Lammania Preview 3: Blightcaster

[Duhboy]

Grasping Roots- Level 6: Conjuration, Cost: 30 SP, Cooldown 20 seconds. Duration 10 seconds. Powerful thorny vines rip out of the ground seizing all enemies in the area. Enemies save vs Reflex or become entangled, with a re-occuring Strength save to break free. Targets also take 1d6 in piercing damage every 2 seconds. All enemy movement through the area is slowed by 30%, no save. Area of effect fire spells will destroy these vines and free any entangled creatures. Incorporeal creatures and oozes are naturally immune. Fire elementals and other fire creatures are immune because they burn through the plants.

On Lamannia, it's listed as a transmutation spell. WAI or oversight?

Poisoned Thorns - Your Splinter Bolt and Thorn Spells now also cause additional 2 points of Poison damage for every spell level. This scales with spell power.

Grasping Thorns not affected by Poisoned Thorns despite the spell being a "thorn" spell as per description.

[Ordinary]

I spotted the following typos/issues while transcribing the tree:

1. An Unkindness of Ravens: Has "save vs confusing and blind", should that be "confusion and blind"?
2. The Ability items in tier 3/4, Have thee wrong base icon, say "Dex/Int/Wis" and let you choose between con/wis
3. Is it "Splinterbolt" or "Splinter Bolt"? for the spell name. You have both used in the tree.

[Sam-u-r-eye]

I understand the vested interest in playability in reaper. But what about... the rest of the game? That isn't reaper? The people who do not play reaper difficulty? Just throw it away or overtune it to meet the needs of the reaper crowd?

The answer is definitely to let it work in both in a balanced way. <3

[newmart]

I agree that the poison/disease spells are out of the meta, but not for the reasons you explained. The reason I believe stat damage is irrelevant is because mobs heal it almost instantly in high reaper. If you're lucky you'll have a very few seconds window to use the debuff before the mobs heal it off with a shrug. Much like concealment and incorporeality, you're setting up a class for failure if you base it around a mechanic that also does not work in high reaper. I'm saying this because I do not think Elite difficulty or low reaper is the meta.

In my opinion, the problem is that these mechanics do not work in reaper and need an adjustment on that front. Until then, stat damage, concealment, and incorporeality are useless to me.

I am aware of that, I don't think they can adjust this right now, but a spell useful while leveling is, is usable in 90% of this game. Its ok low lv spells are only situational in high levels, but useless from the beginning?

The ability damage in epic/reaper could be difficult to implement due to these limitations, just to open the window to ability dmg specialists, like the blight caster, able to overcome this and do tons of ability damage, more than they can regenerate.

I still don't understand where ability damage and negative levels are OP to devs, and made all epic monsters so resistant to them, since a single hold monster can render them helpless instantly and a finger of dead kills them, why casting energy drain and diseases lot of times to same results is forbidden?

Now that we have a class working around ability damage, those spells should sap stats faster and/or slow their regeneration (as it does with hp regeneration). Blight debuff in core 5 or 6 could slow their ability stat regeneration and negative lv regeneration by 50% or so.

[MaeveTuohy]

If the Blight Wolf form is a zombie plant like other blights, will it also have all their immunities to trip, stun, enchantment and everything else? You should be consistent.

[SpardaX]

I agree that the poison/disease spells are out of the meta, but not for the reasons you explained. The reason I believe stat damage is irrelevant is because mobs heal it almost instantly in high reaper. If you're lucky you'll have a very few seconds window to use the debuff before the mobs heal it off with a shrug. Much like concealment and incorporeality, you're setting up a class for failure if you base it around a mechanic that also does not work in high reaper. I'm saying this because I do not think Elite difficulty or low reaper is the meta.

In my opinion, the problem is that these mechanics do not work in reaper and need adjustment on that front. Until then, stat damage, concealment and incorporeality are useless to me.

It's comments like this one that make me wish that I had copied / taken a screenshot / some other way to just directly link to the dev posts made when reaper was coming out, I don't have a real quote, but that boiled down to: "We will not balance game mechanics and abilities around reaper difficulty. Reaper difficulty is a challenge difficulty, and it is meant to be as such. You should not play it and expect your character abilities or DCs to work as consistently or effectively as they do on elite."

I know that way of thinking has seemingly been all but scrapped at this point, but it was a nice sentiment to hold on to for a while.

[Skyael]

"We will not balance game mechanics and abilities around reaper difficulty. Reaper difficulty is a challenge difficulty, and it is meant to be as such. You should not play it and expect your character abilities or DCs to work as consistently or effectively as they do on elite."

Hi spardaX, I believe your quote describes a different situation from what we have on the live servers. It describes reduced effectiveness for things like Stat damage and Negative levels. They do not have reduced effectiveness in high reaper. They are completely ineffective. The same goes for displacement and incorporeality, even though it's a bit off topic with Blightcaster druids.

In my opinion, the problem is that these mechanics do not work in reaper and need adjustment on that front. Until then, stat damage, concealment and incorporeality are useless to me.

My point here is that Blightcasters have access to some cool effects, like stat damage. I would like them to be usable in reaper, even if with reduced effectiveness. In other words, I would like to be able to use poison to damage con and the effects of my spell to not disappear before I can cast a follow up spell.

I still don't understand where ability damage and negative levels are OP to devs, and made all epic monsters so resistant to them, since a single hold monster can render them helpless instantly and a finger of dead kills them, why casting energy drain and diseases lot of times to same results is forbidden?

This mirrors exactly how I feel about it.

[Greantun]

When leveling up a pure Blight Caster, at Level 11 (when you get Level 6 spells), it shows

Fire Shield (cold version)

Not the whole fire shield, just the cold version. Should that still be there, it isn't available after the leveling in the character sheet, and it was stated in the OP that Fire Shield should be removed.

[Xezom]

Bugs:
High Priority:
- Thorn Lance causes massive performance issues bogging down stronger rigs and causing weaker rigs to force the game to crash after casting. Huge frame rate hit.

Mid priority:
- Grasping Thorns is listed as a conjuration in the patch notes to match all the other thorn spells. In game, it is a transmutation and scales with transmutation DC. Needs changed to conjuration.
-- If Grasping thorns is supposed to be Transmutation, I'd recommend changing Doomsayer from +1 Conjuration, Necromancy, and Evocation to +1 Conjuration, Necromancy, and Transmutation considering that most of the spells related to the blightcaster are more Transmutations and Conjurations. It's locked behind a t5 so it should be pertinent to the bread and butter of the enhancement tree, Evocation doesn't really fit.
- Grasping Thorns is not considered a Thorn spell for the purpose of Poisoned Thorns causing it to miss out of the 2 poison damage per level. Should be getting this damage in addition to the Defiled Growth. Currently it does 1d6/CL piercing damage +1d4/CL negative damage with defiled growth. Should be 1d6/CL pierce + 1d4/CL negative + 2/CL poison once you have all three points.
-- If this is WAI, change the name from Grasping Thorns to Grasping Roots, as in the patch notes. In game, all versions of the spell are called Grasping Thorns and gain the proper bonuses from things that grant caster levels and increases to your Thorn spells. So IMHO it should gain the +1 acid or +2 poison damage per level from Poisoned Thorns.
- Unkindness of Ravens animation depth is far longer than the actual hit box of the skill. Fine if it's the shorter version, but right now it's a fair bit shorter than the animation would suggest.

Low Priority:
- Grasping Thorns SLA description is wrong. Needs to be updated to match the spell book version.
- Grasping Thorns SLA uses a different icon than the spell book version. (It's still sharing the icon with entangle)
- Fire Shield (Cold) is still in the spell book. It's not TECHNICALLY a fire spell, and there are other cold spells in the spell book so this one is potentially permissible.
- Unkindness of Ravens doesn't appear to scale with spell power and doesn't have a scaling listed. Does it scale with MP/RP? Regardless of how it scales, the point should probably note how/if it scales. Right now it doesn't seem like it does, making it kind of a "meh" point for as long of a CD and short range as it has. It's pretty high up in the tree to try to justify it as a Wolf Form only ability.
- Thorn Bloom SLA uses a different Icon than the Spell book version. (It's still sharing the icon with Splinterbolt)
- Thorn Blade Spell notes that the weapons "have the flaming effect," even though it deals poison and acid damage.

Art Comments:

- I like the sickly looking mangy wolf. Pretty cool and awesome look for a decaying wolf.
- Hive Master looks pretty cool and very putrid. Mentioned before that it looks like a good fart elemental. (My running buddy called it the sewer elemental)
- Thorn Kin, I know is buggy, but I'm hoping it looks better when it's working properly than it currently does. Right now it's just Barkskin. Not even a reskinned Barkskin, just the base. Could use some zhuzhing up. Would've been cool to transform into the old wood woad from the old ED trees.
- Defiled Growth art changes to the base spells are pretty cool and not overly invasive. Well done there.

I'm very happy with the way this Archetype has turned out. Definitely my favorite of the three for this round and favorite so far out of the 6 available. I'd have loved to seen more support for a melee thorn knight using the new Thorn Blade spell and imbues, but then again we all know late game that conjured weapons don't stand a chance against sentient weapons so it's not a huge loss there. This is definitely a cool casting tree for both the thorn and the hive. I didn't try out the wolf personally, but maybe once it's live I'll give it a go. Fix up the performance issue with Thorn Lance and I'd give this one the green light to be ready for live, other issues notwithstanding (What's DDO without it's quirks, right?)

[LurkingVeteran]

...

Melf's Acid Arrow - Now does 1d6 acid damage per caster level (Max caster level 10 for 10d6). Applies damage and ticks twice again over 6 seconds (Damage occurs 3 times in total) (fixed the missing tick problem)

Black Dragon Bolt - is being updated to do 1d10 acid damage per caster level (Max caster level 25, caps at 25 to 250 damage). Applies damage and ticks three again over 8 seconds (Damage occurs 4 times in total)[/INDENT](additional tick of damage added)

...

Is the 8s on BDB a typo? I think it was 4s in an earlier preview and Melf's now is +3 ticks over 6s. 8 doesn't really divide well by 3. Anything above 6s is just too slow imo.

[newmart]

It's comments like this one that make me wish that I had copied / taken a screenshot / some other way to just directly link to the dev posts made when reaper was coming out, I don't have a real quote, but that boiled down to: "We will not balance game mechanics and abilities around reaper difficulty. Reaper difficulty is a challenge difficulty, and it is meant to be as such. You should not play it and expect your character abilities or DCs to work as consistently or effectively as they do on elite."

I know that way of thinking has seemingly been all but scrapped at this point, but it was a nice sentiment to hold on to for a while.

No problems with the difficulty, but mobs in reaper are essentially immune to stat damage. Also due to true sight it's impossible to sneak. This makes some strategies and builds inviable or useless. It's like if playing a necromancer, meet with all mobs in reaper with death ward.

Since reaper is the endgame content, these immunities discourage many kinds of builds, narrowing the possibilities.

[Firebreed]

Here is a Flame Blade bug that likely also affects Thorn Blade (didn't have time to test on Lam):

The Flame Blade item that's created by the Flame Blade spell currently scales based on Druid Caster Levels, unlike the Feydark Illusionist's Shadowblade and the Active-Druid-Past-Life's Flame Blade, both of which scale based on character level. This has two problems:
- A) if you're not playing pure Druid (and you kinda need to splash Ranger if you make a build around Flame Blades) the Flame Blade spell is of almost no use.
- B) But more importantly, in epics you only get 1 CL every 2 levels, meanining that you get the CL25 version of the weapon when your pure-Druid gets to level 30, and you get the CL30 version of the weapon when you get to level 40! This is clearly unintended, as the CL25 version has stats that are intended for a level 25 character and are in line with other ML25 weapons, and the CL30 version has stats that are intended for a level 30 character and are in line with other ML29+ weapons.
In short, the Druid Flame Blade spell should scale with character level, not caster level (or, failing that, the epic versions of the Flame Blade should be looked at and adjusted).

As far as I can tell, the Thorn Blades scale the same way Flame Blade does, so they likely suffer from this same bug.

Also, please make sure you don't just slap Cursespewing on all versions of the Thorn Blade; the ML10+ version should have Improved Cursespewing, and the ML30 version should have Legendary Cursespewing.

[xaxaeb]

Bugs:
High Priority:
- Thorn Lance causes massive performance issues bogging down stronger rigs and causing weaker rigs to force the game to crash after casting. Huge frame rate hit.

MFW Ryzen 5800x, 32gb ram and 6900xt is considered a weaker rig xD

[misterski]

Here is a Flame Blade bug that likely also affects Thorn Blade (didn't have time to test on Lam):

The Flame Blade item that's created by the Flame Blade spell currently scales based on Druid Caster Levels, unlike the Feydark Illusionist's Shadowblade and the Active-Druid-Past-Life's Flame Blade, both of which scale based on character level. This has two problems: A) if you're not playing pure Druid (and you kinda need to splash Ranger if you make a build around Flame Blades) the Flame Blade spell is of almost no use. But more importantly, B) in epics you only get 1 CL every 2 levels, meanining that you get the CL25 version of the weapon when your pure-Druid gets to level 30, and you get the CL30 version of the weapon when you get to level 40! This is clearly unintended, as the CL25 version has stats that are intended for a level 25 character and are in line with other ML25 weapons, and the CL30 version has stats that are intended for a level 30 character and are in line with other ML29+ weapons. In short, the Druid Flame Blade spell should scale with character level, not caster level.

As far as I can tell, the Thorn Blades scale the same way Flame Blade does, so they likely suffer from this same bug.

Also, please make sure you don't just slap Cursespewing on all versions of the Thorn Blade; the ML10+ version should have Improved Cursespewing, and the ML30 version should have Legendary Cursespewing.

That's not a bug but WAI. The reason Shadowblade and the Druid past life Flame Blade are tied to character level is because they are not class specific abilities so they have to scale off of character level, but the Flame Spell is specific to the Druid class so it scales off of Druid levels as do all Druid spells.

[Xezom]

MFW Ryzen 5800x, 32gb ram and 6900xt is considered a weaker rig xD

Rigs weaker than my main gaming PC I suppose i should have said lol.

Thorn Lance causes a crash on all my other comps except for me and my running partners main comps (they're almost identical). Even on mine it causes a frame rate drop from 45 stabilized to 2 FPS, GPU only at 35%, CPU 63% during frame loss.

[Firebreed]

That's not a bug but WAI. The reason Shadowblade and the Druid past life Flame Blade are tied to character level is because they are not class specific abilities so they have to scale off of character level, but the Flame Spell is specific to the Druid class so it scales off of Druid levels as do all Druid spells.

Please refer to point B) of the post you quoted.

[Bjond]

Thorn Strike- Level 1: Conjuration - Cost: 2 Sp, Cooldown 2.0 seconds. You hurl a magical thorn at your target dealing 5 to 7 points of Piercing damage per caster level (up to a maximum of 50 to 70 damage at caster level 10).

Thorn Bloom- Level 3: Conjuration, Cost: 15 SP, Cooldown 3.5. Point Blank AOE - Thorns blast out from your body inflicting 5 to 10 points of Piercing damage per caster level (up to a maximum of 50 to 100 damage at caster level 10) to all nearby foes. Reflex save for half.

Thorn Wave- Level 6: Conjuration, Cost: 25 SP, Cooldown 4.5. Cone - You hurl a wave of magical thorns in front of you dealing to all targets in front of you for 6 to 11 points of Piercing damage per caster level (up to a maximum of 90 to 165 damage at caster level 15). Reflex save for half.

The major attraction of a caster druid to me is that damaging spells are either no-save or NOT reflex; eg. Ice Flowers only has reflex on half it's damage, for at most a 50% damage loss on that spell for mobs with improved evasion. IE seems to be on about 10~30% of all targets, varying by quest, and was a major problem for the caster builds I tried. I'd suggest making it fortitude or these spells will end up with a fair number of targets that are immune to it.

IMHO, I'd rip out the SLA Enveloping Swarm and move the T5 & T4 SLAs down a tier. Unless short and VERY strong (eg. rend the soul), dots are pointless outside of raid boss fights. I always try and use them on my casters because they look so efficient. But, I always end up killing with DD instead because they take too long. Then I stop using them altogether. You'd probably be safe moving the swarm SLA to T1 if you want to keep it in the tree for flavor. Doubt it will see much use.

BTW, I loved seeing the immunity breaks. That kind of support makes me think SSG is serious about making this fun and playable (heh, as contrasted with the skin warlock).

[neain2008]

The major attraction of a caster druid to me is that damaging spells are either no-save or NOT reflex; eg. Ice Flowers only has reflex on half it's damage, for at most a 50% damage loss on that spell for mobs with improved evasion. IE seems to be on about 10~30% of all targets, varying by quest, and was a major problem for the caster builds I tried. I'd suggest making it fortitude or these spells will end up with a fair number of targets that are immune to it.

IMHO, I'd rip out the SLA Enveloping Swarm and move the T5 & T4 SLAs down a tier. Unless short and VERY strong (eg. rend the soul), dots are pointless outside of raid boss fights. I always try and use them on my casters because they look so efficient. But, I always end up killing with DD instead because they take too long. Then I stop using them altogether. You'd probably be safe moving the swarm SLA to T1 if you want to keep it in the tree for flavor. Doubt it will see much use.

What seems to work best with the AOE dots that normal druid has (at least until you start running r6+ at endgame) is that you drop a dot or two on a group, and then just ignore them and move to the next. As a druid I'm plenty tanky enough to walk through/around the dying mobs to get to the next group to repeat the process. Its not nearly as fast as a nuke, but it gets things done and is fast enough that I'm not too far behind if I'm in a group.

One thing I'm a bit worried about since druid and its epic tree seem to have a few problems with, is dot stacking (and by stacking, I mean if one is on the mob when the next is cast, the first goes away). There are dots out there that just don't stack with each other. PA thorn dot (Carrion Swarm) wont stack with half the druids acid spells, and both the PA thorn dot (Carrion Swarm) and half the normal dot spells will ALL overwrite the acid dot from items, making those items look shiny but mostly be a waste of a gear slot.
Please fix this and ensure that it doesn't happen with the Blightcaster.

[misterski]

Please refer to point B) of the post you quoted.

Again it's a class spell so it scales off a class's CL. No class spells scale off of character level. It's a feature, not a bug.

[Firebreed]

Again it's a class spell so it scales off a class's CL. No class spells scale off of character level. It's a feature, not a bug.

Again, the epic versions of Flame Blade clearly do not function as intended. This is the bug. The "make it scale by character level instead of caster level" was just a proposed solution. They can solve it whichever way they wish.