Class Resources
Structural Integrity
Biofuel
- Reduced max points to 10, increased base points to 5.
3.0 version saw an increase in Biofuel capacity to make up for the reduction of items fabricated per batch (i.e., basic bombs crafted per batch dropped to 3 from 9). The changes were made to prevent low tier items from being too spammble. "Quantity becomes quality" was a real problem for basic and advanced items, especially bombs due to the container mechanic (read "packaging your bombs" section in Scrounger's Field Manual). I increased Biofuel capacity to 14 in exchange, but that turned out to be an unnecessary buff.
Also, it doesn't help that Camp Supplies are easy to come by, allowing players to replenish their class resources without much thinking. Camp Supplies and Long Rest are issues beyond the scope of this mod, so I have to address it within the mod itself, which leads to the next change.
Consumables
General
- Reduced the number of times certain capsules, bombs, ammo and concoctions can be fabricated per rest.
Advanced Bombs: twice per short rest.
Superior Bombs: once per short rest.
Superior Capsules: once per short rest.
Superior Ammo: once per short rest.
All Concoctions: once per long rest.
- All legendary items have their fabrication cost reduced to 6 Biofuels, down from 8.
- Fixed a bug where Scrounger's arrows would appear in some vendors' inventories.
- Updated item models and icons of the following concoction:
Extract of Sedation
Mutagen of Heightened Senses
Mutagen of Musclemass
Remedy of Abnormality Purge
Remedy of Flesh Dredge
First, the bombs. People have pointed out in comments that this class deals too much damage. To put them into perspective, I'd like to offer some math. Prior to these changes, a level 12 Scrounger can fabricate up to 324 basic bombs per long rest, bundle them and detonate them all together, dealing up to 3888 damage in a single turn, and still have 1 or 2 actions left (more with haste).
During the first iteration of this class, the 1.0 version, I didn't give its damage potential much thought. I was using patterns rather than logic. I was like, oh so basic bombs get 9 per batch, so advanced ones get 6 per batch and so on. See the problems? I was typing number in patterns without doing the actual math.
However, in my defense, part of the problem was the container mechanic which allows you to bundle explosives. Scrounger was partially inspired by Grenadier Alchemists from Pathfinders. The difference is that in Pathfinders, Grenadier's bombs were functionally identical to spells, meaning you can't bundle them together. This isn't what I wanted. I want to use actual consumables, actual items that you can inspect and manipulate with commands. Hence every item fabricated by Scrounger is a real object, and by extension, everything cheesy applies to them as well.
Second, legendary items. They were too costly after the Biofuel capacity change. I reduced their costs across the board.
Third, Scrounger's special arrows. I never added them to vendors' treasure tables, but they showed up nonetheless. I went over every entry of custom arrow and removed some keywords that I suspected causing this issue.
Fourth, concoctions. They are divided into three categories: extract (coating), remedy (potions) and mutagen (elixirs). Before update 3.8.2, every concoction looked different, and it was hard to tell which group they belonged to. I wanted to make each category more visually consistent, hence 3.8.2 happened. I also took the opportunity to give Extract of Raw Arcane a buff to make it worth using, and made its functionality more intuitive.
Extract of Raw Arcane
- Weapon enchantment bonus increased to 2. Description was updated to be more intuitive.
Bolt of Battering Ram
- Reduced knock back distance to 5 meters, down from 10 meters.
- Added "Off Balance" status effect.
This item was just a buffed Arrow of Roaring Thunder with a 200% multiplier, which was powerful but not very interesting. Even with this new change, it is still a strict upgrade compared to its vanilla version. Admittedly I was a bit lazy when designing advanced ammo, but there really isn't much I want to do with this one. In hindsight, I probably could have replaced it with a modified healing arrow instead.
Flash Flare
- Added 2d6 psychic damage to the initial detonation, save to halve it.
- Duration of Blindness increased to 10 turns.
- Saving Throw changed from Dexterity to Constitution.
- On a failed save, still applies 2 turns of Blindness (since enemies tend to have high Con).
Flash Flare was an ok-ish crowd control tool, but unnecessary most of the time. It was one of the first items I thought of all the way back in 1.0, and it didn't keep up with newly introduced items in terms of power. Baldur's Gate 3's sandbox heavily favors nuking over cc, there's a reason Barrelmancy is a word. I can't change the game design, so might as well let Flash Flare do a bit damage. The increase in Blindness duration makes it consistent with regular Blindness spells, which is another thing I should have done earlier. I think the buff to its utility is potent enough that its damage needs not be too high.
Uncanny Husk
- Added 4d6 poison damage to the initial detonation, save to halve it.
- Initial detonation also applies 2 turns of Enwebbed debuff should a target fails their saving throw.
- Note that Uncanny Husk also creates a standard Web surface. This Web surface has its own separate saving throw event, and will apply 1 turn of Enwebbed debuff should a save fails. This can happen even if enemy succeeded the save against the initial detonation. As a result, your combat log might be a little confusing.
Uncanny Husk is very powerful if you can get enemies to stay inside the area of effect, and that's the problem, they tend to runaway before hatchlings could... well, hatch and do their thing. The added poison damage on initial blast is designed to mitigate the risk to an extend, so players could still get some value out of their action. The 2 turns of Enwebbed, if successfully applied, can ideally force enemies to go through at least one cycle of Repulsive Eggs.
Mutagen of Musclemass
- Removed immunity to Burning. This effect was added to another item introduced in 4.0 update.
Extract of Sedation
- Duration of coating reduced to 2 turns.
- Sedation duration reduced to 2 turns.
Extract of Neurotoxin
- Duration of coating reduced to 2 turns.
You might not believe it but these two extracts are extremely powerful. When paired with the new item in 4.0, their effects can get out of hand.
Atrophic Canister, Improvised Chemstick & Shell of Absolute Zero
- Fixed a bug where their respective Persistent surface effects would apply debuffs on targets that already have them.
- Fixed a bug where Atrophic Canister's disarm effect wasn't working properly.
- Increase damage by one die for Atrophic Canister and Improvised Chemstick on their initial blast.
There are a couple of things here. First, there was a long time bug where these items would apply their debuffs even if a target already has them, causing enemies to be completely stunlocked throughout their duration. This wasn't intended and was fixed in 4.0.
Second, Atrophic Canister's disarm effect was a complete fraud. It turns out I was using the wrong keyword this whole time. Enemies would appear to be disarmed, their weapons would become invisible, but they could still attack with it regardless. Update 4.0 fixed this issue, enemies now will be properly disarmed and you can pick up their dropped weapon.
Handheld Supernova
- Reduced base damage, max damage unchanged.
- Surface effect changed to Lava, duration increased to 2 turns.
Its damage went from 10d6+100 to 12d10+40. I intended this item to be powerful but its base damage of 100 was too over the top. This should give its damage more variation, and making it more reasonable to use Shell of Sonic Boom for the force vulnerability debuff.
As for the surface effect, its previous hellfire effect was misleading. It didn't actually ignore fire resistance and immunity like advertised, it simply did magical fire damage instead of physical fire damage. However, everyone in this game who has fire resistance resists both magical and physical fire damage, making hellfire nearly useless. I changed it to Lava instead, which still does fire damage, but with a different visual.
Megafungi Blister
- Duration increased to 2 turns, up from 1 turn.
This items is very, very powerful. But due to how status effect ticks, it would sometimes expire when it happens to be enemies turn. It could use some buff to be more competitive.
Tonic of Perfect Body
- In addition to its base effects, now it also increases Strength and Dexterity to 27.
- Removed redundant status immunity that are already present on basic and complex mutagen.
- Added a flat -3 damage reduction.
- Users cannot be critically hit while this mutagen is active.
Tonic of Perfect Body's effect always felt too vague. For those unaware, resistance to all damage type wasn't the only thing this mutagen does. It also granted immunity to nearly all status effects I could think of. However, in update 4.0, I ultimately decided to ditch the status immunity as it's unintuitive and confusing, and made it lean more into tank fantasy.
Tonic of Perfect Mind
- Critical hit threshold reduced by 2, up from 1.
Toolkits
General:
- Ghastly Reagent: Removed bonus to Medicine. No long costs Structural Integrity.
- A Gaze Beyond: Removed bonus to Insight and Investigation. Added Psychic resistance.
- Counterfeit Documents: Removed bonus to Deception and Performance. Now increases movement speed by 50%.
Toolkits, by design, will stay in your inventory until long rest. Therefore they can only be fabricated once per long rest (to reduce clutter). However, in the middle of a conversation, if there is a skill check, and you click "add bonus" and add any tool that can provide one, it will destroy the item. The only way to prevent this is to use the item prior to the conversation. Having to reload due to this can be very annoying. Plus, skill bonus aren't the primary functionality of tools. In the end, I decided to remove skill bonus from various tools, and gave them something else.
Clairvoyance Brew
- Now lasts until long rest.
- Items type changed to consumable, instead of casting a spell, you will now perform a drink animation to gain its effect.
- Skill bonus increased to 1d6, up from 1d4.
- Now destroyed upon use.
The aforementioned interaction was the reason I changed Clairvoyance Brew to be destroyed upon use, I buffed its duration till long rest and bonus to 1d6, as a compensation for removing skill bonus from other tools.
Ghastly Reagent
- No longer costs Structural Integrity to use.
Rusty Crowbar
- Fixed a bug where this tool deals no damage to objects not tagged as "debris".
Rusty Crowbar dealt no damage to certain objects, for example the enchanted door in the monastery. It turns out that I bound its damage to certain tags, and if an item doesn't have these tags, Rusty Crowbar would not do any damage to them. This fix addresses that.
Abductor Parasite
- Removed the cooldown of this item because there is already a resource limitation.
Vivisection Instrument
- Reduced Structural Integrity cost from 4 to 3.
Total points of Structural Integrity was reduced to 5, along with the cost of all tools. However, for Vivisection Instrument, the cost really wasn't very justifiable given how risky and niche (but powerful) it is, and how applicable other tools are. By reducing its cost to 3, players now will have enough resource left to combo it with other tools.
Creatures
Malformed Experiment
- Reduced overall hit points.
- Changed Lightning immunity to Acid immunity.
- Tenderize the Meat: reduced damage.
- New ability: On death or despawn, leaves behind a surface of black tentacles.
- Slam: renamed to Concussive Slam, added "Dazed" status effect. Base damage slightly increased.
- Concussive Slam: added a new effect called Defective Larvae.
- Defective Larvae: attacking with Concussive Slam causes a larva to crawl into the target for 2 turns. If the target dies before the larva does, the larva will hatch into a Living Failure for 10 turns.
- Living Failure: uncontrollable ally units, its basic attack deals bludgeoning damage and apply Defective Larvae.
- Living Failure has acid and poison immunity.
- On death, Living Failure will leave a blob of twisted remains on the ground that can possibly restrain movement of those who pass through.
- Fixed a bug where Malformed Experiment's unique Berserk effect did not have the correct description.
- Added a custom tag for Malformed Experiment, so that Living Failure will ignore it while it's Berserking.
Balance wise, Malformed Experiment dealt too much damage and was too tanky. Especially consider you can fabricate multiple of them and distribute the capsules among your party. Having up to 4 Malformed Experiment helping you every short rest, effectively adding close to 800 hit points and 240 damage to your party isn't very healthy. You can still have multiple of them at once, but less frequently now.
Currently, Malformed Experiment's overall damage output is around 2/3 of a regular flesh golem, and hit points about 50% of that, as the original flesh golem was a bloated stats bag.
However, I always wanted to make Malformed Experiment more distinctive from a regular flesh golem, which was the template it was built upon. I tried to change its multiattack damage type, giving its regular attack a debuff on hit, changed their names, added a death action, etc. But it still felt like a watered down version with no obvious uniqueness. A new ability naturally calls, but it can't be any ability, it has to be immersive and fits the theme of Malformed Experiment.
Introduced in the update is a new interaction called Defective Larvae, which is attached to Concussive Slam. This is similar to Crawling Macus of raised zombies which spawns newborn zombies on kill. Defective Larvae will spawn Living Failures on kill, and those Living Failures also have a death action like Malformed Experiment. I feel like with this new ability, Malformed Experiment finally has its own characteristics.
Another problem is the Berserking mechanic. When Malformed Experiment begins to Berserk, it will appear hostile to everyone, causing allied npcs to attack it. You can still fully control it at it's turn, it's still your summon, that doesn't change. The annoying part is that due to this hostile interaction, it will provoke attacks of opportunity from allies. It's not a big deal normally, but when a Living Failure does that, it can be somewhat immersion breaking because they are its spawns. Also, Living Failures aren't designed to be controlled by players (I originally allowed them to be controlled but as their numbers racked up it became tedious), so they often targets Malformed Experiment because it's the nearest "enemy". As a countermeasure, I added a custom tag to Malformed Experiment and effectively removed it from Living Failure's targeting parameter. The prompt will still show up but Living Failures won't actually attack it.
Weapons
Makeshift Crossbow
- This item is deprecated in update 4.0
Makeshift Pickaxe
- This item is deprecated in update 4.0
Both of the basic weapons don't feel like they have a place once players gain access to Superior Fabrication. While it is true that superior items should be more powerful than basic ones, I try my best to make every single item has something to offer, and this isn't the case for Makeshift Crossbow and Makeshift Pickaxe. Their weapon architypes and proficiency abilities are nearly identical to their superior version, forcing them to be strictly inferior stats wise.
Lung Impaler
- Changed the icon for "Fabricating Lung Impaler"
- New intrinsic ability: Shrapnel Blast.
- Shrapnel Blast:
Deals damage in a cone, has a small knock back. The blast shakes the air and clears any gaseous surface, similar to Gust of Wind.
Scrounger is good at creating surface effects, some times too good that it blocks your throwing path (path is interrupted). This ability should help alleviate the problem somewhat.
Deep Anchor / Sunken Maul
- Renamed Deep Anchor to Sunken Maul
- Updated weapon model and icons
- Weapon description changed to reflect the visual update.
- Weapon architype changed to Warhammer, updated proficiency abilities.
- Depth Tow: cooldown reduced to once per battle.
- Removed immunity to Frightened, Blinded and Poisoned.
Deep Anchor was visually identical to Makeshift Pickaxe, which looked incredibly dull. The new look is rusty, which I think fits the weapon's theme. Depth Tow was one of the selling point of this weapon, so I took the opportunity and gave it a slight cooldown buff. Its status immunity is moved to other new items.
Speculative Evolution
Optical Melanophores
- Fixed a bug where Optical Melanophores invisibility effect wasn't working as intended.
- Reduced stealth boost to 5, down from 10.
- Reduced duration from 30 turns to 10 turns.
There are two parts to Optical Melanophores, invisibility and stealth skill boost. Before, these two elements were bundled into a single entry, and were causing problems. While the skill boost to stealth was fine on its own, I discovered it was interfering with the invisibility effect, causing it not to work at all.
This bug is fixed by separating the two elements into different entries and apply them together via the main ability cast instead. A condition check was added to remove the stealth boost if you are no longer visually invisible, to prevent one effect from lingering when another expires.
Immersion
Custom Tags
- Added custom tags to Scrounger.
It only recently came to my notice that Scrounger has wrong tags on character sheet. When you check your character sheet, it will say Warlock, Fiend. Nothing wrong with warlock as this class was inspired by the "patrons and pacts" theme. It also uses Warlock dialogues. But Fiends shouldn't be there. It was removed, and two custom tags were added, Scrounger and Witch Machinatio.
New Items
Weapons
Makeshift Hand Crossbow
- New visual, new weapon architype, new proficiency abilities.
It pairs well with Motion-Assist Prosthesis, as you can disengage and use bonus actions to attack. It's playstyle is different enough from Lung Impaler so it's not completely overshadowed by the latter.
Makeshift Harpoon
- New visual, new weapon architype, new proficiency abilities.
- New intrinsic ability: Salvager's Dive
- Salvager's Dive: dive beneath the surface and reemerge at another location.
- This weapon isn't bound to your inventory like other fabricated weapons do, so you can throw it.
- It will automatically return to you after throwing.
You know those kind of stories that take place in a fishing town with creepy locals? Then authorities, outsiders and scavengers alike show up one by one and find out whatever horror lurks beneath the waves? A rusty harpoon is one of the living embodiments of that atmosphere. It's proficiency ability is Rusk Attack, allowing you to quickly close the gap as a melee character. You can also use Salvager's Dive to reposition yourself, to gain high ground for example, and throw the harpoon from range. Salvager's Dive is a reflavored and refurbished Misty Step. I've added water effects and sound to the ability.
While Makeshift Harpoon isn't inventory bound (so you can throw it), it still falls under the same group as other fabricated weapons. Just like before, you can't have multiple fabricated weapons at the same time. Crafting one will replace others.
Toolkits - Hazard Navigation Gear
Hazard Navigation Unit is a special task force within the cult, responsible for handling the most dangerous exploration mission. Your fruitful expedition helped the development of several advanced equipment, and you were granted access to Hazard Navigation Gears.
Hazard Navigation Gear, while categorized as Toolkits, are actually armors you can fabricate and equip. They can be fabricated once per long rest like other Toolkit items. Because they are armors, they do not expend your class resources.
Hazard Navigation Boots
- This pair of boots is made from chemical resistant materials that can maintain its properties under excessive hazardous exposure, allowing you to safely travel through perilous terrain.
- Passive: Durable Polymer
- Durable Polymer prevents AC reduction from acid puddles, as well as protecting you from slipping on grease or ice. Certain floras also no longer entangles you.
Hazard Navigation Gloves
- Gloves indulged in chemicals for far too long, giving off a pungent stench.
- Passive: Grazing Chemical
- Hazard Navigators are very nimble when it comes to contraptions and machineries. This pair of gloves gives you advantage on Sleight of Hand checks. It also allows you to "graze" with your attacks. Whenever you miss an attack, whether it's Throw or melee, you can use an reaction to deal acid and poison damage equal to your strength modifiers.
- Your throw and improvised weapon attack also deal additional 2 acid and 2 poison damage.
Note that the "graze" reaction applies on hit effect such as weapon coating. Which is also one of the reasons why Extract of Sedation and Extract of Neurotoxin received some tuning.
Hazard Navigation Suit
- This isn't an actual suit, but a miniature swarm mimicking the look of one. These swarms are cultivated by the biology department of the cult, and engineered to become a symbiotic augmentation for Hazard Navigation Unit.
- Passive: Symbiotic Assault Interlace.
- This living suit burrows its countless threads into the wearer and enhance their abilities. Wearers gain +2 bonus to their spell save dc (remember your bombs also use your spell save dc) and cannot be frightened. The suit feeds on the blood of the wearer, and triggers a reaction which causes the outer layer to mineralize, gain acid resistance and immunity to burning.
Chemical Support Tank
- This is perhaps the most unique item in 4.0. It is equipped in the musical instrument slot. When equipped, it looks like you are carrying a tank full of liquid.
- Passive: Chem Pump
- This tank periodically pumps restorative chemical into your body, healing you 2 hit points per turn, in and out of combat, until you are full health.
- This device also has access to your circulation system, regulating your blood cycle. Giving you resistance to poison damage and immunity to poisoned status effect.
There were two goals when designing these new items: fashion and immersion.
My favorite one is the Chemical Support Tank. To be honest I didn't thought it would actually work, and looked that cool. It looks like you are carrying a piece of alien technology on your back and are navigating treacherous environment not meant for humans.
These items are designed to be as immersive as possible for the Scrounger class, but they aren't meant to be "best in slot" gears. The boots for example just allows you to ignore certain terrains.
Conclusion
As of 4.0, every feature, trope and theme I wanted for this class have been implemented one way or another. All major bugs have been fixed as well. There might still be minor changes down the road, but as far as gigantic overhauls go, 4.0 update is likely the last one. I sincerely hope you had fun with this class as much as I do designing and developing it.
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