Zizzo wrote:So, against my better judgement, I fired up a couple Possessor characters recently, on the strength of a forum description of them as a "faceplant" (which in my experience translates from forum to English roughly as "might actually survive Normal-mode endgame by some freak miracle"
). Impressions so far:
- Y'know what I've done virtually none of while playing a Possessor? Actually possess any bodies. It's exactly the problem I was worried about from the very beginning: a stored body is effectively a non-renewable resource, which means that for all practical purposes you can never use it, because you can never be certain you shouldn't have saved it for a greater need later.
- What is even the point of limiting the types of creatures the player can possess? It's just another cripplingly limited resource like inscription slots, except the player can't even plan how to use this resource, because there's no way of knowing in advance what kinds of creatures you'll need to be able to possess. (I actually had to resort to source diving to assemble a list of all creature types and pick out a list of types to avoid like "vermin" or "immovable", just to be sure I had enough slots to cover the rest.)
I believe your core problem is in the difference between "faceplant" and "faceroll." A faceroll is much more relaxing than a faceplant.
The additional information given by your possessor tweaks mod sound like generally A Good Thing. I don't think Possessors need any additional power, since they are one of the very few classes capable of a Madness win, and that's a pretty tough bar to clear. My suspicion, based on your self-description of your level of playing competence, is that you're actually playing on too low a difficulty level for Possessors to reach their potential. If you're playing on Insane the game will keep feeding you top quality bodies, while rare+ tier enemies aren't that common on Normal and so you have to try to hoard them. If your plan was to get attached to a particular body in the early game, though, that's simply not what Possessors do. FWIW, I'm also one of those players who tend to reach the final boss in any given game with a huge amount of hoarded temporary buffs given how parsimonious I am with them in general play. But bodies are your core mechanic as a Possessor, and you gotta go hand-over-hand with them, swinging from one monkey bar to the next. (Later on, when you've gotten a couple of strong damage shields, corner snipes, and your damage is appallingly explosive, you can afford to get attached to really top-tier bodies - I particularly like Aluin for option to combine Flexible Combat, Superpower, and Arcane Might all in one character.)
Also, once you've played the game for a bit you *can* generally know what types you need by when (dragons before Daikara, undead before Dreadfall, elementals prior to the Temporal Rift, etc.) I admit that it may not help you until you're familiar at the game, but there's a reason why the game warns you about how confusing it is for beginners.
I don't know how the early game will work for Possessors once drowning is gone, but right now you can start on Insane, take a Cornac for mastery out of the gate, restart until you have a boss in Last Hope, drown a couple rares to level up, and then possess a 20+ level boss body first thing by last-hitting a drowning boss. Assuming it isn't an evading halfling that insta-gibs you off Evasion, you basically just won the game, especially if you catch Rune of Reflection from the mage city or Hedge-Wizard.
Anyway, thanks for the information mod, thanks but no thanks for the buffs!
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On preliminary investigation, it looks like I can check for that and flag corresponding talents with a new (Saw) annotation, though it will involve slightly more complex method-dump grubbery. Some steamsaw-using methods, to my surprise, don't even have an on_pre_use() method enforcing their steamsaw requirement (notably Bloodstream, Spinal Break and Continuous Butchery); they just don't do anything if you're not wielding a steamsaw.