charge acquisition... bug?

[seebs]

Doing tombworld warfare, I noticed a weird thing. If the zombie spell is on my hotbar, it gains charges more slowly over time. If it's not, it gets them at a rate based on the charges it showed last time it was active. So with fairly high nightfall (1.7e4%), if I have 0 charges of the zombie spell, and flip to a spell set that doesn't include it, and run the plague for a couple of seconds, I can easily have 2e3 charges, while if I run the plague for a similar length of time while the zombie spell is visible, I might get a few hundred.

Haven't tried this in normal realms yet, but it seems probably-unintentional?

[sandokanski]

When the Plague Zombie spell is visible, is it on auto-cast?

Also, when you flip the spell set, do you flip the equipment as well? Temporal Scabbard and Eerie Turquoise Phylactery can give huge difference. Some other items can have smaller effect, but still substantial one.

Also, having Conjure Greater Elemental active in the spell set without Plague Zombie can make some difference, depending on how many times the spell was cast and your Summoning Efficiency.

[seebs]

I don't have access to greater elemental in this build. I do switch equipment sets... Hmm.

Okay, this is interesting. If I run corpse explosion down to zero, the first tick gets me maybe 2e3 charges. If I run it down close to zero, it counts up to like 500 and then goes up fairly slowly.

So I think this isn't actually so related to whether it's on the bar or not, except that if it's not on the bar, I've seen counts as high as 7k. I wonder if the charges-so-far updates slightly less often when it's not visible. So yeah, if I run it down and stop it just before it runs out, say at 70 charges, it counts very slowly up, getting to like 800 in the time it took me to write this paragraph. If I run it all the way to zero, it jumps to 2k or even 5k occasionally on the first tick... then counts slowly again.

[seebs]

btw, the other thing I've noticed is that at this point, with nightfall around 2e4, i get ~315 casts/sec for nightfall with other pets, but if i switch to ley keeper, i get ~630. in general, it seems to sometimes-but-not-always give me significantly higher cast counts. I'm not 100% sure why, but it looks like a factor of spell duration and charge speed somehow.

[sandokanski]

Ah. I forgot this specific quasi-realm changes some necro spells. The one that does the charging apparently has the following description (from wiki): "Increases Evocation Efficency, based on character level. Every second may also grant a random amount of charge of Corpse Explosion"

So it "may" grant charges,. That means it may not grant charges. I do remember I left that realm at 1.01 Delusions. I didn't like it, but I now do not remember exactly why I didn't like it. Perhaps because Idle mode is not a thing.

Did you try using an Umbramancer pet to counter this "may charge" behavior?

[Delreich]

That description is probably based on an outdated description of the spell it's based on. You alway gain charge progress from the inca, though how much you gain is random (to some extent) and inversely proportional to how many charges the evo has.

each second:
  charge_progress += random(0.2, 1.8) * (charge_speed / charge_cost) / (charges + 1)

It is affected by both charge-spell cost reduction and charge speed, so wearing items with those stats and enchanting Temporal Scabbard and Eerie Turquoise helps.
Using Nix-Instability is more or less required after spell memes. It bypasses the increased cost caused by meme levels, so you can charge up before switching pets for VM and burst. That does mean the cost reduction items are no longer relevant, but charge speed ones still matter, including both the enchanted pieces.

[seebs]

Given how fast charges show up, I'm pretty sure that there's an actual difference, although the more I look at it, the more I think it's just that, if charge speed is really high and charge cost is really low, the "/ (charges + 1)" means that you benefit hugely from running down to exactly 0 charges before swapping to a set with a lot of charge speed, because even a single charge means you get half as many charges, and if you have 40-50 charges, you're getting about 2% of what you'd get from that first tick if you were at 0...

[sandokanski]

Synthetic Entity charges in a similar manner,

(wiki):
While in Idle Mode, gains 1 charge every: (<current charges>+1)×300 seconds.
Cost: Charges automatically in Idle Mode, based on current charges. Can have up to 1e9 charges.

Perhaps this spell code was copy/pasted from Synthetic Entity and modifies, with cost depending on charges, etc. Can you verify that the tooltip doesn't say the cost depends on charges?

[seebs]

I can't verify it right now but I believe it did say it was based on charges. I think I just underestimated how MUCH it was based on charges so I found the effect of being down at 0 surprising.

[M F]

The Tombworld Warfare Quasi-realm had an interesting mechanic (IIRC) that I used for a bit higher profits (about 1e1 to 1e2 per exile, not burst). I found if you timed switching between sets just right, you'd get a better random amount of charges and thus a better burst. I think this is the bug you're talking about. It seemed like a minor bug, so I never mentioned it. I think I'd prefer that the amount of charges granted were not random. I didn't look too closely at the issue, so I could be wrong about the cause.

[Jerry]

The spell does not work for Heart of the Grave, does it?