The
second part of my playthrough is up. Did some prison cleaning here, and tackled the
Dallis/Bishop fight near the end. That fight took me way too long. It was hard not relying on magic surface + AoE shenanigans, haha. I had to cheese the flee mechanic, and barricading pathways with chests/reinforced crates.
Also
Paladin Cork went kind of nuts after we saved his life.
Cool! Watched some of the stream, but my internet is slow so it cuts out a lot for me
Satisfying to see my mod played from another perspective though. Glad lucky charm seems to be working out, hopefully not giving you too much good stuff early on though. Also note that enemies receive extra loot from the buffs, so it's not just loot from lucky charm you're seeing. I meant to add some kind of visual cue to show when lucky charm has activated on a target.
Ah, no worries. And yes, I was well aware that champions specifically drop more loot. I view them as walking loot-bags now.
As far as combos, masochistic melody and creative burden can be good together. Resonance, Feedback, Swindle, Rhyme, Inspiration of Pain, and Creative Burden can be comboed in many different ways offensively or for spreading around buffs. Song of Living Nightmare + Soundwave + feedback can be a good combo. Lullaby and Dream Scream is an obvious one, and also lullaby and song of living nightmares (which causes madness to sleeping targets).
My current issue with figuring out Bard combos is that I decided to go for some weird builds, and had everybody go physical damage. So I've had to scrap some of the Bard spells that rely on magic armor being depleted (for instance, in my streams, I kept trying to Swindle and forgetting that it's blocked by magic armor).
Song of Living Nightmare is great fun when the pieces are set and you dial debuffs up a notch. Song of Guilt is handy as well, and Barbarian's Delight has been, well... A delight. I haven't tested it with totems, but I imagine using the negative buff part of it would be effective.
Reposition has been really useful as well. Using it with summons feels very satisfying, especially if the person casting it has a height advantage, and can shuffle around party members and save them some AP that would have been used for movement.
I just started working Inspiration of Woe into my build, but I like the idea of turning negative statuses into a positive effect. I can see a Glass Cannon frontline build in the works, using Masochistic Melody + Woe to get some craziness happening.
Tame the Chaos is one of my new favorite spells. It's so simple, but I love the utility of creating a small safety circle in the middle of a lava lake.
So it turns out a rudimentary status resist system wasn't too hard to implement. What do people think of this: armor only completely blocks hard CC like stun and knockdown, frozen, fear, chicken, sleeping, charm, etc. Most other statuses can be applied through armor, but your chance to resist is determined by:
your % of your current armor of the relevant type + 1% * your constitution + 3% * your perserverance.
So someone with 50% magic armor, 15 constitution, and 3 perseverance would have a 50+15+9=74% chance to resist burning. Does this make sense and sound like it helps with some problems? Armor is still very useful, but not completely binary. Haven't really tested it thoroughly, but my initial impressions is there's a whole new layer of decision making by evaluating status application chance, and that combat has a much smoother flow from healthy to debuffed characters.
That sounds really interesting, and definitely worthy of some testing. Being able to apply bleeds, burning, etc. to enemies without depleting their armor would make those effects feel more beneficial, as right now, it's usually just overkill on an enemy already headed for the grave.
I'm not a huge fan of trying to balance with RNG, but this system is nice because the power swings from RNG rolls will tend to be less dramatic than in the first game (especially with my nerfed stun and knockdown effects). Also the RNG is more interactive than the first game, since armor is the primary factor, and resist chances overall will be very low without it.
I wasn't a huge fan of the RNG in the first game either, status-wise. It felt like such a waste when you'd try to debuff an enemy and it just completely misses.
With statuses like oil/slow bypassing armor, other minor status having a chance to bypass armor may feel right.
Some ideas:
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Come Together is an interesting ability. It really made me wish Warfare had a similar ability that works on enemies. Something like a small cone attack that pulls enemies closer. It would be sort of a "soft taunt", in that you could use it to pull an already clustered group of enemies closer, within attack of opportunity range (or set up an AoE combo).
Push Off feels somewhat less than ideal currently, given that it's an AoE circle around the caster. If it were in a similar shape to Battle Stomp (with shorter range), you could use it to push away an attacker, or push an ally closer to an enemy. If it worked on objects too (like pushing a barrel into an enemy), I could see some funny scenarios cropping up, but that may be more complicated to script.
I love the changes to Five-Star Diner. I find it very useful now. My flying dwarf Walnut has it, and I keep being happily surprised every time I remember it's there - A free heal/buff per turn is very nice, and being able to swap weapons to fit the situation is handy in its own right.
