PT: 3 new Classes. Bard, Battlemage, Summoner

#21

Alright my two serious cents on the classes

Bard
“A little TOO helpful.”
On the surface, this guy is pretty neat. Sick MP regen boost aswell as tacking on extra range. Its great for just about everyone… except the Bard. He plays as a direct team player, having little tools when left alone. The Priest was essentially this problem, bar having the ability to heal yourself, and that came to use eventually. But the Bard, he does himself no favors. Extra range to a bow? Sure its a great perk but bows are already at that nice healthy range for most combat (given now a lot of bosses form rings or barricades around the outside of their radius to keep long rangers from cheesing). And the mana boost is just to keep yourself at longer range.

I get to the point of, what makes someone want to max out this class aside getting the white star and maybe being a Bard main in a Lost Halls discord or something? He flops about outside of groups, but I guess that’s the direction you want to send the game anyway, so maybe its a motivator. Just don’t expect everyone to Bard emote on your next run.

Battlemage
“Immune to Stun v2”
Not the worst idea in the world. His main appeal would have to be the defense/speed boost (vitaility being less appealing than having a Paladin in close quarters). A nice top off of survivability for anyone up close makes him great to have by your side. The Daze I see is intended for dazing enemies that come too close to the Battlemage, allowing him to even the playing field. But we know he will go the way of the Knight one of two ways: more and more bosses become immune to prevent steamroll, or more bosses will have generators to make more bullets outside of the boss range. This is speculation and do not shoot my entire argument down because of this, but the Knight has taken a lot of heavy hits off his main niche, now that “tanking hits” is soon to be out of the question.

He acts as a walking Huntress trap essentially. It can be really great for crowd control on monsters, but I mean most monsters face the trio of immunity (stasis, stun, paralyze), resorting to having buff those classes in other ways to make them more viable. The fate of the Battlemage might just be a snap away.

Mad Scientist/Summoner
“I didn’t want to pay for a pet, so I made one myself”
This seems like the biggest WIP class in the three so I guess I’m not gonna rag on it too hard. As it stands now, you get a nice little helper that patrols your perimeter for a bit of extra damage. The mechanic itself is a bit lackluster, mimicking that of a stronger/more accurate Attack X pet. Right now it just gets outclassed by playing Wizards as a staff DPS. If I were to make a suggestion, perhaps have minions that work like actual minions, like maybe summoning three little skeletons (or maybe Buddy Bots in the MS case) that’ll run up and start causing damage to whatever it attaches to. Maybe even different kinds of summons for various ST sets.

I can’t make heads or tails on this, but right now its a bit weak in my opinion. Buff the Summons, and make it a wand class to finally balance out the 3 class weapons (battlemage being the next step to 4)

#22

fun
image

#23

wai how

#24

veri cool

#25

i noticed this, i created an account but i cannot play the summoner class without leveling multiple classes to lvl 20

#26

Summoner

  • this behaviour happens when next to a wall. if it can’t go thru (i.e. tight hallways) it will get “stuck” and “slingshot” towards where it wants to go
    https://thumbs.gfycat.com/RealisticIncompatibleEagle-mobile.mp4
  • 160 mp per use seems kinda high? at t6 i counted 15 damage ticks. which is 15 * 205 = 3075 total damage against a 0 def enemy. against a 50 def enemy, total dmg = 2325. compared other damage dealing t6 items, the mp cost is just too high
  • the current implementation (circles you with radius r) seems kinda…bland? would be nice if they did something like latch onto closest enemy to cursor etc.
  • range of the summoned objects at t6 are like 7? This covers a huge area and encourages just keeping cursor close to character. Don’t have a problem with that though, just a consequence of large range

Bard

  • bard’s energize being an equivalent 20 mp/s is too high, especially since mp is proportionally smaller than hp for most classes
  • second craftable’s comment about the ability being useless during solo play. i mean the stats are pretty nice atm, so the solo mbc / cult / shatters went smoothly but the ability was pretty much useless

Battle Mage

  • stat buffs are cool, the daze wlll render the daze aspect of brain prism useless but doesn’t matter
  • daze duration / range should scale w/ tiers, i don’t think it is rn?

Range increase:

  • need to figure out some edge cases (e.g. for bulwark and other parametric weapons, the effect isn’t as desired?). similarly, some abilites are affected while others are not (e.g. tested spells with @seelpit and tablet is affected, while jade storms is not)
#27

Are the Apples of Semi-Maxening still available from the mystery box area? If so, that should make your leveling endeavor go much quicker.

#28

Untitled

#29

I disagree with it making tje daze prism useless, using a decoy to daze is a lot safer for enemies that might be way to dangerous to run up and daze, so there are still a few situations where the prism better, I agree with everything else you said though

#30

it will always be good for 02 and cult runs still

#31

Forgot to mention this in my original response, but the bard’s range buff seems to increase projectile lifetime as its mechanism for buffing range. This would have two (presumably/potentially) unintended consequences.

First, it disproportionately benefits single-shot weapons and/or weapons with an arc gap of 0, because it doesn’t affect the true range of multishot weapons. This is really odd from a balance perspective, since pixie-enchanted sword is the only multi-shot weapon with an arc gap of more than 0 that is worth targeting in this way. The majority of ‘meta’ weapons are single-shot or have an arc gap of 0: etherite, ripper, leaf bow, void bow, deathless crossbow, tiered staffs, tiered wands, wand of the fallen, tiered swords, sword of the colossus, pirate king’s cutlass, celestial blade, and kazekiri. This mostly hurts things (relatively) that really don’t need nerfs: tiered bows, corruption cutter, coral bow, nectar crossfire, tyrant wand, and edictum praetoris. Obviously nerf isn’t quite the right word here, but it doesn’t benefit them nearly as much as it does the ‘meta’ weapons.

Second, it allows weapons with low projectile speeds to burst harder by stacking more bullets. The most notable example here is void blade, but it can be used for ripper and blade of the assailant as well. I think this is probably unintended, but not really unbalanced since higher range is LESS beneficial than average with low projectile speed. The advantage and drawback kind of balance each other out here.

Range buff is a neat mechanic.

#32

Honestly, I hope The Mad Scientist/Summoner sticks around, I might start using it as a secondary main to my Wizard, it’s really that good.

#33

Would it be possible, in addition to increasing lifetime, for the lute to also decrease shot spread? That wouldn’t affect single shots (I think?) and would help with “increasing true range” as you mentioned. Pfiffel’s tool has a parameter called “Arc Gap”, not sure if that’s how it’s defined in the xml iexplore_2019-11-13_17-02-42

#34

Would be a good solution, and I expect it’s possible. In the xml, it’s tagged in a very similar manner to the projectile lifetime, so if one can be affected on the fly I see no reason why the other couldn’t.

<LifetimeMS>325</LifetimeMS>

<ArcGap>10</ArcGap>

Technically, lifetime is within the <Projectile> tag and arc gap isn’t, but I assume that wouldn’t matter.

#35

I really like the name “summoner” or “Conjurer” like Kwisp mentioned over “mad scientist” personally but that is probably my favorite of the 3 atm.

I also feel like the Lute ability atm is a little op / ridiculous with the range witht he current values

Also ik the names aren’t the focus but feel it should be brought up

#36

summoner is a better name choice because it doesn’t limit them to only things related to science (ie it would be able to summon basically anything rather than just constructs/amalgamation type allies)

#37

so my ninja transformed into a battlemage for whatever reason…

Capture2
Capture2.PNG802x652 68.1 KB

im gonna keep this character, cuz this is pretty cool ngl

#38

What if I told you… that I kinda got bored and made ST concepts for the bard?

DJBardR5

And yes, that is infact a boombox.

DJBardSkinR1

An example for what a 16x16 skin could look like.

Other than the above, my thoughts on the new classes:

Bard has a decent concept on paper, + an entirely new buff currently exclusive to it. Other than that, the range buff might need to be tweaked a little to make it more usable with classes with high shotspread weapons that can’t benefit all that much from higher range (Looking at the DBlade and Pixie in particular, okay maybe EP too).

Battlemage’s ability invalidates the likes of the QoT/Brain against everything except bosses you can’t exactly get close too. It’s otherwise just a weirder warrior with a daze AoE.

Summoner is surprisingly fun and satisfying to play, same reasons Assassin is one of my favorite classes. Would make more sense as a wand class than a staff class TBH.

#39

Lowkey tho, I couldn’t get the Mad Scientists abilities to attack for some reason. i was able to summon like 3 at a time and they wouldn’t attack

#40

wow deca, stop it. You’re making me wanna spend more money and support you… I’d shit myself in excitement if I woke up to find out these classes are out.