[1.6.7] Bristlebarb - Thorn class

[visage]

They were also far more bumpy than i liked, running around passively damaging people was supposed to be a bigger part of the theme.

If you want them bumping less, could you convert the bump attack into something that is more about focusing the radiant thorn damage and less about doing damage directly? ...or perhaps a non-stacking ramping-up-DoT effect on bump? The idea there being that once you bump attack someone, you could just sit around letting damage happen to them, rather than re-bumping.

[visage]

- New tree ! Root is a generic tree that requires level 10. It gives bonus for staying in place and getting hit.

I have now taken a Bristlebarb through to the point of waiting the Master to death. Some thoughts on its current form:

1) Am I correct in thinking that the only way a Bristlebarb has to breathe underwater is to be(come) undead? If so, perhaps either Crown of Thorns or Body of Thorn should increase breath capacity?

2) Having invested heavily in Root, I'm finding that I don't particularly want to attack with the thorn weapon anymore, so I've been wielding a weapon as a stat stick. Conveniently, I get a lua error every time I accidentally attempt to bump someone with it (This may well be an interaction with some other mod I have.) If you don't want people doing that, you may want to make occasionally bumping work better with a Root-based build, or give some other bonus when the weapon slots are empty.

3) It's pretty impressive how common pin effects that don't care about pin immunity are.

4) Slow Wrath with Adept gets you to waiting in 50% of a turn. That's... pretty impressive, in practice. I suspect it might be a good thing if it didn't scale quite that well, and in exchange the Root tree got a buff via some other means.

5) However, Slow Wrath doesn't hold a candle to movement infusions. The interaction between Thorn Walker, Thorny Presence, and movement infusions is in my mind unfortunately reminiscent of Awesometoss. I'd love to see the class get some anti-synergy with global speed and movement speed. Could it get a thorn damage bonus/malus that scales inversely with those somehow? (Queue the Ghoul Bristlebarbs!) I'm feeling really tempted to get Windtouched Speed so I can wait even faster, and that seems wrong.

[Frumple]

Heh. Awesometoss or old-school beyond the flesh. Slayers used to have the thing where you could dance around something without breaking wild speed for stupid amounts of damage, too, and it was also just sorta' passive. Bbarb's interaction there is super reminiscent.

[Cathbald]

1) belt and lantern of undeath both let you breath underwater, but no other options yeah. Considering you don't need that to do Nur and you could always wait until after to do Antimagic Quest if you wanted to do it, I don't think i'll change anything.

2) bumping with weapons used to work fine but it's quite possible i - up something when changing thorn fists, i'm gonna look into that. I did leave main hand slot open because i wanted people to be able to use a weapon for bump/stat stick if they wanted.

3) what pin doesn't care about pin besides spydric poison and daze again ? oh, and implode. yeah, that can add up, and is always annoying when it happens.

4) balance feedback, good ! i haven't have time to try root in real game yet, so thanks for giving me a heads up i am quite aware some number changes will need to take place.

5) finally someone see (or at least tells me) how strong that is ! my mid game is a lot of shielding torque --> path of pain --> movement inf on the path of pain. Thorny presence used to only be once per global turn, maybe i'll nerf it back to that state ? Thorn Walker shouldn't be nerfed that way though, or it loses a lot of interest. Maybe a cap at 5-10 per global turn ? Taking wintouched to wait faster is amazing imo, i want more out of the box combos like that in ToME :p

[visage]

3) what pin doesn't care about pin besides spydric poison and daze again ? oh, and implode. yeah, that can add up, and is always annoying when it happens.

The other I noticed was Dominate.

4) balance feedback, good ! i haven't have time to try root in real game yet, so thanks for giving me a heads up

Sure thing! If you're leaving in the synergies with high movement speed (or even merely damping them a bit), then I doubt maxing out on Wait Speed is dangerous in terms of the class's balance.

Taking wintouched to wait faster is amazing imo, i want more out of the box combos like that in ToME :p

Fair enough!

[Fertasd]

Really fun and relaxing experience, in particular the most comfortable alt SWL clears I ever had! Currently in the East with a krog on insane, so far gearing has been much easier since between antimagic and fewer slots there are much fewer decisions to make. Krog's stun also rounds out the list of debuffs thorns inflict very nicely.
Not sure if this is intentional, but Drakeblood Strike deals Thorn damage on this class, gets to fairly large hits at high thorns.
I've only been using Root to wait in more dangerous situations, anything below unique dies to bumping (or just to retaliation or thorn walker in passing) often without my hp moving at all, even with Slow Wrath constantly sustained simply because the damage and pen is too good to miss out on. Uniques and bosses take slightly longer but once they get Thorn Rot and all their stats are 50 lower they are a lot less dangerous.
I've been mostly coasting on bumps and Drakeblood Strike, but most of the actives are very nice in the situations where I'd need them (like the swap or a third silencing talent). I'm not yet sure when Pincushion would be worth it, maybe if it also took less time to use with higher talent level?

[Cathbald]

oh, dominate is a big one, yeah.


yeah, BB playthrough are FAST since you don't read 2/3 of the loot. first full run with them i won 1h faster than my previous fastest run ever ^^
every weapon/unarmed attack will deal thorn damage if you don't have a melee weapon equipped, the only way to deal a different dam type is to use elemental fury and the like.
everything still dies to bumping easile early/mid game, in the east it should change quite a lot normally ? at 5/5 the thorn weapon is worse than pretty much any T5 2h and a number of T4.
Pincushion was more useful before Root. Slow wrath giving huge dam and pen gives a way to deal with resilient enemies. Before, when you were bricking on a tough enemy Pincushion being able to build damage infinitely helped a lot. Other use is tagging that annoying range hiding behind melees. Since it stacks, the damage goes up more than you'd think with level, but yeah, maybe something else would be nice with more points.

[Cathbald]

As everyone who used it expected, here is the "Root OP pls nerf" patch !

0.10.2 :
- Nerf : Thorny Presence is back to its previous state, it can only proc once per global turn rather than everytime you act
- Nerf : Strength of the Earth heal is halved and thorn gain is greatly reduced
- Nerf : Weathering Rock bonus save and armor reduced by ~30%
- Nerf : Slow Wrath damage boost is halved (pen is unchanged)
- Nerf : Thorn Walker can now only trigger up to 5 times per global turns, putting a cap on movement infusion/path of pain synergy
- Nerf : Blighted Bristle stat reduction reduced by ~20%

the balancing saga continues !

[velk]

This is a fun class.

After a few false starts, cruised pretty easily to insane victory. About the only dangerous things were hexes, especially empathetic hex - too hard to stop doing damage if you can't dispel it .

Some thoughts :
- It's a bit weird that con is the only stat that matters at all past level 12.
- Thorny weapon is a bit weird in that it also becomes mostly pointless past 12.
- Being forced to take a completely useless generic point in heavy armor irks my OCD
- Most of the stats on the gear you actually can wear don't really do anything.

A suggestion that might add a little bit of interactivity to make gearing more interesting would be to have thorny presence actually make a weapon attack at some low % of weapon damage. That way you care about thorny weapon, procs from rings etc can do something, cunning isn't a useless stat, strength actually helps you, most prodigies are no longer pointless etc etc.

I underestimated the wall talent initially - it actually does massive single target damage ( compared to your other stuff ) in near total safety as the walls expand onto stuff from all directions at once.

Bugs - if you wield a bow ( because you don't care about weapon damage and it has good stats ), there's a lot of errors about combatstats.

[Cathbald]

thanks for the input !

indeed if you wait all the time only defensive stats matters, but if you bump/use wrath talent str and cun still have use !
that said, i want to add some more stat interaction at some point (like wil interacting with regen or dex reducing slow penalty for example), and for bump to be more interesting than rest some of the time (not all the time though ^^)

you don't "lose" a gen point, even if it stops being useful at level 12 you still have more gen points than several vanilla classes ! i understand the feeling but i assure you, you lose nothing

maybe some of the retaliation or passive damage could be based on weapon damage, so you'd have to scale with it rather than just con, good idea, thanks !

Hedge Wall is ridiculously good if it can encircle an enemy. Every wall stun, so even if the duration isn't longer or the damage isn't enough, ALL their talent will be on cd !

I actually did a good part of a run with a bow equipped (and despaired that i hadn't seen that interaction sooner, because now i need to nerf it :p) and didn't see any issue ? You can't use Wrath talents, bump are unarmed attack so work like weaponless bump, nothing else should interact. If you have more info i'm interested.

[Cathbald]

New patch, fixing the regen and a bug nobody notified me for but i'm sure some abused

1.0.0 :
- Slightly nerfed Slow Wrath
- Fixed a Path of Pain abuse
- Regen *really* brings you to 50 thorns now

[Zizzo]

1) Am I correct in thinking that the only way a Bristlebarb has to breathe underwater is to be(come) undead? If so, perhaps either Crown of Thorns or Body of Thorn should increase breath capacity?

You could always use my Nur Kit addon, which restores amulets of the fish. That's what I'm doing.

At any rate, having fun with the class. Observations so far:

• Small bug: any equipment you were wearing in an inventory slot that you lose when learning a One with the Thorn talent is permanently lost. You should probably put the gear back into the player's inventory after you remove it (or if that's intended behavior, at least a message to the effect of "Your rough leather cap is destroyed!"). Fortunately I didn't lose anything important, but still.
• The only small disappointment with Body of Thorn is that this seems like the perfect class to play in bikini challenge mode. (shrug) Meh, maybe I'll write an addon to draw the character in a thorn bikini.

[Zizzo]

Ooh, just thought of something else that would be nice: an on-screen indicator of how many charges you have on Patience of the Trees. Prob'ly the easiest way to do that would be to move your charge count into a temporary effect, which would buy you a display in the buffs bar for free and even take care of the expiration timer for you.

[Cathbald]

Thanks for the message Zizzo

Small bug: any equipment you were wearing in an inventory slot that you lose when learning a One with the Thorn talent is permanently lost. You should probably put the gear back into the player's inventory after you remove it (or if that's intended behavior, at least a message to the effect of "Your rough leather cap is destroyed!"). Fortunately I didn't lose anything important, but still.

I initially meant to put it back in inventory even if you couldn't use it anymore and huh... failed to do so. Then never bothered because it will so rarely be an issue. A little message could be nice though, you're right.

The only small disappointment with Body of Thorn is that this seems like the perfect class to play in bikini challenge mode. (shrug) Meh, maybe I'll write an addon to draw the character in a thorn bikini.

Ha !

Ooh, just thought of something else that would be nice: an on-screen indicator of how many charges you have on Patience of the Trees.

Honestly thought i put that in, guess i didn't update or never got around to it.

I'll put those in the old "to do list" but haven't been around much lately so might be a while, sorry