Skill to calm down enemies.

[Aquillion]

Currently, it's hard to pursue diplomacy with hostile faction leaders. You can't calm them down to talk to them without either using Proselytize / Beguiling or by raising your faction rep; and you can't raise your faction rep via Water Ritual stuff unless you can talk to them.

Proselytize / Beguiling work, but they're awkward for that purpose. You have to get next to the leader, and their followers will remain hostile and keep attacking you. You also lose any followers you previously had with those abilities. Finally, while the diplomacy tree is Intelligence now, Proselytize / Beguiling are Ego.

I suggest adding a new high-prerequisite Intelligence-based skill that calms down a hostile enemy without making them join your side. Unlike Proselytize / Beguiling, using it on a member of a group should calm their entire group - their leader, if any, and anyone following them or their leader. This would allow you to calm down a group of enemies led by a single legendary so you can then walk up to that legendary and negotiate.

While it should have a high Intelligence prerequisite (to make it an Intelligence skill), success would depend on either your Intelligence or Ego, whichever is higher. This would make logical sense (you can persuade with either logic or emotions), but more importantly, this would be so it could also be a starting skill for the Consul class (who would logically have such a skill and have their big bonus to Ego.)

Success would also depend on your reputation with the faction; if they loathe you, calming them would be very difficult. (This would also make "marginal" faction reputation changes matter a bit more - currently, if you can't get into the range where people to stop attacking you, reputation changes don't matter at all.)

[Qua3st0r]

Good points. A couple of adjacent thoughts:
- I think love injectors would also work to allow you to start chatting with hostile legendaries (actually, I suspect they were added for this exact purpose). I haven't tried this in practice because I usually play with Beguile.
- Beguile / Proseyltize (and I think love injectors too) don't work on robots. I can never figure out a way to get on Napthaali's good side, since their leaders always seem to be hostile chrome idols.
- When performing water ritual with Faction Leaders in the Sultan dungeons, you seem to earn reputation with the leader's base faction type (insects or whatever), but not with the Sultan faction itself. For those faction leaders, it seems to me that you should get Sultan faction rep ahead of the base faction rep.

[My name can't be thirtytwo chara]

Yeah, Love Injectors are totally a valid way of doing this, but I still think this'd be a great skill to have. However, how would it be used for normal enemies in groups?

Either it can be used on them, which would make it possibly super OP, being basically an instant kill for a bunch of enemies, or it can't and only works on individual enemies, which would have some weird consequences.

For example, if I'm fighting two snapjaws, and I calm one, I still have the other one to kill. The moment I kill them, the first will get mad again.

[wehttam449]

I think the ideal way to go about this is love injectors coupled with "dart guns" which are the natural weapon equipped by boosterbots, almost exclusively found in bethesda susa. acquire one through disarming or a lucky random drop- I've found them in more than a few runs, but they're rare enough to be hard to find.

It won't kill the followers, but it will cause the leader to stop actively trying to murder you. if you lead the followers away, and murder them out of the line of sight of the legendary, it would be possible to negotiate.

For the record, I've never tried this. I mostly just fight my way through everything, damn the consequences. No idea how it would really work out, this is just theorizing.

Lastly- I totally want to see this skill, but I think rather than making it intelligence-based, the diplomacy tree should just be switched to ego. Let's be real- being obviously smarter than the person or people you're talking to is exactly the opposite of diplomatic. Egoists are the ones who become car salesmen and politicians.

[Aquillion]

Originally posted by wehttam449:

Lastly- I totally want to see this skill, but I think rather than making it intelligence-based, the diplomacy tree should just be switched to ego. Let's be real- being obviously smarter than the person or people you're talking to is exactly the opposite of diplomatic. Egoists are the ones who become car salesmen and politicians.

The problem with this is that Ego is already a godstat for Espers (and they can now raise it for free, even.) Attaching all diplomacy to Ego means that all dedicated Espers will also be masters of diplomacy.

Whereas very few builds go high-intelligence currently (high-level Tinkering is pretty useless at the moment. Even when it does become useful, offering them other options for their skill points seems worthwhile - or they can raise another stat and get good at fighting.)

Additionally, Ego builds already have a way to calm people down with Proselytize. If there's going to be multiple ways to do it, it would be better to put them in two different stats, since that will leave multiple options available for different builds rather than resulting in just one possible diplomacy build.

You can justify it, again, by realizing that there are sometimes multiple ways to achieve the same thing. Ego is better at convincing someone to fight and die for you (Proselytize) or exploiting their emotions (fear effects, inspiring presence, berate.)

But knowledge - knowing their culture, knowing what words to say, knowing their slang and lingo and rituals - can let you approach them safely. Politicians might use Ego, but diplomats use Intelligence (and knowledge, which Intelligence-based skills generally represent) - a diplomat focused on Ego and emotions would be terrible at their job. You convince people to fight and die for you with Ego, but you negotiate safe passage using intelligence and knowledge. That's what this skill would represent.

Actually, it would probably make more sense to move Snake Oiler to Intelligence - this would be interesting, too (giving Ego builds a way to get better prices when Ego already raises prices is a bit redundant; whereas for Intelligence it would be an interesting option, especially if they lack Ego.) Possibly it could be renamed to justify this (eg. Market Expertise); but, again, knowledge can help you get good prices, too.

Originally posted by My name can't be thirtytwo chara:

Either it can be used on them, which would make it possibly super OP, being basically an instant kill for a bunch of enemies, or it can't and only works on individual enemies, which would have some weird consequences.

I don't think it would be OP at all. It would probably have a fairly high cooldown, require that you get next to one of them to talk to them, and wouldn't always work. And it would also have a very high Intelligence prerequisite, limiting it to just a few builds (or Consuls, who could start with it to make them more unique.)

You're not killing the people you use this on - you get no XP, and you get none of their loot or possessions. The game already has lots of ways to bypass or dismiss enemies without fighting them or to escape a bad situation (phasing, teleportation, fear effects, space-time vortex, often just running), and they're generally not particularly overpowered. This would just be one more.

Besides, to the extent that it enables a more pacifist style of play, I see that as a good thing. If someone can actually manage to use this as their main way of dealing with encounters, more power to them (they're not going to have an easy time of things, what with the diminished XP and loot, and they'll still have to deal with turrets, other ranged attackers, situations where it fails, etc.)

[My name can't be thirtytwo chara]

You raise a good argument... I think this would just be a super cool skill in general too.