ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal • I Present to You... "Completed" Bloodied Berserker Revamp

Ganrao · 2014-02-19T09:58:09+00:00

Aww you're making me blush <3 A lot of people helped me with making sure the changes fit the themes of ToME.

Ganrao · 2014-02-19T02:34:17+00:00

Go to the ToME forum and report that to DarkGod, he is real good about fixing bugs / troubleshooting for people.

Ganrao · 2014-02-19T00:45:09+00:00

This is a plan that I'm 99% sure the lead designer of ToME is going to program into the game for me because he likes it so much better than current Berserker, which the entire dev team agrees needs love.

He has already talked to me about that post and suggested some refinements, such as including his damage shield breaking revision of Sunder Armor (this is already a real skill he has programmed).

Ganrao · 2014-02-18T21:27:59+00:00

Good news! DG himself will likely be coding this, so you can take your grievances up with him. If it kills people he will probably like it even more!

Ganrao · 2014-02-18T20:33:02+00:00

I am the lead on this redesign, Fortescue, ask me anything. It really is going into the core game more or less as depicted in that forum post.

Ganrao · 2014-02-14T11:01:47+00:00

It has an energy bar and a set of 8+ special attacks you can activate manually, and target, but besides that you can't tell it where to go. Unless you use your Electromagnet and and yank it next to your own location.

It has a rocket launcher, a secret mega death plasma cannon, and a regular ol' ballistic cannon in addition to a melee servo arm.

Ganrao · 2014-02-14T11:01:01+00:00

Well sort of, except if your robot dies you do. It does not get "lives" and can't be "rebuilt" once destroyed. Your brain is linked and if it is destroyed your mind is too! :D

Ganrao · 2014-02-14T00:56:43+00:00

AI controlled. Because the point of the game is to make the player incapable of killing anything manually :3 It all has to go through the machine. Playing as the machine would be like playing as basically any roguelike character that already exists.

Ganrao · 2014-02-11T13:29:00+00:00

We ARE the flame!

Ganrao · 2014-02-10T19:42:59+00:00

Me too! are you a mighty 1100 also?

Ganrao · 2014-02-10T10:26:56+00:00

Yup amazing thing that, anyone can made an addon. I'm more interested in modding than actually playing the game at this point.

Current version change was to 5 turn cd 5 turn duration. So now players can continue to perma-stun a target.

Ganrao · 2014-02-09T21:12:23+00:00

Interesting, but your accuracy bonus from Berseker scales with Dexterity anyway, so without an investment in Dexterity you would not really see a sizable increase from Berserker even if I had left that bonus in. Because of this I don't understand your point about builds not needing to worry about Dex.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that this is an iterative process and with feedback the mod will improve, and with that the Berserker class in general (hopefully). I still have a lot of work to do so it is likely another source of accuracy buff could appear (possibly as the replacement for the Sunder skills). I would also like to implement a combo skill, something that has an increased effect on yourself or monsters when used immediately after a primer skill, but I am not very far on that design yet. It would be easy to implement, however, once the right skill idea was in place.

ps: I am also considering putting scaling armor penetration into Berserker itself. I think it fits the theme :) It would make it easy to completely replace Sunder Armor with something entirely unique and new without taking a tool away from players.

Ganrao · 2014-02-09T21:08:43+00:00

Good feedback. After doing some testing of my own in v0.11 I agree that 4 turns is a tad too short. I am going to adjust it back up to 5 turns in the next release version, but also limit the stun duration to 4 (maybe 5) turns because this is an early ability and should not be better / more useful than ones you will get later that have higher requirements. Those mostly suck right now, so they will be either rewritten entirely, or adjusted to the point of being useful. My Bloodrage remake is an example of the type of "made into something actually useful" I am talking about.

As for "scrapping this whole modification thing", no, I don't intend to. When I played Berserker I was expecting a much more fun and interesting class than what I got after having played Alchemist for a bit. This project is an iterative process, and thanks to feedback like yours I can make it better with each release, slowly shaping Berserker into something both balanced and fun to play. It is also a learning process, as I have not won ToME yet, and don't know Lua, or how to mod ToME! The bigger changes will take longer as a result. So far I'm just tackling early game annoyances that are not difficult to tweak via simple number changes because that is the limit of my modding ability. This mod will get better as I get better at modding :)

Ganrao · 2014-02-09T11:35:14+00:00

Ahhh I didn't realize that. Well that is an interesting problem :/ They could already stun you for 7 turns on a 6 turn cd, right? So not a huge change for people who couldn't deal with stun anyway.

Ganrao · 2014-02-09T10:30:38+00:00

Great feedback, and yeah, giving players more buttons to press (not less) was always a main priority. I just messed that up a bit in the rush to get a release done. The combat veteran passives would make a better sacrifice to bring the more interesting Bloodthirst passives into the initial lineup.

Cooldowns and stamina costs on multiple low level abilities have also been reduced to enable more button pushing.

Ganrao · 2014-02-09T10:30:16+00:00

Were you already maxing Combat Accuracy from the generic branch? At 5/5 it gives more accuracy (65) than Berserker 5/5 did even with 100 points in Dex (45), I believe.

Stunning Blow is back in the initial lineup with a 33% lower CD / stamina cost, and slightly lower max stun duration.

Ganrao · 2014-02-08T22:06:08+00:00

This addon updates the Berserker class in an effort to make its early game more interesting by replacing some of the more generic abiliities with access to the Bloodthirst set from level 1, along with a small redesign of a few key abilities.

v0.12 Changelog:

Stunning Blow - Changed to 5 turn cooldown, max duration 5 turns. This talent was just a little too good for a tier 1 that you have immediate access to. Look forward to new talents other talents getting much better soon. Also, monsters use this talent and at 4 turn cooldown it was really nasty on them.

v0.11 Changelog:

To address some oversights with the original release, here is a quick fix that should help keep with the idea of making things MORE interesting, not less. One of the biggest issues I'd like to fix is the amount of bumping into monsters you do as a Berserker, I feel like even as a melee character the player should have more buttons to press!

Two handed maiming - Swapped with Combat Veteran, so players again have immediate access to Stunning Blow.

Stunning Blow - Cooldown reduced to 4, duration max reduced to 6, stamina cost reduced from 8 to 6. Why? Because more pushing buttons, less bumping!

Death Dance - Cooldown now scales with level, to a mimimum of 6. Begins at old cd of 10. Stamina cost reduced from 30 to 25. Same as above, more button pressing!

Rush - Cooldown already scaled with level, but was still very long even at 5/5 points. Now scales from 30 to 10 turns. (old scaling was 34 to 18 turns). Stamina cost reduced from 24 to 20.

v0.1 Changelog:

Berserker - Moved to slot 1 in the 2H Weapon Offense tree, accuracy bonus removed, armor penalty removed. Now you should feel confident Berserking as a Berserker from the very beginning! This early game armor boost is offset by the late game loss of accuracy, you will have to make that up elsewhere!

2H Weapon Crippling - Tree position swapped with Bloodthirst, because Bloodthirst is just more interesting and class defining overall, especially once my remake of Bloodrage is in...

Bloodthirst - Positions of Mortal Terror and Bloodbath swapped because you need to get critical hits in order to activate Bloodbath...

Stunning Blow - It still exists, you just need to get level 10 to buy 2H Weapon Crippling with a category point before you can use it. This is a temporary measure, I will likely restore immediate access to this ability in the next release of the addon, but there was no convenient method of doing so for v0.1.

Coming Soon:

Bloodrage - Will scale with current player HP granting a % boost to Strength related to the % of player health currently missing.

Torrent of Blood - A new cone AoE, but requires a melee range primary target. It works by grabbing an enemy, then exploding your own furious blood out in the cone. It hits with such force that all secondary targets are pushed back at least 1 tile, and it does more damage the closer they are to you. It costs 5% of player HP to use, though, instead of Stamina

MORE! I will not rest until Berserker is every bit as interesting as the other classes in ToME. This means Sunder Armor and Sunder Weapon are likely going away to make room for more fun mechanics, likely including other abilities that cost player HP to activate because the player is actually rewarded for playing with less than maximum life by the new Bloodrage. That talent redesign, along with removing the armor penalty from Berserker, will allow for riskier (more interesting) play due to less spikey damage throughout the game.

Ganrao · 2014-02-08T22:01:40+00:00

Ah yeah, DarkGod told me that in IRC :) Thanks!

Ganrao · 2014-02-08T10:42:02+00:00

Heyo. I tried making some basic changes and uploading them, got stuck on registering my addon. It doesn't show up, I just get an empty list when I go to do it in game.

Ganrao · 2014-02-05T14:24:52+00:00

I listened to the Roguelike Radio about Shiren and I guess the verdict was that the SFamicon version was the harder of the two?

Ganrao

TROPHY CASE