Technological Disciplines Improved

Langolier, regarding the usefulness of Disintegrate - you forget to count its rather steep fatigue cost. 50 at a time is no laughing matter - if you keep disintegrating everything, you'll either be waiting a LONG time to recharge the points every time, or you'll be chugging Fatigue potions like an addict.

Tulla doesn't appear in the game until fairly lategame (unless you rush the main quest), so for the longest time, you'll be spending your whole fatigue pool for one Disintegrate.

 

That's all true, however recover fatigue potions are pretty cheap and light weight. I also doubt you'll use Disintegrate on everything. Also remember that the right staff can give you a lot of extra fatigue. Not to mention items that increase constitution and/or fatigue recovery rate.

It is still an extremely powerful spell which tech has no real equivalent.

What does physical strength have to do with this?

I can see your reasoning here. If it were possible, I'd suggest that magick resistance would sort of deflect the power of disintegrate so that instead it did damage to a target's weapons and armor. Whatever the solution, disintegrate is too powerful. There needs to be a reliable way to resist or weaken its effects so that it isn't a one-hit-kills-all spell.

He won't accept Torian because Torian is a product of the Derian Ka.

Edit: It's a similar situation to one with Raven and Z'an Al'urin. You need enough persuasion to convince Magnus to stay or he'll leave.

 

Same could be said about ammo, really.

As far as the cost goes, fatigue potions aren't necessarily cheaper than bullets.

As for their weight, they also have some disadvantages ammunition hasn't. For one thing, as opposed to ammo, you cannot safely* let your followers carry them for you, so if you value your money and convenience, you're pretty much forced to keep all of your potions in your own inventory.

That's when the next problem arises - potions take space, meaning there is quite a limited amount of them you can still carry around while maintaining the minimal reasonable inventory space needed for collecting and managing loot, which cannot be said about ammo.

* A follower won't use up any ammo as long as he doesn't have a weapon using it, but he will use up fatigue potions whenever he gets tired or receives fatigue damage, which can happen at any given moment. That strongly discourages any mage from handing over his precious potions to followers if he ever wants to see them again.

Give it time. They'll discover nuclear fusion eventually.

The maximal number of hit points is dependant on strength, among other things.

And here I thought Raven-vs-Z'an and Perriman-vs-Goeffrey were the only follower conflicts in the game. Always nice to learn something new. Can't wait to check this out and hear an additional line of Magnus' bitching.

The problem here is that spells have 100% accuracy, even when cast by a weak mage on a high TA enemy. There could be a To Hit variable dependant on own MA and enemy MR and TA. This, of course, would require rebuilding the whole game's system of dealing with spells.

A quicker solution prepared exclusively for Disintegrate could be
100% * MR or TA (whichever is higher) = chance for Disintegrate to miss
or
100% * (MR + TA)/2 = chance for Disintegrate to miss.

 

Except there isn't a single gun in the game that can kill anything and everything in one hit without any chance of missing.

Yes, well I don't think that if I sit there traveling the world map until 1946 rolls around that I'll get any new schematics. Besides, atomic bombs aren't really man-portable. Maybe when 2077 rolls around I'll get a fat man?

Your point being?

HEEEEY! I don't understand why we're attacking such a decent type! If things don't change, I'll be going my own way...

I'm not saying the spell should literally miss. Perhaps I should have worded my thoughts differently.

I don't think disintegrates effect should come down to all or nothing. Rather its effectiveness to disintegrate things should be lessened by MA, perhaps in conjunction with electrical resistance. If you have high resistances in these areas then disintegrate should hurt you and damage your armor and weapons but not outright kill you. The degree to which it hurts you of-course being dependent on your resistances.

So in the end disintegrate is sort of like a really powerful corrosive acid, except throwing it doesn't piss off your allies and create a foul stench.

 

I have recently enjoyed the mechanized gun in real-time combat and it's all kinds of fun and effective. Yes, you need a billion bullets, so what? That's the nature of the beast. It is such a simple matter to burgle shops, haggle or gamble (or all three) that the cost of bullets never even registers.

 

POST RESUBMITTED (WITH AN EDIT AT THE END)

(Confusing there. Is the answer even related with the quote?)

It would be hard to design such a gun without making it far more overpowered the Disintegrate. It would probably need to have insane ammo usage, 100 fuel per attack or so, and still a patient technologist would be able to gather and carry dozens of "shots" on himself and all of his followers.

Truth be said, the more I think about it, the more I perceive the idea of a a tech equivalent of Disintegrate a forced one. If that one would be even placed there, for the sake of magick-tech equality, what would be next?

Tech teleports? Alignment sensing spectrometers? Grenades turning enemies into sheep? Potions of invisibility? Spirit summoning machinery? Shrink rays? Radiation emitters turning people into the Thing or the Human Torch?

We can go that cheesy way or just accept the concept of technology and magick being different paths with different possibilities, different rules and different ways of achieving goals.

Hey, only one way to be sure.

Max HP number is dependent on strength. You suggested that Disintegrate's damage should be dependent on max HP number. Therefore you suggested that Disintegrate's damage should be dependent on physical strength.

No, that's what I'm saying. I think it's reasonable that an inexperienced mage would have problems tossing Fireflashes around accurately, plus that high MR and TA would create a kind of a field or a distortion around the NPC having a chance of bouncing off enemy spells into walls.

It would still have to deal more (or at least equal) damage than 5 Jolts or 2 Lightning Bolts cast under the same conditions, though, unless we want it to share the Quench Life's fate of uselessness ("Why should I ever bother casting this spell if 10 Harms deal much more damage?").

EDIT:

Come to think of it, in a way there actually is. It's called the Shocking Staff.

 

Um... I think so? I don't know.

How so? Give it a moderate MSR (say 14), low speed (1 without apprentice training), and high ammo consumption. Say 100 charges per shot, maybe more. You can give it a shorter range too. Furthermore, unlike disintegrate it can miss and it probably weighs around 150 stone.

That doesn't look hard to me. Not to mention the fact that to get disintegrate a mage needs to invest only 17 CP's (assuming 8 base willpower). To make this theoretical disintegration ray a techie might need a lot more depending on what the components are, and of-course he needs points in perception and firearms to use the weapon with any chance of success.

Indeed, a mage can do the same thing with fatigue restoring items.

Cats and dogs sleeping together?

Certainly magick and tech don't have to be and probably shouldn't be the same. An effect that is relatively easy for a mage to produce might be comparatively harder for a techie purely on the basis that the techie must (for the most part) obey the natural laws of the universe. On the reverse side of things though a techie can reproduce his weapons and armor and distribute them to followers with the right stats and skills to employ them.

At this point I'm gonna fall back on my original post. I think the technological disciplines should have more items that provide moderate stat boosts, allowing a technologist with diverse interests to be save CP's and thus have enough over to obtain competency (say three ranks) in most most any skill he chooses. A techie can spread these items to followers but mages have things like tempus fugit, teleport, and disintegrate; abilities which techies have no direct counterpart too.

Though I suppose one should note that paralysis and knock-out gas grenades are quite potent and I don't think mages can have any equivalent there. If you recall the demons of Ruby Glenn (I think that's the name), the ones you face after obtaining the quest in Stillwater, they can be very easily be overcome with 1 paralysis grenade. So let it not be said that tech doesn't have some ridiculously powerful items, though they tend to be a bit harder to gain access to.

I was suggesting a method to simulate disintegrate completely destroying beings unresistant to it but only wounding beings which are. If anything quench life would make more sense as an all or nothing spells. The spirits either rip out your soul or they don't... Being burned to a crisp however, even if you manage to stop it, is probably still going to leave a mark on you.

Hmm, well that does make sense. It might also be a nice way to balance the early-game in which most mage characters can breeze through it without any effort. If spells functioned a bit like firearms, with lighting, range, and aptitude modifiers... well that would be interesting. It would be quite ironic too, but might make for a nice duality with regard to firearms.

I think I know what you are talking about, but I also think that might be a bug. After all the stats for the staff don't indicate that it will 1-hit KO opponents. I rather like the way it works, its clever, but it feels broken.

If anything it should maybe have a chance to induce "stun" when it hits opponents. (making electrical even more overpowered)

 

The amount of point by point, quote-rebuttal posts in this thread has reached epic proportions.

Shut up, you!

 

But Muro, I thought the staff killed enemies in 1 hit only in Real Time combat and not Turn-Based. Or am I wrong?

 

Only to a limited degree, keeping in mind that the only reasonable solution is to keep them exclusively in your own inventory and that they do take precious space.

It the end it would be a "kills enemies quicker than you can blink but you never really use it because it uses up an insane amount of ammo" type of weapon. While you rightly pointed out that the Mechanized Gun isn't as powerful as Disintegrate, I think it already quite effectively serves as that type of a weapon if anyone ever is in need of one. In Real Time, so does the Shocking Staff.

There could be an additional weapon with even higher AvD/AP and even lower AvD/AmU, but I'm wondering if it's existence would be justified by anyone actually using it. Hardly anyone as much as touches the Mechanized Gun and Shocking Staff already.

Indeed. Yet seeing how you are more or less suggesting Disintegrate feels broken as well, I figured it would make the Shocking Staff an even better tech equivalent of it from that point of view.

It would be more of a legit Disintegrate equivalent if it demanded a higher expertise, perhaps from more than one discipline at that, and had a higher MSR too. I'm sure everyone would then consider its properties a feature rather than a bug.

No, you are correct. In Turn Based, it only deals electrical damage until you run out of APs and then it just acts as a normal staff against that enemy. In other words, the first attack either kills it or acts like a vaccine.

I'm just saying that if a techie is in a desperate need of Disintegrate, he can always change to Real Time for a moment.

 

So if one has more dexterity (i.e more AP), the first hit of the staff in Turn Based deals more electrical damage?

 

More or less yes, but more remaining APs is the key phrase here.

You see, when you land a successful hit with the Shocking Staff, you deal 1-6 normal and 1-3 fatigue damage (+ the bonuses from strength), so the first hit acts like a standard melee attack. After that the weapon "takes over" and 100% successfully deals 1-10 electrical damage (using up 2 batteries per hit) with each hit and doesn't stop until it runs out of your APs in the round, kills the enemy or uses up all of your batteries.

In Real Time, where there are no APs, the only thing that can stop the Shocking Staff's effect are using up the supply of batteries, the enemy's death and your own death.

I was partly wrong on the vaccine part earlier. Some tasting has proven that it sometimes works like that whereas sometimes it doesn't. I'm not yet sure what exactly determines whether it does or not.

As funny as it is, I just found that casting any spell dealing direct damage (and a few other ones as well) on an enemy while holding the Shocking Staff for some reason turn on the Shocking Staff's electric damage dealing effect on that enemy, no matter the distance. Turns out the weapon is bugged to an even greater degree than I previously thought. I didn't check too many spells, but it sure worked for Harm, Jolt, Bolt of Lightning, Stone Throw and Stun.

 

That is so overpowered it's not even funny! But thank you for explaining!

 

Come to think of it, a grenade launcher is a very good candidate for an overpowered weapon. Up its damage even more, give it a higher ammo consumption (I forget, does it use fuel or grenades as ammo? If former, then higher ammo consumption, if latter, 1 grenade per shot is fine).

 

It uses one unit of fuel per shot.

At the moment it's rather weak. Even if it dealt damage to six enemies at once (and how often does that happen, really?), the total damage it would deal to all six of them would still be lower than what the Mechanized Gun deals to a single target, AvD/AP speaking. Increased damage (and perhaps ammo consumption) would make it more realistic and worth considering, at that.

 

I remember being underwhelmed with the power of the grenade launcher, and found myself loving the LGR pre-patch due to its consistent damage and low ammo consumption.
If the launcher could be improved, perhaps by doubling the damage and making it cost 3 fuel per shot. I assumed the launcher did incendiary damage from the fuel consumption, and so essentially it was a sort of attenuated flame thrower. Even if it did a little less (maybe 5 HP less) damage than a thrown grenade, it would be worth creating.

 

Yes, most of damage of a grenade launcher comes from Fire. A tiny bit oh physical damage is added (I assume, to emulate the "impact" of an explosion, 1-4).

What I would suggest is keep the fire damage as is, but bump the physical damage up to around 10-15. That would make it useable in most situations (just like disintegrate!)

 

Poppycock. Fatigue potions don't weigh much, they aren't expensive, and you can give them to followers to hold onto for you. You don't even need to rely on them as long as you pace your self. You're also ignoring the presence of any magickal staff which will grant you extra "fatigue".

Let's leave that up to the player. You say fatigue potions are prohibitive for a mage but the ridiculous money spent and weight carried around for ammo for the mechanized gun apparently isn't the same burden on a technologist. Neither is that prohibitive really, if you are patient. However disintegrate is going be cheaper, faster, and more reliable...

The shocking staff I don't think really applies here because it is obviously bugged. Nothing in its description or stats indicates it will do what it does in real-time. It should do the 1 to 10 electrical damage per attack and not more. If we're gonna bring bugs into this then we've got a lot of ground to cover.

Perhaps, albeit when I think of an electrical weapon that instantly zaps things dead I'm thinking of the tesla rod. Perhaps this is how the tesla rod should function, only it can miss. If it does hit though it does electrical damage to the enemy until either it dies or your charges run out. It would be quite a sight too if it had a proper animation of an actual thunder bolt arcing from the tip of the tesla rod into the helpless opponent.

Indeed, the shocking staff's location so early in the electrical tech tree in contrast to its effectiveness seems out of place.

If the tesla rod behaved as described above then yes, I'd say techies have an equivalent to disintegrate.

However that's probably still broken so I say instead of making the tesla rod even better than it is (it is already a fine weapon) that disintegrate needs to have some better weaknesses and drawbacks. There needs to be a realistic way of saving yourself from it. I stand by the idea that enemies with magick resistance should be able to defeat the spell before it can disintegrate them completely, leaving them with burns of various degrees (missing HP) and damaged armor and weapons.

Edit:

The grenade launcher and flamethrower are both BS when you consider the investment needed to make them. The pyrotechnic axe needs to be less uber and the grenade launcher and flamethrower need to be more uber (or uber at all would be nice).

 

Indeed, that's what I say.

I don't consider ammunition heavy when followers can be used for carrying around thousands and thousands of bullets.

I also do not consider the cost of bullets an obstacle, seeing how technologists earn much more money from staying in a city and building technological miracles from junk (Eye Gear, anyone?) than they spend on, well, anything. Mages, on the other hand, lack such a stable source of income and lose money when they stay in a city rather than earn it.

Not ignoring, I simply didn't consider their presence in this discussion crucial.

All non-staves are hardly worth mentioning - their mana is low and regenerates mighty slow, so the mage hardly notices the bonus.

Staves have a significant amount of mana, especially the Arcane Staff, but because of sharing the mighty slow regeneration, it counts less than a +80 fatigue points bonus would, which is not really that extremely much. While we're at it, I don't think the Mage's Staff (50 mana) should give have any mana at all, it makes the Charmed (20 mana) and Magick (40 mana) Staves virtually useless.

Even though I don't thing the authors intended the player to use more than one mana possessing item at a time, one could argue that if a mage dedicated his inventory to being a Arcane Staff warehouse with 10 staves or so, using them alternatingly could mean nearly unlimited mana.

While that's true, he would either have to check the inventory of Wise Women 1000 times on average (assuming there would be no inventory hacks involved) before that would happen and, in most cases, spend over 100'000 coins on them (in which case I'd say unlimited mana would be a fitting reward for the patience, effort and amount of coin) or steal/kill his way through Tulla (which would happen so late in the game, he would only have that much mana for the last two locations, anyway) and still buy a few from the Wise Women.

 

Not to mention staves are rather large, and will take up most of inventory. Juggling them with followers is time consuming and tedious.