I just want to say that I really appreciate the way you're taking feedback Oskar and the change list for 2.0 is looking much improved so far.

Recommend conflagator.

- Change fire beam from 50 heat to 100 heat
- Change fire beam psycost from 50% to 30% (or 40%)

Here is why (please read so you can understand my reasoning):

For mechanical balance, the focus on psyfocus rather than heat management causes balance to be shifted towards low level psycasters. I think we want to really move away from giving early psycasters a lot of power. To this end we need to make high end psypowers more costly and less spammable for the player early on. As such it's totally OK if certain powerful psycasts have much high heat costs as that means they can't be spammed in unbalanced ways and if used by low level psycasters they will carry huge risks. It's interesting mechanically if you need to overload for 'epic level psycasts'. It's the risk vs reward that's fun in those situations.

Fire beam is one of those raid ending psycasts that fits this description, its an awesome and amazing psycast and right now it costs only 50 heat but a whopping 50 psyfocus. That high psyfocus but low heat means psycasters with low psystats and at least psylevel 5 can technically already completely safely fire it without focusing on leveling psycaster stats due to the neural heat limit being 55 at level 5.

I reckon your idea is that you can only realistically cast fire beam once per day for balance reasons which I why it costs 50 psyfocus making it practically impossible to fire off a second time, the 50% cutoff ensures you still have room to cast some other spells with the remaining psyfocus after firing of a fire beam. That is indeed balanced and if that's the way you want to go, I can completely respect and understand that design decision but we can get there in another perhaps more interesting way.

What if you made it cost 100 heat and 30% psyfocus instead? A level 5 conflagator pawn can cast a firebeam but will result in a high chance of psychic breakdown or even a psychic coma for potentially a whole week or quadrum. That's a huge punishment and balancing mechanic by itself. A low level psycaster is now very much at risk of suffering some penalty and reprecussion for using this powerful psycast even if he technically can cast it. They would be much more inclinded NOT to use it unless it is absolutely necessary and they are in a desperate pinch. They can technically fire it off twice if lucky but they will be guaranteed in a coma for 10 to 15 days! (ouch!)

In contrast in the current set up with low heat costs and high psyfocus costs, they are entirely encouraged to spam the fire beam since there is no 'risk' to using it with 50 heat cost, and a level 5 conflagator pawn has 55 heat limit and is thus completely safe from overloading. A higher heat cost in this case gives a bigger risk vs reward balancing mechanism while also preventing the spammability of this powerful psycast.

By focusing on balancing heat you've now effectively hindered low level psycasters from spamming the raid ending psycast. Players won't abuse the spell while mid level psycasters can use the spell but with risks and dangers attached to them and high level casters can really shine as powerful psycasters that can completely turn a situation around.

The 30 level psylevel limit now is a really good balance point for this too. A psycaster pawn would have to spend at least 5 levels into conflagator to cast fire beam and another 5 levels in psystats to be able to safely fire off a firebeam without overheating (neural heat 105 at level 10), meaning he'd need 10 levels to use firebeam safely whereas in the current psyfocused system he can fire off firebeam as soon as he reaches level 5 without any risks. Just this change alone allows late game casters to be much more powerful while early game psycasters are encouraged not to use overpowered spells unless in a pinch. This drastically shifts the balance more towards higher tier psycasters and postpones the power rampup to later levels.

I hope this helps you understand why 'heat' balancing is so such an interesting mechanic that is underutilized in the mod currently and how it can be used to prevent spamming of powerful spells while opening up the ability for more higher tiered psycasters for the late game.

Really love your mods and wish you and your team the best,

The Blind One.

Have some mid combat methods of recovering psyfocus like it is with Go-Juice if the balance is done around psyfocus instead of heat disspiation. 5 casts per combat of mid level abilities feels very weak considering what I can do with similar investment of resources and time e.g. a decked out super soldier, high shooting, charge weapon, cataphract armor and augs or a monoblade dude with good legs, speed, shield belt and armor.

Go-Juice is a one time per fight kinda thing due to its random OD thing. It recovers 15% of psyfocus. Maybe have a drug that one can take that gives mid combat regeneration but either puts the caster into coma after being fully metabolized (as in it wears off) or makes him straight up unable to use psycasts after since coma is another REALLY annoying way to balance. Maybe have it as "psychic fatigue" or something where their stats are capped at 40 or 50% for as long they are drained from said drug.

Heat balancing has risk and reward. Psyfocus balancing has none of that, you get your 5-7 mid level casts and thats it. A level 5 caster with no eltex gear gets as many casts as a level 30 caster decked in eltex and other heat mitigation.

Same really for skip. Have it have high neural heat production instead, but less cooldown or have cooldown scale inversely with psy sensitivity (high psy senstivity = less cooldown, obviously not for paralysis pulse). Have psyfocus cost scale inverse with psy sensitivity up to a degree so theres even more incentive to specialize casters.

Originally posted by Irkalla:

Have some mid combat methods of recovering psyfocus like it is with Go-Juice if the balance is done around psyfocus instead of heat disspiation. 5 casts per combat of mid level abilities feels very weak considering what I can do with similar investment of resources and time e.g. a decked out super soldier, high shooting, charge weapon, cataphract armor and augs or a monoblade dude with good legs, speed, shield belt and armor.

Go-Juice is a one time per fight kinda thing due to its random OD thing. It recovers 15% of psyfocus. Maybe have a drug that one can take that gives mid combat regeneration but either puts the caster into coma after being fully metabolized (as in it wears off) or makes him straight up unable to use psycasts after since coma is another REALLY annoying way to balance. Maybe have it as "psychic fatigue" or something where their stats are capped at 40 or 50% for as long they are drained from said drug.

Heat balancing has risk and reward. Psyfocus balancing has none of that, you get your 5-7 mid level casts and thats it. A level 5 caster with no eltex gear gets as many casts as a level 30 caster decked in eltex and other heat mitigation.

Same really for skip. Have it have high neural heat production instead, but less cooldown or have cooldown scale inversely with psy sensitivity (high psy senstivity = less cooldown, obviously not for paralysis pulse). Have psyfocus cost scale inverse with psy sensitivity up to a degree so theres even more incentive to specialize casters.

But there are some! For example, Heat focus psycast converts heat into psyfocus. There is also the fact that putting points into Psycaster stats literally reduced Psyfocus cost of abilities.

Update on 9/13/2023 9:49:03 PM.
- Enchant Quality now scales with Psychic Sensitivity of the caster. If below 120%, it will only be able to enchant up to Good quality. If above 120%, it will be able to enchant up to Excellent quality. If above 250%, it will be able to enchant up to Masterwork quality.
- Psychic meditation focus gain multiplier can now be re-enabled in mod options. It is disabled by default. If enabled, meditation focus gain multiplier will apply based on current Psycaster level.

I feel as thought the reduced Psyfocus cost in the levelings is way too low to get any use out of them unless you dump at least 20 points into the Stats alone, as I feel any noticable change with it only occurs with 20% or 30% cost reduction.

Now if you bumped it to like, 2.5% to 4% per level, I think that'd be a bit more okay.

Or as I previously suggested, instead have stats increase Psyfocus TOTAL instead of reduced cost, such as 5% Psyfocus per stat increase, so a Psycaster with 20 Stat levels has 200 total Psyfocus.
But I agree with a few past comments here in that, the Focus to Heat cost isn't well or good at all, powerful abilities should have a lower Psyfocus cost but require a large amount of Heat cap or to purposely overload their Heat.
The huge comment about Fire Beam alone for example, in my opinion I think it should cost 15% Psyfocus and cost about 250-350 Neutral Heat to fire off. This prevents early game Psycasters from being real powerful but allows lategame Psycasters to be the proper force multipliers they should be instead of a win button.

I'm willing to make a HUGE list of what changes I think are okay to compare to the current draft of the Second Rebalance list so far, as I've heavily used Psycasters since their first introduction (and no matter the colony or tribe I was making) and always had had VPE in my list since its release.

Heavy user of VPE here. Really appreciate the work Oskar. I think the changes were very good in balancing the mod. So far I haven't noticed any dip in enjoyment with VPE. Some of the stronger psycasts were very cheesy and I do admit that I abused them. However "weakened" my casters are now, raids are still manageable, just takes more strategy instead of brute forcing it with just OP psycasts.

I do admit that I was not happy at first with the sudden changes. With all the tweaks and patches added afterwards, I'd say the mod is in a good spot now. Thanks for listening to the community and being very open minded despite some of the users being pretty belligerent and entitled.

One challenge I've run into with the re-balance is that it's affected my run where I had been pouring all my effort and resources into a super psycaster whose only job was to amass XP and upgrade psystats. I'm wondering if you would be able to implement more changes that kept psycasters below certain psyfocus, stats, and psylink level in a "weakened" and balanced state, AND allowed extreme examples like mine and others to be overpowered. The direction the recent 9/13 patch on Enchant Quality went would align with what I'm trying to convey.

Thank you.

Strongly Recommend:

> Enchant Quality only works once per item and applies only one quality upgrade from the base item quality with max quality upgradable determined by psy sensitivity:

Reason:

When you can enchant any item multiple times from awful to mastercraft, it devalues and trivializes the items original quality and the crafter involved prett much completely. Even an awful tier Marine Armor item will end up as mastercraft as long as you have the enchanter for it.

This is bad for gameplay balance and story imho.

Up to what quality you can enchant an item should be limited to your psy sensitivity as it has now been implemented which is a great improvement so far and with the added mechanical limitation of only 1 quality upgrade it is also more mechanically reasonable to allow enchanters to enchant up to legendary since they would require an item to be created at mastercraft level to begin with and the enchanter has to be highly skilled / enhanced to achieve this level.

Max item enchantment proposition:
Psy sensitivity at <120% = good
Psy sensitivity at >120% = excellent
Psy sensitivity at >200% = mastercraft
Psy sensitivity at >280% = Legendary

For comparison a full excellent quality eltex gear set will give you = ~155% psy sensitivity bonus (255% total)

Here's a very good reason why unlimited enchants on an item is a terribly broken idea.

Eltex gear increases your psy sensitivity, so what's stopping an enchanter from enchanting all the awful quality eltex gear higher and higher in quality by putting on the same eltex enchantment over and over until he has all mastercraft?

Absolutely nothing. This is borderline skyrim broken crafting shenanigans.

Items should only be upgradable once and be denoted with either an [E] in their condition similar to how tainted stuff shows its tainted property, or with a [+] sign after the quality name for something like 'Marine Armor, Excellent Quality[+]' to show that is has already been 'enchanted'.

Originally posted by Reidlos:

Think plantskip was hit too hard. 1 year of age for not even a guarantee mature plant seems rough. keep the year and guarantee maturity (id say at even higher radius) or remove year and just make it possible cost 2 casts to maturity in its range.

Chronopath is a bit rough in general, due to the age mechanic its already very restrictive to cast anything. I think fortelling shouldnt have a age cost. or the restore age cast needs to be more then 2 years.

having a set acceleration is the main issue, it might be tolerable with a percentage of growth achieved rather than set growth acceleration

Originally posted by YaBoiTem:

having a set acceleration is the main issue, it might be tolerable with a percentage of growth achieved rather than set growth acceleration

No that doesn't make much sense. Plants are balanced around growth days yielding x amount of produce per y growth days. If the balance is set to percentage plant growth that means that certain plants will disproportionally benefit from this psycast compared to others. Growing rice with 33% isn't nearly as good as growing corn with 33% for example. Using the Growth Days as it is right now means you gain just as many resources when using the psycast whether you target rice or corn. That is much more balanced.

Using the growth days mechanism ensures it is balanced for every plant, even modded. Right now it's already being planned to give 7 (14 actual) grow days and reduced psycost with extended range effect so you can technically grow devilstrand again within just a few days with this psypath. You only need to cast it 3 times to get instant devilstrand. The balance is honestly right where it is supposed to be balance wise. (though remove the garbage age mechanic or reduce it to a quadrum, its honestly frustrating as hell)

@The Blind One
The primary issue with this is an implementation one, in my view. To implement this we would either be forced to add a new data structure to everything with quality, which is rather invasive, or maintain a mapping somewhere else, which would lead to difficulties keeping it synced up with what was happening in the game.

@Reidlos
The issue with plant timeskip that the nerf was meant to fix was that it made it really easy to get a ton of money really fast by planting something like devilstrand and using the psycast on it. Both of your solutions would bring back that issue.

Originally posted by legodude17:

@The Blind One
The primary issue with this is an implementation one, in my view. To implement this we would either be forced to add a new data structure to everything with quality, which is rather invasive, or maintain a mapping somewhere else, which would lead to difficulties keeping it synced up with what was happening in the game.

I was afraid of that being the case

The game does already have 'tainted' tag system and some modders seem to use tags for mechanical reasons such as;

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2269697598

Whch uses an (U) tag to indicate it was a dropped raider item.

Is it too hard to give an item an (E) tag after it's been enchanted and simply not allow the enchant quality cast to work on it anymore? Wouldn't the code simply need to check if the item name has an (E) for enchanted in its namet? No need to add a whole new quality system as this seems like the easiest workaround I can come up with.

Truth be told, I'm not really sure what the idea was with the 'haywire' rework. It feels now less like a 'berserk pulse which traded off working on humanoids for a stronger effect of (mostly) stopping them from attacking your pawns' to 'berserk pulse but it only works on mechs and only hits up to 3'. This might work better if you balanced it around 'berserk' instead of 'berserk pulse' i.e. you can specifically choose the targets you want to set off instead of basically having to pray you get the ones you want in a situation. I can understand the need to balance it, sure - but I feel like it would have been a better call to balance it around a higher cost rather than kneecapping the whole thing. If, instead of being able to cast it wildly (because the psyfocus cost was much too low) I had to ration out where I placed a haywire, and use it when I felt it would be most effective it would be more engaging than just having to let the game select 3 in whatever area it decides, and if that's a centipede, charge blaster and scyther or the random slew of worthless militors around.

A lot of the changes do seem like they would be for the better, especially some of the ones on the second pass. I personally disagree with the balancing for resurrection (I don't find 'trading a finger for a pawn' a particularly interesting mechanic and would prefer something more tangible on the recipient) but it seems like you have a vision for that, so it is likely just a preference thing.

@The Blind One
That mod actually takes the exact approach I described, adding a new part to every weapon. The name of something is actually calculated dynamically when you look at it, so you can't just set the name, you add something that modifies the name.

Originally posted by legodude17:

@The Blind One
That mod actually takes the exact approach I described, adding a new part to every weapon. The name of something is actually calculated dynamically when you look at it, so you can't just set the name, you add something that modifies the name.

I see ...

I do think it's still the better solution than to allow every item to be infinitely upgraded with the enchant psycast. It's just skyrim borderline exploitable

Maybe add it as an option that needs to be toggled with a warning that if people enable it and then remove the mod that all their enchanted items will likely get vaporized as well

Originally posted by Oskar Potocki:

Right, I don't think this is going anywhere. You're acting like this mod was entirely different before the rebalance when it wasn't - all I did is tweak the numbers. Now you're saying it's 'not about the numbers'.

I think I will just stick to having a discussion with people who are actually willing to propose solutions, like a few people above your comment, instead of spending my time reading about how this mod is badly designed and how Tynan is a great designer. I'm not Tynan. I work with Tynan, but this mod is my own.

On the contrary. Some people (including me) are upset because the mod is indeed very nicely designed, but the abrupt change breaks the game style we have chosen.
Some changes definitely make sense.
But most changes seem to be about limiting the number of casting by psyfocus cost or high cost of cast like coma or aging.

On the other hand, I have yet to be limited by heat on any of my psycasters on various runs, because their focus runs out quicker than the heat rise. I can't even use aggressive heat dump or conjure heat pearl because it's actually hard to rise heat high enough :)

So, to repeat what many others have said, any change that would make psychic heat management more of a problem, would probably feel nicer than any change that can be summed as 'no, you can not/should not cast that anymore'.

And to use specific numbers, on a psycast I wasn't using much before anyway. rebalance effect:
Plant timeskip psyfocus cost increased from 25% to 50%.
Plant timeskip now ages the caster 1 year.
Plant timeskip now advances time on all plants in radius by 3.5 days instead of growing them to maturity.

-> so, for the cost of 1 year of lifetime and 50% of psyfocus (that does not rise as quickly as before, so even longer time to meditate), you got 3.5 days of growth.
How do you calculate those numbers to consider it balanced?
How can it be a reasonable investment to get a psycaster to do that rather than plant a few more plants or buy the resources ? I do understand that if it is too strong, it can have undesirable effects. But ... I fail to see how those can be reasonable values.