I'm currently working on a new skill, pretty much revolving around yelling while you attack, loosely themed on a few anime attacks. I'd like help balancing it. Here's the tree. Rank 1: Yelling Really Loudly - Finished, Want Balance Input A skill that enables the Yelling buffs. The first buff gives +1 Burl, +1 Dodge, +1 Crit, -1 Counter, -1 EDR, and -4 Sneak, and each one is pretty much that time whatever buff number. The higher buff you have, the more damage you inflict with the combat skills. 2 turn cooldown, to keep you from throwing it up quickly in a fight after running around with it off Rank 2: Hitting Someone With A Strange Spinning Sphere Thing - Finished, Want Balance Input A close-range knockback move. Deals Aethereal damage scaling to Melee Power. 8 turn cooldown Rank 3: Firing A Giant Laser From Your Hands - Finished, Want Balance Input A 3-tile long beam attack. Deals Aethereal damage scaling to Melee Power. 12 turn cooldown Rank 4: Shooting Beams By Swinging Your Weapon - Finished, Want Balance Input A long-range attack with attack="1". Deals Aethereal(What a surprise) damage scaling to Melee Power. 10 turn cooldown Rank 5: Punching While Also Making Spikes To Fire At Something Far Away - Finished, Want Balance Input A long-range trap laying ability. The traps do Piercing damage scaling to Melee Power. 12 turn cooldown. Rank 6: Yelling At Reality - Finished, Want Balance Input Adds a 6th Yelling buff that adds a powerful but risky function to the combat moves. It lasts for 20 turns, has a cooldown of 50, and gives +3 Burl, +3 Dodge, +3 Crit, -3 Counter, -3 EDR, and -12 Sneak Rank 2: Deals bonus damage to a random element not resisted by AA, but takes a resistance debuff+Dot of the chosen element Rank 3: Adds a "backblast" effect surrounding your character, but also hits your character Rank 4: Causes AoE that can effect the player. Different range of explosion sizes, biggest using a modified template 101 Rank 4: Does more damage upfront, but places a 90 turn wall on the target, no knockback to push the enemy behind it In addition, using a combat skill with the Yelling At Reality buff has a 5% chance of spawning an equipment item relating to the move being used, which can give a buff that further modifies the move Rank 2: The Sphere can be fired at a range, though you still do more damage upclose Rank 3: The beam becomes significantly wider Rank 4: Target gets knocked back, you automatically teleport to the spot the technique hit Rank 5: Random ranked spikes are spread over an area of template 99 Remaining: Better skill icons, better item icons, matching/better spell visual An alpha build is attached
I feel like this is missing a Fus Ro Dah type blowback skill. Maybe, the first skill would be a pushback when you start it up?
That would require a target for the skill. And that may not be what is desired. Also, pushbacks can really mess things up since you can block areas off unless you can teleport.
I think Dragon Shouts in general would be better as their own skill tree. Plus, this one is about combat augmented by shouting, not combat through shouting. Also, OP updated with latest progress
Have you considered posting a zipped version of your xml? We can likely help out and potentially save you loads of trouble. Your call though. Lots of people here watch such threads and know the basics and a few nice tricks too. Some of them never make a mod of their own, but can and will read your mods xml to see if there is anything they can help with. (I am one such person. My only "Mod" was the one in my sig. It only ramps up the difficulty. But I would love to examine your xml.)
I think I've got how it'll work figured out for now, and I think I'm going pretty quickly on it, so it shouldn't be much longer for a beta. Speaking of working, OP updated with progress
Alright, the main coding of the skill is done, made some placeholder icons for now. Well, technically I did all that and uploaded it and stuff yesterday, but whatever. Anyway, I forgot to change the icon on the initial skill selection screen, so it's still using the batty icon I picked randomly, and for some of the skills, I pretty much just copied the visual components from vanilla spells in ways that won't make sense. The icon will change in the next update at least. If anyone has any feedback on balance*, suggestions on making things work better, proclamations to any deities on how bad and/or confusing my code may or may not be, or whatever, I'd like to hear it. *I honestly have NO idea if it's balanced or not, I'd actually be surprised if it was in it's current state.
I will give it a whirl and see what I can find. It will probably be tomorrow though, I am trying to get another game fixed at the moment.
Sadly I am leaving today for much back-breaking work. I will check this out more thoroughly later if I can manage to.
New version uploaded. Changes the skill icon to it's proper icon, fixed an incorrect path to a buff icon, fixed one of the special items not marked as the proper slot, and hopefully fixed the special items spawning from sources other than the risky skills.
