Temporal form prodigy is highly abusable

[grmblfzzz]

Wasn't 100% sure what forum this would be appropriate to put this in, as I'd suppose that it's not a bug so much as a unintentionally abusive consequence of how the prodigy works. Anyway, if used properly it far outstrips the damage of any other prodigy:



The gist of it is that when you cast it and enter the temporal form, the bonus temporal damage you get from your highest damage type isn't reactive to that damage type when you swap gear.

So, my corrupter there had ~200% bonus blight damage (After buffs such as lifetap, and that sustain that procs bonus blight damage on crit, etc), then cast Temporal Form. Now he has ~230% bonus temporal damage. Then spend a few of it's 10 turns swapping into other gear, for instance I swapped my staff for Corpathus, my robe for a randart with 36 crit dmg, and a crit dmg pickaxe. Lost like 70 blight damage from those 3 swaps, and my 5 turn debuff that gave me +39 can run out, but my temporal damage is unaffected, and I gained over a 100% bonus crit damage. You could concievably get it vastly higher if you carried around all the good temporal gear and/or had way more of it with swift hands, but I didn't realize this could be done till I was hanging around High Peak.

Anyway, it seems like there would be an easy fix of making your temporal damage while in the form change to always be set to your highest bonus type +30% instead of statically checked just that once.

As an aside, I wonder if there's interest in a discussion of general prodigy balance. I spent quite a time looking through/testing them on my last guy because I wasn't sure what to get, and am now of the firm opinion that this aspect of game balance is lagging quite behind the general class balance! Several prodigies are just so horrible that I can't imagine anyone using them who's trying to be effective, and quite a few more are just badly dominated by 2 or more that fulfill fundamentally the same role without offering any particular benefit. Could go through them and point out where I feel the biggest issues/offenders lie, and see if people agree.

[HousePet]

Well it comes as no surprise that prodigies aren't as well balanced as the classes, the prodigies came afterwards.

Also from a design sheet I saw, it looks as though they were initially designed around individual classes. Which explains several of the awkward ones.

[jotwebe]

As an aside, I wonder if there's interest in a discussion of general prodigy balance. I spent quite a time looking through/testing them on my last guy because I wasn't sure what to get, and am now of the firm opinion that this aspect of game balance is lagging quite behind the general class balance! Several prodigies are just so horrible that I can't imagine anyone using them who's trying to be effective, and quite a few more are just badly dominated by 2 or more that fulfill fundamentally the same role without offering any particular benefit. Could go through them and point out where I feel the biggest issues/offenders lie, and see if people agree.

I'd be up for that.

[SageAcrin]

I'd say that damage value is as much or more indicative of Corruptor than it is of Temporal Form. Specifically, the ability of Disease heavy builds to make big shiny numbers on single enemies.

It's impressive, but I've seen someone do 17000 with disease stacking without Temporal Form or taking up multiple extra turns with swapping shenanigans; This makes me a bit less impressed by the shiny number-all it did was allow you more prep time turns to make a bigger number, and Diseases is already perfectly capable of killing most everything in the game without needing more turns than it takes to disease the target four times or so.

If people want to have less turns for more damage, I'm not entirely sure it's that bad. Crafty Hands is the only real reason I'd worry about it, as this is both degenerate(produces a situation where swapping your entire arsenal before using a buff is optimal) and powerful.

Then again, I think Crafty Hands is doomed to be like that anyways. Powerful, but slow, best used by constantly swapping off and on gear before everything. I think if you ruin its power, no one will ever touch it.

Edit: Also, I'd like to see a list of any Prodigies you think are too weak/strong. There's some candidates to my mind, but I haven't been able to figure out any way to actually make them good enough to compete(I Can Carry The World! comes to mind; It's pretty niche and doesn't even dominate in its niches, but what do you do that isn't intensely boring and derivative of another skill?), so if you have any ideas along those lines, that would be even better.

[grmblfzzz]

Alrighty. I'll make another post where I list all the prodigies and put them into the various usablity/dominated categories I feel they fall into when I wake up a little more.

As for Temporal form... if people have no problem with it, I suppose it's fine, but for the record it is hands down the most damaging prodigy. Even without the way that it's bonuses remain in absence of the things that caused them, it already outdoes the other ones (which makes sense that it oudoes, say, Mental Tyrany, as it's an on-use with a timer instead of a sustain). I'm aware that corrupter/reaver catalepsy crits are already huge, but I assure you that you cannot possibly get anywhere near 30k without shenanigans of some sort.

I would already take it without realizing you could abuse it do to it's stun resist and controllable damage boost.

[SageAcrin]

I took it realizing it could do that. At least, I was fairly sure it was possible.

Then I never used it for that. Just for the stun resist, the all_convert and the conversion of the highest damage bonus.

This is because, the run I took it was a Ghoul Archmage with a defensive/multi-element bend, and was running on Nightmare... and I simply never found myself wanting to temporarily eat large resist hits so I could temporarily buff my damage, which would also take a lot of turns to get running(which means lost damage, and meant lost turns of Temporal Form, which meant even more lost damage.).

It looks better as a trick when you're focused more on a burst than constant slugfesting, I think. Corruptor/Reaver, which already focus heavily on one damage type(with ways to pierce resistance to it; For example, Vimsense was doing nothing for you in Temporal Form, as it only lowers Blightres), don't get as much from it in general, but have the potential to use it for huge bursts this way.

I'm not entirely sure that's bad, that they get a hidden bonus out of it.

I mean, I won't cry if it's removed, either, if it comes to that. Maybe it should be just so it doesn't have a hidden bonus, if you see my meaning.