...Huh. I thought Magic Missile was fairly well balanced. It deals fairly high damage, sure, but it only hits a single target, and it's expensive enough that you can cast it like six times before you run out of mana. At least, as far as I was using it. Still, I haven't gone very far into the dungeon using Arcanist so far, so it's possible that it scaled a bit too well.
...okay, I admit that I'm curious. Now I'm not trying to get you to change anything but I do want to know what your reasoning for having the stats in the skill. It's not like it needs them, they add any flavor to it or help with balance issues, they're just kind of there. +6 +5 +4 +2 +1 +1 +5 +1 +3 in a primary skill is just rediculous. No matter how you look at it it's just random, way more stats than what, well, any other -primary- skill (execpt for Werediggle) in the game gives you. At tops Promethean and Fleshsmithing respectively gives you +6 and +1 +1 +1 +6 +1 and in these cases it's done both for flavor and to enhance the skills seeing how you'd risk killing yourself with Prometean without the resistances whereas a huge part of Fleshsmithing is it's whole "meatshield" gimmick. Now sure Arcanist's main gimmick is mana so the bonus mana and minor regn makes sense but the Savvy, Sagacity, Spell Reflect, Haywire Chance, Magic Power and resistance is just mind boggling to me. I can get why a counterspell'd give Magic Resistance though. Personally, if I was blessed with the wits to program stuff, I'd probally've gone for something like; +7 +1 +5. Anywho, as stated before I'm merely curious as to what the thinking behind the stats were. Namely because I'm very fascinated by the whole "design" part of game design. Now I get that the is meant to represent the builds arcane mastery but that's pretty much as far as my understanding goes.
No worries, I'll explain. Before that, though, there are a few background things which need to be explained. -Prior to the previous two expansions, a number of skills in the core game and expansions were arguably horribly underpowered in comparison to others. Skills like Piracy, Perception, Smithing and Vampirism (even after the RotDG reworking) were liabilities in any build compared to Promethean, Blood Magic, Archaeology and Burglary. The reworks that you see rolled into today's game, such as Smithing giving additional resistances and Perception giving you free loot were initially conceived of by one very talented modder known as Essence, who produced (in addition to the CES) two sets of mods, known as the Essential Skills Rebalance and the Essential Expansion Skill Rebalance, total conversion mods (inasmuch as it is supported by Dredmor, by replacing core game files) which sought to boost some of the weaker skills to the level of their peers. Some of these changes, as mentioned before, were rolled into the main game. When I was writing this mod, I was not balancing the skill according to the base skills at the time. I was balancing it according to the standard of the skills rebalance mods, as well as the skills in the CES. That is the benchmark I am using. -Not all stats are equal, point for point. One point of or should be clearly and readily more valuable than one point of or , which in turn are more valuable than or , with and before the CoTW expansion, being at rock bottom. The way the stats translate and work is why you can see the "budget" on items being stingy on , and why you will hardly find more than 1 on any item (save for that CotW hat). On the other extreme, it's obvious that due to the very situational nature of when is useful, the devs are willing to give up to 49 on it on a single shield, along with other stats, and why they're so willing to give penalties that can look substential from a distance. is more important than , because not only does the former mitigate blocks and counters, it also gives bonus damage, while the latter only mitigates resists (and for now, nothing in the base game has reflect yet.) Resists, in the same vein, are ranked in their usefulness in accordance to how often they turn up (there's a thread on these forums sorting these by level). and are obviously far more useful than or , being used by a wider set of monsters. In this specific case, is hardly as close to in usefulness, the main sources of being aethereal bolts and gnomes (which are hardly the most powerful melee opponents anyways). I don't claim to know the exact budget which the devs use to itemise their items and skills (especially with items' special abilities being thrown into the mix), but some basic observation will reveal that there is no doubt a heirachy of stats that's being followed. -Next thing which should be obvious - not all skill levels are made equal. To quote the Deathly Hex example - it only has a scaling of 0.4, so it must be bad, right, especially with all those negatives? The thing is that 0.3 of that damage is taxa-independent drain - and it suddenly becomes a little clearer why Necroeconomics is often recommended for a gish build rather than a pure wizard build (amongst other reasons). Obvious Fireball is actually comprised of four damaging spells - the missile, the blast, the flamefield, and the (when it gets fixed) on-fire effect. The damage scaling (accounting for AoE) is much higher than any one of them would show individually. It becomes a little harder to balance things, given (dis)synergies with other skills, so I've thrown out perfect balance the window, settled for reasonable balance, and tried to concentrate on fun and interesting effects from skills. *** In any case, on to answer your question: *You're right that giving is for the flavour of the tree. * are all considered stats generally useful to the mage archetype. *Cornucopia: general wizardry ability. 1 *Magic missile: offensive power. 1 *Counterspell: magic defense. 1 5, the latter of which is more for flavour and largely negligible. *Arcane Blast: Given the damage potential of this skill and the unique flavour (or at least, hopefully), I felt it needed no additional stats. *Create mana gem - mana storage and manipulation, the trade-off of having reserve mana at a cost of sacrificing some of it. 51. From here on, I become a little more open-handed with attaching stats to skills. Players who invest this many points into the tree should be rewarded. *Supercharge - power and mana efficiency. 1 1. *Arcane Reflux - mana efficiency, unpredictable effects. 11. *Thaumogenic Cleansing - mastery over arcane powers and instability. 2 1.
I think 6 aethereal resistances is excessive. Could tone it down to 4. It's true that it's not a useful resistance but 6 pretty much trivializes any monster with this type of exotic damage ESPECIALLY if you also take Astrology. I prefer mods and skills that reward you for putting points into them. Simply because it feels so underwhelming when you only get an ability. Many skills still need to be reworked or at least buffed with extra stats to compensate. The extra stats in this mod aren't game changing in the least. The defensive stats are usually superior to any offensive one simply because as long as you can't die then you can eventually kill any monster. I would rather gain 15 counter chance than 20 crit for example.
Good post, but Evil Chest monsters can have reflect; I lost a character just last week to having a Narcosomatic Induction (Psionics sleep spell) bounced back at me, giving the monster 10 turns to melee me (players apparently don't have the "combat wakes you up" trigger...) It was a Carrot of some sort from a Floor 7 chest if that matters.
Somehow, this skill seems to corrupt my save games. I've tried toggling it off and the save games start working again. I have the last version, and today I just downloaded it again to try it another time.
