A God am I - Egyptian Magic

Good point about the requirements of 25 potentially making this impossible to use. But some mods have skills that use up to the maximum mana. And one such was added to YHTNTEP. Warlockery. It has the capstone that uses *ALL* and that could work with some tweaks.

 

I have a feeling that if the Sandstorm will be nerfed, non-Ra glyphs should be buffed.

 

I think that's too much - but remove one random buff? THAT sounds totally reasonable!

 

Cheaper and easier to increase the magical resistance of a few monsters on those levels. No heavy tinkering, no muss, no fuss.

For the rest, if you really want to spend all that time micro-managing a build to get all your equipment aimed at mana production, you shouldn't be penalized for doing so, or claim things are too easy. And I write that as someone who was an early cheerleader for the nerfing of Sandstorm.

 

Except this has humongous balance ramifications in that it affects everything else in addition to Egyptian Magic.

If EM is the problem, then EM must be changed. Unless we're going the route of "AoE spells are too powerful" but I don't think we are.

 

AAAAAND no, it's not called "dungeons of hero", it's called "dungeons of dredmor" for a reason.

I could barely scratch dredmor, not with sandstorm (of course), not with my thrown weaponry (which was a lot), not with my bolts, not with my d*ck, not with anything I was carrying.

I ended meleeing him out of desperation, to no avail, he had around 75% health when my character went down. Doesn't feel too bad, I had all sorts of gear and had moped the whole dungeon clean - dying to dredmor is !!FUN!!.

At least I now have the "It is MY dungeon!" achievement.

 

Using wands against Dredmor tends to be ineffective, just use them up on monster zoos.

 

This wand is bony, unpleasant, and starts to quiver whenever you point it at a corpse. Hmm.

This wand is funny-smelling and it might have just moved a little.

...And it's... oozing.

Also, I think all the Killer Vegans would have something to say about Kazeto advocating the use of Wands against zoos...

 

I found I can only use Egyptian Magic if I take both Laywalker and Magic Training. I can't use Sandstorm until I have Leyline Siphoning, And I can't use Glyph of the Eye of Ra without Extra-planar Concentration. But yeah, once I get that set up (it takes 9 levels) I only have to worry about monsters spawning near me/opening doors. And there are a few skills that can take care of that. I got to level 15, but got bored before I found Dredmore and started a different build. Not sure what his defenses against that kind of damage are. The Samuraibots were a bit of a problem, but Magic Law took care of them. Polymorphic Injunction changed them to something with less resistances.

Not with how much those glyphs cost atm. That would mean paying close to 100 mana a cast for the full effect on top of the passive costs each glyph has, and the 4 turns it would take to recast them.

 

That's a big "if." We might write instead that if the problem balance using area effect spells in Egyptian Magic on various monsters, then we should consider changing some elements. This way of phrasing the problem lets us explore more possible solutions, and bonus: we also get jelly donuts.

EDIT: Finnien's post late in the Post-COW thread discusses an Egyptian-themed build, and complains about how it's great on zoos, but fares poorly against single units and especially against Dredmor. In other words, Finnien at least doesn't find EM a bed of roses at all, and says that melee builds work better--at least, for him/her. Which is what it's all about: completely valid, contrasting reactions to the same skills.

 

That's great, but since EW takes up only 1 of your 7 skill tree slots, that leaves you with 6 slots to devote to handling single units and Dredmore. Even after taking Magic Training and Leylines for the mana you need to keep all those glyphs active and still cast Sandstorm, that's still 4 skill trees left.

And I didn't have any real problem taking care of single monsters. Ra's Eye Glyph deals pretty heavy damage whenever you use a physical attack, and pushes everyone back a square too. Combine it with a half decent weapon and you can be dealing twice as much damage as a warrior easily, with Call of the Nile to heal any damage you might take.

 

I've got to ask a question - should you be able to fight in the sand? Obviously, as the skill stands right now, very much not, but theres got to be SOME kind of nerf on it. Having it be a area you lay down, another layer of the intensive mana management, feels like it would bring it in theme with the set more elegantly than trying to worry about the amount of damage done.

Its a gish tree, and a rather nice one. But as soon as you've got your mana managed, its a infinite swirling deathstorm..... Being thrown around by a melee character. A nice blasty tree is one thing, but this tree is not supposed to be centered around the blast, no?

 

I think that this tree is what you want it to be.
I, for istance, use really few sandstorms, since I benefit more from the glyphs than from the spell.
Uhm, I'm thinking about something to balance the sandstorm. Like a percentage of deleting one or more glyphs, but not a 100% chance for every one.

 

Why not?

 

When you create a character centred around melee combat and give it one skill tree to have something out of theme, and later find that you are pretty much only using that one skill tree, then something went awry.

 

That's an issue with that skill tree's balance though, not necessarily its focus.

 

Yes, you are right.
Though I think that for characters not centred on spellcasting, this skill tree's focus should be slightly more on the glyphs than it is now (while remaining the same it is now for spellccasters). I think that way, though you might feel differently about that.

 

Well, c/f Astrology. You get some nice buffs and a (blatantly amazing imo) capstone that shreds everything for a mana cost of "lol, mana?"

 

I like the idea of a magic skill tree that asks you to spend large amounts of mana to deal large amounts of damage to a large area. What I don't like is how easy Ra Blast makes it to just beat the monsters up in hand to hand combat. Equip a half decent weapon and you can deal more damage as a mage than if you'd taken a weapon specialty. Especially since you can use any weapon, instead of needing a specific type. If anything needs to be nerfed, it's that.

 

Eye of Ra is indeed silly, I'm using it right now, and whoever said it is a bigger problem than sandstorm is right. Not saying Sandstorm isn't silly, but Eye of Ra is beyond silly.

For all practical purposes I only got Egyptian and Leylines maxed (no leylines cap), and the game felt like I took one point viking magic, one or 2 point fungal for the poison resist, emo for chemical explosion before sandstorm got huge, necro for tenebrous rift once it got huge, communist for the heals, I got some trap sight and affinity for lvl1 fast lvling off traps and I'm destroying stuff in melee.

Gish build is one thing, but picking up something + leylines probably shouldn't be this good. In a funny sort of way having all this on one relatively short skill tree is balanced: if I pick up on other skills, I won't get significantly stronger because I don't think I CAN get significantly stronger.

I guess the tree needs to be longer, give less significant synergy (skills are allready obsoleting other stuff left and right), and have more mana hungry glyphs going on.

EDIT: I am playing on a low difficulty, now that I think about it, I guess EM is affected by a difficulty change qute a bit, so now I'm not sure what to think. But the last time I saw something this stupid was when I went to check Necronomiconomics out and went around simply rifiting everything that moved.

EDIT: Or to turn the issue on it's head, I think the mana recarge abilities might in fact be stupidly powerfull but we all focus on flashy stuff they fuel. Just a thought, and Eye of Ra is still silly.