Come Bitch About Skills! [Skills Rebalance Brainstorming]

What's hunter's strike?

 

Butchers an animal for meat while it is still alive.

Also magic power scaling should be used always, unless you have a good reason to scale to something else. It's not really a cross class thing, it's a gear thing. A warrior can still rely on high magic power for its passive abilities, but it somewhat restricts the gear. Crit scaling is reasonable for assassination but there doesn't seem to be much good reason to switch to it either.

 

No it's not, this is the butcher spell.
Hunter strike is a currently broken damage skill from the core game, which is triggering upon killing animals, for more unholy corpse dissacration, but this does nothing in the game. Essence remade it into a proc on hit effect and put that into the second level; see the RofDG changelog in page 8 for more. And I was thinking that it should proc also on crossbow shots.

The good reason is "magic power is not something into assassination flavour". I don't like it since I think that there are more fitting stats. But I can see your point. Maybe it should scale on since being very intelligent helps you understand (maybe with assassination studies) where to hit for a lot of blood. And that is lowered by armor too.
Or, anyway, leave it as it is for a lesser flavour point but a more balanced thing (but it's a capstone, after all).

 

That's a little silly. We have more than a dozen stats, why is magic power the go to for scaling? There are a number of stats assassination uses, Nimbleness, savvy, caddishness, counter, edr, dodge, crit, and sneaking. As a rouge tree, it naturally gives you extra points in all of those every time you level it up, unlike savvy and magic power, which are only given to wizards. It's ridiculous that your assassin has to multi-class and equip sub-optimal armor to have a usable capstone. Especially when none of its other abilities care how heavy your armor is.

 

Kaidelng wants heavy armor to nix the damage. Seems to me it would make most sense scaled to Nimbleness, then.

 

(wizards and rogues both get 2 savvy per level, warriors get 1)

Magic Power is the go-to for scaling because it's one of the only stats that doesn't do anything else; all of the others you listed help you hit/avoid hits/hit back/avoid hitting back/avoid traps/etc. Magic Power does not help any of those, it just increases the damage/healing of skills. That said the capstone of a non-wizard tree is an awkward place for it; but that's why it's used for scaling so often, because *that is all it does*. Nimbleness sounds fine though.

Also one of the procs scales to Sneak, which does "care about how heavy your armor is" since several Plate pieces give -10 or so.

 

Not savvy, sagacity. The blue thing Vitte was talking about. But yeah, nimbleness would be a good thing to scale to if you wanted heavy armor to reduce its damage.

 

It does absolutely nothing else but scale things, and it has a lot of gear meant primarily to raise it.

The status effects from Sneaky Shiv and Blackjack are already wonderful, and buying the final level provides you with 5 crit. It is not that powerful anyway, and could perhaps use an outright buff. 4 extra base damage?

Again, I am not opposed to scaling to critical hits, but the only thing magic power does is scale things, so whenever you scale something to something other than magic power, you are nerfing the importance of magic power in general.

 

I'm here now just to say that.
And I'll say that just once.
Ok, are you ready?

...
Demonology demon form should have at least all the activated abilities from other demonology skills. If not also celestial circle. This is because it's inconcepible that a semi-capstone should make you weaker than your normal form.

 

Back to your usual levels of shining brilliance, eh, V?

DONE.

 

I don't see this as an issue. As long as there are enough things that scale to magic power (and there are- just about every magic spell in the game does it), there's no need to shoehorn it into skill trees that don't otherwise want it, and where it makes no flavorful sense to be. At the very least we should try to stay away from close range skills that scale to it.

 

Especially when Nimbleness has the same anti-armor properties and makes more sense.

 

This is pendantic, but it really isn't the same at all. Nimbleness doesn't get hurt nearly as much by armor as magic power.

 

This could be a balancing issue, more than a problem. The scale can be lowered.

 

OK, so I'm just about ready to release ECSRII as a "real thing", but I have a question for y'all.

Should I release it as a "replace your core files" thing like I did last time, which got a lot of support -- or should I make it a legitimate mod? As a mod, it wouldn't actually change your core files -- it would basically add "new" skills that were "Ess' Shield Bearer", "Ess' Throwing", "Ess' Emomancy" and so forth.

The advantages of releasing it as a mod are basically that it would be Steam Workshop compatible, so more audience, which is ego juice for me. The disadvantages of releasing it as a mod is that you'd have two of about a dozen skills showing up on your skill sheet, and people who didn't buy RotDG would be able to access Emomancy, Werediggle, BGH, and Demonology by using the modded versions. So that might be a legal issue. (David/Nicholas?)


Thoughts?

 

Replace the core game files as needed. No question about that to me.

People who would be reluctant to do this are often just as likely to pass on vanilla mods too. So go for broke!

 

Do you really have to ask, Essence?

Make them core file changes; if they are changes that are accepted to be better, people will prefer not to have to choose between two versions of the same skills, especially when playing with random builds.

 

I'd say core files. It'd result in a cleaner skill selection screen, and there might be issues with essentially letting people take the same skills twice.

 

I think that the time for totalconversion="1" working is about to come, but for the rest I agree with those three folks over my post: it will be cleaner if there are just one for each of the skills.
But, if you feel like to have a mod compatible with workshop, and you fear about using skills and letting people use those, you can make two separate mods: ECSRII and EESRII (essence's expansion skill rebalance), with the last needing the RotDG.
Anyway, I don't think just 4 skills can compare with the whole RotDG: more items, more monsters, gods, and last but not last MORE FLOORS, something you cannot reproduce with mods. So it may be the very same.
The chose is yours (you can even do both things, mod on the workshop for those who don't feel about modding core files and core replacement for those who loves you already, and it's not much effort anyway, aside from name changes and maybe icons - using my second suggestion may remove the image needing, since ocre files have all this mod should need).

 

OK, then, core file replacement it is. Thanks, guys.