U57 Preview 2: Imbue Overhaul

[Pandjed]

Overall, this change (together with the HP revamp) will have a huge avalanche effect on the META. Well, not really the META, as I really doubt that it will dethrone casters (though Half-Elf casters may now run rampant, if their imbue is easy enough to make count), but there are several things now in motion.

Eldritch Knights will be built entirely different, not only because of the imbue change, more so for the fact that they can use spells at distance again. Means, that especially sorcerers will become DPS EK, as they have easier access to spellpower and most will use the elemental capstone for immunity strip. Wizard EK will either join (due to more metamagic feats) or stay the same with Mass Hold Monster at cap, which they throw first, dive in, do their cleaves and ticking their auras and then picking up the rest.

Melee artis may finally be played as intended, as they not only get to be hybrid characters, but also get a decent boost in damage.

AA will become a more interesting tree, but I won't count for miracles, as they are point sinks, many lesser effects, all bow related, not easy to pick up imbue dice, if you waste many points on stuff you can barely use.
Inquisitive is a better way to go, as it has more enhancements that work outside from the pure double-x-bow style. Inquis itself gets some downgrade on the imbue, which makes their leveling slower, but I was never a fan of that tree to begin with, as it was too easy to get much damage.

Shadar-kai's imbue doesn't scale with any power and only works on sneak, so probably not as much of a powerhouse ppl expect it to become.

The filigrees do hurt, I used them for lower epic weapons for leveling purposes, but I guess they could be useful for endgame instead.

Yeah, the fighter sticks out like a sour thumb. Fighter is (as always) hindered by the fact, that it shares one tree with paladin, the other is almost a copy, and the DPS one is less powerful than the paladin (in most cases). Having no imbue does hurt here, especially given that this may become the next big thing and to make the mechanic general for real.
Ideas for Fighter imbues:

• Endurant Soul: Gain on hit 1d8 temp hit points (doesn't stack with itself). 1d8 per additional imbue die. Plays into the mechanic, that fighters are supposed to be very tough, training their bodies with nothing but ability. No rage, no magic, no gods, nothing else. Just determination.
• Foeslayer: The boring additional damage, maybe d4 bane damage to make it damage all kinds of stuff? Scaling with 200% MP or RP of course.
• Gladiator's Might: All tactical feats gets +1 DC per 4 dice. Tactical feats do 1d10 bane damage per die, scaling with 200% MP.
• Strikeback: Enemy that hits you in melee combat, gets 1d6 damage per die, scaling with X% amount of PRR. (may make tanks too good for damage, but MP seems a bit boring here, and guard damage effects are now rare).

I guess, these imbues could be feats, and higher forms of weapon focus and specialication could give more dice, to make multiclassing less attractive for supposedly pure fighters.

EDIT: Giving more dice per 3 fighter levels or so like VC or EK may also bring more people to play pure.

[droid327]

Enhanced Elemental Dice - Destiny Feat +1 Dice is NOT enough and balanced for a lvl 31 feat when a lvl 28 feat is giving +2 dice. Enhanced Elemental Dice - Destiny Feat should be +3 Dice

With that new mechanic I think that MORE set effects should give imbue damage dice as a standard. Only 3 sets giving Imbue Dice is really NOT enough.
Arcane Archer set from gilvaenor s ring & Givaenor s necklace from tower of despair should be reworked and give +3 Imbue Dice !!!

Additionnaly I wish to know what is the scaling for imbues.
For exemple is the spell power scaling for Arcane archer imbue is the same as the spell power scaling for an eldritch knight imbues ? and for all other classes ?

I thought the same thing - I can't imagine a build where +1 imbue die would make the cut for feats. There are better options for pretty much every build archetype. Even Toughness would be more competitive, and that's basically just the "if there isn't anything actually useful" feat

I'm worried that if imbue die become TOO ubiquitous then there's no point in having them anymore...they're just damage that everyone gets from a million different places without making deliberate tradeoffs for it. Or, conversely, they become de facto required, where anything that doesn't include imbue die is never chosen - like non-set armor right now. Both cases are bad for the game.

Imbues scale 100% on either spell power or mp/rp, unless it says otherwise, like inqui imbue is 200% rp

[Ereshkigal]

+1 to this. Please make sure that going the Abyss route does not carry even more detriments than it does today due to the inability to use the Celestial Spirit toggle. In fact, can we just get rid of Celestial Spirit as a toggle entirely, and just build its bonuses into the core?

^This

[Bagel99]

So I have spent much of the last two days trying to work out builds on Lamania that will use the imbue system, and it all boils down to one major flaw in it. IMBUES DON" CRIT. The builds I was playing with had some decent base numbers. I was using the EK tree, and getting over 28 Die added on, and using boosts and self buffs, could get hits for over 8K on every hit. To get that, you sacrifice Ranged Power, and there is no easy way to say it, but a Ranged Power build at end game, will do more DPS than an imbue build, because of things like crits, and because of abilities that bump your next attack.

I based my "non-crit" info on the fact that I never saw one, and the fact that on preview one, it was asked if they would, and that question went unanswered. The imbue system seemed like it was going to be very fun to play, and I was looking forward to trying out different builds, but I'm sorry to say, that I can't see me playing this at end game at all.

Change the imbue system so that when your weapon crits, your imbue crits, and these have the the potential to be very solid builds, as well as being very fun to play.

I don't believe crits are the answer BUT i proposed in the previous forum for Update 57.1 an idea for a feat line called mystical attunement which had varying feats to take at 1,9,18,21 and possibly 30 which would replace your critical hit staple feats and apply + Imbue dice to varying degrees.
Lesser Mystical attunement (level 1, Magical training) - +1 Imbue Dice
Mystical Attunement (level 9, Magical Training and LMA) - +2 Imbue Dice - you can no longer critically hit
Greater Mystical Attunement (level 18, Magical Training, previous stuff) - +3 Imbue Dice
~~~~So as of level 18 you now have 6 additional imbue dice or 6d6 at the worst, thats about a x2 crit multi on an endgame wep~~~~
Epic Mystical Attunement (This would replace Overwhelming Crit) - +4 Imbue dice, bringing the total total to 10d6.
Legendary Mystical Attunement 30 (or 31, however that system will work) - +5 Imbue dice for a total of 15d6.

Now 15d6 is a hefty hefty sustained dps gain to have, BUT not crits, no on crit effects, no weapon damage scaling anymore and your fighting Resists and immunities. I think this would be cool for flavor, and 100% spellpower, 200% MP, 150%RP should be standard.

Dont forget a nice solid, 5 feats for this one, and could be used as generic feats BUT given to Arti/Alch/Wiz as bonus feat options, as you would also have some tradeoffs between dcs and raw powah.

Why 150% ranged power .... your feats grant it for BAB, melee has no such luxury. It can be argued there are more sources etc possibly but your at a distance and should deal substantial damage but you trade some for being safer.

Anyhow excited for the changes and wishing for something along these lines, maybe in the future.

[Ereshkigal]

Changes from first preview are in this green!

Feats:

• (Embodiment of Law - Destiny Feat) is now: +3 PRR and MRR. if you are lawful, you also gain +2 imbue dice
• (Embodiment of Chaos - Destiny Feat) is now: +2% doublestrike and doubleshot. If you are chaotic, you also gain +2 imbue dice
• (Enhanced Elemental Dice - Destiny Feat) +1 Dice
• (Scion of the Feywild - Legendary Feat) +3 Dice
• (Scion of the Plane of Earth - Legendary Feat) +3 Dice
• (Scion of the Plane of Fire - Legendary Feat) +3 Dice
• (Scion of the Plane of Water - Legendary Feat) +3 Dice
• (Scion of the Plane of Air - Legendary Feat) +3 Dice
• (Scion of Arborea) +1 dice
• (Offhand Versatility) - Orb/Runearm gains +1 Imbue dice

I'm curious -- why exclude Scion of Celestia (& Scion of the Shadowfell?) Seems like Dark Apostate could certainly use the extra dice.

[Ereshkigal]

I don't believe crits are the answer BUT i proposed in the previous forum for Update 57.1 an idea for a feat line called mystical attunement which had varying feats to take at 1,9,18,21 and possibly 30 which would replace your critical hit staple feats and apply + Imbue dice to varying degrees.
Lesser Mystical attunement (level 1, Magical training) - +1 Imbue Dice
Mystical Attunement (level 9, Magical Training and LMA) - +2 Imbue Dice - you can no longer critically hit
Greater Mystical Attunement (level 18, Magical Training, previous stuff) - +3 Imbue Dice
~~~~So as of level 18 you now have 6 additional imbue dice or 6d6 at the worst, thats about a x2 crit multi on an endgame wep~~~~
Epic Mystical Attunement (This would replace Overwhelming Crit) - +4 Imbue dice, bringing the total total to 10d6.
Legendary Mystical Attunement 30 (or 31, however that system will work) - +5 Imbue dice for a total of 15d6.

Now 15d6 is a hefty hefty sustained dps gain to have, BUT not crits, no on crit effects, no weapon damage scaling anymore and your fighting Resists and immunities. I think this would be cool for flavor, and 100% spellpower, 200% MP, 150%RP should be standard.

Dont forget a nice solid, 5 feats for this one, and could be used as generic feats BUT given to Arti/Alch/Wiz as bonus feat options, as you would also have some tradeoffs between dcs and raw powah.

Why 150% ranged power .... your feats grant it for BAB, melee has no such luxury. It can be argued there are more sources etc possibly but your at a distance and should deal substantial damage but you trade some for being safer.

Anyhow excited for the changes and wishing for something along these lines, maybe in the future.

Do Imbue dice from different sources all stack?

Example:

For Dark Apostate, am I missing something or is this going to be possible for Apostate's Curse dice?

9d6 - DA Tree
2d6 - Warpriest Tree
2d6 - Drow Tree
2d6 - Embodiment of Chaos Feat
1d6 - Ehanced Elemental Dice Feat
3d6 - Scion of the Plane of Fire Feat
3d6 - Draconic Epic Destiny Tree
3d6 - Primal Avatar Tree - Mantle

25d6 for Dark Apostate's Curse - Imbue dice?

If yes, then I can see why it isn't going to crit.

[cmecu]

I really dislike this entire imbue thing.. You guys are really gutting this mechanics of this game way too much , too fast.. Sure change is fine, but not like every update.
There are so many things in the game we need fixed. I dont recall people asking for Archtypes, Epic Destiny redone, Level cap increase, Imbues, bank being changed, other than us needing more space for all these items your pumping into the game... What else.. oh competence hitpoints in tier 5 trees and such.. Its just way too much change..
Your not even giving us a chance to see what one thing is before hitting us with something else. These imbues are horrible. They completely destroy some builds, and in one case, a racial tree like the Tiefling Scoundrel.. which btw its broken as of right now. I left a post about it on the lammania discussion forum. Its like to the point, I dont even know what I am playing any more. Or how to play it.. all these augments, and turning gear into augments, and making dino gear crafting, and epic crafting, legendary crafting.. It was a relaxing game to play, now its like how do I play this game now? Do I even want to any more...? Also the more things you all keep adding, the more stuff that becomes broken. And it becomes too much stuff to fix. Please slow down, and let the game slowly evolve, not be turned upside in such a short period of time.

[MrWindupBird]

Few thoughts on proposed imbue changes:

On the one hand, adding imbues to things like bard and artificer is definitely cool, and thematic. On the other hand, making imbues nearly-ubiquitous is going to feel really really bad for those who do not have access: right now it looks like handwraps monks, fighters, animal-form melees (unless barb) don't have a reasonable way to get access outside of race. Imbues used to be pretty class-specific, but if they move to nearly-universal, the absence is going to be a significant proxy nerf. Wolf/bear is pretty strong, but wraps monk and fighter- not so much. As a preemptive retort to those who say Henshin and Ninja Spy have imbues for wraps monk- wis wraps monk simply does not have the AP to go into those trees, its not really possible with Shintao and Falconry.

I think if we're making imbues this common, all melee/ranged dps types should really have a reasonable option to pick up an imbue- the choice then becomes how much to invest in extra dice to make it useful: theres lots of interesting decisions and opportunity cost there with gear, feats, and EDs. Some classes obviously will get much more support for extra dice in the trees, which is fine. My objection is just being locked out of an imbue entirely. Otherwise you're going to have to balance certain classes up around the absence, which will inevitably cause problems in the future if everyone else is doing 20+d6 scaling proc damage, or force them into races like drow.

For monk, I think rather than tying it to the trees you could put the base imbue in the 6 or 12 (adept/master) stance feats, maybe with +1 dice at 18. Itd make thematic sense, and as previously noted, the elemental ki-strikes are straight atrocious and not worth using.

For druid a bleed dot might be cool if tech allows, but those bleed procs have never been valuable for more than the on-hit damage.

Dont really have any good idea for fighter- the +d3 seeker idea is neat, but I dont know if that would work.

TL;DR
imbues are neat and the decision on whether or not to scale them vs front number is interesting, but making them this common and locking out some classes/styles is not going to go well

[Lominal]

1. alchemist VC imbue doesnt deal any damage with (simple) ranged weaps (darts, throwing daggers)
2. damage doesnt appear to scale off anything for the dice (~ 700 posion power, 22 dice and hitting 40-50)

[Wdh]

On lammania the barbarian bane damage is significantly lower then on live. It does about half as much damage on lammania. I think the damage should be increased, more melee power scaling.

[Azarak]

How about adding a Cleric domain for imbue dice builds?

[Indubitably]

The spell crit on vorpal for orbs and runearms have been replaced by +1 imbue dice in Offhand Versatility in Preview 2. In Preview 1 only orbs had the +1 imbue dice and runearms still had the spell crit on vorpal. Looks like it's gone for good :/

This is a really lame change.
The crit after vorpal was a really flavourful and engaging mechanic that really promoted a hybrid playstyle.
And it felt like an impactful choice. +1 imbue dice is hardly worth the feat considering it's not too hard to get 20+ dice.
I'm not sure anyone was running around claiming offhand versatility was over powered or anything.

And agree with others - The new imbue system will create 2 issues, especially down the road:
Builds with no access will find they can't utilise a mechanic found all over the place now. (maybe add a low hanging ED option for an imbue?)
Builds that specailised in it before will be less unique and find their trees bring less to the table now as before.

AA having to 'GIVE UP' the whole imbue system to use an enchant arrow is now absurd.
Other trees can get close to the level of an AA for imbue damage, effectively for free with trees not designed around imbue damage at all.
Whilst the AA has to give up its (expensive) core line of damage + any imbue investment found in epic/feats/splashes/etc in a tree centered around it's use (unlike artificer, monk, paladin, etc) and can only use it with ranged weapons that doesn't AoE.
These other classes get the imbue damage plus all their other features, whatever it may be.

This system will almost make AA's feel like an anti-imbue class or a splash purely to try gain dice (with no intent to use AA imbues).


Off-handed note.
It feels off that the vile chemist Alch - with it's focus on poison, has no stacking poison dots?
The first thing when i think a specialist in poison, is stacking poison damage over time. (Waves don't count, don't stack, and hardly any damage - utterly insignificant once you hit epic).
Since the VC tree brings very little to the table except poison dice, and its not that special anymore - perhaps using the imbue dice for poison wave or creating some minor stacking dot with a cap could be an idea?

[SpardaX]

With Lighting the candle scaling at 1x Melee Power (or so it seems) It really doesn't feel punchy. Yea, it has the force, but that means on crit you would have near the same effect as SF with it's 2x scaling. Except sacred fist has many more dice it can get. All considered, the HeM imbue is really unsatisfying. 1x scaling with MP just hurts. SF gets spells to add force on crit in addition to many more dice and 2x scaling. They don't need to be the same by any stretch, but having played around with it, I just don't see myself using Lighting the Candle... ever. And I say that as someone with monk in all my favorite builds.

This basically. The crit is an added benefit, sure, but when the dice are d6 and the scaling is just 1x, other imbues that don't have a penalty still get higher easier and quicker.

So I think if you feel like the crit dice is worth the -1 Ki gen Lyn, then at least up the scaling to be on par with other imbues?

[droid327]

I really dislike this entire imbue thing.. You guys are really gutting this mechanics of this game way too much , too fast.

I kinda tend to agree. The whole imbue thing feels like something that started off as a good idea, but then the devs got too excited about it and ran with it way too far, and now its encompassing a far greater swath of changes than it needs to. And it also feels like the kind of thing that they'll forget about once they get excited about their next cool idea and fixate on that...and then it'll languish in whatever form its in after a week of being Live.

Unifying all the existing imbues under one streamlined system was the good idea. Expanding it with all these bonus die sources, adding a whole bunch of novel imbues, talking about scaling other things on imbue die...that's mission creep, and its how you get power creep too.

[Azarak]

I think Tiefling scoundrel should just add imbue dice rather than having it's own toggle that is limited by HP %. The damage is not good enough to warrant the limitation of HP% and it doesn't stack with resonant arms from swashbuckler meaning if your a swashbuckler it's useless.

I also think Pale Masters vampire and negative damage melee cores should scale with imbue dice, as the damage output and healing is fairly terrible.

I think you should be able to use Shadar-kai's Winter Favored with rogue Venomed Blades or Winter Favored should give some imbue dice or something. Currently since you can't uses both there's really no point in taking Winter Favored ever because it takes less points to get to venomed blade and venom blade is simply better in every way...

[Synthetic]

Changes from first preview are in this green!

• Iced Edges is now just 1 rank and is no longer a prereq of the rest of the ice line, so you can skip the imbue if you want the other stuff.

Any chance you could change the cost of Northwind while you're working in that area? An on vorpal proc with 3 tiers and 2 ap a tier costs too much, and since it's a prerequisite for T5 spinning ice you are going to be paying all 6 points.

[Duckology]

Changes from first preview are in this green!


Ranger:

• (Ranger - Tempest) 1d8 Electric, melee or ranged power
• (Ranger - Arcane Archer) 1d8 Fire/Cold/Acid/Electric, appropriate Spell Power
• (Ranger - Arcane Archer) 1d8 Force, force spellpower
• (Arcane Archer) Tiers 2, 3, 4, and 5 grant +2 Dice each
• Note: All other primary Arcane Archer imbues are also now imbues in this system.

As this change stands after testing on Lamania and even optimizing for imbue dice,.... Running a Ranger 18/ Arti 2.... my DPS is dropping about 25%.... Law damage on Cannith is 450-1100 on Lamania it's 180-800

Deepwood stalker has zero imbue die... so with half points in it and the other in Inquisitive , even tried splashing arcane archer to get an extra 4d to get those numbers... giving up 20% temp morale bonus to doubleshot and the extra damage from killer....

I understood the initial nerf, a bit heavy handed, but I could live with a character that was at the bottom of the DPS tree, but lowering the gap even more after spending over 1000 additional hours and MONEY, to get back 10% of what was taken in the first nerf this feels like the final straw to me. Some of us want to build a character and have spent literally thousands of hours getting all of the tetris gear and raid filigrees for that particular build, to have all of those gains wiped out in one update and then set back a few more pegs is really not my idea of fun. Grinding for progression is something I will do, grinding for regression is something I won't.

[SpartanKiller13]

The spell crit on vorpal for orbs and runearms have been replaced by +1 imbue dice in Offhand Versatility in Preview 2. In Preview 1 only orbs had the +1 imbue dice and runearms still had the spell crit on vorpal. Looks like it's gone for good :/

So uh any build that relied on Offhand Versatility + Spellcasting is just dead?

Lmao I just got my OV Gruin build to 32 lol. It's a lot easier to get good crits on a low-investment toon if you have 100% crit rate XD

Time to make an imbue build out of them IG.

[oraness]

Glad to see more people bringing up Arcane Archer in this preview, despite the fact that Lynn clearly hasn't been interested in discussing it in either thread (no hard feelings).

In one last attempt to generate discussion around it, I'll quote my post regarding AA from the previous thread:



For those asking about the non-damage imbues, nothing changed for them either. They currently do not interact with Imbue Dice.

The non-damage imbues definitely need some love. 1:1 imbue dice to DC is for sure too much, but what about 1/2 Imbue dice to DC and then getting rid of the +1 enchantment bonus on each of them. Could even spice it up and make each of the imbues draw from the correct DC for the effect (Phantasmal Killer arrows being an Illusion effect, for example)

AA is THE Imbue tree. That's their entire identity. It's a shame that it's been playing second fiddle these past 2 previews

[Anurakh]

Well, I have tried my two inquisitives, a pure arti and a ranger/arti, and I have to say that I don't like this update. The dps is significantly lower. For example, with the pure arti, before I had two imbues, the one for the feat of Air plane and the one for law of the inquisitive. The numbers were much higher than they are now, significantly more, than they are now with a single imbue. Also, it is impossible for the numbers to be comparable, because one of them used to scale with spellpower.

It's not bad that some imbues are consolidated into one, but I think you have gone too far by unifying imbues. Some are fine to unify, but it's better to have multiple imbues at once, especially when some are from such different sources and scale differently (range/melee power vs spellpower). I don't like so much unification, I have lost too much dps.

I guess it's useless to ask you to moderate with that update, and don't create such a big unification. When you expose your ideas in Lammania it is usually already an irreversible process. But I really think you should at least keep two different imbues, that don't stack: the energetic ones based on spellpower and the rest (alignment, bane, etc) based on range/melee power. If you don't do this, people are going to be very upset when they see all the dps they've lost.

Also, consider the idea of renaming the elemental weapons spells (and the feat elemental weapon), as with the new system they no longer deal any elemental damage (which should refer only to cold, fire, acid, electricity) and don't even increase elemental imbues, instead they increase all types of imbues, not just elemental energy ones. Don't create any more confusing discrepancies with D&D terminology, devs. Remember that this is still a D&D game, not one you made up.