Should bleed damage via short blades stack?

[Balm]

It's a nitpick, but the 'stacking bleeds' component of Bloodletter skill is extremely underwhelming. I thought I could squeeze a bit more damage out of my multi-limb mutant build, but all it does it create more instances of 0-1 bleeding damage, instead of creating a larger bleed. Overall very, very small amount of damage and utility. Even in early game it would be negligible.

What do you think?

[glass zebra]

It really depends on your agility modifier, but the damage isn't meant to burst down enemies. It can last a rather long time and even in mid game it can still kill enemies from "fine" down to "dead" if you focus on agi and move away. Grants quite a lot of money from robots too.

I am not really sure what the difference between "more instances of 0-1 bleeding damage" vs "creating a larger bleed" would be, except that it would be easier to cleanse and would not boost up Shank a lot, which I guess is kinda the "combo move" the tree aims for. Personally I never use Shank tough, since "do one big main hand hit" is not that great compared to all the extra attacks you get from your offhand strikes (especially with elemental mods and a shortblade in the main hand). The bleeding already stacks. Is your post aiming for a refresh of it's "duration" on each application?

Bleeding itself can still add a lot of damage when you barely make it through the armour. With high agi chars you can notice how a single crit of a short blade can do quite relevant damage to enemies that have too high armour for you to penetrate. Vibro daggers can help a lot here too, but I usually kill with proc damage on shortblades and use their speed and extra hits. The fact that it allows you to get damage from agi is great. "Bleeding" is still just passive extra damage, even though it's slow. Passive damage = always good.

Would be cool if there would be some other interaction with bleeding though. The electrical damage mod + food for electrical proc seems the most relevant. Or if Shank would get a boost and not throw away your offhand strikes for that action. Unless you are only using 2 short blades or have no tinker mods, Shank will usually reduce your damage output..

[Balm]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

It really depends on your agility modifier, but the damage isn't meant to burst down enemies. It can last a rather long time and even in mid game it can still kill enemies from "fine" down to "dead" if you focus on agi and move away. Grants quite a lot of money from robots too.

I am not really sure what the difference between "more instances of 0-1 bleeding damage" vs "creating a larger bleed" would be, except that it would be easier to cleanse and would not boost up Shank a lot, which I guess is kinda the "combo move" the tree aims for. Personally I never use Shank tough, since "do one big main hand hit" is not that great compared to all the extra attacks you get from your offhand strikes (especially with elemental mods and a shortblade in the main hand). The bleeding already stacks. Is your post aiming for a refresh of it's "duration" on each application?

Bleeding itself can still add a lot of damage when you barely make it through the armour. With high agi chars you can notice how a single crit of a short blade can do quite relevant damage to enemies that have too high armour for you to penetrate. Vibro daggers can help a lot here too, but I usually kill with proc damage on shortblades and use their speed and extra hits. The fact that it allows you to get damage from agi is great. "Bleeding" is still just passive extra damage, even though it's slow. Passive damage = always good.

Would be cool if there would be some other interaction with bleeding though. The electrical damage mod + food for electrical proc seems the most relevant. Or if Shank would get a boost and not throw away your offhand strikes for that action. Unless you are only using 2 short blades or have no tinker mods, Shank will usually reduce your damage output..

I have like 300 hours in this game across multiple versions, and I have never seen a vibro knife, ever. I use short blades quite often for the reliable off hand attacks, so I would have definitely noticed.

Anyways, I disagree fundamentally with the 'bleeding itself can add a lot of damage'. Once you are in palladium reef territory and around mid 20's in levels, your character can and should be doing 70-100+ reliable AV-independent damage a turn if you have anything resembling an actual build. I just don't see the value-add with the 5 extra bleeding damage a turn at that point in the game when your damage and survivability are starting to scale upwards very hard. It's really just a matter of 'is this skill actually doing something for me?'. Well I guess it lets me collect oil for my flamethrower (still busted/OP btw freehold, high level enemies should have built in resistances imo), but the damage is very poor. Most other weapon skills do something important. In order for short blade bleed to remain relevant I really think the bleed should stack into into a single scaling instance that removes the possibility of a 'zero damage' bleed tick. Perhaps even take a page out of some other RPG's when if a bleed stack hits 5 or 10, it does 5% or 10% of the enemy health damage all at once. Probably annoying to code, but its just a thought that would make 'bleed builds' relevant. OR, and here's a wild thought, add a certain % of your agility modifier to bleed ticks to represent accurately targeting vital spots.

Yes, early-mid game if you need to skirmish and dance around I do see the value in bleed. I usually take rifle bleed as one of my first picks often since bleeding out annoying enemies is a good way to deal with them. But rifle bleed scales with number of penetrations, and this means it is relevant well into midgame.

Anways this game is huge and bleed damage is just a minor part of it. It just feels like its sort of left in the dust of history and is really outdated/irrelevant in late game content. Maybe bleeding robots can have a chance for an emp pulse effect, and bleeding biological opponents can have a stat reduction effect? IDK, but there is room to make it interesting.

[Balm]

Originally posted by Balm:

Originally posted by glass zebra:

It really depends on your agility modifier, but the damage isn't meant to burst down enemies. It can last a rather long time and even in mid game it can still kill enemies from "fine" down to "dead" if you focus on agi and move away. Grants quite a lot of money from robots too.

I am not really sure what the difference between "more instances of 0-1 bleeding damage" vs "creating a larger bleed" would be, except that it would be easier to cleanse and would not boost up Shank a lot, which I guess is kinda the "combo move" the tree aims for. Personally I never use Shank tough, since "do one big main hand hit" is not that great compared to all the extra attacks you get from your offhand strikes (especially with elemental mods and a shortblade in the main hand). The bleeding already stacks. Is your post aiming for a refresh of it's "duration" on each application?

Bleeding itself can still add a lot of damage when you barely make it through the armour. With high agi chars you can notice how a single crit of a short blade can do quite relevant damage to enemies that have too high armour for you to penetrate. Vibro daggers can help a lot here too, but I usually kill with proc damage on shortblades and use their speed and extra hits. The fact that it allows you to get damage from agi is great. "Bleeding" is still just passive extra damage, even though it's slow. Passive damage = always good.

Would be cool if there would be some other interaction with bleeding though. The electrical damage mod + food for electrical proc seems the most relevant. Or if Shank would get a boost and not throw away your offhand strikes for that action. Unless you are only using 2 short blades or have no tinker mods, Shank will usually reduce your damage output..

I have like 300 hours in this game across multiple versions, and I have never seen a vibro knife, ever. I use short blades quite often for the reliable off hand attacks, so I would have definitely noticed. In my current game I have 3 ceremonial kopeshes and 6 vibroswords that I haven't sold that are just sitting in my stockpile. Never saw a knife.

Anyways, I disagree fundamentally with the 'bleeding itself can add a lot of damage'. Once you are in palladium reef territory and around mid 20's in levels, your character can and should be doing 70-100+ reliable AV-independent damage a turn if you have anything resembling an actual build. I just don't see the value-add with the 5 extra bleeding damage a turn at that point in the game when your damage and survivability are starting to scale upwards very hard. It's really just a matter of 'is this skill actually doing something for me?'. Well I guess it lets me collect oil for my flamethrower (still busted/OP btw freehold, high level enemies should have built in resistances imo), but the damage is very poor. Most other weapon skills do something important. In order for short blade bleed to remain relevant I really think the bleed should stack into into a single scaling instance that removes the possibility of a 'zero damage' bleed tick. Perhaps even take a page out of some other RPG's when if a bleed stack hits 5 or 10, it does 5% or 10% of the enemy health damage all at once. Probably annoying to code, but its just a thought that would make 'bleed builds' relevant. OR, and here's a wild thought, add a certain % of your agility modifier to bleed ticks to represent accurately targeting vital spots.

Yes, early-mid game if you need to skirmish and dance around I do see the value in bleed. I usually take rifle bleed as one of my first picks often since bleeding out annoying enemies is a good way to deal with them. But rifle bleed scales with number of penetrations, and this means it is relevant well into midgame.

Anways this game is huge and bleed damage is just a minor part of it. It just feels like its sort of left in the dust of history and is really outdated/irrelevant in late game content. Maybe bleeding robots can have a chance for an emp pulse effect, and bleeding biological opponents can have a stat reduction effect? IDK, but there is room to make it interesting.

[CoiledLamb]

Originally posted by Balm:

Well I guess it lets me collect oil for my flamethrower (still busted/OP btw freehold, high level enemies should have built in resistances imo),

most creatures do have innate elemental resists and weaknesses, but it's tied to their species rather than their level.
IE star krakens, svardym, and chrome pyramids all have their own weaknesses.
since creature level is normally dependent on species it makes a bit more sense to map them to creature blueprints rather than scale them all invisibly, imo
(wrt to post topic: bloodletter does not seem that great to me, i'm very picky with skills in general but it's one that i would never pick due to antisynergy with freeze)

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Balm:

I have like 300 hours in this game across multiple versions, and I have never seen a vibro knife, ever. I use short blades quite often for the reliable off hand attacks, so I would have definitely noticed. In my current game I have 3 ceremonial kopeshes and 6 vibroswords that I haven't sold that are just sitting in my stockpile. Never saw a knife.

The blueprint for a vibro dagger seems pretty common. I don't know if I ever saw a dagger drop directly, but the blueprint usually does not take too long to get. It's tinkering II though so you might not want to invest into that.

Originally posted by Balm:

I just don't see the value-add with the 5 extra bleeding damage a turn at that point in the game when your damage and survivability are starting to scale upwards very hard. It's really just a matter of 'is this skill actually doing something for me?'.[...] Most other weapon skills do something important.

What other weapon skill do you want to compare this to? You can e.g. take the long blade aggressive stance that adds +2PV for -3hit. On a vibrokhopesh that adds about 7.5 dmg per hit. If your blood letters would tick for 20 rounds (more like 15 if you factor in short blade main weapon boost), the damage would add up to the same. That is a lot worse, but it also does not remove 3 hit (making it possibly +4 with Short Blade Expertise). With a zetachrome weapon it would add more, with lower tier weapon less.

Originally posted by Balm:

Yes, early-mid game if you need to skirmish and dance around I do see the value in bleed. I usually take rifle bleed as one of my first picks often since bleeding out annoying enemies is a good way to deal with them. But rifle bleed scales with number of penetrations, and this means it is relevant well into midgame.

Wounding Fire needs 2 actions to use (though with a hit bonus) and has a cooldown and then does ~2.6 times the damage per pen that short blades would do per hit passively. Keep in mind that even with just 2 daggers you would do ~3.3 hits per turn, so with those 2 actions you could have made ~6.6 short blade hits, meaning you would need 2.5 pens on wounding fire to do the same damage (unless you have more than 1 rifle) - and then it's on cooldown. I can't see how that active cooldown ability is scaling better than blood letter, unless you are using it on enemies that already have almost no armour to speak of or are using 4 rifles as a true kin (but you can also wear much more than 2 short blades).

Originally posted by Balm:

In order for short blade bleed to remain relevant I really think the bleed should stack into into a single scaling instance that removes the possibility of a 'zero damage' bleed tick. Perhaps even take a page out of some other RPG's when if a bleed stack hits 5 or 10, it does 5% or 10% of the enemy health damage all at once.

Having 15 bleed stacks that hit for 0-1 is overall the same damage as having 1 bleed stacked 15 times that hits for 5-10. The scaling part in qud comes from your agi modifier and if you don't focus on it, the skill will indeed do next to not damage and likely tick only once. It is still passive damage. Maybe it could be boosted a bit, but taking one skill that just adds damage on every hit (well 75% of the hits) is still pretty much always good. A single passive shouldn't wreck enemies.

Originally posted by Balm:

Well I guess it lets me collect oil for my flamethrower (still busted/OP btw freehold, high level enemies should have built in resistances imo), but the damage is very poor

Elemental resistance is rather common after early game especially for heat and cold (acid is rather rare and electricity is even negative for robots), which usually makes you need to use plasma later on to keep builds focusing on it viable. The plasma debuff itself is a bit too strong though imo. Freezing shortblades can keep chrome pyramids in freezelock with it.

Originally posted by Balm:

Anways this game is huge and bleed damage is just a minor part of it. It just feels like its sort of left in the dust of history and is really outdated/irrelevant in late game content. Maybe bleeding robots can have a chance for an emp pulse effect, and bleeding biological opponents can have a stat reduction effect? IDK, but there is room to make it interesting.

Afaik short blades were changed/nerfed in the last bigger weapon change. It still looks to me like the bleed part is supposed to just add some running against tough targets (which unfortunately also often have high "toughness" and therefore remove the bleed early) and set up general targets for shank, but shank is just too bad to use. If shank wouldn't remove all offhand hits for that action, the damage boost from bleed could be relevant enough to make it feel like part of a build. Right now it still feels like an "okay to have", but not a game changer. Short blade bleed damage could be higher, but definitely not by much.

Edit: forgot to add that it's also an excellent way to have a vast amount of power with biodynamic cells. 1 dram of blood = 7.5k power.

[I blame Earthshaker]

I think all stacks should max out at like 5 and do some overdamage effect instead, game starts to get ridiculous calculating damages late game...

[Balm]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Originally posted by Balm:

I have like 300 hours in this game across multiple versions, and I have never seen a vibro knife, ever. I use short blades quite often for the reliable off hand attacks, so I would have definitely noticed. In my current game I have 3 ceremonial kopeshes and 6 vibroswords that I haven't sold that are just sitting in my stockpile. Never saw a knife.

The blueprint for a vibro dagger seems pretty common. I don't know if I ever saw a dagger drop directly, but the blueprint usually does not take too long to get. It's tinkering II though so you might not want to invest into that.

Originally posted by Balm:

I just don't see the value-add with the 5 extra bleeding damage a turn at that point in the game when your damage and survivability are starting to scale upwards very hard. It's really just a matter of 'is this skill actually doing something for me?'.[...] Most other weapon skills do something important.

What other weapon skill do you want to compare this to? You can e.g. take the long blade aggressive stance that adds +2PV for -3hit. On a vibrokhopesh that adds about 7.5 dmg per hit. If your blood letters would tick for 20 rounds (more like 15 if you factor in short blade main weapon boost), the damage would add up to the same. That is a lot worse, but it also does not remove 3 hit (making it possibly +4 with Short Blade Expertise). With a zetachrome weapon it would add more, with lower tier weapon less.

Originally posted by Balm:

Yes, early-mid game if you need to skirmish and dance around I do see the value in bleed. I usually take rifle bleed as one of my first picks often since bleeding out annoying enemies is a good way to deal with them. But rifle bleed scales with number of penetrations, and this means it is relevant well into midgame.

Wounding Fire needs 2 actions to use (though with a hit bonus) and has a cooldown and then does ~2.6 times the damage per pen that short blades would do per hit passively. Keep in mind that even with just 2 daggers you would do ~3.3 hits per turn, so with those 2 actions you could have made ~6.6 short blade hits, meaning you would need 2.5 pens on wounding fire to do the same damage (unless you have more than 1 rifle) - and then it's on cooldown. I can't see how that active cooldown ability is scaling better than blood letter, unless you are using it on enemies that already have almost no armour to speak of or are using 4 rifles as a true kin (but you can also wear much more than 2 short blades).

Originally posted by Balm:

In order for short blade bleed to remain relevant I really think the bleed should stack into into a single scaling instance that removes the possibility of a 'zero damage' bleed tick. Perhaps even take a page out of some other RPG's when if a bleed stack hits 5 or 10, it does 5% or 10% of the enemy health damage all at once.

Having 15 bleed stacks that hit for 0-1 is overall the same damage as having 1 bleed stacked 15 times that hits for 5-10. The scaling part in qud comes from your agi modifier and if you don't focus on it, the skill will indeed do next to not damage and likely tick only once. It is still passive damage. Maybe it could be boosted a bit, but taking one skill that just adds damage on every hit (well 75% of the hits) is still pretty much always good. A single passive shouldn't wreck enemies.

Originally posted by Balm:

Well I guess it lets me collect oil for my flamethrower (still busted/OP btw freehold, high level enemies should have built in resistances imo), but the damage is very poor

Elemental resistance is rather common after early game especially for heat and cold (acid is rather rare and electricity is even negative for robots), which usually makes you need to use plasma later on to keep builds focusing on it viable. The plasma debuff itself is a bit too strong though imo. Freezing shortblades can keep chrome pyramids in freezelock with it.

Originally posted by Balm:

Anways this game is huge and bleed damage is just a minor part of it. It just feels like its sort of left in the dust of history and is really outdated/irrelevant in late game content. Maybe bleeding robots can have a chance for an emp pulse effect, and bleeding biological opponents can have a stat reduction effect? IDK, but there is room to make it interesting.

Afaik short blades were changed/nerfed in the last bigger weapon change. It still looks to me like the bleed part is supposed to just add some running against tough targets (which unfortunately also often have high "toughness" and therefore remove the bleed early) and set up general targets for shank, but shank is just too bad to use. If shank wouldn't remove all offhand hits for that action, the damage boost from bleed could be relevant enough to make it feel like part of a build. Right now it still feels like an "okay to have", but not a game changer. Short blade bleed damage could be higher, but definitely not by much.

Edit: forgot to add that it's also an excellent way to have a vast amount of power with biodynamic cells. 1 dram of blood = 7.5k power.

you're talking pure stats in a vacuum, but I am talking in practice in the actual game
wounding fire can be applied safely from across the zone, it doesn't matter that it takes 2 turns to do it, in fact you save turns compared to having to close to melee to start a bleed
penetrations on longblades applies to all your longblades and all your short blades you are currently wielding, making the skill investment more powerful the more weapons you are holding and giving you extra melee damage that scales with number of limbs
there are also plenty of passives that DO wreck enemies, namely axe dismember, cudgel stun, swipe, pistol disarm, just to name a few 1 point wonders that massively impact gameplay

the purpose of this thread is to highlight the frankly boring and limited nature of bleed past early game in its current iteration, and no I don't rank 'being able to fill up biodynamic cells a bit faster' as being interesting, since if you are criting you will create blood anyways

oh yeah, and in actual practice the flamethrower doesn't seem to give a ♥♥♥♥ about any type of resistances, there is nothing short of chrome pyramids that it doesn't handily reduce to a pile of smoldering ashes with ZERO skill point investment (this is the broken part), you can even get a robot follower and just bleed him with your short blades for infinite oil for infinite flamethrower easily...oops I found the only good way to use bleed in the game

[glass zebra]

Your first argument is mostly ranged vs. melee in general. Ranged starts sooner, while melee has a higher damage potential (in Qud it's also sometimes a cost balance). Not sure what your long blade argument is aiming for, since Bloodletter also scales with number of short blades (but capped by agi mod). If you want to change the focus of the thread from "bleeding damage is too low and should be combined into 1 stack" to "bleeding is extremely boring in gameplay", then I would kinda support that view, even with the oil and blood springs that allow you to make some builds more viable. The only direct interaction I can think of is still Shank and that's pretty much it. If we are talking about dots, at least fire has food procs, while I am not aware that bleeding does anything special in the game (apart from Shank). Making yourself bleed has some possible food procs, but there are a ton of better options.

Either making Shank more interesting as a combo (and usable in more than 2dagger builds) or giving some other interaction with bleeding could make this feel a lot more interesting compared to other debuffs in the game. Stun, dismember and disarm all make the weapon sets feel more unique than "add damage and fuel tech". Short blades themselves still boost (elemental mod) proc builds the most by far, in addition to super high power/fuel need builds, is one of the best for DV builds and hobble is amazing for ranged builds, but for people who want to do a "pure short blades" build that bursts things down the bleeding is just something that "happens" on the side.

The current later game balance will probably make no one hit an enemy 5 times and then hide and let them bleed out. Things just die too easily without dots. My 15 (I think) short blade wielding chimera killed chrome pyramids certainly by 90% with the freezing and electrical damage. I did maybe 100 damage total with bleeding, though I had infinite oil after that. Short Blade Expertise and Jab both add more damage than Bloodletter and Bloodletter costs as much as both combined and booth of them can also boost other utility. Bloodletter is still good, but not all of its uses are very direct (you ended your post with a paragraph saying how strong it can be as as support).

[Balm]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Your first argument is mostly ranged vs. melee in general. Ranged starts sooner, while melee has a higher damage potential (in Qud it's also sometimes a cost balance). Not sure what your long blade argument is aiming for, since Bloodletter also scales with number of short blades (but capped by agi mod). If you want to change the focus of the thread from "bleeding damage is too low and should be combined into 1 stack" to "bleeding is extremely boring in gameplay", then I would kinda support that view, even with the oil and blood springs that allow you to make some builds more viable. The only direct interaction I can think of is still Shank and that's pretty much it. If we are talking about dots, at least fire has food procs, while I am not aware that bleeding does anything special in the game (apart from Shank). Making yourself bleed has some possible food procs, but there are a ton of better options.

Either making Shank more interesting as a combo (and usable in more than 2dagger builds) or giving some other interaction with bleeding could make this feel a lot more interesting compared to other debuffs in the game. Stun, dismember and disarm all make the weapon sets feel more unique than "add damage and fuel tech". Short blades themselves still boost (elemental mod) proc builds the most by far, in addition to super high power/fuel need builds, is one of the best for DV builds and hobble is amazing for ranged builds, but for people who want to do a "pure short blades" build that bursts things down the bleeding is just something that "happens" on the side.

The current later game balance will probably make no one hit an enemy 5 times and then hide and let them bleed out. Things just die too easily without dots. My 15 (I think) short blade wielding chimera killed chrome pyramids certainly by 90% with the freezing and electrical damage. I did maybe 100 damage total with bleeding, though I had infinite oil after that. Short Blade Expertise and Jab both add more damage than Bloodletter and Bloodletter costs as much as both combined and booth of them can also boost other utility. Bloodletter is still good, but not all of its uses are very direct (you ended your post with a paragraph saying how strong it can be as as support).

you're right I am sort of off on a tangent now, but essentially bloodletter feels underwhelming and boring, and seeing the log filled with ' something bleeds for 0 damage' is plain silly

[Dr.Desty Nova]

Originally posted by Balm:

you're right I am sort of off on a tangent now, but essentially bloodletter feels underwhelming and boring, and seeing the log filled with ' something bleeds for 0 damage' is plain silly

See thats again another topic, message log clutter xd

If I can just add the one thing, seem to me you mainly need to pull out of the game for a bit. Too much of a good thing can be bad. Be sure not to get game fatigue.

Stop comparing a passive skill from one branch to an active skill from another branch while looking for balance (in caves of qud of all thing xd ).
I would advise paying more attention to the loot (a much more important part imho of what make you op or not late game) and less to the minutiae of skill in a game that update (mostly) every weeks.
Cause If you didn't find a single vibro dagger in 300h+ of playing the game, you've not been paying enough attention to the loot xd
And since it seems to be some kind of a metric in a rng heavy game, I have more than 1000h on this game across 1 plateform and I definitively found more vibro dagger than I can count xd

[I blame Earthshaker]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Either making Shank more interesting as a combo (and usable in more than 2dagger builds) or giving some other interaction with bleeding could make this feel a lot more interesting compared to other debuffs in the game. Stun, dismember and disarm all make the weapon sets feel more unique than "add damage and fuel tech".

I'm not averse to a bunch of bleeding damage causes a "shock" negative status effect, but the result would seem to just be a stun/unconscious state which is already covered with cudgel.

[glass zebra]

Just giving you more damage for a single main hand attack per bleed stack is just not useful most of the time. They can obviously not make Shank also include the normal offhand attacks or you could easily make instant death combos with congealed skulk + some hit trigger. Stunning should definitely not be added, not only because it's covered by cudgel, but also because it would make boni of AGI pretty pointless during that.