Warlock Enhancements: Tainted Scholar

[btolson]

Thanks for the continued feedback, trying to catch up on replying. We've been reading along, but been very busy here recently (along with U.S. Holiday on Monday).

I guess this is a bit out of scope now, but did you happen to look into Poison damage as a spell type / Creeping Doom? It would be nice if that functioned correctly at some point.

[gwonbush]

I really like how that shows up on Weapon Bond (and I believe Spirit in PA). I'm less of a fan of needing to hotbar something that I will never, ever click, but I can live with that rather than another constantly-changing-position buff lol (Although +25 USP and +2 DC is something that I probably would click every so often, unlike the Weapon Bond clicky...)

If the mechanics are the same as Weapon Bond, all abilities that use Depravity as a resource should show the amount you have.

[Requiro]

As general note: We wait for Lamannia. The main problem is that we don’t know speed of Eldritch Blast. And that is primary focus on this tree. Before that, there is little to improve/test.

General opinion and suggestions

Core abilities: Looks ok.

Level 1 - Summon Monster 2 instead of FeatherFall (and move FeatherFall to normal Spell Book)
Level 6 - Active ability: +33% HP, -1% max HP (-3% max HP for 60 second minor buff is too painful)
Level 12 - Add: Echoes of Power restore 4 SP every 4 second instead of 6 (thematic improvement)
Level 18 - Add: Echoes of Power restore 5 SP every 3 second instead of 4 (thematic improvement)
Level 20 - Add: Additional +1d4 Pact damage, Echoes of Power restore 6 SP every 2 second, and expand to minimum of 20 SP (thematic improvement)

Tier 1 abilities – Nothing special here.
Strong Pact – If all subtree cost 1 AP per Ability then fine. If not, and cost 2 AP, then Tier 3 and 4 should get some bonuses. See below
Eldritch Focus – Add + 1/2/3 Perform skill (For sonic Fey Pact damage)

Tier 2 abilities – Some very interesting abilities. Eldritch Chain and Stunning Blast is must have.
Unholy Blast – Evil is great unknown damage. But Poison was totally useless. Also Add +1d4 Pact damage for balance (and usefulness) reason.
Wand and Scroll Mastery – Add + 1/2/3 Caster Level (for unique and useful improvement)

Tier 3 abilities – Some very good abilities. Especially Faltering Blast. Suggestions:
Strong Pact – (Only if cost 2 AP) Add Beguiling Defenses/Fiendish Resilience/Thought Shield feat

Tier 4 abilities – Mix of good and week abilities. Bewitching Blast is sweet Eldritch Blast improvement.
Penetrating Blast – Quite week ability. Good for some monsters that are immune to Force/Evil but in every other situation 1d6 more damage is much worse than CC ability from Faltering Blast. Improve damage to 2d6 or add some Spell Penetration traits.
Enervating Shadow – Strange ability. Nice for one target, that is moving. In every other situation Eldritch Chain is better. Add Destruction ability that trigger with every Eldritch Blast.
Strong Pact – (Only if cost 2 AP) Add Beguiling Defenses/Fiendish Resilience/Thought Shield feat

Tier 5 abilities – Most good abilities. Only one suggestion:
Eldritch Power – Improve damage to 2d6 or Add 1d4 Pact damage.

And let made this tree less than 80 AP cost, if all abilities is taken.

[gwonbush]

Tier 4 abilities – Mix of good and week abilities. Bewitching Blast is sweet Eldritch Blast improvement.
Penetrating Blast – Quite week ability. Good for some monsters that are immune to Force/Evil but in every other situation 1d6 more damage is much worse than CC ability from Faltering Blast. Improve damage to 2d6 or add some Spell Penetration traits.
Enervating Shadow – Strange ability. Nice for one target, that is moving. In every other situation Eldritch Chain is better. Add Destruction ability that trigger with every Eldritch Blast.
[

Penetrating Blast's 1d6 extra damage is a passive, so it is always worthwhile. As for Enervating Shadow, it is always better against single target compared to Eldritch Chain because Eldritch Chain has reduced spellpower scaling. I do agree with all the other points, especially buffing up Eldritch Power, which is rather underwhelming as a T5.

[Requiro]

Penetrating Blast's 1d6 extra damage is a passive, so it is always worthwhile (...)

I must misread then. If this is passive ability (so you gain 1d6 damage with Eldritch Blast, no matter of Active Eldritch Essence Stance) then you are right, this ability is worth 2 AP.

(…) As for Enervating Shadow, it is always better against single target compared to Eldritch Chain because Eldritch Chain has reduced spellpower scaling. (…)

Theoretical – yes. But in practice, Trash is never alone, and even with 2 enemies Eldritch Chain is better in DPS. Against Boss (so in most cases in fight against one enemy), there is no point Turn on Enervating Shadow, because most bosses are immune to negative levels. It is better spend that 2 AP somewhere else, and just turn off Eldritch Chain on Boss fight.
That’s why I suggest a little improvements to Enervating Shadow – Destruction on hit, with Eldritch Blast. For that little debuff on Boss fight, I will glad spend 2 AP. For the record - this is normal Destruction (not Improved one), that can occur once per 3 second only.

[CelticTrojan]

Thanks for the continued feedback, trying to catch up on replying. We've been reading along, but been very busy here recently (along with U.S. Holiday on Monday).

Some thoughts:

• "Unholy Blast" will probably become Evil damage. We've been concerned about the re-education that comes with that, but a sufficiently good tooltip should help there. (Due to precedents, we've seen fairly frequent confusion where some players believe alignment damage doesn't affect that alignment -- aka, some players believe Evil doesn't affect Evil creatures. This is not true generally. DDO unfortunately trained some players incorrectly early on with the way some weapons and spells work, but that is something specific to those weapons and spells.)
• We don't believe Penetrating Blast will be a 100% must have for all Warlocks 100% of the time. We've seen a small contingent of players say this repeatedly, but we simply disagree and haven't seen any real argument for why it would be required so much of the time (nor does it seem like all that many players are saying it). At least 90% of DDO doesn't require Piercing damage, and it may be closer to 99% of quests.
• Our current understanding is that magical damage of physical damage types ignores DR but is reduced by PRR (and not MRR). These are some things we'll continue to investigate (we would NOT want it to be reduced by both PRR and MRR, for instance). Steelstar covered our other reasons for wanting to preserve the nature of untyped damage in DDO as-is. To be clear, changing the design from untyped to Piercing is not intended a buff to player power. It's a buff to DDO, but not a buff for characters who take that specific ability.
• Eldritch Blast isn't a Magic Missile.
• We'll probably look at options for adding Spell Pen.

We've been having some discussions about this. Exactly what is done more generally isn't decided yet.



Specific ideas are always interesting to us.


Depravity isn't a buff. It's a resource like Weapon Bond in Occult Slayer, and shows up as soon as you put Tainted Spellcasting (first Core) onto your hot bar.

(This is part of why Tainted Spellcasting is an activated ability, by the way. Not an accidental design!)


Yes. This isn't that alarming to us. There should be monsters that some characters fear or having more problems with than other characters (or other monsters). Being able to get around this with a tier 2 enhancement or other more creative solutions is more or less acceptable to us.

Welcome back, I hope you enjoyed some time off.
Thanks for the following :

"Unholy Blast" will probably become Evil damage.
Excellent, glad you moved away from poison, and I was surprised to learn Evil damage can affects Evil NPC's? Indeed I would like to see more on that, as I am one of those old ones who thought same alignment did not effect same alignment. Perhaps a short dev post explaining the current status of damage types and whom they affect would be great if someone could spare the time. Otherwise a good tool tip would certainly help. (Does Good or Pure Good effect Good NPC's or am I misunderstanding ?)

Our current understanding is that magical damage of physical damage types ignores DR but is reduced by PRR (and not MRR).
This plus Steelstars perfectly understandable statement makes me much more interested in Piercing and I await testing in Lamma land with more eagerness now.

Eldritch Blast isn't a Magic Missile.
Many thanks for that clarification - I had a minor nightmare that a simple shield spell would nullify a lot of this class, I did assume you had thought of this but you never know. Just checking. :-)

We'll probably look at options for adding Spell Pen.
Oh please do, it will be needed greatly after level 15.

Depravity isn't a buff. It's a resource like Weapon Bond in Occult Slayer, and shows up as soon as you put Tainted Spellcasting (first Core) onto your hot bar.
(This is part of why Tainted Spellcasting is an activated ability, by the way. Not an accidental design!)
Ohh nice I love the Weapon Bond mechanic in Barb, have you considered that for revamped Kensei? (Off topic but somewhat appropriate ...)

More feedback to come when the test server is open for business, looking very appealing so far.

Celtic Trojan

[XxJFGxX]

That’s why I suggest a little improvements to Enervating Shadow – Destruction on hit, with Eldritch Blast. For that little debuff on Boss fight, I will glad spend 2 AP. For the record - this is normal Destruction (not Improved one), that can occur once per 3 second only.

Would be better if they just implement the Utterdark Blast Invocation.

[Vargouille]

"Unholy Blast" will probably become Evil damage.
Excellent, glad you moved away from poison, and I was surprised to learn Evil damage can affects Evil NPC's? Indeed I would like to see more on that, as I am one of those old ones who thought same alignment did not effect same alignment. Perhaps a short dev post explaining the current status of damage types and whom they affect would be great if someone could spare the time. Otherwise a good tool tip would certainly help. (Does Good or Pure Good effect Good NPC's or am I misunderstanding ?)

• Like all damage, alignment damage (Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic) doesn't have any immunity built-into the damage type itself.
• Many existing DDO effects that deal alignment damage DO care about the alignment of the target, but they (should) all say so.
  
  • Weapon abilities like Righteous, True Law, Pure Good, Anarchic, Axiomatic, Holy and Unholy.
  • Spells like Chaos Hammer and Unholy Blight.
  • The fact that so many things do this has naturally led some players to believe this is inherent in the damage type, and is mostly a bad precedent if we ever wanted to use those damage types in other ways.
  
  
• However, there may be some monsters with immunity to particular kinds of damage, though for alignment damage we're fairly certain this isn't widespread. There are large categories of creature types that sometimes do have interactions with specific damage types.
  
  • For instance, Undead heal from Negative Energy, which is inherent to Undead.
  • Rust/Repair damage generally doesn't affect most creatures, unless they are Constructs of some kind.
  • They may be exist specific monsters who are immune to Evil or Chaos damage, etc., but that's not a general rule. This isn't stuff I'll dig up and share often, but I found some old data analysis we used for looking at some monster stats. 99% of monsters have 'normal' vulnerability to each of the four alignment damages. Compare to Poison, where ~20% have some kind of immunity to Poison. Or Rust/Repair, where 94% of monsters ignore it (apparently about 6% of monsters in DDO are constructs).
  • There's always a few weirder monsters. Some monsters repair/rust at large multipliers, taking x3 normal amounts or other amounts, or the monsters who take double or more sonic damage, etc. Those are probably mostly named bosses of some kind (but I'm not going to spend extra time looking into this even though it's interesting).

[InsanityIsYourFriend]

• Like all damage, alignment damage (Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic) doesn't have any immunity built-into the damage type itself.
• Many existing DDO effects that deal alignment damage DO care about the alignment of the target, but they (should) all say so.
• However, there may be some monsters with immunity to particular kinds of damage, though for alignment damage we're fairly certain this isn't widespread. There are large categories of creature types that sometimes do have interactions with specific damage types.

There are a few abilities that deal unholy damage already. Darkfire from drow. Shadow Dagger from assassin. Shadow Lance from Shadowdancer. Just to name a few. All decent abilities, and most are easily obtainable if you'd like to check out what is immune and what isn't to unholy damage. Deific Vengeance is a level 2 cleric spell that (while very weak) deals good damage to those of any alignment. You can see this by blasting a paladin in tavern brawl with it. Silver Flame Exorcism (again while very weak) deals good damage to any alignment. There are a few places in barbarian that you deal chaotic damage.

Another Note!

Pick up a Celestia or a Flameblade. Celestia ONLY deals Light Damage, and Flameblade ONLY deals Fire Damage. Grab an artificer with align weapon. They can hit you with any of the four alignments as a weapon buff. Generally this is used to bypass DR on enemies with certain alignment DR, but it does add on that type of damage to the weapon, so you can have an evil celestia...

[J2345678]

A major goal...is presenting you with multiple tough choices, and making your Warlock different from others.
...fewer options for the same number of choices means less diversity.

Will you please change Unholy Blast to a multi-selector?

Distinct Blast: Multi-selector: Choose an Eldritch Essence Stance.

• Toxic Blast: Your Eldritch Blast base damage is now Poison instead of Force. Has a 10% chance to Nauseate non-boss monsters for 6 seconds.
• Unholy Blast: Your Eldritch Blast base damage is now Evil instead of Force. Has a 10% chance to Curse non-boss monsters for 6 seconds. Damage is unaffected by target alignment.
• Luminous Blast: Your Eldritch Blast base damage is now Light instead of Force. On Vorpal if target undead has fewer than 1000 hit points, they are instantly slain. If target undead has above 1000 hit points, they take 100 damage.

It would give more choices "making your Warlock different from others" instead of every Warlock being Force, Evil or Piercing.

---

...alignment damage (Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic) doesn't have any immunity built-into the damage type itself.

So now what is the purpose of Penetrating Blast?

All Eldritch Essences need a secondary effect.

Please add the following to Penetrating Blast:

Penetrating Blast: Eldritch Essence Stance: Your Eldritch Blast base damage is now Piercing instead of Force. You deal +1d6 Eldritch Blast damage. On critical deals 3d10 additional damage. (like Elemental Burst)

[SisAmethyst]

Pick up a Celestia or a Flameblade. Celestia ONLY deals Light Damage, and Flameblade ONLY deals Fire Damage. Grab an artificer with align weapon. They can hit you with any of the four alignments as a weapon buff. Generally this is used to bypass DR on enemies with certain alignment DR, but it does add on that type of damage to the weapon, so you can have an evil celestia...

I thought this is broken, that as soon as you get an Arti buff your Celestia or Flameblade is actually borked and doesn't break any DR at all till reequip/recast.

[CelticTrojan]

• Like all damage, alignment damage (Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic) doesn't have any immunity built-into the damage type itself.
• Many existing DDO effects that deal alignment damage DO care about the alignment of the target, but they (should) all say so.
  
  • Weapon abilities like Righteous, True Law, Pure Good, Anarchic, Axiomatic, Holy and Unholy.
  • Spells like Chaos Hammer and Unholy Blight.
  • The fact that so many things do this has naturally led some players to believe this is inherent in the damage type, and is mostly a bad precedent if we ever wanted to use those damage types in other ways.
  
  
• However, there may be some monsters with immunity to particular kinds of damage, though for alignment damage we're fairly certain this isn't widespread. There are large categories of creature types that sometimes do have interactions with specific damage types.
  
  • For instance, Undead heal from Negative Energy, which is inherent to Undead.
  • Rust/Repair damage generally doesn't affect most creatures, unless they are Constructs of some kind.
  • They may be exist specific monsters who are immune to Evil or Chaos damage, etc., but that's not a general rule. This isn't stuff I'll dig up and share often, but I found some old data analysis we used for looking at some monster stats. 99% of monsters have 'normal' vulnerability to each of the four alignment damages. Compare to Poison, where ~20% have some kind of immunity to Poison. Or Rust/Repair, where 94% of monsters ignore it (apparently about 6% of monsters in DDO are constructs).
  • There's always a few weirder monsters. Some monsters repair/rust at large multipliers, taking x3 normal amounts or other amounts, or the monsters who take double or more sonic damage, etc. Those are probably mostly named bosses of some kind (but I'm not going to spend extra time looking into this even though it's interesting).

Many thanks for the details. Very interesting indeed.

CelticTrojan

[Robai]

• Like all damage, alignment damage (Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic) doesn't have any immunity built-into the damage type itself.
• Many existing DDO effects that deal alignment damage DO care about the alignment of the target, but they (should) all say so.
  
  • Weapon abilities like Righteous, True Law, Pure Good, Anarchic, Axiomatic, Holy and Unholy.
  • Spells like Chaos Hammer and Unholy Blight.
  • The fact that so many things do this has naturally led some players to believe this is inherent in the damage type, and is mostly a bad precedent if we ever wanted to use those damage types in other ways.
  
  
• However, there may be some monsters with immunity to particular kinds of damage, though for alignment damage we're fairly certain this isn't widespread. There are large categories of creature types that sometimes do have interactions with specific damage types.
  
  • For instance, Undead heal from Negative Energy, which is inherent to Undead.
  • Rust/Repair damage generally doesn't affect most creatures, unless they are Constructs of some kind.
  • They may be exist specific monsters who are immune to Evil or Chaos damage, etc., but that's not a general rule. This isn't stuff I'll dig up and share often, but I found some old data analysis we used for looking at some monster stats. 99% of monsters have 'normal' vulnerability to each of the four alignment damages. Compare to Poison, where ~20% have some kind of immunity to Poison. Or Rust/Repair, where 94% of monsters ignore it (apparently about 6% of monsters in DDO are constructs).
  • There's always a few weirder monsters. Some monsters repair/rust at large multipliers, taking x3 normal amounts or other amounts, or the monsters who take double or more sonic damage, etc. Those are probably mostly named bosses of some kind (but I'm not going to spend extra time looking into this even though it's interesting).

That's a bit like saying "Weapons are THE key class feature (at least for damage) of Fighters. All weapons wielded by Fighters should do Bludgeon, Piercing, AND Slashing damage, always bypass DR, and always bypass PRR".

We aren't trying to balance it like just another spell; we're trying to balance it like the primary attacks (AND primary spells) of every other class, which are all resisted by SOMEthing, even if they're able to switch to another spell or weapon to counter that. Things like PRR, MRR, DR, Energy Resistance, and Protection from Energy apply to every other class' primary attacks; Untyped Spell damage is not reduced by any of those.

While prolly offtopic, this reminds me about immunities idea.
It would be fun to actually have some strategy vs mobs with some immunities.

I hope that at least some classes will be weak against something.
I mean currently there is no big difference which class you play since you can kill everything anyway.
And not just kill, but also everyone can heal themselves, almost everyone is unlocker, automatically finds secret doors, etc. (= boring)

[moo_cow]

I might have missed it, but I notice warlocks are receiving spell critical damage. Will we see a return of this to other caster classes? Will we see this back on items?