nsrr wrote:I took a brief peek at the Archmage changes and did a quick starter run on a Wizard.
Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
So quick first impressions and thoughts:
Archmage hasn't changed much, except to have it's focus narrowed a bit. Loss of Temporal for Time Shield and speed is a bit of nerf, as is the loss of Stone Wall, but outside of Insane+ it probably won't make much difference. Can probably still get by in Insane if you get Light from an escort. Could maybe tweak Water / Ice a bit to make them more defense oriented, or at least a bit better a freezing enemies.
's true. I set out with the goal of making both the trimmed down Archmage and the new Wizard a bit weaker than vanilla Archmage, so that's certainly a feature rather than a bug. Water/Ice does have a bit more oomph with the changes to Ice Shards and Glacial Vapor, but you're thinking better access to freeze would help? I'm considering the possibility of making either Ice Shards or Glacial Vapor (maybe both!) apply the Wet effect. Of the two, I'm thinking Ice Shards would be the better pick. First hit doesn't get the damage amp, but follow-up attacks (and Glacial Vapor) does.
Wizard has more new trees, of course, but is still very similar to Archmage. Damage spells have a slightly different flavor, but don't do a lot of different things. The notable exception is Lucent, which has a unique gimmick in super range and increased sight range. This has the potential to be very strong, giving you the option to nuke things before they even see you. Style points for Higher synergy.
Lucent was probably the easiest of the trees to design, since the idea more or less carried itself. Super long range lasers feel like a pretty obvious idea for an advanced light tree. It doesn't do much else in terms of secondary effects, but my thought was that being able to nuke enemies down from 15+ range easily and consistently is a really powerful gimmick.
Warp is ok,
The idea with Warp was two fold. First? Using Warp Step to juggle as many Chronobolts as possible at once. Being able to double or even triple up on hits racks up damage pretty fast. The second was single target lockdown. Timewarp into Crystallize Time puts a threat out of play for quite a while. The secondary effect on Warp Core also adds an extra bit of durability in the form of ongethit health recovery.
As far as I know, aside from the Rush upgrade Prodigy, there aren't many other sources of mobility quite like what Warp Step offers. As you might imagine, I was really leery about packing too much power into a tree that has such a potent teleport/aoe damage talent.
but Void is a bit... eh. You have blind already in your base trees in Illuminate and Circel of Death, so having more blind in the advanced Dark tree is a little lackluster.
Okay, yeah, I can see that. Different effect, maybe?
The Void tree's thing was meant to be overwhelming (and dangerous) area of effect damage. Sort of like the Wizard's version of the Wildfire tree. Just without a built-in way of protecting you from your own damage. The blind effect is mostly there as a little ribbon to tie on top of the damage that Ruination deals, since I based the ability on Hurricane and wanted it to trigger on a status.
On the topic of the Dark trees, having Nightfall is a bit out of place. I know it's a Darkness spell trees but it's heavily Necro themed. I appreciate that you've done a lot of work creating new trees already, but I would suggest creating a replacement low level darkness tree.
I'll admit, I considered doing exactly that. Nightfall has a pretty reasonable theme as is, damage with a side of rider effects. Blind/confusion, slow, and repulse. I could bend the element a bit more toward stellar darkness, certainly. Or maybe throw in a more defensively oriented darkness ability? It's something to consider.
With that in mind, I should bring up the nerf to survivability again. Wizard suffers maybe a bit more than Archmage. It has Time Shield, but it loses Disruption Shield, which is arguably a harder hit. A few ideas to compensate. Buff Phantadmal Shield. At the very least you could merge the lost defense from Blur Sight. Better might be to replace defense with evasion or negate damage chance. Could replace the blind in Void with numbing darkness (reduces damage enemies deal) as another defensive tweak, or maybe have the potential new darkness base tree have numbing darkness and give the advanced trees a chance to inflict bane of confusion. Confusion also locks enemies down pretty well and is another sort of defense.
If I did build a new darkness tree I would probably be rearranging things a fair bit. Maybe leave Blind mostly for the Phantasm tree? I could rearrange Phantasmal Shield to work more like the Feedback/Backlash ability. Retaliate to damage with a Blinding Light attack. I do want to point out that I made some buffs to the Stone tree, most notably Body of Stone gives a decent chunk of Resist All rather than fire/lightning/acid.
So as far as defense goes, the Wizard still has Time Shield, Body of Stone, Conveyance, and Aegis for direct defense. In addition to the indirect defense of extreme range (Lucent), extreme mobility (Warp), and Void Rupture being able to wall off enemies. Do you think Warp Core would be better off as damage reduction vs destabilized enemies rather than healing? I had chosen healing since it wouldn't directly buff the raw power of Time Shield, instead supplementing it during the healing phase.
Hmmm...
Maybe do something gravity themed for a new basic Darkness tree? Dark Matter, maybe?
Overall I like the idea of splitting up Archmage, and splitting into elemental and astral seems like a good divide. Could maybe make a couple more tweaks to solidify that even more; it think there are talents in cold and temporal trees each that deal a bit of physical damage as well which could probably just be consolidated into the primary element.
Tidal Wave does half physical damage. That's a good point, I think I'll alter that while I'm at it.
I have encountered zero bugs so far, and your icons are really nice; more than I might expect for a first time mod. Good job!
Regarding Void and compatibility, it would be a very easy fix to rename your Void to something unique while still keeping 'Void' as the displayed name. Just replace "spell/void" in the type definition with something like "spell/voids" or "spell/voided" or even "spell/bananomancy"; as long as the talents are defined with the same name and you don't change the displayed name ('name' field in the talent type definition) then no one would know the difference on the user side.
tl;dr
Great mod, could benefit from a few tweaks imo, but keep up the nice work!
Thanks! I've got one bug that I'm aware of at the moment that I'm puzzling through (Crystalize Time is spitting errors when targeting nothing or a Stone-immune target, which is weird since the if/then for stun-immune and non-destabalized is all in the same function and those variables are both working fine), but to my knowledge there isn't anything at the moment that will cause a crash or actual gameplay disruption.
I'll make those buffs to Water and Ice for sure. I think I'll add the Wet condition to Ice Shards. Thanks for the feedback! If you have any more suggestions after spending some more time with the Wizard, let me know. I may have left a few abilities intentionally under-tuned since I didn't want things to get too out of control.
