it would turn into utterly wasted talent points until I actually put a point in body of thorns and went "Oh."

... then a point into light after I got BoT 'cause it looked like it still might do something, heh.

Mostly the design concern on that front to me is that right now it's set up so the armor talent is literally a trap, and one you're subtly encouraged to step on, and that just seems... unnecessary? Undesirable? Not cool, yo'. Class is nice but I don't think it's strong enough you need to short it generic points and trip up people new to playing it

Accuracy and thick skin are pretty important, i don't see why we'd skip combat training. No classes go full 0 in combat training, thick skin is good and the class has no built-in acc.

Some mod classes do, actually, 'cause they don't get it (though I guess the training workaround on that front still exists? It's been a while since I started an adventurer without CT to min-max on that front, so it might have changed). Most recently updated one I can recall is the Mage Knight stuff, that has a unique tree filling in for combat training, but there's others and there's quite a few (even vanilla classes!) that functionally fold some or all of the combat training stuff into unique talents.

Mostly it's just a... look, CT for bristle right now consists of two talents that are helpful, two that are actively detrimental (either wastes points or functionally locks you out of body of thorns), and two that while not explicitly detrimental, are heavily discouraged. When you're just not using 2/3rds of the tree it starts looking super attractive to just replace it with something more interesting, yeah? If only so you actually need to make decisions instead of mindlessly dumping excess generics into the only two that do something for you.I

Given how much these guys are supposed to hate other people, it even makes some thematic sense they wouldn't have formalized combat training, now that I think about it. Reading back over the class blurb actually makes me think it'd be pretty on point for them explicitly to not (disdains fighting, other people, i.e. what combat training is about and where it would come from, heh), maybe even have grounds to do something weird with escort quests. I could see an option to refuse them for thorns based boosts, and a cost somewhere to aiding them (-10(%) max thorns or something).

Heck, I can almost see some kind of long term/accumulating bonus for just flat not entering towns or interacting with people at all. +10 thorns for telling the lumberjacks to shove off, stuff like that. Maybe some exceptions for quest necessity (last hope, sunwall), maybe removing the necessity entirely for this class.

[Cathbald]

i thought about some quest related stuff like lumberjack and co to flesh out the "lore/feel" of the class yeah, but it isn't in the cards for now ^^

i can't think of a class that will not go to Last Hope and spend 50 gold to get thick skin. Not starting with combat training is only relevant in Infinite Dungeon where you need a potion to learn the tree. By adding a tree that "replaces" combat training i would either add more tankiness since people would then go buy it anyway, or would have to prevent learning it somehow and then i would have made a tree to replace a tree that serves its purpose well (imo).

Bristlebarb could use a dedicated generic tree but i was uninspired so far and it would not replace combat training anyway.

I wouldn't say the point in HAT is "wasted". If you create a bristlebarb, you'll see you have 5 generics (3 free, 1 in HAT, 1 in racial) If you create an archmage you'll see you have 3 generics (1 free, 1 in racial, 1 in phase door).
Even after the HAT point becoming useless, you have 1 more gen point than Archmage !

I'll make a note to tell the player somewhere that they shouldn't invest in either armor mastery to prevent waste of points though.

[Erenion]

First impression after a brief testing session:
Congratulations, you have made the best user of the Adept prodigy I've seen to date.
Thorn Drag gains range 3. Three-Pronged Point turns into a net damage bonus.
You gain 30 additional maximum thorns.
And you get some more miscellaneous stat boosts from higher One with the Thorn levels. Not that many though, as most stats seem to be capped.

Flexible Combat... does not cooperate. You just make weak physical attacks that do next to no damage and have no additional effects.
Both Superpower and Arcane Might work just fine.
Irresistible Sun might just be amazing on the class if you can figure out a way to deal the required damage.
Same goes for Corrupted Shell, since it maxes out your armor hardiness.
Eye of the Tiger just does not work on this class.

Spine Twirl's radius scales with talent level, but that level is almost not achievable outside of the Infinite Dungeon. (You need a category point and Adept to gain range 4.)
Funnily enough, with Adept, the last point in Scorn and Thorn is purely detrimental. It raises the damage a hit must do to trigger it, but does not decrease the thorn loss.

You have also managed to make tinkers not break, so congratulations. There is no retaining of any talents or stat bonuses given by tinkers.
However, the One with the Thorn talents should probably be flagged as no_unlearn_last, since they rob you of your inventory slots. You can accidentally put a point in there while leveling, take it out again and lose the slot (including any items currently inside) for good. I see no way this is actually going to happen on a playthrough, but still.

Bug Report: Something about Displacement Shield really freaks this class out.

[Cathbald]

oh yeah, adept unlocks several breakpoint indeed ^^ i like mastery to mean something and thorn drag was specially tuned that even a little mastery from an amulet would grant that extra range, haha.
flexible combat will be bad since you have no gloves and no procs, yeah. and eye of the tiger huh... could reduce talents from survival :p
you're already at prodigy level ? was the early game that easy ?

i tested tinkers and fanged collar to ensure nothing would break, well fanged collar breaks in the sense you don't have the updated head on the doll. but the rest works fine !

One with the thorn were supposed to be no_unlearn_last i... must have deleted that at some point by accident ? Since i was always in dev mode while playing i didn't notice.


displacement shield might interact badly with body of thorns i guess ? do you have a log/screen of the error ? will try to reproduce and push a fix.

[Erenion]

Concerning prodigies, Arena is very fast but I did some devmode testing as well.
That might have been the cause of the no_unlearn_last as well.

The error seems to be due to Three-Pronged Point, as it does not occur with it turned off.

[Erenion]

Okay, so I was testing adventurer builds with Bristlebarb components (as I tend to do - if I see an interesting class, it gets made into adventurers) and I discovered something.
If you pick tentacles, they work and trigger twice off of your normal attack - but they do thorn damage.
Combine this with a dash of Brawler and you get a class that is hitting enemies with eight thorn attacks as early as level 2 (maybe earlier if you play as a +MAG race.)

Update: even skills that only do tentacle attacks (Tendril Eruption) are affected. But the thorn damage they do still scales with your tentacle weapon mastery.

[Erenion]

Update: the Displacement Shield error also affects Mitosis.

[Cathbald]

New update !

0.9.2 :
- properly disable NPC from being Bristlebarbs
- allow Bristlebarb categories on amulet of mastery/perfection
- fixed a bug when dealing thorn damage to a displacement shield (also fix mitosis apparently since i haven't been able to reproduce)
- fixed a bug with speed displaying for wrath of the thorn talents if a weapon was equipped

Please make sure you update as some of those fix will not apply on an existing save.

[visage]

Is there Thorn-resistance-penetration, or do you need to find sources of all-pen in order to deal with All resistance?

[Cathbald]

you have one talent that reduce thorn res and otherwise you need all pen (or ethereal form/temporal form as prod)

thorn rot (from Blighted Bristle) can spellshock, also reducing all res by 20%

[Erenion]

More random Bristlebarb discoveries:
Elemental Fury and Pendant of the Sun and Moons prevent Three-Pronged Point from working.
However, they split the damage up into multiple instances that each have a chance to trigger the other effects from Mutation, so Elemental Fury might actually be a better choice than Three-Pronged when it comes to applying debuffs.
Temporal Form is actually a good choice when it comes to resistance penetration not just because of the temporal conversion but also because it grants access to Anomaly Flawed Design, which reduces resistances (and can spellshock to reduce resistances even further.)