Originally posted by Marlow:

Summoning feels particularly weak at the moment.

This is my experience as well, although i think most of it comes down to stat inheritance, incarnate and totems just don't seem to do anything compared to the chaos elemental with it's long range searing dagger attack

Yeah, attributes are inherited by summons. Summons were also balanced with attribute economy in mind, and AI consider most of them priority targets.

Pet Pal's summon chance seems to be too high in my opinion, friend has a Pet Pal in coop and we end up with 3+ summons most of the fights from his Pet Pal itself.

I personally think pet pal's summons are usually very weak. Bears are the strongest, with birds and wolves being a close second and maybe spiders. The rest are underwhelming.

Originally posted by Kalavinka:

I personally think pet pal's summons are usually very weak. Bears are the strongest, with birds and wolves being a close second and maybe spiders. The rest are underwhelming.

time for crab

Originally posted by Mean Man (Alfons):

Originally posted by Kalavinka:

I personally think pet pal's summons are usually very weak. Bears are the strongest, with birds and wolves being a close second and maybe spiders. The rest are underwhelming.

time for crab

time for crab

i personaly like the crab because there is never a time its came up when i didnt need its haste buff, and it always put it on the right person for me.

Crab is the most faithful woodlands friend.

all crabs except Septa

@Kalavinka
Isn't the issue that Pet Pal is proccing too often the problem, rather than the summons themselves? Because the issue of summons in turn based action economy games isn't their strength, but the fact of how they are affecting the action economy (namely wasting enemy actions on them, rather than your character).

Hey Kalavinka, thought I'd just chime in here with my experience. Logged 10 hours so far using the mod and I'm hoping you can find my suggestion helpful.

Would you consider introducing a toggle for Pet Pal summons similar to the Knockback toggle? I can't play without Pet Pal and the changes you've made to help with fights are a nice addition but just for me, personally, I don't find it fits thematically with my characters. I don't want to discourage your interest in making it useful in combat - I found the change really considered and well implemented. That being said I'm in a small niche of players who want to benefit from out of combat Pet Pal without benefiting from in combat Pet Pal. I'm not even sure if this is mechanically possible in the Dos2 engine, just thought I'd put it out there. Thanks again for everything!

It should definitely be possible. Thank you for letting me know, I'll work on that when able.

So, checking more into the game, I think it's lacking points of combat abitilies, if you wanna try a mage build or something different, unfortunately.

I'm using all odinblade's classes overhaul, the requirements to learn skills are changed, some skills requires at least 4 or even 5 points on that specific class to be able to learn/use it.

Something that could be done on that, it's to bring back items stats that can give combat abitilies, like Staff +2 Pyro, Armor +2 Summoning, Ring +1 Aerotheurge, etc, but it's just to be able to learn/use skill from that specific class, and not to trigger their passive (Polymorph does that!).

OR

You can use the older system per level, but limit one passive active at the time.


Also, some Summoning skills condition is still set at 10 to trigger their effect from odinblade's mod.

I haven't played with the mod yet, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but haven't you considered making changes to Apotheosis and Skin Graft? They are both phenomenal abilities, which just so happen to be able to combo together. I'm sure with the change to adrenaline and the added difficulty of one-shotting enemies, Skin Graft won't be nearly as problematic anymore, but Apotheosis, particularly in conjunction with the polymorph mastery, seems like it'll be pretty crazy; even more so if you consider its across-the-board stat buffs (now that literally every attribute helps you out, whereas in the vanilla game, you'd have two unrelated damage stats getting pumped to no benefit) and the opportunity to reset your source skill cooldowns with a high intellect stat.

I feel like the number one way to steamroll mages out of control in the vanilla game was by using this precise skill, combined with the elemental affinity talent. While elemental affinity was indeed nerfed to require polymorph, you'd be grabbing (and speccing fully into) polymorph to snag Apotheosis either way, so it doesn't really make a difference in the end. Ultimately, you're forced to get some polymorph (which was probably a good idea either way) to get your hands on elemental affinity. I feel the answer lies in changing elemental affinity directly. Since it's much harder to burst enemies down now, how about elemental affinity making you weaker to the very element you're standing in, to show your character's increased receptibility to the element?

On the topic of polymorph, what was the reasoning behind leaving its attribute gain bonus intact? While it's true that other trees will give you a mastery talent which will usually help out your damage output, polymorph not only has a mastery talent which plays very well with the expensive transformations (particularly Medusa Head, which will now leave enemies with no willpower or frost armor permanently petrified, quite valuable in the new crowd-control-over-damage meta); it's still giving you attribute gains alongside access its versatile skillset. While i'm sure it's not necessary to stay viable, I feel polymorph will be the most efficient path to a min-maxed character, regardless of what you're trying to make (even pure summoners will want to spec into poly now that their summons receive their selfsame attributes). I feel you could fuse both concepts together (transformation and growth, i.e. attribute gain), by having specific transformations grant you attribute buffs (for a quite obvious example, bull horns give you more strength), and having these attribute buffs increase relative to your investment in polymorph.

Finally, haven't you also considered having mastery talents give out their bonuses as you level up each skill, instead of exactly when you master them? As it stands, I feel mastery talents encourage dumping points into one skill until you've gotten the talent, which hurts more versatile characters who might want to diversify their level-ups and max out skills side-by-side.

Sorry for the long post and if I came off too critical; I read through the changelog and I adore every change. I'm very excited to see this mod progress!

P.S. Please nerf Lady Kemm's teas; I'm not sure if consumables are within the scope of your mod, but that tea is ridiculously busted.

Originally posted by magnet:

Something that could be done on that, it's to bring back items stats that can give combat abitilies, like Staff +2 Pyro, Armor +2 Summoning, Ring +1 Aerotheurge, etc, but it's just to be able to learn/use skill from that specific class, and not to trigger their passive (Polymorph does that!).
.

Agreed. You had to constantly switch armor for newer ones because the newer ones has better Protection, even if the one you're using at the moment has a Combat Ability you needed, This made builds very unstable because you might have to ditch equipment with an Ability boost just because the other armor is higher level

With that no longer in place, having equipment grant just a small ability boost can allow you to optimize points by having good gear, and be mastered in more Skill-trees at once. But perhaps it could be modified so the maximum Ability points you can get on a piece is one, and maybe two if you're lucky.