Sub skill re rolling /fairy magic+ transmutation feedback

[Mbaums]

I’m a little concerned with how fairy magic rerolls on gear. It might be a me problem, complaining about something that is intended to be a rare outcome. I tried explaining it to friends to help hammer out my thoughts. I did suggestion-report this in a less thought out manner (but equally polite mind you!!!) and fairy magic being the first test of a sub-skill, I thought I’d share my ramblings.

The fairy magic topaz only lets you have a chance for FM mods crafted, and how FM gear drops, I’ll argue it’s unreasonable to ever get gear with the right mods for a FM build that uses 3 FM-skills. I HIGHLY recommend a way to transmute mentalism mod-slots into FM mod-slots. Going forward, I’m going to pretend I just care about the helm slot. If you want to know, the build “goal” is to go ham on astral strike, pixie flare, and fairy fire. I’m pairing FM with ice magic. And overall I am going to toss in all of the distanced AoE attacks and take advantage of some the unique FM skills I mentioned above. I’m really only pointing this in case the community response is, “just use one FM ability”.

What I can deduce:
At first, when I crafted stuff with inscribed topaz I thought the odds on each slot being made was like… “have FM or have Ment”. That’s probably not really the case. Crafting a helm with FM topaz on top, I now believe it’s “select mod from a list of 15 mods ( 5 FM, 10 ment). I’m assuming there was one purple/yellow only mod in there, so we’re looking at a 50% chance to get a FM mod on a green/blue helm. For red gear, assuming you want 2 FM mods, (4 FM left, 10 ment) we’re at 20% for two FM mods ([5/10] *[4/10]). For a red piece of gear for the FM heavy build you’ll need 5 times the drops to get the skill you want because you can’t roll mentalism mods into FM mods. I personally like to have a goal of yellow gear but some of the gear I want has 3-FM mods and I can tell a mile away, it’s just not happening.

I hope this doesn’t come off as harsh. I’m not someone who was preemptively excited for fairies, but somewhere along the lines of getting hopped up on fairy dust and zooming around with a group of fairies doing the hive-quests made me appreciate them. When I decided to make a FM set and realized it would take 5x the effort, I had to type this out. I feel that if this was not brought up, this could sink player adoption of all of the advanced-sub-skills to come (not sure what we’re calling spear/axe/fairy magic anymore) and I know a lot of effort goes into each skill.

Solution: I really doubt there is code in the gear to say if the item was almost made with fairy magic, but came out as mentalism. However it should be possible to code something so that if the item has a fairy magic mod, it’s possible to re-roll mentalism mods into FM. If a yellow drops and has the wrong ratio of FM mods, it’s much more enjoyable to know it might be perfect after weeks of rolling vs never. I can’t say if the cost to do this should be in phlog/transmutation or prisms/augmentation, but obviously either of those would be the right choice.

[Glythe]

I’m a little concerned with how fairy magic rerolls on gear. It might be a me problem, complaining about something that is intended to be a rare outcome. I tried explaining it to friends to help hammer out my thoughts. I did suggestion-report this in a less thought out manner (but equally polite mind you!!!) and fairy magic being the first test of a sub-skill, I thought I’d share my ramblings.

The fairy magic topaz only lets you have a chance for FM mods crafted, and how FM gear drops, I’ll argue it’s unreasonable to ever get gear with the right mods for a FM build that uses 3 FM-skills.

In short... building armor in this game is both incredibly rewarding and frustrating.

When you look at normal armor consider that I have a purple helm (meaning extra rolls before it breaks and needs repairs) with 2 skills for BC and 3 skills for shield (with a 4th enchanted dummy or blocker modifier)

This helm was created with one incorrect power - so it should be easy to fix right? Wrong. Ignore the BC half of the helm (as that is locked in). There are 2 correct shield mods and a 4th power that is blocking an extra mod so make rolling easier. In other words the choice for the correct mod every time I roll is : 1/6. The problem from what I can tell is that the mods "say" they are equal chance but I am not actually convinced they are based on certain comments made by admin type people.

The hat should have been fixed well before the 4th repair but it was not. I do not remember how many extra rolls you get (yellow is 4) but I think it is at least +2 over the next tier up. The first 3 weeks gave a minimum of 24 rolls to get that one slot fixed.

In my experience this is the typical armor creation scenario.



Now then let's talk about Fae magic. Looking on this experience fae magic is going to be mechanically gimped. The most realistic result for Fae magic is that you use at most 1-2 skills and everything else is mentalism. Why? To make armor for a fae mentalist you will likely be making max armor with topaz/ whatever. And then you will add the 7th power via augmentation. Doing it any other way is going to take too long/ too much effort to be worth it. Thats kind of funny as that is kind of how I feel the fairy is right now.... too much effort to really be worth it.

Here's an example... you build an armor set and instead of using agonize you use Astral strike. All of these mods you will apply by ripping them off another piece of gear (probably building non max armor for the sole purpose of deconstruction/maybe dual purpose skill raising).

Head - Astral Strike Damage +50%
Chest- Astral Strike's reuse timer is -4 secs, and damage is boosted +80% vs Elite enemies
MainH.-Astral Strike's reuse timer is -4 secs, and damage is boosted +80% vs Elite enemies
Feet- Astral Strike's damage is +160 and all targets are Stunned
Ring- Astral Strike Damage +50%

Optional
Neck- Astral Strike Power Cost -62

[Glythe]

Now compare those with Agonize

Head - Agonize deals +22% damage and conjures a magical field that mitigates 20% of all physical damage you take for 1 minute (or until 200 damage is mitigated).
Chest- Agonize Damage +67%
Legs- Agonize deals +576 Psychic damage over 12 seconds
Hands- Agonize Damage +67%
*MainH.- Agonize deals +70% damage and reuse timer is -11 seconds, but the ability deals 120 health damage to YOU
Ring-Agonize deals +576 Psychic damage over 12 seconds

In short the way this is setup is that looking at just one power swap (mental to fae magic) is what it seems like the developer intended. But this kind of gimps fairy even more : Have lots of cool abilities that you aren't really allowed to use except maybe one at a time - because not enough mod slots. In end game builds the number mod slots you have directly relates to your power level.

At a glance the Fae Magic looks wickedly OP and simultaneously UP. I still think most of it should be side bar enabled abilities that require energy to use.

I would also suggest ditching the entire bit about FM requiring a specific gem. All things being equal simple is better. Just make the slots for mental and FM take up the same space. If you use X power for mental it does this and Y power for FM it does that. Granted in the case of agonize and astral strike it works perfectly because they are mutually exclusive. The same could have been done for power conduit and power wave.

The trouble would have been what to with pixie flare and fairy fire.

Honestly..... if Fae magic goes to the trouble of having its own gem make the armor.... then why is it not a 'bar' of its own?

It levels up like a combat skill, gem slots like a combat skill.... but is not its own combat skill. And I think that honestly is the fault.

Suggested fix : make more fairy dmg/utility abilities and make fairy magic its own skill. That way when people make Menta/fae magic armor their skills are not gimped.

[Citan]

Thanks for the write-up, and to the first point you're maing: you're right -- and I realized it was going to be an issue, but didn't have time to rewrite the transmutation table yet. But I've got it encoding the needed info already.

Whenever you loot or craft an item that has a Fairy Magic power in it, that information is being encoded into the item. In a month or two (when I'm next working heavily with treasure), I'll change the transmutation table to use this information. It'll look to see if an item has the "fairy magic" flag, and if so, all fairy magic and mentalism abilities will be available in all re-rolls. This will also mean you can roll fairy magic off an item, and later roll it back on, if you wanted. That will make it more practical to have two Fairy Magic abilities on an item.

I'll also be adding a few more Fairy Magic treasure mods at some point in the future. (None picked out yet, or I'd have added them already, but there's space for a few more which haven't been filled in yet.)

[Mbaums]

Thanks for the reply, and I’m happy to hear that I should actually be saving my yellows! Not sure if it was on purpose but it’s probably a good plan that you left room for more mods, so after people have poked around with the skill set, you can plug any holes in FM from player suggestions.

[Mbaums]

In a month or two (when I'm next working heavily with treasure), I'll change the transmutation table to use this information.

[Mikhaila]

"Soon".......