Master Berserker In my upcoming Core Skills Mod I was struggling with how to make both Master of Arms and Berserker Rage distinct from each other, very appealing, not overpowered when combined, and not both required to be a late game melee fighter. The solution I came upon was to just merge them both into a primarily defensive melee skill package that would be powerful enough to enable a variety of melee builds to be played while using it. A major balance issue that must be considered is how critical hits ignore all of your dodge, counter, and block stats, and this is the bane of many melee builds. No matter how high you get your dodge, a monster with a 30% crit chance will still hit you 30% of the time, and hit you very hard at that. Additionally, many of the worst late game monsters do elemental damage that is not mitigated by the armor absorbtion statistic. Considering these issues, I designed this skill path keeping in mind the need to help players survive AFTER the monsters get past your % chance mitigation stats. As a result it does not buff dodge, counter, or block. Instead, this path focuses on boosting max HP, Armor Absorb, important late game resists, and healing some of the melee damage you take without making you guzzle potions / spam heal spells / run out of food. With all of that in mind, here are the goods: -Viking Temperament causes you to gain 2 melee power for 5 turns every time (100% chance) you are struck in combat, up to 3 stacks - passively gives 1 Armor Absorb and 5 max HP. Angry damage! This is a simplified form of 3/5 of the old Berserker Rage tree, and quite a powerful buff alongside other skill tweaks in my Core Skills Mod that allow more abilities to scale with melee power. Don't forget Dual Wield causes you to gain your melee power bonus damage twice per swing, either :3 -Armor of Anger is an activatable buff that grants, 2 armor absorb, 25 magic resist, and 2 resistance to hyperborean, conflagratory, transmutative, and aethereal damage each for 10 turns, on a 50 turn cooldown - passively gives 1 Armor Absorb and 5 max HP. Helps close the gap against magic users / survive general beatings, it barely resembles Suit Up now since it isn't a fragile (lost by taking hits) buff, but I think it is MUCH more useful. -Walk It Off now has a 30% chance of granting +1 health per turn for 5 turns, stacking up to 3 times - passively gives 1 Armor Absorb and 5 max HP. Taken from Master of Arms, simplified, strengthened a bit. -Killing Blow is unchanged for now, and I feel will be useful overall in my mod as I have a number of skills that are buffed by melee power that didn't used to be - passively gives 1 Armor Absorb and 5 max HP. I will leave it to Gaslamp to fix the ranged attacks exploit and am not considering it a factor when balancing this skill path. KB wasn't strong enough to be tier 5 material, and Body Paint was a good thing, just not enough of a good thing in tier 4. -Ancestral Body Paint now grants 10 hp regen (15 is the cap), 10 magic reflect, and 3 conflagratory, hyperborean, aethereal, and transmutative resist each - additionally gives 1 Armor Absorb and 5 max HP. Swapped positions with Killing Blow to justify buffing this. The resists will be most useful late game anyway, so it won't hurt your build to take this last. -Total passive stat gains for the path are +25 hp, +10 hp regen, 5 AA, 10 magic reflect, 3 conflagratory, hyperborean, aethereal, and transmutative resist each. While the elemental resists and max HP may not be enough to save you by themselves, they'll certainly help when combined with equipment and other skills you can take in Core Skills Mod when it is released, and are more than you can get right now from either of the old trees combined. Tell me what you think! Too powerful? Not powerful enough? Don't think you would use it on your melee character? Love it? Hate it?
That's not how it works; you can't ever get more than 1 HP/turn from health Regen. That's why most mod heal skill use dots that give 1 or 2 hp/turn. Other than that, this looks pretty decent.
In short, I like and support most of these changes. With that said, let me address each point individually. Viking Temperament - I like this idea. The 100% chance is nice, and this should help melee fighters with their ability to "man up" and hold the line in various situations (such as when funneling a monster zoo). Armor of Anger - This compliments Viking Temperament very well, giving them the ability to not only maintain their position, but to gain some regen and promote their survivability in a pinch. However, the numbers sound a little bit too high for me, and it would need some testing. Perhaps 20-25 MR would be a tad more reasonable. Walk It Off - Sounds like the unnecessary cherry on the icing on the cake if you ask me. Health regen can only go so far. With the potential 30 regen from this skill alone, and an additional 15 from Armor of Anger's active buff, this skill line seems a little heavy on regen. Perhaps cut the regen down per stack, and add in some flat HP per stack or some AA. Yes I realize the skill is suppose to be about "walking it off" after combat and not necessarily helping you to withstand a ton of damage, but I think playing the beserker line should lead to a risk-benefit situation. Killing Blow - No comment needed, other than that KB is definitely not tier 5 material (so good change). Ancestral Body Paint - Definitely a good change. Having the additional hyperborean and conflagatory resistances is a must for any melee char who has hopes of making it through DL7+. This is just a tasty buff to an already worthwhile skill. From what I can tell, the total passive benefit from this line may be slightly too high. The fact that a character running only Master Beserker would potentially have more survivability than a current character running Master of Arms and Beserker Rage is also probably a problem. However, these are just my two cents, and this change would obviously need to be tested thoroughly before making a hard and fast decision. I definitely support the development of this line.
Thanks for the tip! Fixed. Well, I don't feel like a character running both Master of Arms and Berserker Rage is going to be strong enough to survive in melee vs. monsters with 30% crit rates anyway, so it is entirely ok with me if this is stronger than taking both of the old lines was. The only problem I will have is if this trivializes melee. I did tweak down the HP gain on Body Paint to be uniform with everything else, took the HP regen away from Armor of Anger (moved it to Walk it Off which now maxes out at 3 hp / turn heal), and lowered the MR on AoA to 25. Oh and, I was trying to figure out a way to sneak more resists into this line, so now Armor of Anger gives some of that too Body Paint now gives 10 passive hp regen in addition to other effects, my logic being that if you can max out hp regen at 15, this should help guarantee that you DO by late game, just not by itself. Remember a major goal of this tree was to reduce reliance on food healing, because melee take more damage than other builds even with all the bonuses this tree grants. I don't like it that they also have the spend the most money on food in addition to all the other disadvantages they have.
I'm not really sure if there are any rules against necro-ing threads but this seems like the best place to put it. I made Lohen's Master Berserker skill because I didn't think he would come back and because I wanted to learn how to make a mod without having to come up with any ideas first and this seemed fairly simple as a rehash of two other skills. This is going to be as balanced or unbalanced as Lohen currently has it because I made it word for word from the original post. Please test it out and let me know if Walking It Off actually gives the heal, as I gave it the <food hp="1"/> and I don't really know how to actually implement it to fit Lohen's designs. I used the pictures from Berserker Rage and Master of Arms for the skills because Lohen designed this to be a merging of the two skillsets. If this is not allowed, please let me know and I'll try to make some new pictures.
Keep in mind that the problem this mod was designed to solve (the crit-countercrit) has already been addressed by a change in the core mechanics, so my earlier concerns about balance are even greater now. That said, excellent first modding effort- keep it up!
Not at all -- I'm sure people will use it (they like things slightly more powerful than core things), and more importantly, you know some stuff about modding now -- time to get to being a badass with your own ideas!
