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

If Death is Power is lowered to a -3, it gets too close to free - because a standard action can give you 3 pips.

ZamuelNow wrote:Been thinking about Granite Axe recently and it's kinda weird.  In a vacuum, it's really subpar.  However, it actually does get a fair boost from outside sources if treated as just survivable damage rather than a pure tank.  The revised Crescendo alone makes the damage output jump up there.  Still at absolute minimum the ult should apply a weaken to enemies, or even outright prevent them from attacking until the next turn, to reduce the suicide factor and make it less of a newbie trap.

Well the fact that its a conjuration weapon means that even with stuff like crescendo to buff it, you risk losing that damage output to a stray attack / hit during that one round (most non-minion enemies can more than easily take out half your hp, which would get rid of any temporary hp). It's a bit impractical to combo regular talents and conjuration weapons in general (due to combined costs of both and the minimum of one round between them), without focusing soley on that, which is impossible without a lot of gold (for stuff like reloader, mystic sheath, rabbit hat...).

Is it just me, or are the conjuration weapon upgrades severely limited, as far as the traits/items go? There are a bunch of items to buy, but those are mostly expensive, meaning the conjuration weapons are largely useless for "fresh players". The best/reliable way to improve upon conjuration weapons are items (unavailable at low levels, and often limited), or traits, and the traits that noticably help conjuration weapons are few to choose from. And most of such extras that boost conjuration weapons are largely identical - almost all revolve around reducing the cost of the initial summon of the conjuration weapon, and do nothing to boost the actual abilities gained from it.

Perhaps there could be additions to the conjuration weapons actual combat aspects, rather than just the initial summon? For instance:

Spectral Familiarity - Trait
You gain a +2 to values (total) you roll on combat talents granted from conjuration weapons.

Weightless Weapon - 2/battle - Trait
Trigger: You summon a conjuration weapon.
Effect: You immediately gain an extra standard action to use.

Spectral Anchoring - 1/battle - Trait
Trigger: A conjured weapon would vanish.*
Effect: Flip a coin. If heads, the conjured weapon doesn't vanish. If tails, it vanishes at the end of the next turn instead.**

* From a KO, a combat ability that makes it vanish, or other effects other than dismissing it manually.
** Or sooner, if another "vanish" effect goes into effect.

Spectral Funnel - Trait
The pip costs of combat talents granted from conjuration weapons are reduced by 1. These cannot be reduced below -1.

[-3] Everlasting Misery - Interrupt Utility
Trigger – An enemy makes a saving throw and you dislike the result.
Effect - The triggering creature rerolls the saving throw.

I'm sort of surprised nobody's mentioned this one yet.

This move is over its cost. a -3 interrupt that aims to disrupt something like this should remove the equivalent of a standard action. That's how misdirection was originally priced: 3 pips in return for negating a standard action's worth of damage. It did more than that, so the cost was boosted, but Everlasting Misery does a lot less, because it applies to a single saving throw. It's extremely good at making that saving throw fail (see below), but one saving throw is not the equivalence of a standard action. I would suggest a drop to a [-2] interrupt, since [-1] would be excessive for something so good at its job, but it needs either a cost reduction or a power boost.

The following is some math that shows off how potent Everlasting Misery is at killing Saving Throws:
Basically, another way to phrase everlasting misery is "Target enemy must roll twice on their next saving throw and take the worst result." Mathematically, this means the enemy has to roll 2 consecutive successes, which squares their percent chance of success, dropping it to:
25% if no penalties to saving throws are applied.
56% if the enemy has +5 to saves (which I have seen before)
16% if a -2 penalty is applied
9% if a -4 penalty is applied

You're not factoring in the condition that you might be keeping them from saving against. If it's domination, stun or similar - that's far more valuable than keeping them from saving against 5 ongoing damage.

Thunderstorm and Daredevil's Rush...are pretty bad.

Thunderstorm:

Good things about it: It's fun. You pay X, and you launch X attacks that hit things you didn't intend to.
You get to roll a lot of dice.
It's good if you've split the party and are solo-ing a crowd.
Bad things: Random creature target means you'll hit your allies, potentially meaning you spent your turn and a fair amount of energy only being counter-productive.
It's less than useless in fights against a big bad with the party.
The damage output is incredibly underwhelming, especially when compared to...any talent. Stab and Fireswath make good comparisons, as they both deal equivalent damage. You roll an additional d10 with Thunderstorm, sure, but I don't think the increased crit chance offsets the potential worthlessness of the talent.

Stab:

Fireswath:

Daredevil's Rush:

This is supposed to be a high-risk, high-reward sorta thing, right? It's...so much damage.
Compare it to Supercharge. +3 for 1d8 damage to you, with a chance of striking an enemy as well; whereas for the same energy gain you can use DDR and take three times that damage, and end up dazed.

Supercharge:

How does that make sense balance-wise? I understand DDR has to be somewhat less powerful than equal energy gain talents, but that's so much loss for so little gain.
I'd like to suggest re-instating the "If at least one of the dice is an 8, halve the damage taken." It's powerful and fits the theme of the talent, taking a large damage risk for large pip gain, while trying to get that 8 so you take overall slightly less damage.

One of the most powerful builds I've seen used Thunderstorm along with the friendly-fire style traits to crit like mad and throw huge bolts of lightning around.

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:One of the most powerful builds I've seen used Thunderstorm along with the friendly-fire style traits to crit like mad and throw huge bolts of lightning around.

Does that not mean that it's still bad, after all the fact that it can be really good if you do a opmized build for it, yet if not it's kinda not so great?

Except that you don't even have to optimize for it's use. You just have to take this trait:

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

The average damage of Thunderstorm is 5.25. Because you take half of 2d10, the damage is more focused on the middle range of damage (3- than it is on the out range (1, 2, 9, and 10). For example, you have a 1% chance of dealing 10 damage with any 1 thunderbolt, compared to the 10% chance of dealing 10 damage with stab. So with this one trait, your party damage becomes negligible, especially if your party has access to any sort of Regeneration. (Soothing Presence, anybody?) Having said that, it's damage output is still rather low, but it really can't be finagled with until crits have a mathematical definition, at which point the system will be overhauled anyways.

tl;dr;tmm (too long; didn't read; too much math): Thunderstorm is really not as much of a loose cannon talent as it might seem, requiring single, relatively obvious, trait choice to shore up your party against it. Power level issues are very debatable, but pointless until crits are better defined.

On a last note, with a second trait, you can spam Thunderstorm for two or three consecutive turns:

I Meant To Do That
Whenever you roll a 1 on a d8, d10 or d12; you may gain 1 energy.

I've seen it happen, though I won't go into details.

sunbeam wrote:Except that you don't even have to optimize for it's use. You just have to take this trait:

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

The average damage of Thunderstorm is 5.25. Because you take half of 2d10, the damage is more focused on the middle range of damage (3- than it is on the out range (1, 2, 9, and 10). For example, you have a 1% chance of dealing 10 damage with any 1 thunderbolt, compared to the 10% chance of dealing 10 damage with stab. So with this one trait, your party damage becomes negligible, especially if your party has access to any sort of Regeneration. (Soothing Presence, anybody?) Having said that, it's damage output is still rather low, but it really can't be finagled with until crits have a mathematical definition, at which point the system will be overhauled anyways.

tl;dr;tmm (too long; didn't read; too much math): Thunderstorm is really not as much of a loose cannon talent as it might seem, requiring single, relatively obvious, trait choice to shore up your party against it. Power level issues are very debatable, but pointless until crits are better defined.

On a last note, with a second trait, you can spam Thunderstorm for two or three consecutive turns:

I Meant To Do That
Whenever you roll a 1 on a d8, d10 or d12; you may gain 1 energy.

I've seen it happen, though I won't go into details.

Nope, in this system one trait to improve one talent is optimizing it... That's what was the assement for bronyoumus' Hypber Beam Talent if it did a self-stun thing for a turn...

So, I don't know if this thread has much relevance given the new system coming up, but I thought I'd post something that's been bugging me for a while.

"Exploit Weakness" seems just a tad weak:

[-3] Exploit Weakness – Standard Attack
Deal 2d8 damage to target creature. If that creature is suffering from vulnerability, deal 3d8 damage to it instead.

3d8 seems a tad weak with 13.5 average damage. Compare this to Heartseeker (2d12, 13 average damage) and Furious Rage (2d10 damage normally and a whopping 3d12 damage when bloodied) which have the same energy cost..

Personally, I'm still bugged that Granite Axe's suicidal ultimate never got fixed, despite one of the proposals being noted as a decent stopgap. There's another combat talent with a similar issue though I'd need to check and see which.

Dusk Raven wrote:3d8 seems a tad weak with 13.5 average damage. Compare this to Heartseeker (2d12, 13 average damage) and Furious Rage (2d10 damage normally and a whopping 3d12 damage when bloodied) which have the same energy cost..

Technically the 3d8 only happens if the creature is suffering Vulnerability, so the average damage gets adjusted up by a minimum of 1 (14.5, better than Heartseeker) and potentially a lot more.

Philadelphus wrote:

Dusk Raven wrote:3d8 seems a tad weak with 13.5 average damage. Compare this to Heartseeker (2d12, 13 average damage) and Furious Rage (2d10 damage normally and a whopping 3d12 damage when bloodied) which have the same energy cost..

Technically the 3d8 only happens if the creature is suffering Vulnerability, so the average damage gets adjusted up by a minimum of 1 (14.5, better than Heartseeker) and potentially a lot more.

True, but you can apply vulnerability to any of those other attacks and they'll get the boost two. Never mind when you don't have vulnerability, in which case it the average damage drops to that of a -1 talent.

Dusk Raven wrote:

Philadelphus wrote:

Dusk Raven wrote:3d8 seems a tad weak with 13.5 average damage. Compare this to Heartseeker (2d12, 13 average damage) and Furious Rage (2d10 damage normally and a whopping 3d12 damage when bloodied) which have the same energy cost..

Technically the 3d8 only happens if the creature is suffering Vulnerability, so the average damage gets adjusted up by a minimum of 1 (14.5, better than Heartseeker) and potentially a lot more.

True, but you can apply vulnerability to any of those other attacks and they'll get the boost two. Never mind when you don't have vulnerability, in which case it the average damage drops to that of a -1 talent.

Furthermore, the fact that you need to apply a vulnerability effect means you have to do one or more of the following:
1) Spend a minor, standard, or limited free action to apply vulnerability to something.*
2) Spend pips and/or x/day 'charges' to do 1), thus making "Exploit Weakness" cost more than [-3] to perform.*
3) Wait a turn, during which your opponent, if the vuln is "save ends", has a chance to remove it, forcing 1) and 2) to be repeated.
4) Spend a standard/pips to receive 3d8 damage + vuln effect trigger.

*Exception is if you have a cooperative ally with vuln effects, in which case your effectiveness comes at their partial cost. This rarely happens, though, as players rarely build specs that rely off another player's abilities for obvious reliability reasons.

Also, it should be noted that any conceivable metric for pricing a vulnerability move would expect the applier to proc said vuln on at least their standard actions, so you've already paid energy to get damage from vuln, and should not have to pay it again.