[Traits] "What is overshadowed, underpowered, impractical?" - discussions

Use this thread to discuss whatever traits you consider either neglected, overshadowed, underpowered, or otherwise "not worth picking", compared to other options.

Here's my beef on them:

Spoiler:

Discussion ho!

I disagree with quite a lot on this list.

The bloodied traits are fine because they work with the bloodied combat talents.

Guardian's Oath is important as it lets you do its effect without attacking and it's easy enough to end up with a build without any attacks. Also you can have both it and Iron Warden.

Fool Me Twice is actually really good with the right build. Anything involving Critfisher for example (though not limited just to that).

Falling With Style makes up for its hard to use randomness by being very strong. Once you've been KOed, it's not likely hard to get KOed again. And again. And again.

Conjurer's Pet is fine as it is. It's a bonus ally with half your HP that can take hits for you as well as do an attack. If it wasn't possible to kill it off in battle, it would require a large raise the strength of monsters in the fight.

Conjurer's Artillery is fine. You just need someone in the party to have Monkey's Backfist or the Hookblade.


Agreement that I have something to add to: Warlord's Special needs to apply to more things or there needs to be more talents it applies to.

Well what I want to know, in regards to the conjurer's pet, is why there isn't some option of giving its owner a re-summon at a cost, either for a pip cost (a costly one most likely, like the fire giant), or in the form of a trait you take to be able to do so (of course, any of the "pet death" effects would probably need to be 1/battle then), or both. Considering the amount of traits one can invest in it, or the combat talents that might rely on it, losing the pet early (through bad luck, AOE attacks, or using its interrupt) can bring ones whole combat build crashing down.

I'm equally curious as to why there aren't any traits that allow conjurers to get around the conjuration vanishing rule (especially for conjuration weapons, easily the biggest weakness of such), or a trait-version of the no-pip-loss armor.

I'd just like to point out, whatever trait I submitted that inspired Falling with style, was probably much better than Falling with style.

Have to disagree on Seize the Initiative, I've used that talent to murder entire rooms before. Because it isn't limited to one creature, or one trigger if you build a AOE guy with good initiative or someone who can make a couple multi-attacks on turn one you'll get multiple instances of the 1d12. If you can proc it at least 3 times (which is possible if you build to do that) it becomes over the curve. It does, however require a build to do that but alot of the traits do.

Don't know about anything specifically underappreciated, but I know I would like to see one or two traits beyond the Duelist set that increase damage output.

In fact, Duelist. It used to just be 2 extra damage to Single Target attacks. How on earth was that too powerful for a trait, so they had to split it into two levels? Especially since its ONLY Single target attacks. I mean, I guess if tacked onto Crescendo then it might be really good and effective, but on anything else its more of a "well at least I didn't only do 1 damage" kind of thing.

It got hilariously over the curve with mult-attack builds, and was under the curve without them. The only build that can utilize it to its fullest extent is multi-attack builds and we were having number issues balancing it as one trait. By splitting it into two traits and upping the overall effect it became balanced.

Bronymous wrote:In fact, Duelist. It used to just be 2 extra damage to Single Target attacks. How on earth was that too powerful for a trait, so they had to split it into two levels? Especially since its ONLY Single target attacks. I mean, I guess if tacked onto Crescendo then it might be really good and effective, but on anything else its more of a "well at least I didn't only do 1 damage" kind of thing.

I think the answer to that question is the recent multi-attack rebalance: Combine duelist with 2-3 different single target attack abilities (standard, minor, items...), and it adds up to decent damage each round, for free. There's also the fact that a lot of the talents deal damage to a single target, so there's a lot of stuff that benefits it. It's also pretty good for any "low guaranteed damage" abilities, like whirling blades is now.

Zarhon wrote:

Friendly Fire
You and your allies gain resist 5 against your attacks

Not strong enough to be reliable, and thus not very worthwhile to take for any build that works with random creature targeting / wild lightning special. This probably needs an "upgrade trait" that completely negates ally damage, or allows rerolls/target re-selects.

Oh... Sorry! Didn’t See You There!
Whenever you deal 5 or more damage to an ally, that ally may flip a coin. If heads, that ally gains 2 pips.

Comes in direct conflict with the Friendly Fire trait, and unreliable.

I'm not quite sure how you see them as being in "direct conflict," to my mind they are in perfect harmony and there isn't much point in taking one without the other. When you have both, if you hit an ally with an attack, if it's 5 or less damage they don't get hurt and if it's more than 5 they have a chance to get PiPs. And a 50% chance to gain 2 PiPs? That's pretty good, really. Didn't it use to be "roll 2d8 and gain a PiP for each 8 you get"? Or am I thinking of another trait?

But in order for them to gain pips when you have both, you have to be doing 10 damage since the resist 5 stops damage from being dealt.

With the friendly fire resist trait, it makes it significantly harder to trigger the pip-gain trait. Like Matthew said, a minimum of 10 damage, which kinda makes it impossible to trigger from anything lower than 1d10 (wild lightning's 1d10 effect has a 1/10 chance of triggering, unaided). So you have have a "blind spot" between 1-4 damage where you can't trigger the other trait, and you have to deal A LOT of damage to get a 50% chance of giving your allies 2 pips, which I'm pretty sure is not worth the cost (5+ hp).

Also, I noticed that the friendly fire trait affects only attacks - so anything you inflict without attacks, or doesn't count as one (ongoing damage and such) is ignored by the resist.

thematthew wrote:But in order for them to gain pips when you have both, you have to be doing 10 damage since the resist 5 stops damage from being dealt.

Ahh. Hmmm. I realize I was interpreting it slightly differently (such that 5 damage is 5 damage, even if it gets absorbed by Resist). Since I'm not sure that's correct, I've asked about it in the Simple Questions thread.

Yep, I was 100% wrong on that one. So yeah, they're basically either/or: stop low amount of damage or have a good chance to give PiPs at high amounts of damage.

I'd actually like to see this small but specific change made

Conjurer’s Pet - Revised:

Upping the damage to 1d8 means that it can be used with the Special Summon trait without having to jump through even more hoops.  It also makes Bite and Farblast trade offs instead of Farblast simply being better.

A few of the Conjurer's Pet abilities actually seem sorta combo oriented but I may have to look over them a bit.

I'm not entirely certain if this counts, but I feel like the "Handi-Capable" tree could do with a lot of fleshing out. The major problem that strikes me is that all of the traits seem to lack synergy with the combat system as a whole. First of all, Plague Eater gives you regeneration for, admirable, but it is also /very/ risky to try and build around something as prohibitive as save ends condition. Say, for example, that I am willing to blind myself for the 4 regeneration. Very nice, but at the same time, that's a 50/50 chance of failing that attack, then a 50/50 chance of losing that regeneration. The odds are that in at least one of those scenarios you are losing. And, while the concept is to take a bad thing and make it slightly better, which I will not deny that it does, the odds of a player using a Combat Trait to allay what is mostly a minor nuisance is rather small.

Granted, the four effects that benefit you total do work rather well together. For example, if I have all four traits that effect me when I'm subjected to a (save ends) condition, then I could be getting +6+1d4 to damage, Regeneration 4, and earning 5 free temp hitpoints. The problem is that ongoing damage, even with 4 regen, can be prohibitive, and that 5 free temp hitpoints can get eaten fast, not to mention that I am blinded, meaning that the nice extra damage I'm getting might not look so hot, especially considering I can't see it. (Yuk yuk yuk.)

Ultimately, the cost is, from a player's perspective, not bad, but the key thing here is that the cost ultimately renders them hard to build around this is, in my opinion, much more problematic. The reasoning being that if I can have a very high cost for a very high reward, I will take it (in my session a couple of people are already considering Gambler's Armor, despite it being painful to even consider, for example). However, when I am not giving enough benefits to what is essentially strategically crippling myself, a player will take one look, think "too hard", and look for other traits to take, even reoptimizing.

The solution, I think, is more traits that build off this concept. Give the Blindfighters a higher chance to hit when blinded, say 2/3s rather than 1/2. Make it so that people who are suffering from ongoing effects have a choice to end or continue a save ends effect (this one might need finagling, especially with Regeneration). The option to lower the amount of damage from save ends without removing the effect would be nice. More synergy within the skill tree would be nice, and more status-specific benefits would be nice.

This is mostly just me spitballing, but I think most of it is intelligent, so I would request that you take a look at it, think about it, and give me suggestions, critiques, etc.

Agree on blind-fighting. It really can't benefit from itself - if you miss, you not only not get the trait's benefit, but you lose out on a number of pips (and thus, make repeating the attack a no-go), and become unlikely to benefit from the blindness next turn (since you probably save against it, or can't perform an attack it would benefit from). It's a risk with a reward that isn't worth it, and it doesn't even apply on most attacks - many attacks don't even use damage (so +damage becomes worthless on them), but they can still 'miss' and not happen due to blindness.

I'd say it would need to have one of the following added to its current +damage effect, for it to be a viable pick:

1) Gaining a "free" save ends to get rid of the blindness, as an interrupt/reaction, if you use an attack whilst blinded.
2) Have the trait passively prevent you from losing pips when you "miss" due to blindness.
3) Have you flip two coins for the "blindness" effect.
4) Have you gain a minor (or even standard!) action to perform, if you miss from blindness.
5) Have you gain pips if you miss.
6) Have the attack be considered weakened, rather than miss completely, whilst blinded.
7) You automatically apply a random status effect to the enemy whenever you miss (e.g. vuln, ongoing damage, daze, stun...).

I've found "Gusher" to be a pretty good trait - it had a number of abilities that benefit it or allow its 'application', as well as items.

The passive "gain something from a save ends on you" abilities I've found to be a bit, well, lackluster - they're good, but not quite good enough to pick on their own.

It's also worth noting that the armor that seems like it should be a natural choice for builds that want a (save ends) condition on at all times, Demonscale, Already grants you regen 3 (and resist), which cuts down considerably on the utility of gaining Regen 4 from Plague Eater.

Excuse me, but I'm rather new to the website, so I was simply wondering if there is a mathematical conversion for the value of any particular traits? I was wondering because, by logic, the average damage gained from Blindfighting would be 3 and the average from Gusher would be 2.5. Granted, you can also fairly easily argue that you get a bit more from Blindfighting because you can also lose pips, but I was just wondering if there was a standard to go off of.

I also think that pip-builders that inflict statuses upon you other than "Dazed" would be relatively effective for a "Handi-Capable" build, because as it stands I'm pretty sure there are only a couple.

Also, my information might not be up to date: I had heard that they were revamping the combat system, but hadn't seen any threads related to it. What's going on with that?

Well, traits cost 2000 worth of combat gold. That's their general level of 'power', unless they have prerequisites which increase the investment cost.

Abilities granted by traits, equipment, or abilities are measured in their pip cost - it's been talked about and mentioned in a few threads, but that's sort of impossible to find unless you know where that was. Specific values I don't know right now. You'd have to ask the devs. One place that has math is the special moves design thread.

On that note: Devs, could you make a sticky post/thread that details most of the math behind some of these things? Notably for the various power-cost-pip-gold conversions for combat, destiny utility 'values', etc...?

Combat redesign I have no idea what's going on with - devs have been quiet about it.

Gusher is probably valued as such because it requires you to take damage - it's pretty much "damage for damage". Blindness effects can be ignored or avoided with the right talents or a bit of strategy.

DrownedChampion wrote:The solution, I think, is more traits that build off this concept. Give the Blindfighters a higher chance to hit when blinded, say 2/3s rather than 1/2.

Nice idea. Maybe something like:

Fighting Blind
Whenever you would make an attack while Blinded, roll a d6 instead of flipping a coin. On a 3 or higher, the attack hits, otherwise it misses.

Theoretically you could also use Unacceptable on it to decrease it to a 1/6 chance of missing.

DrownedChampion wrote:Make it so that people who are suffering from ongoing effects have a choice to end or continue a save ends effect (this one might need finagling, especially with Regeneration).

That wouldn't really work with that one move that gives Regeneration (save ends), but perhaps there could be something that gives a slight penalty to your saves.

DrownedChampion wrote:The option to lower the amount of damage from save ends without removing the effect would be nice.

Sounds like you're describing Resist. I thought there was a trait that gave you Resist while you were suffering from a save ends effect, but there wasn't when I looked. Maybe something like:

Grit
You gain Resist 2 while suffering from a save ends condition.


Regarding the combat revamp, I know it's ongoing. I'm guessing it just isn't yet in a state where it's ready to be revealed.