Some questions/criticque:

What was your thought process behind making Forced Exchange a 1SP ability, from 2SP, while in addition giving it additional range? It's now a mid-range, effective 1-and-a-half-shot, if you can set it up properly, that now is dirt cheap. It feels like it's counter intuitive with the philosophy of not one shotting everything, when an ability now turns a losing position into a massive game-changer at little cost, and less inconvenience, in a new meta where HP defensiveness matters even more (turning the philosophy upside down). I know that effectively all 2SP cost ability became 1SP cost abilities, but it appears incredibly strong now, considering it's also low AP.

Maybe my judgement is off, because I've done my best to stay away from the damage-meta before.

Additionally increasing the radius of Guardian Angel can be counter intuitive, where at times a large AoE is inconvenient to take, especially with such a skill that you can't toggle off, but have to rely on careful positioning to deduce if you still want to make use of the skill or not, potentially leaving you in a position where it will kill you. I feel the philosophy behind the skill is mitigating collateral damage when you specifically are too close together, rather than allow for tanking damage from people further away, out of AoE range.

In short, increasing the radius moves control away from the player. But again, I'm a dirty non-damage-meta-peasant, so maybe I'm just overvaluing the tactical part.


I get the feeling that:
1. giving everyone The Pawn, while
2. removing range of movement skills, but
3. giving skills additional range kinda defeats the purpose of changing up the positioning game altogether. Feels ironically like creating a band aid for a self-created shortcoming.

I was GLAD when I saw the nerfs to movement skills (kinda wished they were gone altogether, honestly, devalues the utility of teleportion and novel skills like the Cat Summon)


Arrow Recovery was always a trash-skill, imo, and giving it more power, while keeping it random-based doesn't make it any more attractive, when the design is counter to the philosophy of consistency that permeates the game.

When Braveheart mentions "enemies in melee range consider you a priority target", does that mean anything THEY "threaten", or if YOU "threaten" them, and does that mean they are only more likely (as with taunted status) to attack you, or is it guaranteed that you become the target of their apprehensions?


Maybe something to consider.


PS: I'm glad we're getting some representation for our friendly woodland-crab-critters in here!
PPS: Yes, I read the entire thing (just so you don't feel your efforts are gone unappreciated).

Originally posted by Schleicherfreund:

Some questions/criticque:

What was your thought process behind making Forced Exchange a 1SP ability, from 2SP, while in addition giving it additional range? It's now a mid-range, effective 1-and-a-half-shot, if you can set it up properly, that now is dirt cheap. It feels like it's counter intuitive with the philosophy of not one shotting everything, when an ability now turns a losing position into a massive game-changer at little cost, and less inconvenience. I know that effectively all 2SP cost ability became 1SP cost abilities, but it appears incredibly strong now, considering it's also low AP.

Maybe my judgement is off, because I've done my best to stay away from the damage-meta before.

Additionally increasing the radius of Guardian Angel can be counter intuitive, often times a large AoE is inconvenient, especially with such a skill that you can't toggle off, but have to rely on careful positioning to deduce if you still want to make use of the skill or not, potentially leaving you in a position where it will kill you. I feel the philosophy behind the skill is mitigating collateral damage when you specifically are too close together, rather than allow for tanking damage from people further away, out of AoE range.

In short, increasing the radius moves control away from the player. But again, I'm a dirty non-damage-meta-peasant, so maybe I'm just overvaluing the tactical part.


I get the feeling that:
1. giving everyone The Pawn, while
2. removing range of movement skills, but
3. giving skills additional range kinda defeats the purpose of changing up the positioning game altogether. Feels ironically like creating a band aid for a self-created shortcoming.

I was GLAD when I saw the nerfs to movement skills (kinda wished they were gone altogether, honestly, devalues the utility of teleportion and novel skills like the Cat Summon)


Arrow Recovery was always a trash-skill, imo, and giving it more power, while keeping it random-based doesn't make it any more attractive, when the design is counter to the philosophy of consistency that permeates the game.

When Braveheart mentions "enemies in melee range consider you a priority target", does that mean anything THEY "threaten", or if YOU "threaten" them, and does that mean they are only more likely (as with taunted status) to attack you, or is it guaranteed that you become the target of their apprehensions?


Maybe something to consider.


PS: I'm glad we're getting some representation for our friendly woodland-crab-critters in here!

Now this is balance feedback.

I take your point somewhat on Forced Exchange, however:

• It is now a once per combat skill. It's a situational single target nuke that costs half your turn.
  
• The investment required to get it is Polymorph 4. Due to the way my mod calculates ability points, it takes double the investment from vanilla. A strong skill indeed, but hard earned reward.
  
• Enemies regenerate vitality.
  
• It by no means guarantees oneshots. If you go into combat at 1% vitality cackling maniacally to yourself, you're going to get roasted because players can't build initiative and go first to use it. Unless you spent the points in leadership in which case you've earned this kill.
  
• That being said, you could sneak in to battle and use the skill. Still not an immediate guaranteed oneshot but close enough.

So it's strong. Too strong? Maybe. Not crazy imo but I'm happy to change it.

Guardian Angel? The problem with its short range beforehand was every enemy and their mother has AoE. You were painting a target on your back by grouping up. That was not a suitable return for the warfare investment required. Now you say it's less reliable but all I read is it requires better positioning or a beefier build, both of which are now doable.

As for additional range on teleport skills... kinda? You'd need 8 points in Finesse to reach their original radius. That's reward for investment to me. The real nerf to teleportation skills is their tier requirement increase and AP cost, meaning you can't take six trillion of them and warp around for basically free.

As for Arrow Recovery, OH BOY, it's funny you mention that because I agree 100%. But the problem is Arrow Recovery's 33% chance is completely hardcoded. My original plan was to have you instead recover all arrows after combat ended, so you could have fun managing stock during combat without worrying about hurting your economy. Alas, those dreams were dashed and I thought back to Attribute Insanity's beloved multicasting.

Braveheart makes them prioritise you as with taunted but with a little more liberty.

P.S. I appreciate you reading the whole thing. ;) You've got some attention span, my friend.

I want to say from the start I'm no designer, just a player with some questions on the possibility of a few changes from a user perspective. That said a couple things quickly came in to mind while playing this mod.

1. Certain events triggered via stats being at the right threshold (talking about withermoore and pulling the spear out using Strength.), seemed to fail given we no longer start at 10 base. That said I was able to spend all my points at level 2 into strength to get 5 Strength. I was able to pull the spear out but I still got the failure message (Ugh! It's stuck fast...). This has me worried other stat dependent challenges later in the game may be unable to be complete, or at the very least sort of bugged like this one.

2. The removal of armor is a welcome one, and I see that you changed alot of the abilities in the base game to compensate for the fact armor no longer exists (Soothing cold, Armor of Frost, I assume mend metal is changed too.) But this leaves certain modded abilities somewhat useless now (Helena's Mirage class can't really use Chaos Armor now, Odinblades Umbra no longer is rewarded with temp armor when using nimble leap while invisible.) I know mods aren't always made to work perfectly with each other, but I was wondering if it would be possible to somehow allow abilities to add temporary armor still so that modded classes that use the mechanic are still viable? Again I know that it's not as easy as I make it sound, Was just hoping to start a conversation on the topic in hopes of making all my classes viable.

3. I used Attribute Insanity for the longest time and loved alot of what it had to offer, albeit there was alot of extra baggage that made it somewhat hard to use overall (Some fights had enemies that would heal everyone every round via the hydro stat, some times the voidwoken skills felt broken or overpowered considering how fast they could be obtained, sometime resets felt too cheesy, etc.) I love the Level 6 talents you have made for Combat Abilities, I think it's super slick. However other than being able to use skills from higher requirements, investing points doesn't really give you any other way to creatively build your character. The new utility skills are really cool and I want to invest in them since they make creating a character interesting and flexible. I was wondering if there is a way to marry the two similar to how you had it in Attribute insanity where each invested skill point got you some minor buff. I think the Utility skills are powerful by themselves and warrant investing in them, if Warfare,Necromancer,scoundrel,etc all gave you small buffs on the way to level 6 I feel as a player in would feel more rewarding to invest in them, and could open up some cool skill splashing builds.

Anyways Thank you for this mod, it is absolutely already an essential part of my mod list, and I hope as it gets tuned and updated that it can strive to allow even more flexible play for this amazing game. Hope my somewhat limited insight can help in some way.

Oh another thing I forgot to mention is Helena's succubus class has a move called "Serenade" That does a small amount of magic damage and then sleeps the target if it can't resist. I believe it still sleeps targets with no willpower, but the damage aspect is completely gone making it essentially only a sleep. This is honestly not that bad of a deal considering in the base game it could only chip away at armor anyways, but still it loses some value with the changes in this mod. I don't know if there's anything you could even do for things like this, I wondered if it was possible to just make all magic damage convert to piercing damage similar to what you did to Chloroform, but anyways I just thought I'd bring it up to at the very least start a dialogue. Cheers again for the great mod.

Originally posted by IndyLohan:

I want to say from the start I'm no designer, just a player with some questions on the possibility of a few changes from a user perspective. That said a couple things quickly came in to mind while playing this mod.

1. Certain events triggered via stats being at the right threshold (talking about withermoore and pulling the spear out using Strength.), seemed to fail given we no longer start at 10 base. That said I was able to spend all my points at level 2 into strength to get 5 Strength. I was able to pull the spear out but I still got the failure message (Ugh! It's stuck fast...). This has me worried other stat dependent challenges later in the game may be unable to be complete, or at the very least sort of bugged like this one.

2. The removal of armor is a welcome one, and I see that you changed alot of the abilities in the base game to compensate for the fact armor no longer exists (Soothing cold, Armor of Frost, I assume mend metal is changed too.) But this leaves certain modded abilities somewhat useless now (Helena's Mirage class can't really use Chaos Armor now, Odinblades Umbra no longer is rewarded with temp armor when using nimble leap while invisible.) I know mods aren't always made to work perfectly with each other, but I was wondering if it would be possible to somehow allow abilities to add temporary armor still so that modded classes that use the mechanic are still viable? Again I know that it's not as easy as I make it sound, Was just hoping to start a conversation on the topic in hopes of making all my classes viable.

3. I used Attribute Insanity for the longest time and loved alot of what it had to offer, albeit there was alot of extra baggage that made it somewhat hard to use overall (Some fights had enemies that would heal everyone every round via the hydro stat, some times the voidwoken skills felt broken or overpowered considering how fast they could be obtained, sometime resets felt too cheesy, etc.) I love the Level 6 talents you have made for Combat Abilities, I think it's super slick. However other than being able to use skills from higher requirements, investing points doesn't really give you any other way to creatively build your character. The new utility skills are really cool and I want to invest in them since they make creating a character interesting and flexible. I was wondering if there is a way to marry the two similar to how you had it in Attribute insanity where each invested skill point got you some minor buff. I think the Utility skills are powerful by themselves and warrant investing in them, if Warfare,Necromancer,scoundrel,etc all gave you small buffs on the way to level 6 I feel as a player in would feel more rewarding to invest in them, and could open up some cool skill splashing builds.

Anyways Thank you for this mod, it is absolutely already an essential part of my mod list, and I hope as it gets tuned and updated that it can strive to allow even more flexible play for this amazing game. Hope my somewhat limited insight can help in some way.

Hey there!

1. I have fixed most challenges you speak of. Sadly, as I can't literally overwrite vanilla code without some crazy bs, you simultaneously had to fail and succeed: that's why you pulled the spear with the failure dialog. Let me know if anything does go wrong.

2. I will work on these. One by one I'm gonna compatibility patch these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. For now, you're only down one or two skills from each mod, so I hope you can bear with it for the time being. Sadly, temporary armour isn't a thing and would clash with the mod, but I'll be working on replacement effects in the compatibility patch.

3. Sadly not. There are only so many things you can increment in this game - I had a hard enough time coming up with attributes! Though I do hear you, and may work on an attribute insanity compatibility patch later that'd only transfer the ability passives (not attributes).

Key word may. Thank you for your feedback.

4. Thank you for letting me know. To the compatibility patch todolist with thee!

Hey thanks man. It's crazy the amount of work you are putting into this. It's super awesome that you are taking the time to address all this. Wish I had more of a mind for coding cuz I'd love to be able to help. Really thank you for the great mod.

First, great mod. I really enjoyed Attribute Insanity even with its quirks and this is shaping up to be even better for my current play-through. 2 things:

1. I noticed the creature spawns from the pet pal change seems to sometimes become enemies. It looks like it happens if the creature spawns on an attack that kills the last enemy but i haven't been able to test it yet to be sure. It's happened twice so far in my run (killing an enemy spawned an enemy creature and then killing that spawned another). The enemy i killed was charmed so that might be a factor.

2. have you considered making damage remove charm? I know there are mods out there for it but thought i'd suggest since it seems like it would fit with the overall balancing aspect of this mod.

Glad you fixed the almighty cleave issue I was having, but it seems a little strong. For example, in the Kniles fight the meat golems hit you 4 times and you retaliate with the cleave each hit. If multiple hit you it just keeps going. Got rid of 3 meat golems without actually having a turn.
Granted at this point it's not a lot of damage but I can see that being immensely strong late game. Not a super big issue, but I thought I'd bring it up and try to help :)

Originally posted by Kalavinka:

As for additional range on teleport skills... kinda? You'd need 8 points in Finesse to reach their original radius. That's reward for investment to me. The real nerf to teleportation skills is their tier requirement increase and AP cost, meaning you can't take six trillion of them and warp around for basically free.

Did the range of the actual Teleportion spell get nerfed, too? Because this may impact the ability to reach places for treasures you find throughout the world.

To clarify I wasn't asking to increase the range of teleportion/movement skills, as I mentioned, I'm glad they are getting nerfed, but the skill teleportion itself is fine as in vanilla, imo.
I'm assuming you had to nerf the range of basically all targeted spells, because of the new stat that increases range of skills?

Originally posted by Schleicherfreund:

Originally posted by Kalavinka:

As for additional range on teleport skills... kinda? You'd need 8 points in Finesse to reach their original radius. That's reward for investment to me. The real nerf to teleportation skills is their tier requirement increase and AP cost, meaning you can't take six trillion of them and warp around for basically free.

Did the range of the actual Teleportion spell get nerfed, too? Because this may impact the ability to reach places for treasures you find throughout the world.

To clarify I wasn't asking to increase the range of teleportion/movement skills, as I mentioned, I'm glad they are getting nerfed, but the skill teleportion itself is fine as in vanilla, imo.
I'm assuming you had to nerf the range of basically all targeted spells, because of the new stat that increases range of skills?

If it did, by no more than 2 meters. I can't remember at this moment and will check later.

Also, no, actually. I didn't nerf the range of most skills. I originally had a global range deficit of 2m to make the attribute more valuable, but playtesters did not respond well.

This looks like a great mod, but could I plug in a rather niche and minor complaint about DoS2 at its core? : Self teleportation abilities are way too generous, and it'd be great if this mod would touch on that issue

The game has surfaces that punish movement, blocking paths with oppurtunists, having highground is a significant advantage, etc etc. There's a lot of depth to positioning and movement- except when you start getting several teleportation abilities which allow you to escape really bad positions very cheaply, same goes for the enemies. This nullifies a lot of these mechanics to the point where you think :"Why bother intentionally using surfaces"

You can set up a ring of fire surfaces around a pesky archer and make a melee unit run next to it. Now you think "Yes! He's done for now!", but all it does is use Tactical Retreat and now your pin down is gone. It really is a bummer.

If I were to change it, I would do self teleports like Phoenix Dive, Grow Wings, Tactical Retreat and possibly Netherswap all cost much more AP, to say 3 or so, and increase their respective Cooldowns by 1. This means that if you put a lot of effort to try to pin someone down and they use an ability to run away, they've atleast spent a lot of AP so it doesnt feel like all your efforts were wasted. And after they've used it and they don't have another self teleport, you can press the advantage because they're vulnerable.

This encourages you to use surfaces and natural movement a lot more, because a self-teleport is surprisingly powerful when you think about it for being so cheap. You can flee from melee units while not even getting Oppurtunist'd, you can completely avoid dangerous surfaces, and also aquire highground, and all it costs is ONE action point.

I agree totally, Mean Man. This mod already changes those.

The AP cost is increase to 2, their range is reduced 4m, and they require 3 points in their respective disciplines instead of 2. Considering the halved ability point gain, that means they effectively cost 5-6 points.

Enemy self-teleportation has also been nerfed in the exact same ways, minus the investment, and their cooldowns have been tripled if not quadrupled.

Originally posted by Kalavinka:

I agree totally, Mean Man. This mod already changes those.

The AP cost is increase to 2, their range is reduced 4m, and they require 3 points in their respective disciplines instead of 2. Considering the halved ability point gain, that means they effectively cost 5-6 points.

Enemy self-teleportation has also been nerfed in the exact same ways, minus the investment, and their cooldowns have been tripled if not quadrupled.

Whaat? Really? Amazing, glad atleast someone agrees with me

Sorry to keep making seperate posts, but does this mod change anything with surfaces and clouds? Pretty difficult to make it out yourself ingame if it did. Their damage scaling isn't as grand into the late game currently, by the endgame it deals so little damage in proportion to everything else. So why not improve them a bit since its such an unique feature for DoS

One change I'd do to make the difference between surfaces and clouds more distinct, would be that there's a 1.25x damage multiplier or so from walking through a lethal ground surface, and 1.75x damage multiplier from ending a turn inside a lethal cloud(Like you're suffocating), this does that clouds are better for when you're trapping someone, and surfaces are better for "Don't pass here" zones. This makes Pressurize and Vaporize more worthwhile.

Some surface effects could perhaps be modified? I had the idea that poisongas/cursedsmoke applies a stackable debuff called "Oxygen Deprivation" if you end a turn inside it(Gag order and Tornado could also apply it, I suppose), if it stacks 3 times they'll "Pass out" for 2 turns and recieve reduced elemental resistances, that way they act as a better 'force evacuation' tool, or can be used combined with crippling to create a powerful CC.

Another curious thing is that the damage of the surface seems to depend on the casters stats(Like Pyrokinetics). Why not implement a new talent(or innate feature) that if someone creates a surface/cloud, its damage will be governed by the person in the party who is the best at the respective surface. This causes less jank with surface conversions, for example if someone who creates a powerful fire surface, and someone in your team curses it to Necrofire, its damage isnt all that impressive. This also makes that if someone in a team uses Vaporize or Pressurize, they don't have to be really good at the respective surfaces for it to be worthwhile offensively.

Now, with self teleports being revamped, surfaces and clouds are already technically buffed, but some changes would be cool

EDIT: I am currently reading the changelog post and bless you for adding a hassle-less way to gain the Curse skill, this mod really thought of it all.

Summoning feels particularly weak at the moment.