U51 Preview 1: Draconic Incarnation

[Lynnabel]

Disclaimer

Everything seen on the preview server, Lamannia, is not final and is subject to change or removal before live release.

Draconic Incarnation is a tree about dealing damage with your offensive spells and turning into a dragon.

Core 1 (level 20): Draconic Heritage: Multiselector: Select the Color of Dragon you embody. No matter what color you pick, you gain the Magical Training feat. Each Core ability in this tree also grants +50 Spell Points, +5 Spellpower with the chosen element, and +5 Universal Spell Power. Each core also grants a +1 Epic bonus to all Spell DCs.

• Red: Fire
• Blue: Electric
• Green: Poison
• White: Cold
• Black: Acid
• Shadow: Negative

Core 3 (level 23): Draconic Bloodline: -5% Spell Point cost on all spells. Your spells no longer need material components, as if you had the Eschew Materials feat.

Core 6 (level 26): Elemental Blood: -5% Spell Point cost on all spells. Casting spells that align with your Draconic Heritage now trigger a 15% chance to grant yourself +10 temporary Hit Points per character level, these last for 10 seconds. This can only trigger once per 10 seconds.

Tier 1 (req level 20):

• Draconic Perception: +2/4/6 spot/search and reflex saves.
• Dragonhide: +2/4/6 AC and +2/4/6 fort saves. Rank 3: no longer fail fort saves on a 1.
• Attune the Arcane: Draconic Destiny Mantle: Spells of the chosen element of your Draconic Heritage have a 5/10/25% chance to deal 1d6+6 bonus damage per caster level of that type (so if you pick blue, electric spells deal bonus electric damage). This has a cooldown of 10 seconds.
• Dragonscales: +1/2/3 Physical and Magical Resistance Rating
• Arcane Studies: +2/4/6 Concentration, +1/2/3 Use Magic Device. Rank 3: +5 Spellpower of your Draconic Heritage and +5 Universal Spellpower

Tier 2 (req level 20):

• Draconic Presence: +1/2/3 DC to breath weapons. Rank 3: Immunity to Fear
• Draconic Rage: You may now cast spells while Raging.
• Dragon Breath: Epic Strike: This is a Breath Attack spell. Deals 1d6+10 damage per Character level of the element of your choice to enemies in a cone in front of you. Cooldown 25/20/15 seconds, cost 20 SP
• Speed of Magics: +10/20/30% enhancement bonus to Movement speed. Rank 3: You gain the Mobile Spellcasting feat.
• Conduit: Double the implement bonus of quarterstaves you wield.

Tier 3 (req level 23):

• Piercing Spellcraft: +1/2/3 Spell Penetration
• Daunting Roar: Breath Weapons (including your Dragon Breath Epic Strike) have a 25% chance to paralyze enemies caught within them with fear for 6 seconds with no save. This can only affect each monster once - once they have been feared successfully, successive attempts will fail. Enemies that are immune to fear are immune to this effect.
• Scales of the Dragon: Activate this to shroud yourself in the Scales of a Dragon. This has two components - firstly, it absorbs 15 points of damage per Character Level in ablative protection. Secondly, it shields you from 50% of the Elemental Damage of your dragon type. Both effects last for 5 minutes. Cooldown: 30 Seconds. SP Cost: 30.
• Arcane Spellsword: (multiselector, choose 1) +1/2/3 dice with either Eldritch Knight, Vile Chemist, or Arcane Archer toggles
• Draconic Spell Focus: (multiselector, choose 1) +1/2/3 Evocation, Conjuration, Necromancy, or Transmutation DCs

Tier 4 (req level 26):

• Elemental Inevitability: SLA (choose from 6 elements): Cooldown: 30s, Cost: 20sp. Conjure your Draconic Element to curse a single enemy with damage over time. Deals 1d6+3 damage per character level every 3 seconds for 12 seconds. Can stack 5 times.
• Pull from the Wellspring: Wellspring of Power's duration is doubled. When you activate it, you gain +10 temporary Spell Points per character level that last for the full, doubled duration.
• Metamagic Attunement: Maximize, Intensify, or Empower
  
  • Enhanced Metamagics: Maximize: Using the Maximize Spell Metamagic costs you 3/6/9 fewer Spell Points.
  • Enhanced Metamagics: Empower: Using the Empower Spell Metamagic costs you 2/4/6 fewer Spell Points.
  • Enhanced Metamagics: Quicken: Using the Quicken Spell Metamagic costs you 1/2/4 fewer Spell Points.
• Energy Vortex: While your Draconic Destiny Mantle is on, casting Dragon Breath causes elemental energies to swirl around you, dealing 1d6 damage per caster level of your Draconic Heritage every 3 seconds. This lasts for 10 seconds. Subsequent casts of Breath Weapon will add to the time of the Vortex instead of refreshing it from the start.
• Coalescence: You bypass the first 5/10/15 points of Damage Reduction with your spells. Rank 3: +5 Spellpower of your Draconic Heritage element and +5 Universal Spellpower

Tier 5 (req level 30):

• Epic Moment: Dragonform: Activate this ability to take on the aspect of your Draconic Bloodline. This intensifies over the course of 30 seconds, with successive tiers adding to previous ones.
  
  • Initial Activation: You become immune to elemental damage of your Draconic Bloodline for the duration.
  • 5s: You gain Dr/100- and your hitpoints begin to regenerate at a fast rate for the duration.
  • 10s: Your spells gain a 50% cost reduction for the duration.
  • 15s: Your Dragon Breath Epic Strike and Energy Vortex now deal double damage for the duration.
  • 20s: A pulse of elemental damage erupts from you, knocking down enemies in a large area for 2 seconds with no save, and dealing 1d6+6 Elemental damage per character level.
• Ruin Intensified: Your Ruin and Greater Ruin now applies a secondary burst of damage (at the same amount that ruin/greater ruin does) based on the chosen element and scaling with the appropriate spellpower.
• Hellstorm: +10 Spellpower of your element, +10 Universal spellpower. Hellball is added to your Spellbook at level 8, assuming you can cast Level 8 spells.
• Spread your Wings: Leap forward a la Abundant Step. Cooldown 15 seconds.
• Enhanced Draconic Spell Focus: +1/2/3 spell DCs

Known Issues:

• Of Special Note: This tree is in a work in progress and several abilities are nonfunctional and/or not yet implemented. Abilities that do not function are:
  
  • Dragonform (Epic Moment)
  • Energy Vortex
  • Elemental Inevitability
• Several abilities are currently granting the wrong amount of Spellpower
• Several abilities are missing finalized text and/or finalized icons
• The Dragonbreath abilities are currently shuffled in their elemental types

[QuantumFX]

First question: What is the DC calculation for Dragon Breath?

First complaint: Dragon Breath is useless at point blank range. Zero damage when any melee mob tries to attack you, and they are sitting right in front of your gnome character.

First bug: Lightning breath seems to be doing acid damage.

[Thar]

Elemental Inevitability: SLA (choose from 6 elements): Cooldown: 30s, Cost: 20sp. Conjure your Draconic Element to curse a single enemy with damage over time. Deals 1d6+3 damage per character level every 3 seconds for 12 seconds. Can stack 5 times.

if it goes away in 12 sec, how can you stack it 5 times if cooldown is 3x longer at 30s?

[Thar]

no more energy burst... sad panda.

[Lynnabel]

no more energy burst... sad panda.

Energy Burst and Dragon Breath got merged together into one ability, the Epic Strike. Rather than having two abilities on two different cooldowns, I split the difference and just made one strong attack on a shorter cooldown than either of them.

First question: What is the DC calculation for Dragon Breath?

First complaint: Dragon Breath is useless at point blank range. Zero damage when any melee mob tries to attack you, and they are sitting right in front of your gnome character.

First bug: Lightning breath seems to be doing acid damage.

It appears I've shuffled all of the damage types so every breath is a little, uh, off right now. Thankfully an easy fix.

I'll take a look at the detects. Its possible that I can just nudge the box's back edge back a little bit so it hits people right up in your business.

[QuantumFX]

no more energy burst... sad panda.

Indeed. I think I'd rather have it instead of Hellball.

[Dark_Lord_Mary]

What's the plan for Sonic? It is very conspicuously missing - especially considering Fatesinger and Magister are missing

[Taurnish]

Coalescence: You bypass the first 5/10/15 points of Damage Reduction with your spells. Rank 3: +5 Spellpower of your Draconic Heritage element and +5 Universal Spellpower

Given this is an epic tree, I think the damage bypass should be adjusted unless I am completely wrong in believing that epic monsters have more than 15 points of DR. How about make it a % instead of a specific number. Say bypass 10/15/20% of DR with spell abilities.

Also, I tried out an arti/Wiz build and I get the message that I cannot cast spells from another class when I obtain the Hellball selection. I can choose it but when I save the tree I get that message.

[WruntJunior]

Initial observations:
Draconic Hunger gives a LOT of buff bar spam. This is only a minor annoyance, but it's still worth saying.

Hellstorm is not adding Hellball to my character (30 sorc). My understanding is that it should be added to level 8 spellbook, which I'm assuming doesn't work properly for classes that don't memorize spells.

Spread Your Wings (the Leap of Faith), Draconic Heritage (Eschew Materials) are greatly appreciated. I've specifically been hoping for a better way to get eschew materials for a long time.

Lynnabel has already acknowledged this problem, but my fire breath is doing poison damage. Kind of funny.

Overall, I prefer this version of DI to the version that's on live, which is of course good.

[SerPounce]

I'll take a look at the detects. Its possible that I can just nudge the box's back edge back a little bit so it hits people right up in your business.

The dragonborn version (and maybe others) will shift 90 degrees to the right if you move during it also. It also sometimes fails to go off at all (even with quicken) or not hit stuff that appears directly in it's path. TBH i'd rather have the energy burst shape. I get that "dragon breath" is more flavorful, and I'm not against it in principle, but the wonkiness of the shape/ability makes me warry of this as a primary destiny feature.

[Alled78]

Energy Burst and Dragon Breath got merged together into one ability, the Epic Strike. Rather than having two abilities on two different cooldowns, I split the difference and just made one strong attack on a shorter cooldown than either of them.



It appears I've shuffled all of the damage types so every breath is a little, uh, off right now. Thankfully an easy fix.

I'll take a look at the detects. Its possible that I can just nudge the box's back edge back a little bit so it hits people right up in your business.

Please mantain energy burst in some ways. Was the more fun ability for me.
In my opinion these 30sec. Mutating moment will create big lag... Can u do 1 thing during 30 second? In this case the magic moment seems meh

[Zretch]

I hate to say this because it's soooo good, but....

The draconic cores, at least for fire, are giving +55 fire and +55 universal spellpower each, according to the character sheet. I think they're adding the +50 spell points to the +5 spell power, or something.

Also, can you please reconsider the DCs across cores in different trees not stacking? DCs are just as important to casters as spellpower, melee power, and ranged power are to their respective archtypes and the ability to increase DCs by spreading points across multiple trees vs going hard into a single tree but giving up DCs in other cores presents a nice build choice for DC casters, who otherwise have little use for picking up cores in any of their secondary trees.

Thanks for your consideration.

[Natashaelle]

There's clearly an attempt to provide something for EK, Alchemists, and AA in the tree -- but it seems a bit lopsided.

At least :

• Attune the Arcane: Draconic Destiny Mantle: Spells of the chosen element of your Draconic Heritage have a 5/10/25% chance to deal 1d6+6 bonus damage per caster level of that type (so if you pick blue, electric spells deal bonus electric damage). This has a cooldown of 10 seconds.

This should IMO work not just with spells, but also with EK Eldritch Strike, VC Poisoned Coating, AA Elemental Arrows -- if the cooldown of 10 seconds means it can only proc again after that delay, that's fine, but if you follow this idea, you might need to limit the 5/10/25% chance check to 1/second or 1/2 seconds or something.

[slarden]

This is a long-standing problem with warlock. If you are in any stance other than aura spells that proc on a certain element type don't work with warlock pact. This is true of empyrean magic on live for example.

So if I choose fiend pact my eldritch blast shapes empyrean magic doesn't proc with chain, focused or cone shapes. It does work with aura regardless of pact.

This is a bigger issue with U51 as there are more things proc'd by spells and warlocks will be boxed into aura builds unless this is addressed.

Please fix this.

[Kortar]

This is a long-standing problem with warlock. If you are in any stance other than aura spells that proc on a certain element type don't work with warlock pact. This is true of empyrean magic on live for example.

So if I choose fiend pact my eldritch blast shapes empyrean magic doesn't proc with chain, focused or cone shapes. It does work with aura regardless of pact.

This is a bigger issue with U51 as there are more things proc'd by spells and warlocks will be boxed into aura builds unless this is addressed.

Please fix this.

I agree, this should be fixed, Warlocks should benefit from Draconic, what other destiny would they take?

[slarden]

Energy Burst and Dragon Breath got merged together into one ability, the Epic Strike. Rather than having two abilities on two different cooldowns, I split the difference and just made one strong attack on a shorter cooldown than either of them.
.

Just comparing an energy burst twist to a tier 3 draconic spend (not main tree)

What I see currently on live

Energy burst 1d15+15 per character level (cooldown 30 sec) = 690 base damage per 30 seconds

What I see on Lamannia

Dragon breath 1d6 + 10 per character level (cooldown 15 sec) = 405 base damage x 2 = 810 base damage per 30 seconds

The damage is higher but I wouldn't say it's stronger because you generally can't hit as many enemies with a cone that you can hit with a burst. Additionally, the whole idea of energy burst was to do high burst damage quickly to end an encounter sooner. If the fight would have lasted 14 seconds with the old energy burst it's a net loss in dps as you are only doing 405 instead of 690. It's only an increase in damage if the fight lasts longer than 15 seconds. With the high damage melees do mobs don't last 15 seconds typically.

I've also lost arcane tempest from magister entirely which was more important to me because force is my main spellpower type. Looking at the combination of arcane tempest + energy burst and comparing it to dragon breath my aoe dps is way down. I hope you add arcane tempest to the new tree as it was the only good aoe force ability in the game.

I also see alot I like in the trees - the buff to greater ruin and more boss dps with a dot (hopefully it won't be just fire when released) is great, but the loss of my arcane tempest + energy burst 1-2 punch is really going to hurt since warlock dps is so bad I rely on those heavily as my main aoe.

Also testing is really hard because there are some bugs I can't work around. For example I am seeing no extra damage with greater ruin with cold. My dragon breath seems to misfire alot (I cast but it doesn't hit the thing directly in front of it) - could be related to bladeforged size it seems to work better on a tiefling. Spellpower is way higher than it should be due to the cores granting too much. This leads to misleading results.

After more testing it seems greater ruin element has a save that every enemy makes except the kobolds in the test dojo - must be a dc bug of some kind.

[mikarddo]

Energy Burst and Dragon Breath got merged together into one ability, the Epic Strike. Rather than having two abilities on two different cooldowns, I split the difference and just made one strong attack on a shorter cooldown than either of them.

I am sorry, but the change is not appreciated.

Losing the very valuable shape of energy burst which hits in a circle around you is really bad. The cone shape simply does not have the same appeal.
Also, getting a single smaller "boom" more often is significantly less valuable than having two larger booms less often. Its all about the ability to quickly deliver overwhelming damage - which the new version does much less well.

Please reconsider this change. At the very least add a multi-selector with a choice between a cone and a burst.

[Archfae]

This is my favorite of the destinies so far, but I do have some concerns.

I actually like the de-emphasis on dragon breathe / energy burst being so overwhelming because hopefully it'll give you room to balance caster dps around rotations with more weighty spells. However, it is a nerf as it stands right now both tempo wise and damage wise, I'm worried how this will carry over into live where caster dps is already pretty far behind after U50.

The wings ability having a 15 second cooldown with no added effect feels like a significant nerf to air savant. At least in live, the wings ability in draconic (flyby) has a longer cooldown of a minute with a strong knockdown effect (and great graphic). I dont know if we'll get a savant sorc enhancement pass but Id love to have a reason to play anything except fire savant.

The greater ruin / ruin ability is cool, but again emphasizes fire over the other savants due to meteor swarm scaling off fire and force. It'd be cool to see this also give you the ability to scale the ruin / greater ruin damage off your elemental spellpower for the destiny (i.e. if you pick green dragon then poison spell power will be used).

One thing that I always thought was weird that wasn't in the dragon destiny on live was no spell resistance option. Its canon (at least in forgotten realms lore) for dragons to resilient to magic. Given the spell resistance being functional nowadays as opposed to when epic destinies were first made, it'd be cool to have that as an option for characters that want to boost that stat (this seems like the perfect place for it).

One thing I dislike about this tree is that it locks you into too many epic feats. Wellspring of power, ruin, and greater ruin are pretty much automatically forced on you. This doesnt leave the player with many options to choose for themselves. I dislike this type of design, but I dont have a suggestion on how to fix it.

Hellball is just not there yet (it needs a major damage buff to be an actual option). I havent seen anyone even remotely pleased with it. It's also always had targeting problems for me.

For the epic moment, I was hoping to see a way for elemental damage bypass be included. I also was a bit disappointed to see that the damage buff mostly goes to dragon breathe rather than boosting your whole rotation. Id really appreciate this epic moment making all the spells in your rotation feel good not just upping the disparity between breathe and everything else.

Lastly, Im going to put out a suggestion that you could add a Faerie dragon type for sonic to allow fey warlocks to still pick this tree. It'd fit canon lore too (the new dnd book on dragons i believe has a thing about faerie dragons actually being dragons and not just some weird misnomer).

Thanks!

[voxson5]

I am sorry, but the change is not appreciated.

Losing the very valuable shape of energy burst which hits in a circle around you is really bad. The cone shape simply does not have the same appeal.
Also, getting a single smaller "boom" more often is significantly less valuable than having two larger booms less often. Its all about the ability to quickly deliver overwhelming damage - which the new version does much less well.

Please reconsider this change. At the very least add a multi-selector with a choice between a cone and a burst.

This would be a good idea.

Although I'd please just prefer you change it to the energy burst AoE shape.

Edit - for the neg scales of the dragon, could the absorb be changed to amp instead? Or maybe have that as a toggle / or pull from if a player is in an undead shroud or not?

[Alternative]

You'd have to remove or somehow limit deathward on enemies to make negative damage draconic a viable build. Or add some way to bypass deathward (just for damage, not insta kills) with a significant investement. Otherwise it's pretty meh.

edit: seconding the poster above, neagative scales giving neg heal amp would be sweet