A few questions before I buy Stolen Realm

[ClevaEnGeanyus]

Hello. I've been eyeing this game for a little while and I'm thinking about getting it, but I wanted to ask about a few details first. I have quite a few things that I'd like to know, so I'll try and be brief:

1. Fortunes cannot be transferred between characters, scaled up, or duplicated; is that right? So you WILL need to grind to get all of the fortunes you want?

2. Items that you like can be leveled, but you can't do anything about tiered items, so you WILL need to grind for those, too?

3. Critical damage is multiplicative of normal damage, which is multiplied by might and additive of whatever else you just so happen to have (skills, gear, fortunes, etc.) - meaning all damage dealers WILL, eventually, need to spec for crit in order to be effective against late-game content?

4. Given that there are so many stats on items and there are several ways to regenerate mana through gear, skills and fortunes, is intelligence worth putting points into late-game (aside from meeting the +1 range quota and summoners)? If not, I know about the crit and armor passives for intelligence. Are they enough to justify the investment in the hyper specific scenario that you choose both of them?

5. Are the attributes... finished? I asked about the other ones already, but reflex is a tough one. I can't neccessarily call it "bad" but it seems that you would need to invest a lot into it in order for it to be effective - enough that you wouldn't properly benefit from other things that would make it valuable i.e. health/armor/damage. Is perfected soul the exception? I could be wrong.

6. Is new content being planned? I looked for a road-map, but I must've missed it. I read that there are supposed to be ten skill trees, but I only count nine. Maybe Earth magic? I would like to see some more region appropriate items, too. (Explosive flora instead of barrels, rocks and logs instead of crates for the wilderness maps)

7. Are crafting items just used for potions and adding prefixes and suffixes onto gear?

8. 32 skill points are all you'll ever get? Meaning most characters can go two skill trees and some leftovers, at most?

[Ilsalay]

1. At this time - yes. Most all Fortunes would need to be reobtained. If you have a lvl 7 version of a fortune, the lvl 30 version would be better. You would need to find the event that provides it again at lvl 30.

2. At this time - yes. There is no way to upgrade to Tiered equipment.

3. Yes. Critical damage is a multiplier. For it to be effective you need Might. And for Might to be effective you need Dex - for late game builds, anyway.

4. Int is in an odd spot currently, and there's been talk of possibly adding a spell power effect to it. INT is basically viewed as "have enough to comfortably cast abilities." This mostly only applies to mage builds and summoner.

5. Mostly, yes. I believe INT is the only one currently being debated. Reflex doesn't take a lot of investment to reach a dodge cap of 75% - if you wanted to go that route.

6. There is a Nature tree that will come out some time after 1.0 release. There is a roadmap channel on the official Discord. There's also a planned Twitch mode, GM mode, and a rogue-like mode planned for 1.0 or shortly after.

7. At this time, yes. Though there hasn't been any word on anything different.

8. At this time, yes. Lvl 30 is currently the max. There hasn't been any talk or mention of having more skill points obtainable.

[ClevaEnGeanyus]

Thank you, Ilsalay. That was an extremely conclusive answer. Many of my interests are regarding what might be considered "instrumental play" because I'm looking to what a long term investment to the game would entail.

At a glance, I like the skills, but I wouldn't mind stats being different. Ultimately, gear would be the late-game goal and, in turn, I assume that stats would be more prevalent than skills. To that end, I would love having more skill points, but 32 isn't unreasonable. I do like that reflex scales better than I first thought, though.

Based on "6." the game itself sounds mostly complete - with additional game modes being the primary focus. I don't suppose mod support is in the works, perchance? Not that I plan on modding, just a curiosity of mine.

[Ilsalay]

The devs have stated they have no issues with mods. There are some that exist on the workshop.

I believe they would like to support modding, but are focused on getting 1.0 launched.

[ClevaEnGeanyus]

That makes sense. Thanks again - I'll check it out.

[Τάρταρα]

I know you've marked this as answered, but I'd like to point out some extra things.

For one and two, the short answer is there's no way in game. The complete answer is that you can just edit your save. You don't even need any fancy program. Saves are a plain text .json, and you can edit them with Notepad++. If you're even mildly technically inclined, you can figure out the structure easily. The rest is just having a "GUID". It's a string of letters and numbers. You can add any fortune, any item, any modifier- including tiers- so long as you use the correct syntax and have the GUID. There's no check for this, no save corruption, and no threat as long as you just back up the save file before editing.

Three is mostly correct. The most efficient DPS mixes the two, but I have no idea what the optimal ratio is. Though I've made a pure dex build that's more than capable of doing its share of damage, even over level 100 on Veteran with a 6 man team.

As for four, you don't need mana regen in most scenarios. Enemies drop pots, and at the end of every fight, all pots are picked up automatically. I dropped Enchanted Pumpkin when I got beyond level 70 or so, and I never touched it again. Now, I don't run mages, because I feel they're extremely weak, but any melee DPS, tank, or healer I've made never really runs out of mana. It's a slow decline sometimes, but missions are short enough for me that at most I'll use my healer to pop Meditation on someone. This may matter if you've created a mana hungry build, but then you can specifically compensate for that.

For five, I can't answer if stats will change. But Reflex is no where near bad. It probably has the highest point-to-output ratio so to speak, as in every point in Reflex gives you the most of what it offers in comparison to other stats. At tier 3, Night Stalker armor + helm will give you enough Reflex to hit the dodge cap by itself without one point of investment. Compared to its closest relative, Ninja Gear, you sacrifice very little Dexterity for having 75% dodge. Now, DPS later on tend to be outright one shot by dangerous enemies, but this is a 75% chance to get a second shot.

I don't have anything to add to six or seven.

And the answer to eight might also come back on editing. I've heard some say you can edit skills and level. I've not tried and I can't say how it effects the game because of that. The only thing I've ever edited that can't be done normally is character colors. If you're feeling brave, you could always make a test character and try it out.

[ClevaEnGeanyus]

I nearly missed your post, Τάρταρα. I've since been playing for the past week or so. I'm fairly familiar with making Notepad++ edits for games, so I could probably figure it out if need be. My concern at the time was in regards to just how rare some of the fortune events could be, as well as mythic tiered drops. Ultimately, I'm comfortable with the current event rates, but I'll have to see how much I like the late-game content. Do you know if you're able to edit character appearance data in a similar fashion?

I have a better understanding on damage from when I asked after the game originally. Before, I thought all percents were additive (like, might and warmonger, for example) except for crit. If the wiki is to be trusted on damage calculations, might and weapon damage are multiplied to derive attack power, while spellpower is might and level. These are multiplied by every other modifier, which are all additive of one another - except critical hit, which always multiplies the final value. With that in mind, I surmise that dexterity would at least need to be maximized to the extent of averaging out the rate of critical hits. Beyond that, I'm with you. I don't know the optimal ratio of might to dexterity. My interest on the topic had to do with whether characters who ignore crit altogether would be viable. So far, they are; especially for specific roles, such as tanking and healing.

Reflex did act as a rather pleasant surprise, as it effectively starts from zero and scales linearly. I'm used to dodge stats having a default value between 5% and 10% and progressively getting worse as your invest. Not to mention dodge counters, which gives the stat offensive utility. The only discernable downside is that it consumes combo breaker, but so do attacks of opportunity - thereby eliminating the point of that passive entirely, more often than not. To that end, I've been thinking about making a list of things that are "jank" like that. The game is clearly good, but sometimes it can be a bit scuffed.

Lastly (sorry for the long response), I would like to know why you think mages are weak, mainly to see if we're on the same page. I'm in the high 20s range, so I don't know about tiered gear yet. From what I can tell, though, weapon damage is starting to out-class spellpower most of the time. The light and shadow trees are still doing what they're meant to do. I have more problems with the elemental trees, as their support options are limited and there are hardly any elemental weaknesses to take advantage of.

[Ilsalay]

Originally posted by ClevaEnGeanyus:

Lastly (sorry for the long response), I would like to know why you think mages are weak, mainly to see if we're on the same page. I'm in the high 20s range, so I don't know about tiered gear yet. From what I can tell, though, weapon damage is starting to out-class spellpower most of the time. The light and shadow trees are still doing what they're meant to do. I have more problems with the elemental trees, as their support options are limited and there are hardly any elemental weaknesses to take advantage of.

You essentially answered this/are seeing this as you stated with "weapon damage is starting to out-class spellpower." Before v.21, Mages were essentially gated as they did not have anything that scaled them in to Tiered content. They were more or less locked at 30. Spell Power is 10% of your Attack Power (minus the weapon). Weapon based abilities have the weapon itself as part of the damage calculation to multiply attack power.

Martial classes have their weapon that gets 50% better with every Tier, all while getting the same Tier benefits Mages get from gear (Might, Dex, etc.) So mages did not have a significantly scaling *multiplier* that martial classes do.

They still don't - but what they got was a +Spell Power% added to all Tiered gear. They're in a much better spot. They're still not as good as martial builds, but they do well enough to be serviceable.

[ClevaEnGeanyus]

Originally posted by Ilsalay:

You essentially answered this/are seeing this

Not explicitly. I wanted to know if Τάρταρα's opinion on mages is entirely numerical or if they think there's a skill tree bias as well. To give an example, I would say fire is the strongest elemental tree for damage but I can't fathom a reason as to why you'd opt into any of their damaging skills that cost three points. They don't give any additional utility that you didn't already have earlier in the tree. They do have higher damage than average, but it's spread over an area, so they won't even be valuable in that many situations; if you really need that, you can usually use a barrel. That's also not mentioning the long cooldowns and high mana costs. You would be better off getting passives in another tree with those whopping three points.

[Ilsalay]

I find Lightning better than Fire. Cold isn't great for damage - bit it's not really supposed to be. It's highly control oriented.

I would agree with Fire having lackluster T5 skills, especially when compared to the other mage trees that have several worthwhile capstone skills.

Game balance is an ongoing thing, and some time after 1.0 (or on 1.0 release) there will be a Nature tree.

[Τάρταρα]

I suppose delayed replies are better than none at all. I'm probably not going to watch this closely, but here's a bit more. I might go a bit into autistic detail at some point, but I'll try to keep it intelligible.

Firstly, yes, you can edit character appearance in limited manners. I've done colors, at a basic level. As long as you have the HTML color value, slap it in. Game allows any of them, but it appears it somehow changes the order of rosters, for some reason. Like if you normally put someone as your second slot, they might load first or last when you actually get in game. No idea on if this can be replicated or otherwise, and it probably won't bother most people. Hair, facial features, and otherwise can also be changed. However, they rely on a number, and that's a bit more of a pain in the ass to memorize. All in all, if you know what you're looking at, you can change it in the JSON. If you do something unusual, I still recommend a manual backup (copy/paste to desktop, etc). A simple syntax mistake will set your save back to how it was pre-edit most of the time, but I take no risks.

As for dex scaling- yeah, tanks don't need it. At all. And you can make some weird tanks. I've got a support spear user, who is perfectly able to get slapped in a 6 man group at level 200. You can even make a shield/light tank, which works surprisingly well. And for healers, you can easily gear them to drop way over any max health value with the right tier 3 gear. I think my dedicated healer pops about 50k with mass cure without any buffs. Usually not needed, but nice.

Now, take what I say here with a little bit of salt. Late game scaling in most games means that most builds don't make the cut. I'm not really a min-max hyper meta guy, but I do like high performance metrics and I establish high standards. I'm also very critical about most things.

A lot of set-ups in this game do not scale late. Mages particularly. This is ambiguous, but what I mean by this is that two-handed melee and Ymir shield + two hand sets a ceiling that is absolutely unreachable by other archetypes. I don't believe these need nerfed, really, as they feel great- but they do set a scale for what a build can be for a DPS. I do expect one to be on top, as one has to be, but not by such a galactic margin. I have a core framework for what I consider the best DPS- a Ymir two-handed auto attack build. They can, in a six man group, on Veteran, at level 180~, kill some bosses solo. Meaning one, by themselves, can deal 8-12 million damage in one turn without external help. Keep this in mind as I go on.

Now for what I have done with mages- I have, with a friend, done a full six man all mage run, where we both had one fire mage, one lightning mage, and one frost mage. I have also done a solo fire mage, and two solo frost mage abomination runs. The all mage run was done pre-spell power on tier items patch, but it was painful even before then. By level 20, we had severe issues. Enemies immune to burning were not fun. Our damage was low and mostly AoE, and left us in prolonged fights, which we did not excel at. In the end, our two frost mages carried the ever living hell out of us by CC spam as our mages hit for maybe 10k tops.

Reasons are simple. Already said, enemies can be immune to burning or freezing. No one is immune to a hammer to the face. Mages rely on debuffs very heavily, and can easily be denied them. Two- game philosophy. Fights now rarely show you more than 3-4 enemies, with certain swarm scenarios being present. By overwhelming majority, though, single target is better than AoE due to 90% of situations being larger maps with few enemies. AoE has lower scaling (most of the time), especially spells. Therefore mages perform a less needed role, and are worse at giving you what you need. A warrior is pretty much an unconditional maverick, which can always put out. Especially with the availability and power of bleed, which shreds physical resist, and stacks in separate instances, meaning it's easy to get some bosses to -200% or lower physical resist. Count the lack of AP cost on Fracture, and that it can stack with other versions of itself, Bleeding Cleave having zero AP cost... what does a mage really give you?

I could go on and on about the numbers, but here's a supercut: my highest damage AoE build ever isn't a mage. It does physical damage. And it has more HP than any mage, dodge cap, and utility built in. What is it? So, it turns out you can grab Quaking Fist (250% attack power) with One Punch Monk, Perfected Soul, and Tricks of the Trade. It takes all 32 skill points. The end result is a tank-assassin-bruiser-creature that can cast one of the highest damage scaling spells in game every turn at a 100% crit rate for 800k damage. Go ahead and try to mimic that with spells in Fire's final tier having 80% spell scaling. With Fickle Flame and crit, you'll be screaming for 100-200k damage, with even Fissure (one of the highest single instance spells) sometimes blessing you with 350k.

But I do have one non-physical, "non-melee" DPS. It's a fire build. That uses no fire, lightning, or frost skill tree abilities. It literally is just a warrior with Ymir's blessing and two Apocalypse swords. Here's the trick: Crushing Slam and Sunder. Crushing Slam has 240% scaling, and Sunder is 200%. Sunder also ignores resistance- meaning you can smack a fire resistant enemy for 500k. So yeah, the best elemental build is probably a warrior just using elemental weapons. Secondary reason damage here is so high is a mechanical oversight, probably. Two handed weapons get +50% spell power at tier 3. So... you can dual wield them with Ymir.

To end this though, frost "mages" are NOT bad. They make great abusive tanks. I've got a "frost mage" with 33k HP who is legit unkillable and pumps CC like mad. Frost has 3 abilities which can instantly freeze one or more targets on demand (frozen spikes, mass freeze, and deep freeze). Combine with stasis and the max HP reduction passive and you can make a very annoying caster. Also, if you have two frost mages, just double up on ice wall. You can put a boss in a toddler cage for two turns if it doesn't have a dash because haha funny hex game (3 per mage, 6 surrounding tiles). Seriously, you'll do no damage, but my god you can make an absolute tumor.

And yeah, I've tried a lot of set-ups thanks to being able to just edit a brand new blank character to 30 and throw gear from my stash on them. I've tried a lot of dumb stuff, and most could get you through a while. Especially to level 30. But the best I ever got out of a ranged build was the same 700-800k crit as my Quaking Fist build, but as single target and requiring a massive amount of space between the firing point and target (and not on a every turn basis). So if your thing is late game, you might want to go into it with a bit of an open mind for completely changing out comps. Some of this you can see (most ranged weapons have about 2/3 the damage of melee because... yes or something?), but the wiki is dated and skills don't always show you scaling in an intuitive way.

[ClevaEnGeanyus]

@Τάρταρα: Late indeed. Now I've nearly put off responding for a month. I'd say that makes us even. I've tried a lot of builds since the beginning of the thread. I haven't really done the *super* late-game yet, but I've been fooling around at level 30 a bit.

Crit isn't required on DPS as of yet. There is one build I've made that ignores crit entirely, which outperforms everything else I currently have. If you go all in on the generic percentile damage increases in the ranger tree, the multiplier is large enough where you can just focus on might and get crits from the precision passive. I've made some bizarre tanks, too. Five points into vitality every level + vitality break and percentile healing is interesting. Inflexible, to be sure, but interesting. Bloodlet into divine intervention feels amazing. Is the 50K on your healer a crit? My health gouging gimmick has been hard to heal without percentile healing thus far.

For the life of me, I haven't gotten Ymir's Blessing, or whatever the fortune is. Based on context, I assume it allows you to dual wield two handers, but I don't know if it has any other effects. I know where to get it. but I haven't bothered with it yet.

Moreover, despite being fully aware of basic attack builds, I don't prefer them. They're usually better than speccing into real abilities, which I honestly find to be a little disturbing. Abilities make the game more fun for me, but they also cause a bit of grief. You see, there's this thing that I refer to as "the dark temptation". As you know, if you gear characters around a single element, they perform better. That being said, it puts you in a rough spot for cooldowns. I am extremely tempted to spec into tricks of the trade on every themed caster. The thief tree is so robust that it's often better than speccing for one's native casting tree anyway. The small, single target spells are usually a better fit for most situations, and with a simple cooldown reduction, they're always available. It makes me wonder why the mana cost is so much larger for casters. Bleeding cleave costs less, often does more damage, increases future damage, and doesn't cost an action. It took me like 100 hours to figure out that it doesn't cost an action, by the way. It's so unexpected, since the other ranks aren't that over-tuned.

I think fracture stacking is a mechanical over-sight. Haunt can't stack, despite being integral to most shadow casters. So why fracture? It's the multiple ranks. They're all coded as unique status effects, even though dispelling fracture does the same thing as regular fracture. In fact, the text even still says "threatening fracture" when you use the ability. Bleed is disgusting, though. That's 100% intended, and I have no idea why. Even skeletons bleed.

Lastly, I do want to know if frost can deal any real damage with shatter and the +100% damage to frozen targets fortune. You said they deal no damage, which is basically true, but I want to believe. I like all of their tier five abilities, but that often means I have no room to invest into anything else. In addition, the earlier part of the tree isn't to my taste, which makes it doubly awkward. I fully acknowledge mages are so-so, but I find that worse characters result in more strategy. I still prefer mages, as you don't necessarily pump auto-attack or the same ability every turn. I just wish they were more rewarding, and probably less punishing for status immunities. It's tempting to just not bring certain casters, depending on the region. I'm not sure if that's the intended design or not. Also, the "borne" passives should be 15% again. No idea why they got a nerf. You get more value for the survivalist passive, anyway.

[Τάρταρα]

Most things will work around level 30 to a fairly well degree on mid range difficulty. Like I've said, I've gotten that far with a six mage composition. It's still not easy when running sub-optimal groups, but that's somewhat in the name. Crit I will say is more or less necessary to me later on. This is due to its availability in passives, which make it very easy to acquire and very highly rewarding. I've yet to find an optimal medium, but with my two top DPS I leaned to survival and base damage more over crit on one, and the two are very even in performance. Which is nice, as there's some variance allowed. But, with Stalker's Mark, one achieves an 83% crit chance, and the difference between a base hit and crit is 220k to 710k. The passives that I am referencing, if you are curious, are Dual Wield Mastery, Precision, Speed, and Stormbringer. Add in Stalker's Mark, and there's a lot my build fits in without waste onto other keystone abilities.

As for my healer, yes, 50k is a crit. Most non-crit heals are 20-40k. These aren't percent heals, it's just a healer geared for the highest output possible at tier 3. Since the Bishop is still not in game, you have to get some of this gear from gambling. Namely, the weapons.

On Ymir's Blessing- it's a ♥♥♥♥♥ and a half. You have to run Frostwrought Mountains, and get a run-in with a giant. You get an invisible quest to gather runes that persists throughout runs. This requires you to grind in the mountains for three "runes". These are also events, are completely random, and you better track which one you've done. Because the game won't tell you you. It's Honor, Courage, and something. Get all three, continue to run in the snow, and get the giant again. Fight, win, and your party gets it. But the runes can be repeat spawns and that means the RNG can just hit you like a brick wall. It took me 5~ hours of farming at level 30 just doing pure speedrunning tactics, but I've heard it takes some upwards of 14.

Ymir is possibly the strongest blessing, though. It does indeed let you dual wield almost any two handed weapons. Even rifle and shield is possible. But if this sounds like something you don't want to do (I won't blame you, it's a boring grind) I'll drop the GUID string on request. I edit it in on new characters all the time, because I'm never farming it again just because I want it on someone new.

I will address preference at the end, but for now, yes, Fracture indeed stacks because the game sees it as a "different" ability. Really, with Master of The Blade (1 stack of bleed on most physical attacks), Fracture stacking isn't really that broken. But it exists. I don't personally believe it needs fixed, but the game has a lot of other weird things in regards to stacks. Sometimes, things with fixed maximum stacks have just been exceeded in my matches, or I've seen them side-by-side like they were different, also leading to them exceeding maximum stacks. Then there's Marked Prey, which is too good to pass up for me due to the fact each character applies it on their own, making bosses get hit for over two million.

As for bleed, I think the complete list of "things that can't bleed" contains ghosts, rock golems, and I think one demon enemy. It's very small, even if they fix it and add skeletons in there.

Now for your points on preference and mages- I want to address both at once. I entirely understand- I like auto attack builds, especially enhanced ones such as Cadence in Grim Dawn. But this ultra-glass cannon that I've cultivated still isn't purely what I like. My preference are juggernauts- that being a hulking mass of high damage and high tenacity at the sacrifice of speed or utility. I can't really build that here. Stolen Realm strongly leans towards roles. DPS, tank, healer, etc. Going between DPS and tank is... eh. I guess my Quaking Fist build is kind of that, but is still one I've considered "alright" overall. I will say that nothing I've said should be followed as a rule, I try to make more and more builds that push boundaries all the time. Hence why I spent so long to find how to make a "good" elemental build, ending up with a fire based Warrior. Since this is mostly single player, "do what you will" is certainly the best way to enjoy yourself.

To a degree. Because if that thing is mage heavy comps, you might be clotheslined. I would agree with you that the mage passives should be buffed, beyond the resists. I often times take them on tanks, just because they're more useful there and my tanks often have extra skill points. Then compare it to mages, a supposedly DPS type class, who will spend them on damage or utility passives and spells at those levels. If we are to assume they were nerfed due to other roles taking them- it's a bit asinine to me. They can remain weak, needing more thinking than "me smack thing hard" physical builds, but they should be enjoyable rather than disappointing for most.

Now for a DPS frost mage... I'd say "eh." I've looked at the wiki, which is out of date to version 0.19, but the formula for spell scaling is the main issue if it's still the same. So, both scaling types use the same might scaling and same general bonus scaling, but the first part is where they differ. The short end is that mages get scaling off of only levels. attack power scaling (AKA physical stuff) gets poorer level scaling, but can use that OR weapon scaling. Essentially, if your weapon damage is higher than 99, you scale harder than a mage. Which is frighteningly low. Even with Shatter and Lich Heart, I'd still pin it on the board in the "not worth trying" category for myself. I'll still explain what I think, and with brutal honesty.

It could potentially do one singular instance of good damage. It would require multiple enemies being frozen, and be thin on AP. Though, this consideration is as a single entity. It is perhaps notable that two or more frost based characters could make this better. So, for Shatter, you have 70% spell power + 70% per extra stack within 4 hexes. This is actually pretty good, considering if there are just five stacks here, you have 420% total scaling. This is higher than any other spell from the three trees, as Thunder Wrath tops out at 400% total. And even then, it can scale from more targets. And thankfully, Inner Warmth is one turn, being shorter than the 4 turn cooldown. I would severely doubt this could work well as one character attempting to do this, however, I would recommend a few things to improve it from non-frost mages: Teleport Other (Lightning), Light's Beckon (Light), or Cyclone Kick (Monk). On the frost mages, I would say Deep Freeze is necessary (0 AP, applies 5 stacks instantly), and perhaps look at Frost Shard, Ice Storm, or Chain Frost. Icefall may help as well. Soul Link may also be funny.