*Chloroform sounds fairly overpowered for a level 1 skill, so why be against a little nerf to it?
That's a silly thing to say. Just because you get the skill at level 1 does not mean it should turn to garbage as you level up. All skills in this game scale with level, which means their power level stays roughly the same over time.
Enemies at level 20 have about 2700 MA on the LOW end of the scale, and both Chloroform and Gag Order do no damage to Vitality. So I disagree with you that Chloroform is overpowered.
But it is up to Larian how they want to handle Chloroform/Gag Order. I did offer the option at the end to Increase Chloroform's AP cost and reduce Gag Order's AP cost, but in addition to my dislike of the idea, it's uncreative and makes them pretty much redundant.
*Taunt really suffers from its enemy/team disparity. I do agree removing the armor-check, but changing the enemy effect to something like 50% damage to non-taunter enemies while under the effect, rather than have the AI use up your entire inventory.
That's another thing which could work well and work for both enemy and ally, because it would no longer remove control from the player characters.
*Shackles of Pain shouldn't be countered by armor. It does no damage at all, takes 2AP, and the usefulness depends on taking damage (to which most of the times enemies utilising this spell get killed by their allies to have effect, ruining their AP in the process so, yeah...) for which players take less than enemies anyway (also the reason why damage reflection generally sucks in these types of games, D:OS2 included). The few times enemies used it on me it was rarily something I bothered being worried about. So removing it makes it a better tool for them, and us. Rather than just being blandishly useless as it is now.
I don't agree with this, because there is no counter to this spell at all except having the victim know Shackles of Pain and cast it onto the enemy who cast it on them, AND it lasts for three turns. You cannot do anything to remove this spell, and three turns is a lot when you can't remove a status.
Additionally, it's a lot more of a pain than you believe it is, because enemies exploit this by ATTACKING EACH OTHER just to kill your party members faster, and given the big disparity in health pools, damage, and armor, that's a lot more dangerous to you than them.
Phoenix Dive. In Beta it offered fire immunity for 1 round so you wouldn't burn yourself with it. Which, you know... makes sense. Now each time it's used you hurt yourself with it too. Why was this changed?
Dunno. Maybe to discourage its use for teleporting into Necrofire? The fire immunity could come back.
Great post and great changes. I dont want to be a party crasher but they will not read this. They will not do anything about this.
I'm actually quite confident that you're incorrect about this.
