Reworking Chronomancy ver 2

[edge2054]

Pushed quite a few balance tweaks and bug fixes this morning. Save files should be compatible.

[Parcae2]

OK, here's something that has been bothering me for a while. It's not urgent or anything, but maybe you could look at it before 1.3.0.

The temporal cloning talent (I might have the name wrong; it's the one that clones an enemy, with half duration based on rank) has been bugging me, for mostly thematic reasons. Firstly, it's really similar to an Anorithil talent. Secondly, it seems a bit weird in terms of underlying mechanics. Wouldn't a clone of a hostile target be hostile to you?

So here's a suggestion, which I think is also balanced in terms of gameplay:

The clone is an extremely confused copy of the original character that doesn't know friend from foe. It has its own faction, which is hostile to everything (including you), and has the Temporal Confusion debuff (which is basically just a fixed-percentage Paranoia that uses spellpower rather than mindpower).

Thoughts?

[edge2054]

Yeah, thematically that talent kind of bothers me too.

I would like to give them another strong defensive talent. Something more on demand. Not sure what though. But that might be a talent that could be replaced.

[jotwebe]

One of the civilians I got from an anomaly later got hit with time prison from another anomaly and turned immortal. He can be used to proc Reverse Causality. Targeting said immortal with Swap duplicates him (Swap works normally on the duplicate), while Temporal Clone only produces a teleport animation, but no clone.

Meteor Strike the prodigy is fun with Gravity Spike. The clones from Temporal Fugue seem to get Meteor Strike, too, also fun.

[0player]

Typo:

all timed effects on all other targets

The projectile for Paradox Bolt is called Temporal Bolt, even in combat log.

[0player]

Screenshot:

That Paradox Bolt was there when I cast Cease to Exist, and now it doesn't home on me, and even hurts me. It doesn't recognize me as the master, as I returned from alternate timeline.

[edge2054]

Oh hmm.. that's a hard one to fix. I'll have to think about it. I'll change it to say Paradox Bolt. I was fooling around with a Temporal Bolt talent at one point that ended up becoming Paradox Bolt and missed that one. Nice catch

Another nice catch on Entropy

So thinking about a locked Warp Tree.

Warp - Low cooldown, high damage, physical/temporal split. Inflicts a random status effect. This will kinda be like the old Quantum Spike.
Warp Field - Active. Reduces all damage you receive by X%. At the start of your next turn all damage reduced in this manner is inflicted on a nearby target as temporal/physical damage.
Warp Blast (or could use a better name, Grand Entrance, Grand Exit, I don't know) - Passive. When you teleport you deal X temporal/physical damage in a radius around you at the entrance and exit points.
Warp Mastery - Sustain. All Warp damage you inflict ignores X% of the targets resistances (resist pen but for just one damage type) and has an X% chance of inflicting a random status effect.

I'd update all the teleport damage to use this new damage type.

I'm also considering bringing back Matter but as a locked tree. It would be usable at level 1 though (so Cornacs could unlock it right away and start using it).

Matter
Disintegration Ray - Replaces Dust to Dust. Inflicts physical damage and reduces the target's physical resistance and armor for X turns. This effect stacks.
Harden - Passive. When you inflict Physical damage you gain X armor and physical resistance for X turns. This effect stacks.
Shatter - Destroys target wall, inflicting physical damage in a radius of X that causes additional bleed damage over X turns. Non-living creatures can be targeted directly by this spell and take X physical damage directly. If they're killed they shatter.
Sphere of Destruction - Slow beam/ball that deals physical damage to targets in it's path.

[0player]

Good idea on Matter! Currently Gravity is a little underwhelming because, well, yeah. Another damage type.
So, I passed t1 dungeons only with my new character, so don't pay much attention to my words, but:
I have 3 "beams" (if you count Trim Threads) on 3, 4, and 4 cooldown (the other two are Paradox Beam and Rethread), one of which gets an execute a little later on, another - stat reduction, third - well, resource gain. So it's like a tribeam with utility AND 10 range. I found Wintertide Phial early on, so I can just blast foes from afar with my spell rotation and cast stuff like Temporal Clone in the 4th turn.
I feel like the ranges are the problem. Rethread needs lower range... and maybe let Paradox Bolt accumulate damage to full, as it travels? Gives an incentive to trade delay for dmage on somewhat-close foes (rather than using it as a ray), also solves blasting from afar.
(What's the point of Paradox Bolt returning paradox if it returns, and not when? It homes, shouldn't it always return?)

[jotwebe]

Warp - Low cooldown, high damage, physical/temporal split. Inflicts a random status effect. This will kinda be like the old Quantum Spike.
Warp Field - Active. Reduces all damage you receive by X%. At the start of your next turn all damage reduced in this manner is inflicted on a nearby target as temporal/physical damage.
Warp Blast (or could use a better name, Grand Entrance, Grand Exit, I don't know) - Passive. When you teleport you deal X temporal/physical damage in a radius around you at the entrance and exit points.
Warp Mastery - Sustain. All Warp damage you inflict ignores X% of the targets resistances (resist pen but for just one damage type) and has an X% chance of inflicting a random status effect.

Could use some synergy with Dimensional Anchor here. Anchored targets get increased warp damage? I like Warp Blast as a name, better than the others. Although there's a bit to much "Warp" going on in the tree. Maybe call the Tree "Warp and Woof" as in the weaving terms, and have a "Woof Field" and "Woof Mastery"? Or weft instead of woof. Or, going with the weaving terms, "battening" for Warp Blast, "shedding" for Warp Field, with "Weft" at the top replacing Warp Mastery?
In a different vein than weaving; Warp Field -> Differential Interference, Warp Blast -> Translocation Resonance, Warp Mastery -> Hyperdimensional Manifold

Matter
Disintegration Ray - Replaces Dust to Dust. Inflicts physical damage and reduces the target's physical resistance and armor for X turns. This effect stacks.
Harden - Passive. When you inflict Physical damage you gain X armor and physical resistance for X turns. This effect stacks.
Shatter - Destroys target wall, inflicting physical damage in a radius of X that causes additional bleed damage over X turns. Non-living creatures can be targeted directly by this spell and take X physical damage directly. If they're killed they shatter.
Sphere of Destruction - Slow beam/ball that deals physical damage to targets in it's path.

Harden maybe should give a % chance to close cuts.
Calcified/stoned creatures (anomalies can do this) should be targetable by this, and not get their physical damage resistance bonus from being in stone form. Also Stone mages in Stoneform. Deeprock elementals. Stonewarden clones from Dwarven Nature.
Sphere of Destruction: could deal shatter to walls and non-living, and either disintegrate or transmutate (stone) living creatures (disintegrate if transmutate fails).
Also Harden and Shatter are a bit... monosyllabic. Not necessarily bad, but Harden at least would go better as Adaptive Matrix/Structure or Molecular Realignment. Mix and match. Shatter could get something like that but with like... Explosive Disassociation? Or keep 'em simple, of course.

Some assorted ideas/notes for existing talents:

• Paradox Bolt: a "contrail" of some light cloudy effect showing where the bolt has traveled in the last turn would help learning to estimate it's behaviour.
• Time Skip: it'd be nice if the AI of various clones would be a bit less enthusiastic about casting this. Or if we could give them instructions, golem-style, that they'd remember?
• Paradox tree refund: this interacts interestingly with the Highers' Highborn Bloom (probably Hidden Resources, too), in that you don't pay Paradox, but get the refund, so these talents are a good way to reduce paradox a good ways. Not necessarily OP, but something to keep in mind.
• Temporal Fugue's description: "When the last fugue clone dies you'll be returned at the location clones location."

[edge2054]

Warp tree done.

Warp - Single target nuke, causes a random status effect.
Phase Shift - Active. For X turns the first damage you take that turn is reduced to 0 and you're teleported a short distance.
Warp Mastery - Passive. All your warp damage now has a chance to cause a random status effect.
Phase Blast - Sustain. When you teleport you deal warp damage in a small radius at the entrance and exit locations.

[HousePet]

The positioning of Warp Mastery doesn't make sense there, as you only have one source of warp damage and it already does a random status effect.
Have I missed something?

[edge2054]

The positioning of Warp Mastery doesn't make sense there, as you only have one source of warp damage and it already does a random status effect.
Have I missed something?

All the teleportation damage in spacetime folding is warp damage. The damage from phase blast too, which will trigger off DS, Swap, Phase Door, etc.

[Kiba333]

I just tested around a bit with the different spells at higher level to see how they play out. A few thoughts on my part:

Speed Control: is quite underwhelming for paradox mage in my opinion.
- Celerety is more or less useless since paradox mages are casters who have at least 7-10 range with every spell, they also have a ton of teleports so moving around manually during combat would be a waste of turns and potentially dangerous. I find infinitely near to zero possible situations where a paradox mage would want to move 3 turns in a row.
- Time Dilitation is marginally better but i will probably never use it since the radius is just too damn small. As a ranged caster with so much mobility in the form of teleports letting enemies get within a range of 3 tiles should never happen if you plan to survive higher difficulties or deep into infinite dungeon. When an enemy is only 3 tiles away from you all it's projectiles will hit and it will likely get in a few lethal melee attacks if it's a rare, unique or boss. In my opinion time dilitation should have a much higher radius and in return have it's strength weakened. Or it could have the same strength it has now but it's effectiveness could fall off by 5% per tile, being at only 50% of it's usual effective speed reduction at max range 10.
- Haste is ok i guess. Does it have the same spellpower/paradox-speed increase scaling as the old haste? The only backdraw is that it suffers from being dependent on the other talents wich are weak in my opinion and do not warrant spending so many points to get deep enough into the tree for haste.
- Stop sounds cool in concept but by my math it can only really be seen as a (not really powerful) defensive measure. It cripples your damage output during the stopped time and 2 turns afterwards. Even if you manage to get the damage reduction down to 60% it would mean that you deal 160% of your usual damage while 2 turns pass for enemies. If those 2 turns would have passed without casting stop you would have dealt 200% damage during that time. As a conclusion this spell gives you effectively a 2 turn breather which is quite weak if compared to spells like temporal reprieve (7 turns) or even time skip which may only be single target but is cheap, early acessible in the tree, deals good damage, has low cooldown and more often than not removing the sinlge most dangerous enemy is more than enough as a defensive measure. The only unique characteristic of Stop is that it allows you to debuff enemies during those 2 turns at your leisure but right now paradox mage does not really have that many convincing debuffs and skilling out a whole tree simply to get 2 "instant" cast debuffs every 23 turns is quite too costly in my opinion.

Entropy: The only timed effect you can apply that you actually want to tick faster would be Trim Threads am i wrong? Otherwise this would only be beneficial if enemies have a ton of timed positive effects while being detrimental if you managed to aplly stun or confusion or any strong debuff.

Damage smearing: As far as i understand it right now does in no way whatt so ever reduce the damage you get but only delays it. I think it wouldn't hurt to have it also reduce the delayed damage somewhat, especially since it at most only delays one third of all damage.

Foresight: critical shrug off is nice but defense... even playing a pure dex character i never managed to get enough defense to even have a remote hint of a chance of evading the attacks of enemies who deal attacks worth evading (rares and stronger). This holds especially true on a highly mobile (teleports) caster that can keep out of melee range in most cases and skills no dex whatsoever. I think this might more be an issue with the nature of the defense/accuracy system itself but it still makes this passive (and also the defense aspect of Spin Fate) extremely weak.

Contingency: I'm sad that many of the best choices for this one have been restricted, i am still hopeful though that you might find a different way of dealing with those arising balance issues. Why though does contingency not allow to select infusions like heal or regenerate for example? I don't think that would be too overpowered.

See the Threads: It hurts to say this since i like the concept this spell but it basically triples your chances of death. It makes you refight the same dangerous situation two times, giving you two more opportunities to get caught in some ridiculous debuff chain or critical damage destruction. And let us be honest, what is the point of using this spell in any non-dangerous situation? I can't think of any valid reason myself (cheating drops not valid). Even if some reason exists, since it was turned into "single use per zone" this spell has been so heavily restricted (why does it even still have a cooldown? xD) that it would require the spell to be muuuuuuuuch more powerful in order to even come close to being worth it to put points in. Usually when you read somethign like "can only be used once per ZONE" you expect some kind of overpowered supernuke or temporary invincibility, especially since such an infinite cooldown is unprecedentet in Tome. What i would expect from this would be more along the lines of: "If you die during the next X turns you get moved pack to the point of time where you cast this spell, this can happen up to two times." Though this would quite overlap with the concept of preserve pattern.

[edge2054]

Thanks for the feedback Kiba333. I'll take what you said into consideration.

I do want to touch on See the Threads though. I won't ever make it like Precognition. It was bugged to hell and See the Threads would be three times as bugged.

As for it being restricted to once per zone level, it lets you reroll boss artifact drops. Unless the way these drops are handled is changed (which may be possible at some point) I can't really leave it how it was.

[edge2054]

Actually I take that back. I'll look at See the Threads and not dying. One of the big issues with it was that you used to be able to infinitely cycle through. Since it's restricted to once per zone level, if I can pull it off on the code side so it's not bugged like precog was, then I think it would probably be balanced with the zone restriction.

We'll see how it goes.

*edit* Yeah, I don't know. I've played around with it and I end up cloning the player on just about every jump. I can get it working otherwise. I'll keep playing with it but it doesn't look promising.