You can go into a new game and devmode in a couple pawns and give them those two traits and test out the classes yourself, if you like. They're fairly different.

Railbreaker has extreme damage output for very low costs and cooldowns, but their main resource bar is their health. In the earlygame, you'll often have times when you don't want to cast some of their abilities for fear of killing yourself, although they do have a self-shielding ability that lets them get some of their abilities off. They have one of the highest damage outputs in the game if you have some way of mitigating their self-damage, such as pairing them with a class that can shield them, or with heavy armor or other mods that introduce methods of damage reduction.

Chainwarden on the other hand is great in the earlygame, all of their abilities are also capable of CC if aimed in a certain way. They are much less likely to hit themselves or their allies than a Railbreaker, but it's still somewhat possible. Chainwarden's damage doesn't scale as well, especially against armored opponents or when there are too many opponents to deal with, since Chainwarden has an AoE cap while Railbreaker doesn't, but Chainwarden can always fall back on CCing for their allies.

For the medic, maybe make it so the condition for them auto using the antidepressant is that the pawn must be at risk of a mental breakdown (any level)

@Aegael
Thank you for your detailed explanation! It helped me a lot and I can see that you have put a lot of thought the classes and your mod. I'm looking forward to playing all of them, eventually, but for now I think I'll go with the railbreaker. High risk - high reward!

Does one of your classes have the ability to resurrect a pawn by the way? In case my railbreaker doesn't make it... I know that the priest and the chronomancer are capable of doing that in the base game, but I'd like to use one of your classes for that - if possible.

Not currently, no. The ability to resurrect a dead ally is an extremely powerful ability I haven't seen fit to give to any class.

Is there an idea on creating a Vampire class? I find the mod very interesting (just grabbed it recently), it adds a lot of fun possibilities to the game.

Also a general idea, a wiki page with information about classes and mechanics would help a lot for people who start their adventure with the mod :)

There's already Mlie's unofficial update of Jecrell's vampire mod, that probably does a much better job on vampires than I could. I don't intend on making a wiki, although there is a basic class documentation steam thread that outlines basic things in the mod.

That's not due to the number of skills, that's because your pawn isn't holding the correct weapon. If you hold a bow, there won't be lag. There's a bug that causes FPS lag if you aren't using the appropriate weapon for certain classes. I don't have control over this bug, because I'm just using the custom class framework from RoM. it may get fixed in the future.

I've done a TON more play(testing?) with these classes and I have more feedback!

-Railbreaker feels SO GOOD. The backblast mechanic is fun, the fact they're basically Explosion Fist power is super awesome. The only thing I can think of I'd suggest changing at all is if you could make it so leveling abilities instead of increasing damage or range decreases recoil - the cooldowns are already short and the range is already strong on pretty much every ability but as-is you can screw yourself just by leveling abilities, even with blast shield and shielding effects like the Starseeker's ultimate defensive spell.

-I completely get Scrapper now. It's SO GOOD.

-Touch of Death on Monk is super fun as a change.

-Samurai is crazy awesome. I love that their gimmick is all their abilities level a ton so they're very much "skill-focused" mechanically. An inexperienced samurai is *nothing* to a high-level samurai and I think that's awesome. That said, would it be possible to include either a gap closer or a disengage? I understand if you'd rather not for balance purposes, especially when Blademaster still exists from Vanilla. I only mention because the FFXIV samurai has those repositioning tools and it'd make them even more awesome.

-Medic is STRONG. I completely underestimated them until I started using them.

-I had an infestation of 153 and discovered that Plague Doctor's "proper disposal" is an incredibly strong answer to that when underground - and that Gadgeteer's "malfunctioning snow machine" at level 3 makes for a fun minigame when your base interior reaches 700F and you have to sweep room to room equalizing temperatures out after you drop them far below freezing. My Gadgeteer almost got frostbite! I love this class so, so much, that was legit super fun to manage while going bug-to-bug to finish them off.

-This mod has a TON of synergy with the RWBY mod, and I can happily reportI have yet to see any significant bugs as a result of using the two in conjunction. (It actually makes railbreaker WAY stronger by giving them a safety buffer shield.)

-Starseeker and Aspirant feel great. That said, because Starseeker can turn their mana regen ability to autocast they seem to always level up much faster for me (I start EVERY colony with one of each now.) Is it possible to give autocast to the Aspirant's heal ability, by any chance?

-Bombardier is way more fun than I had expected. Highly approve.

-Plague Doctor thematically is really cool, and I find it perfect and hilarious that I tried to use mine to cure blood rot in a prisoner mission and ended up giving them lethal malaria. <_< Honestly, screw the empire anyway. I had low expectations going in but I was very much pleasantly surprised!

-Commander's reputation up ability feels overpowered if ranked up, so I've been voluntarily keeping it unranked, but I figured I'd mention it!

-Chroma Mage is conceptually really cool but I'm turned off by the very restrictive level limit. I understand it's a balancing thing, but could it get raised a bit? Maybe 40 or 50? Alternatively, could it be made to work like vanilla RoM's Technomancer, where you pick a path instead? Could toss in a few cantrips for each.

-Red Mage is wildly fun and now that I've figured out how Explosion works they're supremely valuable to me. I love that you found out a way to incorporate the mana-balancing mechanic from FFXIV despite vanilla RoM not really facilitating that!

-The Paladin changes turned one of my least favorite classes into a legitimately really good one. Great work!

-Saboteur feels FANTASTIC, I love it.

-Ninja remains an incredible answer to waves of enemies coming in. The ability to dive in with a huge AOE, throw two shurikens while shredding CC'd enemies and then get out before they can shut you down feels VERY rewarding!

-Reaper feels like what I wanted Succubus to be, and I am HERE for it!

-Your advice was super legit and Scrapper's one of my faves now. I punched a lich to death. I PUNCHED a LICH to DEATH!

-Keeper feels underwhelming, but that's probably just personal preference. I much prefer more active abilities to the foresight-defense spells Keeper uses.

-Atronach with Mana Well is a death sentence btw - their natural mana regen is /so/ far negative that even with a basic lightning wand equipped it's not enough. Obviously not a bug, but I thought I'd mention how hilarious that was to see. I feel like their spells are slightly underpowered for their core mechanic but mine died pretty early so it's possible I just wasn't giving it enough of a chance and once leveled they're monstrous.

-Troubador feels just as good as bard, just a little bit better. I approve. Bard was already one of the craziest classes.

I still have to try out:
Pridestalker, Berserker, Scion, Chainwarden, Ambusher, Hawkeye, Support Specialist, Wind Mage, Cleric, Arbormancer, and the changed versions of Wayfarer/Wanderer and Arcane Mage.

Every one of the new spells and cantrips I've tried has been fantastic and I don't feel the need to elaborate there. <3

Sorry for super long but I have a lot of thoughts on this mod. All in all it remains fantastic and I'm so, so grateful you made it!

Thanks for the feedback.

It's intended that the Railbreaker has to constantly think about their recoil damage, even including how they spend their skill points, so I likely wouldn't look into reducing their recoil damage. They're actually a fairly strong class before they even begin to use any of their explosive abilities, due to their trait granting them a built-in 50% damage reduction, and their Blast Shield, Backdraft, and Explosive Entrance abilities all being fairly useful in their own right, so I think it's fair that they'll always have to contend with their recoil damage when they want to use their more powerful abilities. As a side note, I think they pair best with a Paladin, who can grant them a shield which entirely negates damage, as well as their ultimate spell Holy Wrath which can grant complete damage immunity to the Railbreaker. When a Railbreaker is shielded from a Paladin, they also won't set themselves on fire with Inferno Breaker, and they can cast Redpoint without stunning themselves.

I've thought about adding another ability to Samurai, but it would have to be distinct from their other abilities, and it likely wouldn't be a mobility ability. When I play the class myself I do usually end up trying to Legion a mobility ability, which mitigates some of their weaknesses.

I could add an autocast to the Aspirant's potion ability, if that's what you're referring to, but due to its 0 stamina cost it doesn't actually grant XP. The Starseeker's mana regen ability also doesn't grant XP due to it not costing anything either. If it's granting enough mana regen to make a significant difference in XP, I might look into tuning that down, as all of their Rank 1 and 2 abilities are mostly supposed to be "useless".

I've toned down Commander's reputation ability to grant 40 reputation at max rank in the next patch. It's intended to be powerful, potentially even turning around an unwinnable raid if you can get the speech off safely on a hostile target, but 90 was likely too high.

I can understand Chroma Mage not being for everyone, due to the fact that you have to carefully plan out their skill points in advance. The class is designed to be the polar opposite of a Chaos Mage - The Chroma Mage, as long as they have skill points, can always level the exact spell they need for any particular situation, at the cost of permanently investing themselves into that path, due to their low level cap. I actually thought 30 was a fairly lenient number when I made the class, but I'll look into it a bit more.

Atronach can be a tricky class, due to several of its kit abilities not quite perfectly synergizing with one another, and them having a mix of support/mobility/assassination potential, but not really being perfect at any of those things. There are a few things to note about the class that aren't apparent at first, though. First is their Mana Drain ability - Mana Drain is almost always more useful in combat when not used on mages. Mana Drain applies crippling debuffs to any pawn that isn't a mage. The Siphon Mana cantrip is also very useful for them, which stacks with the debuffs provided by their Mana Drain ability. It's also worth noting that Arcane Weakness will auto-knockdown a pawn after it gets past a certain severity, and is fully lethal past a certain point. The Atronach has armor-agnostic assassination potential with Mana Drain + Siphon Mana and its curse-type abilities which grant Arcane Weakness. They can also just stock up mana and Shadowstep behind enemy lines and start nuking with their AoE abilities if they have a large enough mana pool for it. On the topic of their more expensive spells, several of their abilities cost enough to the point where they'll inflict mana degeneration penalties after casting, and Cleanse will remove this debuff, which is its main function. I'll likely also be reducing some of their mana costs in the next patch.

Would it be possible to add an Anima-Shaman or Anima-Druid? They'll won't do dmg at all, but use their Mana to make anima grass grow faster or grow a small anima tree for the colony (small = less perceptive area of artificial structures) at a designated spot. That would waork like the sentinel summoning by anotehr class just that the tree will drain a little mana constantly until fully grown and only 1 can be summoned/ planted.

Abilities could be:
Strenghten psyfocus gain (+2.5%, AoE, making non-psycaster lose 5% conciousness)
Weaken psyfocus gain (- 2.5%, AoE, giving non-psycaster an unpleasant feeling)
Plant Anima Bonsai (create a bonsai-sized anima tree)
Ritual of Spirit (channeling, AoE, boost animas grass growth by adding a bonus to mediating pawns)
World's Scream (channelling, AoE, psycasters will gain neural heat rapidly)
World's Lullaby (channelling, target, psycaster will loss neural heat rapidly)
Ritual of Abudance (target, converts normal stone to anima stones)

Class malus:
+30% psychic sensibility
-10% move speed
-10% research speed
-20% pain threshold

As much as I love the variety, this addon seems overpowered in compariosn to the base mod

The gadgeteer seems overpowered compared to the original mods classes. The mana regen thing alone makes mana potions basically useless. Each of its abilities are as powerful as a mana based spell, are cast from stamina (which doesn't have drawbacks), and can be leveled to be better than the base version.

The scrapper overburdens the UI with way to many abilities from the get go, with the huge number of abilities available.

Also, the shear number of skills per class is really overdone, especially since they get all the skills all at once. The most skills I've seen on an original RoM pawn is six at start for the monk, while a number of yours start with eight or more.

Suggested balance changes:

- For each class, give them the four abilities that are the most 'core' to the class. Take the rest of them, and make them unscaling learned abilities from scrolls. This brings them in line with the original classes and makes the material cost of the scrolls the balancing factor for the additional abilities.

- Try not to have healing or building abilities cast from stamina. Stamina recharges too quickly for it to have long term effects like that.

- For the gadgeteer, change the strange amulet to something akin to the mana potion, including the withdrawal and addiction chances. A free mana potion on a stamina cooldown is still a powerful ability.

- Also for the gadgeteer, I'd keep the goggles, jet boots, and inflatable walls as base abilities, and move the rest to be unscaling learned abilities like stated above.

- Longer cooldowns on some of the stronger fighter abilities, like the grenades. Compared to the super soldiers under rifle grenade or portable mortar, both of your grenade abilites recharge in about half the time.

I've already stated my thoughts on Stamina vs. Mana several times, as well as earlier in this thread. To make things short, contrary to what most people seem to think, Mana is not a downside, it's an upside. No matter how strong I make a Stamina class, they will never be a mage. They'll never be able to spend a pittance of resources to learn a spell that allows them to teleport 2000kg of loot halfway across the world. After a fight is finished, a Stamina class will never be able to use a spell that instantaneously heals wounds that might have otherwise taken weeks or more to heal. Mana classes are inherently more powerful simply due to their access to disgustingly powerful cantrip abilities. On top of this, Mana regen is almost a non-issue past the earlygame, after stacking cost reduction and regen effects. I absolutely disagree that I should purposely gimp Stamina abilities in any way. Even as powerful as some of my Stamina abilities are, none of them can teleport allies or instantly heal wounds or call down an instant rain that trivializes fires. None of them can summon a minion that can handle up to 100% of all of a colony's hauling and cleaning tasks. All of these are incredibly powerful abilities that every single class with a mana bar can learn, on top of their own class abilities.

It's true that a lot of my fighter classes are stronger than many vanilla fighter classes. I don't think my classes are too strong, I think many of the vanilla fighter classes are too weak compared to their mage counterparts. I've added several cantrips or abilities to certain vanilla classes to try to address this. Aside from that, it's obvious that if you compare my classes to the earliest-released vanilla classes, those classes will be weaker...the same exact thing happens if you compare the latest-released vanilla RoM classes to the earliest classes.

I don't understand the complaints about "UI Bloat". Are a few more additional skill buttons suddenly intolerable? In vanilla RoM, Wanderers and Wayfarers, who are incentivized to learn almost every cantrip, end up with a ridiculous number of skills. Any class that learns even a couple cantrips is going to have the same number of skills as my classes. Torann is working on scaling UI buttons for RoM, which may alleviate some issues with bloat. But once again, if you're comparing earlier vanilla classes with 4 abilities to my classes, of course my classes will have more skills. Compared to later classes, They're usually about on-par.

If you're referring to the grenade cantrip abilities, those do less damage and/or have less range than Super Soldier abilities. In addition, all fighter classes can learn those, so Super Soldiers would be able to learn those as well. All of the cantrip abilities I added are designed to address balance in vanilla RoM, Fighter cantrips are laughably weak or cripplingly overspecialized when compared to Mage cantrips, many of which are incredibly powerful or universally useful.

If you find the classes make the game too easy, I suggest you increase the difficulty, or look into other mods that increase the game difficulty, such as those that add more dangerous enemies.

Heya! Today I started a new colony. I was excited that one of the pawns I could choose was a red mage! But now I see he seems to have a permanent health condition: "Whole body: Max Energy: (50%)". The description just says "energy capacity enchantment". Is this something that all red mages have, or is it because he's a bit old (79)?

Most dual-classes have halved max resource for balance purposes. They're generally fairly strong even with the lower resource cap.

Thanks for getting back to me!

I didn't realize that XP gain was tied to spell cost directly, I thought it was spell POTENCY. So my Stargazer leveling up much faster than my Aspirant must've been because I gave her Dirt Devil and Summon Minion and set them to autocast, and not the rank 4 mana regen thing whose name I can't remember.

So in that case, it'd actually be pointless of me to ask to have an autocast on Aspirant's potion. My apologies for not realizing this!

I ended my latest run with 20 colonists after beating a raid of 154, and can I just say, when you have really solid defensive buildings Sniper and Stargazer are INCREDIBLY strong in their own ways. The insta-cast rank 4 universal summoning spell that Stargazer has is SO INCREDIBLE, I love it SO MUCH!

I hadn't realized, either, that the Paladin shield for allies isn't just a damage reduction, it actually makes them /invulnerable/. I grabbed a Paladin and BOY was my railbreaker a nightmare for that raid!

I was using custom storyteller settings to make the game substantially easier to play around with that run, I think I'm gonna do one with Atronach where I actually use Mana Drain and Siphon Mana properly. If I remember right my last one had died because I tried using it at just barely above the required cost and the arcane weakness from using it knocked them prone, which led to them getting stuck in a fire I wasn't able to save them from.

Also! Am I missing something with the Stargazer's fourth-tier of the spell "Lightshow" (I forget the name, sorry) ? It seemed to be an EXTREMELY long-cast single-tile-range spell that does a ton of damage, sure, but it just felt incredibly underwhelming for 16 levels' worth of investment, especially compared to any of the rest of their spells. Does it have some aspect to it I wasn't realizing in my testing? That was the first one I maxed when I first started playing this mod, so I unfortunately don't have a pawn with it unlocked anymore (changed a TON of mods since then...)

Thanks for the explanation re: Chroma Mage, I gave it a shot where I wrote down in advance exactly where I wanted every skill point to go and I think I get it now!

Also, re: Samurai, is Iaijutsu supposed to have a flashy animation that my game isn't displaying properly? I'm not sure I'm totally understanding how it works - you target the spot and the samurai hits everything between them and that spot, right?

As far as another ability for Samurai, the only thing I can think of that'd make sense is a frontal AOE cone-slash thing. But that's just me going back to the FFXIV well lmao