Having armor back is cool, now it makes sense to get new piece of equipment, but I'd love to have willpower back, so you still can crowd control.

Also too much damage from surfaces, I mean you can lose half hp from your own phoenix dive

Originally posted by YoungSaint:

Having armor back is cool, now it makes sense to get new piece of equipment, but I'd love to have willpower back, so you still can crowd control.

Also too much damage from surfaces, I mean you can lose half hp from your own phoenix dive

Phoenix Dive has just been updated: it no longer creates a fire surface.

Surfaces are also supposed to be deadly by design. It doesn't make sense to wade through fire casually to reach somebody else.

Bear in mind also, early game is when surfaces are the worst. Magic armour - from gear, rings and amulets - is critical for dealing with surfaces, and players don't have much of it at all in Fort Joy.

Lonewolves are bonkers because of how strong ability stacking is. For example, going for 10+ warfare and 10+ geo, picture of health + lonewolf makes you have so much HP even before act 2 that nothing can really threaten you (and I'm playing with mods that end up giving enemies roughly double hp and damage, more for bosses, and also on tactican obv).

This wouldn't have been such a big issue if a lonewolf could still be brought down by small incremental ticks of damage. However, good items + max geo from early on practically ensure that nothing can deal ANY damage to you, barring extremely heavy hits, piercing and criticals.

I really like how armour works in the mod. However, I believe it needs to not refresh fully after each instance of damage like it does now, but only restore a big portion of damage dealt to it. For example, 70%. With a full restore only at the start of the character's turn.

This way, if a character is focus-fired by swarms of low damage enemies, their high armour could end up temporarily neutralized after a couple hits. This would also make flurry-style abilities valuable even without their weird armor break thingy.

Perseverance is a bit on the weak side right now, so it could, in addition to hp recovery, also increase such armour trickleback by 3% per point, for 100% at 10 points, making it valuable for tank archetypes.

Without a way for small hits to matter, aoe and non-nukes/auto attacks end up becoming worthless very quickly, both for the player characters and their enemies, unable to deal any damage at all. They shouldn't ever be a completely ineffective waste of AP, let alone in Fort Joy already, but they often are.

On the other side of the spectrum, there is the acid/suffocating/madness/transfixed statuses, which are quite frankly overpowered in their full armour removal mechanic, and should probably be nerfed a bit. If it were trickleback-based, it could simply halve the ratio, so 70% becomes 35% and 100% becomes 50%, making those statuses still relevant, but not quite as broken. Or perhaps they could simply disable armour recovery but not instantly strip off all protection by themselves?

I think CC needs a way to mitigate it a bit still. Could it not be applied if the ability applying it fails to penetrate one's armour (deals no hp damage)? With an exception for abilities that do not deal damage in the first place?

I also frequently found burning/poison the only way of damaging an enemy when they turtled up with fortify/magic shell or similar, simply because DoT bypasses armor entirely. Though that could simply be because I overdid the +hp mods and they ended up with too much armor in the first place.

Just my share of ideas :)

Originally posted by Crunbum:

Lonewolves are bonkers because of how strong ability stacking is. For example, going for 10+ warfare and 10+ geo, picture of health + lonewolf makes you have so much HP even before act 2 that nothing can really threaten you (and I'm playing with mods that end up giving enemies roughly double hp and damage, more for bosses, and also on tactican obv).

This wouldn't have been such a big issue if a lonewolf could still be brought down by small incremental ticks of damage. However, good items + max geo from early on practically ensure that nothing can deal ANY damage to you, barring extremely heavy hits, piercing and criticals.

I really like how armour works in the mod. However, I believe it needs to not refresh fully after each instance of damage like it does now, but only restore a big portion of damage dealt to it. For example, 70%. With a full restore only at the start of the character's turn.

This way, if a character is focus-fired by swarms of low damage enemies, their high armour could end up temporarily neutralized after a couple hits. This would also make flurry-style abilities valuable even without their weird armor break thingy.

Perseverance is a bit on the weak side right now, so it could, in addition to hp recovery, also increase such armour trickleback by 3% per point, for 100% at 10 points, making it valuable for tank archetypes.

Without a way for small hits to matter, aoe and non-nukes/auto attacks end up becoming worthless very quickly, both for the player characters and their enemies, unable to deal any damage at all. They shouldn't ever be a completely ineffective waste of AP, let alone in Fort Joy already, but they often are.

On the other side of the spectrum, there is the acid/suffocating/madness/transfixed statuses, which are quite frankly overpowered in their full armour removal mechanic, and should probably be nerfed a bit. If it were trickleback-based, it could simply halve the ratio, so 70% becomes 35% and 100% becomes 50%, making those statuses still relevant, but not quite as broken.

I think CC needs a way to mitigate it a bit still. Could it not be applied if the ability applying it fails to penetrate one's armour (deals no hp damage)?

I also frequently found burning/poison the only way of damaging an enemy when they turtled up with fortify/magic shell or similar enemies, simply because DoT bypasses armor entirely.

Hey there. I'm not changing armour this late into development/release. I wish I had you around earlier. But thank you for your feedback.

As for Lone Wolf, yeah, it's always been bonkers, unfortunately. Balancing for it is a nightmare because it makes everything suck for 4player parties. Lone Wolf is hardcoded as hell, I can only change the vitality bonus and so on for it: I can't change how many attributes/abilities it gets.

I do hear you about Acid/Suffocating being overpowered. (Madness doesn't get rid of armour btw, only Fear and Transfixed) Part of me was considering having it set armour to 50% value. That might be better and I might do that later down the line.

As for the DoTs, I'm not that worried. Of course poisoning the knight in crazy armour is a good idea. Of course setting him on fire is a good idea. DoTs are an important part of gameplay now, whereas before they were a joke.

But yes, I appreciate your fondness for Willpower, but I seriously can't stand it. It was a binary "crowd control? yes or no" that left nothing in between "crowd control is too easy" and "crowd control is useless". Plus I hate turn skipping crowd control on principle. Shouldn't players and enemies both be able to actually play the game? Shouldn't you have to deal with each other's toolkits and options?

I also didn't want to make one of those stack systems that separates statuses into 4 versions, each progressively stronger, because then skills like Maddening Song would be ♥♥♥♥ out of luck: they'd apply Stage 1, but there'd be nothing left to apply Stage 2 through 4. Plus there's the fact it'd make things more complicated, and I enjoy the simplicity of the current system.

Hey! Really like the direction you took the game in general.

One minor gripe I have is how because of the prominence of sneaking for rogue types, combat is now intertwined with civil abilities for them. Kinda doesn't make sense to put it near the likes of persuasion/bartering.

This is also especially bad for them, since they are the people who should be speccing into thievery from an rp perspective and that is a really demanding skill since it improves exponentially. I do think it is kind of op if you have the right items etc. but imo people should be allowed to be a bit op if they understand the systems well and think of this as reward or want to feel like they are a master thief robbing a merchant blind.

My solution would be to tie sight cones in with either dex or scoundrel (which makes more sense) and remove sneaking as an ability altogether. Now I have no idea how challenging it is programming wise so idk if you thought about this.

Originally posted by NeinCat:

Hey! Really like the direction you took the game in general.

One minor gripe I have is how because of the prominence of sneaking for rogue types, combat is now intertwined with civil abilities for them. Kinda doesn't make sense to put it near the likes of persuasion/bartering.

This is also especially bad for them, since they are the people who should be speccing into thievery from an rp perspective and that is a really demanding skill since it improves exponentially. I do think it is kind of op if you have the right items etc. but imo people should be allowed to be a bit op if they understand the systems well and think of this as reward or want to feel like they are a master thief robbing a merchant blind.

My solution would be to tie sight cones in with either dex or scoundrel (which makes more sense) and remove sneaking as an ability altogether. Now I have no idea how challenging it is programming wise so idk if you thought about this.

Hey there! I'm really sorry, sight cones are kind of hardcoded from Sneaking's perspective. Nor can I remove abilities from the list entirely. Otherwise, I would love to implement your suggestion. I agree with you on it.

Hello,

First off, happy 2020! What a way to kick off the new year.

Thanks for the fantastic mod. Moving to an EHP-based system sounds really enticing and I'm excited to try it out. It looks like you've put in a lot of hard work fine-tuning everything to work in harmony with each other, and I'm curious to see how it all works in-game.

However, I have one major concern that's making me hesitant to heavily invest in it. I love using Sebille, but it seems like Elves have been easily surpassed by Humans, of all races. Flesh Sacrifice is.. well, let's just say the changes to it sound undesirable on paper. Each racial skill change seems to provide a positive net-bonus to their race or allies - Encourage has been buffed, making it more desirable now (hello there PyroRanger). Petrifying Touch has been buffed, and Play Dead has received a pretty significant buff - but Flesh Sacrifice seems to have taken a quick road to irrelevancy, and now provides a net-negative to its race with almost no use-case.

I can understand removing the insta-blood - the synergy with something like Elemental Arrowhead or Incarnates is a bit OP - but completely removing the damage bonus *and* applying a DoT effect on top of that makes using Flesh Sac highly undesirable, and just a worse version of say Haste. I can see some use cases - e.g. using Flesh Sac into Tac Retreat/Cloak & Dagger, but in that case I'd rather just skip the Flesh Sac and use someone else's blood, or deal with the AP loss of using Peace of Mind/get a Human to spam Encourage.

My suggestion (and only that) would be possibly re-introducing just the damage bonus, but a lower value, say +2% or +5%, while keeping the current changes. Or possibly changing the damage boost to a small Critical Chance boost instead.

Regardless, this is your mod, and I can only give my suggestion. I'm not trying to bash your work or anything - hell, this is above and beyond what any "mod" should do. Thanks again for making such a ground-breaking rework, and if I can get past my Elf hang-up I'll be sure to follow-up with any other thoughts.

Cheers, and Happy New Year!

Originally posted by kraftwerkd:

Hello,

First off, happy 2020! What a way to kick off the new year.

Thanks for the fantastic mod. Moving to an EHP-based system sounds really enticing and I'm excited to try it out. It looks like you've put in a lot of hard work fine-tuning everything to work in harmony with each other, and I'm curious to see how it all works in-game.

However, I have one major concern that's making me hesitant to heavily invest in it. I love using Sebille, but it seems like Elves have been easily surpassed by Humans, of all races. Flesh Sacrifice is.. well, let's just say the changes to it sound undesirable on paper. Each racial skill change seems to provide a positive net-bonus to their race or allies - Encourage has been buffed, making it more desirable now (hello there PyroRanger). Petrifying Touch has been buffed, and Play Dead has received a pretty significant buff - but Flesh Sacrifice seems to have taken a quick road to irrelevancy, and now provides a net-negative to its race with almost no use-case.

I can understand removing the insta-blood - the synergy with something like Elemental Arrowhead or Incarnates is a bit OP - but completely removing the damage bonus *and* applying a DoT effect on top of that makes using Flesh Sac highly undesirable, and just a worse version of say Haste. I can see some use cases - e.g. using Flesh Sac into Tac Retreat/Cloak & Dagger, but in that case I'd rather just skip the Flesh Sac and use someone else's blood, or deal with the AP loss of using Peace of Mind/get a Human to spam Encourage.

My suggestion (and only that) would be possibly re-introducing just the damage bonus, but a lower value, say +2% or +5%, while keeping the current changes. Or possibly changing the damage boost to a small Critical Chance boost instead.

Regardless, this is your mod, and I can only give my suggestion. I'm not trying to bash your work or anything - hell, this is above and beyond what any "mod" should do. Thanks again for making such a ground-breaking rework, and if I can get past my Elf hang-up I'll be sure to follow-up with any other thoughts.

Cheers, and Happy New Year!

Hey there! Thanks for your kind feedback. I really appreciate you giving the mod a look! I personally disagree on Flesh Sacrifice, however.

A small boost might work, but the thing is AP is exceptionally valuable in this game. Haste is an effective profit of 1AP in the long term, taking 2 turns to pay off, compared to Flesh Sacrifice which is an immediate 1AP gain. That made it easily the strongest racial skill (next to Play Dead due to its ability to escape any encounter, something I've now disabled) in the base game, and still very strong now. I wanted it to have a fitting risk attached to using it.

Encouraged was so bad that I actually feel like its change has made it viable rather than strong, and Petrifying Touch is actually arguably weaker than in base game. It may need some work.

I find the instant 1AP of Flesh Sacrifice still makes a huge difference. My main playstyle is an Elf Rogue for example, and I often can use that 1AP to turn a backstab auto-attack into a backstab Flurry, which deals much higher damage for the investment.

Heart of Steel only gives 9 armor for 1 turn while Fortify gives 25 for 3 turns. Seems like an oversight since Heart of Steel costs 2 AP and Fortify is only 1.

Also (maybe a bug because I enabled this mid-game - if this is intended then its a balance issue): Enemies should get the free talents too. Many fights seem super easy with the free repositioning and attacks of opportunity. Would you consider adding them to all NPCs so combat doesn't become too easy?

Originally posted by Reens:

Heart of Steel only gives 9 armor for 1 turn while Fortify gives 25 for 3 turns. Seems like an oversight since Heart of Steel costs 2 AP and Fortify is only 1.

Also (maybe a bug because I enabled this mid-game - if this is intended then its a balance issue): Enemies should get the free talents too. Many fights seem super easy with the free repositioning and attacks of opportunity. Would you consider adding them to all NPCs so combat doesn't become too easy?

Thank you, I'll try to fix the HoS issue. And yeah, enemies are meant to have the talents, but the engine is a bit buggy in that regard. I'll see what more I can do.

Arcane Stitch heals for 100% vitality but it doesnt cleanse decaying and is targettable on enemies. Meaning instant kill on anything that doesn't have comeback kid, death defying or huge amounts of armor/physical resistance to mitigate the damage.

The skill is too strong overall for 2 AP, I think it should cost 3 AP instead and remove all negative statuses. I think its only missing cursed, decaying and transfixed right now anyway.

In its current iteration, it is also abusable on decaying allies to bring them to <5% health with one cast and then equivalent exchange a boss, or through simple low health dmg buff stacking + scoundrel and assasinate, oneshotting any enemy easily from afar if the bow/crossbow is any good.

Of course out of combat one-hit strats cannot easily be removed, but with how the skill works right now, it is easily set-up able in one combat turn by one character.

Originally posted by Crunbum:

Arcane Stitch heals for 100% vitality but it doesnt cleanse decaying and is targettable on enemies. Meaning instant kill on anything that doesn't have comeback kid, death defying or huge amounts of armor/physical resistance to mitigate the damage.

The skill is too strong overall for 2 AP, I think it should cost 3 AP instead and remove all negative statuses. I think its only missing cursed, decaying and transfixed right now anyway.

In its current iteration, it is also abusable on decaying allies to bring them to <5% health with one cast and then equivalent exchange a boss, or through simple low health dmg buff stacking + scoundrel and assasinate, oneshotting any enemy easily from afar if the bow/crossbow is any good.

Of course out of combat one-hit strats cannot easily be removed, but with how the skill works right now, it is easily set-up able in one combat turn by one character.

Thank you. I specifically tried to avoid that happening, but evidently I didn't try hard enough. That'll be fixed as soon as I am able.

Originally posted by Reens:

Heart of Steel only gives 9 armor for 1 turn while Fortify gives 25 for 3 turns. Seems like an oversight since Heart of Steel costs 2 AP and Fortify is only 1.

It says 9 but gives more actually

Originally posted by YoungSaint:

Originally posted by Reens:

Heart of Steel only gives 9 armor for 1 turn while Fortify gives 25 for 3 turns. Seems like an oversight since Heart of Steel costs 2 AP and Fortify is only 1.

It says 9 but gives more actually

That's getting fixed too. It's getting an even bigger buff. It's gonna be kinda nuts.

Bug fixes and quality-of-life changes

• Fixed non-player-controlled summons lasting an infinite duration
  
• Permanent summons now level up with their owners
  
• NPCs stats are now checked more regularly for updates in GM mode. All character stats are now checked on levelup.
  
• NPCs entering combat on existing saves are now restored to full vitality, unless damaged before entry.
  
• Fixed Wits and Torturer tooltips
  
• Suffocating now correctly decreases magic armour
  
• Extended forgiveness period of armour regeneration, leading to fewer multi-attacks suffering

Balance

• Surface damage no longer procs immediately when hit by an attack that created it (such as Fireballs, Searing Daggers etc)
  
• The Advocate's special move - Demonic Madness - now only applies Madness for 1 turn (from 2) in a 8m radius (from 13)
  
• Drastically improved physical armour granted by Heart of Steel (no really, it's nuts now)
  
• The changes to Taunted now apply to enemies as well (they cannot damage other targets)
  
• Arcane Stitch now removes Decaying
  
• Surface damage decreased 5%
  
• Decreased Elemental Arrowheads damage bonus (it still remains higher than the base game)