Not as much build diversity as I thought :(

[DistantFluxSA]

I keep running into monsters that trigger infinite battles: the permanent invisibility from the Chastity trait being the biggest offender so far (another being the trait providing immunity to attacks while below X% HP).

I -was- specializing in direct attack damage (bombardment especially), but now feel forced to go for indirect and spell damage too, just for the occasional one-off mob. For me at least, that breaks the idea that you can have many different builds. :(

(I'm going to assume there are mobs immune to spell and indirect damage, although since I don't rely on those types, I haven't noticed.)

[Xiere]

No one team is going to beat EVERYTHING. Without Instability, you can just avoid most bad encounters. With it, a single Spell Gem on the right Creature could fix all your problems.

[atlas]

Yeah buddy, having to provide for a direct counter for your build is literally what the game is all about

[DistantFluxSA]

To me, mechanics resulting in Infinite battles always seem like something to avoid! :)

Now as you point out, once you know about the problem, you can throw a few different spell gems on creatures to deal with it, making the mechanic high annoyance, but easily solvable (which fits my definition of broken, especially since those traits don't seem to show up until you're well into the game, and are rare when they do).

Direct attack damage should always be enough to win a battle, if you can survive long enough, since (I'm assuming) it's the one damage type every creature is guaranteed to always have, so no infinite battles, ever.

(That, of course, doesn't mean it should be efficient.)

[AdvancedWind]

Chastity can be easily counted with many spell gems. A very straightforward one for attack based builds is Rabid Dementia (creature attacks a random enemy). Indirect damage sources like minions (which I think counts for the second example, but I'm not sure tbh) are also fairly easy to have for these. I'm running a hold Ok and go stat stacking build with Druid atm and it works generally fine against high def / invis and similar stuff. Extinguish is another helpful gem, insta kill anything (non-boss) below 33% life.

As the other person said, having a contingency plan when something bricks plan A is part of having a good build; there isn't many interesting choices if you can just say I'm gonna max ATK only and murder everything, if so you just search for whatever creatures with high atk and atk based trait and call it a day. Shoring up weaknesses is what spices up the process of making a build

[Gravysamich]

i am failing to understand how this means this game doesn't have build diversity... what you are saying is that your current build stopped working so now you need to change it up. or to put it another way, diversify your build.

you ran into a counter for your current build. this means you need to make a counter for that counter. if you know you are going to be dealing with that enemy type, then swap your team. that is what the menagerie is for. save your current build and come back to it when you are no longer running into the monsters that are giving you trouble. you will run into other walls though so be prepared to swap to something else again.

[the chazz]

I dont get this complaint. Next you'll be saying: "game is too easy, able to clear all content without ever dying"
Like, THIS is the game. Making a build that works, unlocking new things, progressing and having fun. Then encountering a new thing that counters your build.... then adapting your build to meet the challenge.

The game doesn't even force you to completely revamp your build if you like the creatures you're using. I've found that making small, sometimes single trait changes can completely trivialise an enemy that was previously kicking my ass.

[MaChao]

How does the realisation that a single team build can't carry you through the entire game lead you to say that there's no build diversity? O.o
Isn't this scenario proof that there's so much diversity that there are counters to your specialized build?

Situations like this is why the change from MP to spellcharges was a godsend.
This way, every single creature, regardless of their prior MP pool and MP growth can properly use spells to get you out of these battles.

Every melee unit should always have a debuff benefitting their damage type, a spell to fall back on when scorned and a mutitarget one that works even on invisible enemies (They can't be targeted, it never said they can't be hit by carpet bombing).

And while they may not be really effective with spells, at least they're doing something.

[Dragoson]

I would consider build diversity as the ability to run many different types of builds - which can definitely happen. You can certainly group these into something as simple as "Direct Attack Damage" or "Magic Attack Damage", however, the ways you can accomplish this is massive with all the traits. You can have damage reflection, blow up your own creatures, cast attack spells by defending or provoking, smash face, etc.

The reality is that you will always run into unique combinations (Especially with Realm Instability) that can be difficult to overcome. I don't feel like this changes up most builds "too" much as a couple spells or traits can usually overcome them. I also use an attack build and 90% of the time I can dismantle a team by picking out and killing creatures in a certain order to remove traits that enable some type of immunity or immortality. I also play a Reaver so even if it can sometimes take awhile for high defense/heal builds - I can eventually outscale them.

[DistantFluxSA]

An infinite battle seems like an uncaught exception: I think the game should handle it somehow. It just feels broken to me.

Granted, I cast this discussion in the context of build diversity. It's like I selected a warrior class to do a single-player ARPG, only to discover many levels later that a handful of enemies are immune to warriors, and yet can't scratch my armor.

I now feel like any team I set up has to be able to do -all- basic damage types (spell, attack, area, possibly DoT), and in my mind that massively decreases the number of potential builds. Sure, I can throw a few spell gems on to get a damage type, but that's not as efficient as building a damage type into a team from the ground up.

That doesn't mean there aren't still a lot of potential builds: just not nearly as many as I had thought. (I also wonder if a damage source like reflect would work against anything.)

[MaChao]

But that's the thing. It isn't such an ARPG, it's a game revolving around building a team of 6 creatures with up to 3 traits each, backed by a set of passives from your own character class.

The whole game system plays off of synergies and diversity in team composition.
Think the classic Tank, DPS, Healer, Buffer, Debuffer etc.

You're building a team, not a single character. Instead of building a team entirely consistent of physical attackers, how about a physical attacker that syngergises with the rest of the team? Traits, artifacts, spellst etc. set up that each action taken results in your attacker becoming stronger than an entire team without this synergy could ever become.

At the end of the day, Siralim is one giant puzzle when it comes to its team building.
And the new fusion and artifact mechanics made that all the more insane ^^

[the chazz]

Not jumping into this, but just wanted to say you can have at least 4 traits on one creature if you find a rare nether stone! Sometimes they have traits attached :)

[Jork]

Originally posted by Roccandil:

Granted, I cast this discussion in the context of build diversity. It's like I selected a warrior class to do a single-player ARPG, only to discover many levels later that a handful of enemies are immune to warriors, and yet can't scratch my armor.

The old Might & Magic games actually did what you're commenting here. Might & Magic 7 (which was an RPG party-based game) had slime enemies that were completely immune to warriors, you needed to use magic to damage them.

On the flip side, that same game had Medusa enemies that were immune to magic, but vulnerable to warriors. You still could run a group of all warriors or all mages, but obviously it's the player shooting themselves in the foot for doing so.

The game gives you options, it's up to the player to use those options rather than try brute forcing with a one track approach to everything.

Originally posted by Roccandil:

I now feel like any team I set up has to be able to do -all- basic damage types (spell, attack, area, possibly DoT), and in my mind that massively decreases the number of potential builds. Sure, I can throw a few spell gems on to get a damage type, but that's not as efficient as building a damage type into a team from the ground up.

It's generally a good idea to make a diverse party, yes. The big one is making sure you have spell gems that can mess with enemy defense such as True Light and/or at least one creature that can deal with wrecking enemy defenses.

I'm on realm 150 or so currently and the only issue I ever have is high defense monsters which was completely solved when I made a dedicated creature for it. I also have a fused phoenix that has Final Breath trait, which means 75% of the time enemies resurrect, they fail and die again.

So far I haven't really needed to rely on DoTs for anything. The only debuff I care about is Cursed because I like to use Damnation to curse all enemies then the Flood of Darkness spell to make cursed enemies freak out and fight each other.

[Tuskai]

See, the real problem is that people are saying "AoE Damage would counter Chastity", but it's not just an AoE damage spell that'd break the Chastity, Start/End of turn actions can target invisibles, Target Extra modifiers can target invisibles, Counter traits can target invisibles, Peekaboo lets you directly target invisibles AND do bonus damage to them.

There are TONS of ways to counter Chastity, but it's about having SOMETHING available in case it does turn up.

[DistantFluxSA]

Originally posted by Coronacop:

The old Might & Magic games actually did what you're commenting here. Might & Magic 7 (which was an RPG party-based game) had slime enemies that were completely immune to warriors, you needed to use magic to damage them.

On the flip side, that same game had Medusa enemies that were immune to magic, but vulnerable to warriors. You still could run a group of all warriors or all mages, but obviously it's the player shooting themselves in the foot for doing so.

I can see your point, superficially, but as I recall, Might & Magic also had non-combat skills, such as Alchemy, Repair, Perception, and probably traps/lockpicking/mercantile/etc. (it's been a while), and the need for those showed up early.

In short, it was obvious from the beginning you needed many specialists in your party, and that running all warriors or all mages was not going to work out well (although I recall reading about all-paladin builds).

In this game, though, you're rewarded for having all the same race in your party (masteries), and their traits tend to synergize on a specific theme that has little to do with the traditional tank/healer/DPS trinity.

That's cool, which is why I was disappointed to find out that that wasn't entirely true.

Anyhow, it was easy to load up some splash/AoE spells to bypass the mechanics that resulted in infinite battles. I didn't have to change my team comp, which tells me these mechanics aren't really the counter to my build; they're more of a spell gem check.

[MaChao]

Originally posted by Roccandil:

Originally posted by Coronacop:

The old Might & Magic games actually did what you're commenting here. Might & Magic 7 (which was an RPG party-based game) had slime enemies that were completely immune to warriors, you needed to use magic to damage them.

On the flip side, that same game had Medusa enemies that were immune to magic, but vulnerable to warriors. You still could run a group of all warriors or all mages, but obviously it's the player shooting themselves in the foot for doing so.

I can see your point, superficially, but as I recall, Might & Magic also had non-combat skills, such as Alchemy, Repair, Perception, and probably traps/lockpicking/mercantile/etc. (it's been a while), and the need for those showed up early.

In short, it was obvious from the beginning you needed many specialists in your party, and that running all warriors or all mages was not going to work out well (although I recall reading about all-paladin builds).

In this game, though, you're rewarded for having all the same race in your party (masteries), and their traits tend to synergize on a specific theme that has little to do with the traditional tank/healer/DPS trinity.

That's cool, which is why I was disappointed to find out that that wasn't entirely true.

Anyhow, it was easy to load up some splash/AoE spells to bypass the mechanics that resulted in infinite battles. I didn't have to change my team comp, which tells me these mechanics aren't really the counter to my build; they're more of a spell gem check.

Again, Fusion, Artifacts, Spells...
You can have up to 24 traits in your party and at least 18 different Spell Gems and 6 Artifacts.

I'd say you have to go out of your way to make all of those focused on a single source of combat prowess.
Of course there are bonuses for sticking with a certain theme, class, race etc.
But you're completely ignoring and neglecting all the behind-the-scenes mechanics here.

You can run an entire Imler&Imling tank party, fuse them with stuff to give them some magical capabilities and give them artifacts that are tuned to give them combat support.
Or your build a "porcupine tank" team, loaded up with fusions and artifacts reacting solely on block and taunt, circumventing all your issues while synergizing with your specified team.

Yes, if you stubbornly run with a single themed party of vanilla creatures and neglect all the nitty gritty the game has to offer, sure.
You either run the "classic party comp" or you run into issues.
But these issues are not the fault of the game, as it gave you all the tools you could ever need.