Hi, I've just started with the mod, so I'll tell you some of my preliminary thoughts. - as a caster class I think the necromancer should be able to GM at least one other school like primordial, and if no new schools will be added, then I think either new spells for dark need to be added or reworked. - I like the idea of the demon spawn, but it doesn't feel as risk/ reward as I thought, also there seems to be some kind of bug with this class that randomly increases my stats.
Other than these things, I think this mod is great, and I can't wait to see more. I don't know what your design philosophy for this mod is or what your background is, but if you like I can give you a wish list I think would be a great addition. Keep up the awesome work.
Hey Xenova, yeah hit me with your wishlist! For this mod I don't have a design philosophy as such, it's basically just "can I create a new concept for a character that's sufficiently different to vanilla and that I think would be fun to play".
Couple of other thoughts:
Agree Necromancer should be able to master another class (probably earth). This class didn't really turn out how i intended; I wanted him to be a high health (grandmaster endurance), low mana class with mana recovery and health drain (dark magic), so you might have say a 400hp/150 mana necromancer that regains mana when losing health and casts health drain to heal. I think this would be really fun but at the moment it's kind of just a mediocre caster. There's a few reasons it doesnt work, as the skill point demand is so high and he'd only unlock the mana regen ability post promotion which comes relatively late, making the early game harder. Open to ideas on this one for sure.
(Nb. the Necromancer special abilities don't work after the promotion quest currently, I'm still trying to diagnose this).
Demonspawn has very low base hp and mana so i buffed other stats and resistances to compensate; possibly I've overdone it. In theory once it upgrades to Infernal Scion, it will explode when it dies doing 300(?) damage to your other party members; i.e. he's health-fragile and if he dies you probably get a whole-party wipe. I think that's kinda spicy/fun, but it only applies post-promotion quest. (and I havent completed the promo quest yet to check if it works - i'm doing a demonspawn playthrough now). I'm open to ideas on how to make this class more interesting and/or better risk-reward tradeoff. I thought about giving it negative light resistances but there's so little light damage in the game.
I haven't paid a lot of attention to balance/synergies between classes so far, and I already know I've probably made some "bad" decisions, e.g. putting dark mastery on the blackguard (twin daggers) defeats the purpose since he has to either cast Agony OR attack. In practice it's probably more just for using the "spot secrets" spell.
A few classes also start off a bit gimped like the Frostwarden and Arcane Warrior as they potentially put points in magic instead of their weapon skill; at least that's been the case in my current playthrough (Blackguard/Arcane Warrior/Frostwarden/Demonspawn).
I'd love to get some new ideas (including ideas for new classes if any) so thanks a lot for taking the time to write your thoughts, and I'd love to hear your wish list.
As far as the Necromancer is concerned, from the perspective of a solo character run, I think it would be a good class for a challenge, but I still personally find dark magic to be pretty weak especially if it's one of the few spell schools you have to rely on, so buffs or new spells (if possible) would be great.
For the Demonspawn, they have the 3rd highest hp and by far the highest mp in my party (orc champion, demonspawn, paladin, dwarf fire mage), which is fine since they have so many magic schools to choose from. With risk/ reward is it possible to have a hp drain effect? So when combat starts they start to take something like 10 dmg per turn? This might also work well with the increased dmg as hp gets lower talent.
My wish list (off the top of my head): - A new unarmed skill for the monk would be cool and thematic - An earth based caster class for the dwarf, something like earth shaker --> mountain king - Maybe a Blackguard that specializes in high dodge and punishes attackers that miss with a high dmg counter - Fire/ dark orc caster. I like the demon theme for orcs so something like diabolist --> occultist
Thanks for being so open minded, and breathing new life into this great.
So I had a think about this and I have a few ideas I'll play with. (I figured out how to create new Relics yesterday)
- Monk gets a "natural" weapon (staff and fist relic) from the start of the game, something unimpressive initially but maybe with like 15 levels, so you can level it up similar to the Ki fist in D&D - reimagine the necromancer as a "Vampire" and give him claws and bite relic natural weapons (magic foci relic), so he can be a kind of melee caster. All the melee casters at the moment use sword or spear; this would be the first one with a Foci. Keep the dark magic, high health, and the limited mana. - fire/dark orc class sounds like a winner - earth dwarf class is interesting, I think I will try this. I had an idea for creating a variant of the earthquake spell (area effect and damage over time) that would go really well with it, if I can figure out how to create it - I wanted to create a Purifier class (originally this was going to be a rework of the dwarf) that has strong melee skills and converts a % of all damage into light or fire damage. but I might rework the crusader instead to make him a bit more aggressively focused
I've also made a couple of tweaks to the demonspawn and I'll see what I can do to improve the risk/reward a bit.
natural weapons for the Monk (fist) and Vampire (claws and bite)
buffs to dark magic (higher damage, better penetration at master and GM levels)
buffed earth GM spell
Couple of other minor changes
Currently completing Duncan's quest grants all 3 natural weapons to every/any party (this just lets me test them easily), but if you sell them you'll get a normal experience. Vampire starts with claws and unlocks bite after Druid Elder promo, Monk starts with fist/staff. Once I finish testing it (probably a while off; I need to do a solid playthrough) ill put it in the main branch.
I've tried monk and vampire, I haven't done their promotion quests yet though, so here are my initial impressions:
- Monk: So far I really like the class, pretty survivable, magic is good, unique weapon is cool. It does do absurd damage at low levels though, I was easily doing 200 dmg on a crit at level 5. I'm not sure if it's possible to add 4 or more substats on artifacts, but if so that would be a great addition. Other wise I love the class so far.
- Vampire: As a melee caster hybrid, its damage is quite low. If all it has to offer is survivability it makes hard to justify putting it in a party compared to other classes. Life drain on its artifact is also kind of unnecessary since they already have plenty of healing from dark spells and its promotion talent.
As first impressions I really like what I see so far. I'm still in the process of a orc champion/ demonspawn play through. So I can give you my thoughts on that later if you want.
wonderful to hear - glad you are enjoying it. Would love to get more feedback, any and all :). Both the monk and the vampire items should get 4-5 suffixes by the time they are fully levelled. Interesting comments on the vampire...I hadn't thought about the overlap with the dark magic healing ability. I'll think on this some more, I agree it's currently lacking a reason to take it other than survivability (the natural weapons and dark magic should now be quite powerful, but a bit of a slow burn).
Quick question - the monk spear, is it levelling up too fast? Or is it the relentless combo that's causing the damage? The spear itself in terms of raw damage is not that strong - ive compared it to default spears and made it about 20-30% weaker (of course it has other perks). So I'm curious - is it levelling up too fast so that its damage is ahead of normal spears? Or is it the abilities that make it so powerful? Thanks again Xenova - hope to hear more from you soon, and I'll have more to share as well.
I'm glad my suggestions are helping, here's some more! - For the spear, I don't know if it's levelling to fast, maybe? It was consistently one level higher than the vampires artifact but the extra attack so early definitely inflates its damage.
- For my other play through, orcs promotion talents don't appear to be working at the moment, and the demon spawn seems to get a set trap ability as well, I'm not sure if that's intended so I figured I'd let you know.
- Fire shield is great, I find I'm using it almost every fight and it's damage isn't over powered. I haven't gotten Crushing Weight yet but from the stats I've seen it seems to be a lot better, I'll let you know when I try it.
There are some things I'd like to ask since I don't know how to access this info or I have just not been paying attention. - I find earth magic to be mostly useless, outside of regenerate the other spells are kind of weak. Stone skin doesn't really last long enough to justify casting it over something like water skin, unless I want to dedicate a character to only casting buff in combat. I'm not entirely sure how poison or bleed works but the damage seems to be unnoticeable. Regenerates healing is very high and combined with light magics shield spell is all your party really needs for survival, so maybe halving it's healing and doubling it's duration might work? - I also have a question about staves and wands, does their damage scale with magic, like how melee weapons scale with might?
Thanks for listening, I hope this helps. I'll let you know if I find anything else.
Glad to hear Fire Shield is useful finally! I'll have a look at the monk artifact - I'm just about to start another playthrough. Thanks for letting me know about the orc promos as well. Between your testing and mine it seems like none(?) of the "custom" paragon class abilities work. The best I can do atm/afaik is tweak the values, images, and potentially spell school. So I could hypothetically make the Druid's heal spell be a dark spell instead of earth (I'm pretty sure), but I don't currently know how to add a new spell or ability. I've reached out to the guy who did Legends of Ashan mod for MMX to see if he can help.
In the interim I've removed most of the custom abilities and reallocated the base game ones, that'll be in the next update (and part of what I test on this playthrough). To answer your questions: - stone skin and liquid membrane have the same base duration (2 turns) that scales with skill. Stone skin adds base 6 to armor (which is 6% physical damage reduction) and liquid membrane gives base 5% to reduce all damage. The difference is that it's possible to get armor close to 100 with Stone Skin spell, which gives near immunity to physical damage (100 armor will make you actually immune). Whereas liquid membrane is more of an all-purpose resist spell. - At max skill (30 points = 150% bonus) they should, I believe, add 15 armor and 12.5% dam resist respectively for 5(?) turns. - I don't believe magic foci damage scales with might or magic attribute. This should be easy to test though, as the foci do magic damage which ignores armor, and the numbers are small (e.g. 15 damage and if your wizard has 50 magic that should be +100% damage) so should be easy to round without the hassle of additional attacks, calculating armor and so on.
I can have a think about whether earth magic needs a buff. The issue it has is (similar to dark magic in endgame) that at the start of the game, you fight a lot of enemies that resist earth (human rogues, naga casters, all of the minotaurs, griffins, undead in the undercity). Poison and poison cloud are quite good especially on dodgy enemies (as it reduces evasion), as is acid splash for the armor reduction, but if your opponent is immune to poison (bosses, undead etc) that makes like 3 of your spells ineffective for most of the game. Maybe I can see if I can make it possible to poison bosses, that might be an interesting starting point.
Btw thanks so much for your ongoing input, it's extremely helpful and thought provoking. really appreciate it!
***edit*** also I figured out why the monk weapon was so powerful. Two handed relics get 2x the experience, it seems, so it was levelling twice as fast as it should. You were probably getting the late-game version by midgame (sorry!). I've fixed this now, it'll be in the next update :).
So I just finished the vampire and monk promotion, and as you said the promotion abilities don't work, I'm also not sure if the vampire is supposed to get a second "bite" relic when they finish their promotion, but if so I didn't receive it. For the crushing weight spell, it does the damage as advertised which I think is a great improvement, however it also poisons the enemy and can crit, so I don't know if that's intended but I figured I'd let you know. I was wondering also if it would be possible to give every class their own unique relic as a reward for their promotion, it would make a nice extra bonus since so many of the relics in vanilla are pretty lack lustre. One more thing I was curious about was if the dual wield skill works with the arcane focus skill, does it provide bonuses when you dual wield wands? Anyways thank you for answering my previous questions, I'm really looking forward to the next update.
Sorry about the promo abilities :| My bad. They'll be fixed in the next update for most classes, mostly by reverting to the vanilla paragon ones. Great news about crushing weight! I got it today on my campaign too and tried it out too, it's definitely more useful. I think the poison is overkill - I added it to help make the spell stronger, but when I cast it, it was doing 48 poison damage per turn which was really strong.
So I'll probably revert that, but it seems like a much better spell atm. As for the class relics, I could add some more, but I'm reluctant to give one to every class since it'll just become the default (i.e. gives players fewer choices instead of more). What I'm thinking atm is I'll give relics to the weaker/less popular classes, for example the Warden could get a unique relic dagger or a relic bow since it's not a popular class right now, and there's only one unique relic dagger despite it being a dual-wielding class.
I'm also thinking about possibly adding a relic ring or necklace as those slots don't have relics. If you have any ideas for that one I'd welcome them :). One possible idea is making a relic reward from the arcane discipline grandmaster quest (the one where you have to wait 37 days in-game time) to tie it to real achievement.
With dual wield, it doesn't apply to magical foci. I think a lot of abilities like relentless and counterattack (from dodge) don't apply, since they aren't classified as a melee or ranged weapon (they're some other third thing). Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, I'm loving hearing about your playthrough. Sorry I didn't get the update out today, but it's very close now (hopefully tomorrow). Have a great day!
I've started a new play through with a monk/ vampire/ war cleric/ quakeheart, so I'll let you know how that goes. A few initial thoughts: - The monks starting damage from the spear relic is a lot more reasonable now, so that's great - for the war priest would it be possible in the future to have a promotion ability that allows melee weapons to scale off of magic instead of might, that way it won't feel like you need all of the stats. This might make it OP though since you can get a weapon with mana drain to make them very sustainable mana wise, so maybe giving them master 2-handed instead to make it harder to hit thus needing the entire party to help them hit anything. Other then that the war cleric is actually pretty fun, I like being able to switch between melee and casting. - the vampire feels mostly the same, I haven't really tried the buffed dark magic yet, since novice level doesn't really have anything that helps with damage. - I like the quakeheart so far, they're just a really solid caster. - the relics level pacing is also a lot better, so far I'm not steam rolling the early game. - Since the promotion passives aren't working at the moment, is it possible to transfer some of the abilities to relics so they can be tested?
This is all off the top of my head, so I'll let you know what else comes to mind later, otherwise I love what I'm seeing so far.
Ahh that's great, I'm so glad to hear that. Try keeping the vampire bite relic from Dunstan and rushing master magic focus (Seahaven library iirc) and then dual-wielding them. I'm partway through a vampire playthrough and I think I really need to award these from the start, instead of late in the game. Using just claws would get really tedious as the mana drain doesn't add up to much.
I love the ideas for the war cleric, both the promo ability (it needs one for sure) and the transferring promotion abilities to relics. Thanks again for your help and I hope you enjoy it, keep it coming.
16 comments
I've just started with the mod, so I'll tell you some of my preliminary thoughts.
- as a caster class I think the necromancer should be able to GM at least one other school like primordial, and if no new schools will be added, then I think either new spells for dark need to be added or reworked.
- I like the idea of the demon spawn, but it doesn't feel as risk/ reward as I thought, also there seems to be some kind of bug with this class that randomly increases my stats.
Other than these things, I think this mod is great, and I can't wait to see more. I don't know what your design philosophy for this mod is or what your background is, but if you like I can give you a wish list I think would be a great addition.
Keep up the awesome work.
Couple of other thoughts:
I haven't paid a lot of attention to balance/synergies between classes so far, and I already know I've probably made some "bad" decisions, e.g. putting dark mastery on the blackguard (twin daggers) defeats the purpose since he has to either cast Agony OR attack. In practice it's probably more just for using the "spot secrets" spell.
A few classes also start off a bit gimped like the Frostwarden and Arcane Warrior as they potentially put points in magic instead of their weapon skill; at least that's been the case in my current playthrough (Blackguard/Arcane Warrior/Frostwarden/Demonspawn).
I'd love to get some new ideas (including ideas for new classes if any) so thanks a lot for taking the time to write your thoughts, and I'd love to hear your wish list.
For the Demonspawn, they have the 3rd highest hp and by far the highest mp in my party (orc champion, demonspawn, paladin, dwarf fire mage), which is fine since they have so many magic schools to choose from. With risk/ reward is it possible to have a hp drain effect?
So when combat starts they start to take something like 10 dmg per turn? This might also work well with the increased dmg as hp gets lower talent.
My wish list (off the top of my head):
- A new unarmed skill for the monk would be cool and thematic
- An earth based caster class for the dwarf, something like earth shaker --> mountain king
- Maybe a Blackguard that specializes in high dodge and punishes attackers that miss with a high dmg counter
- Fire/ dark orc caster. I like the demon theme for orcs so something like diabolist --> occultist
Thanks for being so open minded, and breathing new life into this great.
- Monk gets a "natural" weapon (staff and fist relic) from the start of the game, something unimpressive initially but maybe with like 15 levels, so you can level it up similar to the Ki fist in D&D
- reimagine the necromancer as a "Vampire" and give him claws and bite relic natural weapons (magic foci relic), so he can be a kind of melee caster. All the melee casters at the moment use sword or spear; this would be the first one with a Foci. Keep the dark magic, high health, and the limited mana.
- fire/dark orc class sounds like a winner
- earth dwarf class is interesting, I think I will try this. I had an idea for creating a variant of the earthquake spell (area effect and damage over time) that would go really well with it, if I can figure out how to create it
- I wanted to create a Purifier class (originally this was going to be a rework of the dwarf) that has strong melee skills and converts a % of all damage into light or fire damage. but I might rework the crusader instead to make him a bit more aggressively focused
I've also made a couple of tweaks to the demonspawn and I'll see what I can do to improve the risk/reward a bit.
Sneak peek of the monk's new weapon:
A sneak peek of the monk here
I really like the idea of a vampire class.
Anyways looks awesome, I look forward to trying it.
Main features:
Currently completing Duncan's quest grants all 3 natural weapons to every/any party (this just lets me test them easily), but if you sell them you'll get a normal experience. Vampire starts with claws and unlocks bite after Druid Elder promo, Monk starts with fist/staff. Once I finish testing it (probably a while off; I need to do a solid playthrough) ill put it in the main branch.
- Monk: So far I really like the class, pretty survivable, magic is good, unique weapon is cool. It does do absurd damage at low levels though, I was easily doing 200 dmg on a crit at level 5. I'm not sure if it's possible to add 4 or more substats on artifacts, but if so that would be a great addition.
Other wise I love the class so far.
- Vampire: As a melee caster hybrid, its damage is quite low. If all it has to offer is survivability it makes hard to justify putting it in a party compared to other classes. Life drain on its artifact is also kind of unnecessary since they already have plenty of healing from dark spells and its promotion talent.
As first impressions I really like what I see so far. I'm still in the process of a orc champion/ demonspawn play through. So I can give you my thoughts on that later if you want.
Quick question - the monk spear, is it levelling up too fast? Or is it the relentless combo that's causing the damage? The spear itself in terms of raw damage is not that strong - ive compared it to default spears and made it about 20-30% weaker (of course it has other perks). So I'm curious - is it levelling up too fast so that its damage is ahead of normal spears? Or is it the abilities that make it so powerful? Thanks again Xenova - hope to hear more from you soon, and I'll have more to share as well.
- For the spear, I don't know if it's levelling to fast, maybe? It was consistently one level higher than the vampires artifact but the extra attack so early definitely inflates its damage.
- For my other play through, orcs promotion talents don't appear to be working at the moment, and the demon spawn seems to get a set trap ability as well, I'm not sure if that's intended so I figured I'd let you know.
- Fire shield is great, I find I'm using it almost every fight and it's damage isn't over powered. I haven't gotten Crushing Weight yet but from the stats I've seen it seems to be a lot better, I'll let you know when I try it.
There are some things I'd like to ask since I don't know how to access this info or I have just not been paying attention.
- I find earth magic to be mostly useless, outside of regenerate the other spells are kind of weak. Stone skin doesn't really last long enough to justify casting it over something like water skin, unless I want to dedicate a character to only casting buff in combat. I'm not entirely sure how poison or bleed works but the damage seems to be unnoticeable. Regenerates healing is very high and combined with light magics shield spell is all your party really needs for survival, so maybe halving it's healing and doubling it's duration might work?
- I also have a question about staves and wands, does their damage scale with magic, like how melee weapons scale with might?
Thanks for listening, I hope this helps. I'll let you know if I find anything else.
In the interim I've removed most of the custom abilities and reallocated the base game ones, that'll be in the next update (and part of what I test on this playthrough).
To answer your questions:
- stone skin and liquid membrane have the same base duration (2 turns) that scales with skill. Stone skin adds base 6 to armor (which is 6% physical damage reduction) and liquid membrane gives base 5% to reduce all damage. The difference is that it's possible to get armor close to 100 with Stone Skin spell, which gives near immunity to physical damage (100 armor will make you actually immune). Whereas liquid membrane is more of an all-purpose resist spell.
- At max skill (30 points = 150% bonus) they should, I believe, add 15 armor and 12.5% dam resist respectively for 5(?) turns.
- I don't believe magic foci damage scales with might or magic attribute. This should be easy to test though, as the foci do magic damage which ignores armor, and the numbers are small (e.g. 15 damage and if your wizard has 50 magic that should be +100% damage) so should be easy to round without the hassle of additional attacks, calculating armor and so on.
I can have a think about whether earth magic needs a buff. The issue it has is (similar to dark magic in endgame) that at the start of the game, you fight a lot of enemies that resist earth (human rogues, naga casters, all of the minotaurs, griffins, undead in the undercity). Poison and poison cloud are quite good especially on dodgy enemies (as it reduces evasion), as is acid splash for the armor reduction, but if your opponent is immune to poison (bosses, undead etc) that makes like 3 of your spells ineffective for most of the game. Maybe I can see if I can make it possible to poison bosses, that might be an interesting starting point.
Btw thanks so much for your ongoing input, it's extremely helpful and thought provoking. really appreciate it!
***edit*** also I figured out why the monk weapon was so powerful. Two handed relics get 2x the experience, it seems, so it was levelling twice as fast as it should. You were probably getting the late-game version by midgame (sorry!). I've fixed this now, it'll be in the next update :).
So I just finished the vampire and monk promotion, and as you said the promotion abilities don't work, I'm also not sure if the vampire is supposed to get a second "bite" relic when they finish their promotion, but if so I didn't receive it. For the crushing weight spell, it does the damage as advertised which I think is a great improvement, however it also poisons the enemy and can crit, so I don't know if that's intended but I figured I'd let you know.
I was wondering also if it would be possible to give every class their own unique relic as a reward for their promotion, it would make a nice extra bonus since so many of the relics in vanilla are pretty lack lustre.
One more thing I was curious about was if the dual wield skill works with the arcane focus skill, does it provide bonuses when you dual wield wands?
Anyways thank you for answering my previous questions, I'm really looking forward to the next update.
So I'll probably revert that, but it seems like a much better spell atm. As for the class relics, I could add some more, but I'm reluctant to give one to
every class since it'll just become the default (i.e. gives players fewer choices instead of more). What I'm thinking atm is I'll give relics to the weaker/less popular classes, for example the Warden could get a unique relic dagger or a relic bow since it's not
a popular class right now, and there's only one unique relic dagger despite it being a dual-wielding class.
I'm also thinking about possibly adding a relic ring or necklace as those slots don't have relics. If you have any ideas for that one I'd welcome them :). One possible idea is making a relic reward from the arcane discipline grandmaster quest (the one where you have to wait 37 days in-game time) to tie it to real achievement.
With dual wield, it doesn't apply to magical foci. I think a lot of abilities like relentless and counterattack (from dodge) don't apply, since they aren't classified as a melee or ranged weapon (they're some other third thing). Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, I'm loving hearing about your playthrough. Sorry I didn't get the update out today, but it's very close now (hopefully tomorrow). Have a great day!
I've started a new play through with a monk/ vampire/ war cleric/ quakeheart, so I'll let you know how that goes.
A few initial thoughts:
- The monks starting damage from the spear relic is a lot more reasonable now, so that's great
- for the war priest would it be possible in the future to have a promotion ability that allows melee weapons to scale off of magic instead of might, that way it won't feel like you need all of the stats. This might make it OP though since you can get a weapon with mana drain to make them very sustainable mana wise, so maybe giving them master 2-handed instead to make it harder to hit thus needing the entire party to help them hit anything. Other then that the war cleric is actually pretty fun, I like being able to switch between melee and casting.
- the vampire feels mostly the same, I haven't really tried the buffed dark magic yet, since novice level doesn't really have anything that helps with damage.
- I like the quakeheart so far, they're just a really solid caster.
- the relics level pacing is also a lot better, so far I'm not steam rolling the early game.
- Since the promotion passives aren't working at the moment, is it possible to transfer some of the abilities to relics so they can be tested?
This is all off the top of my head, so I'll let you know what else comes to mind later, otherwise I love what I'm seeing so far.
I love the ideas for the war cleric, both the promo ability (it needs one for sure) and the transferring promotion abilities to relics. Thanks again for your help and I hope you enjoy it, keep it coming.