http://www.runicgamesfansite.com/vbdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=649

After T2 came to gog.com, I dusted off my old mods and tuned them up a little.  They're still far from perfect, but I have stopped making changes the last few days, and now is probably a stable time to let it sit and look for feedback.  I'm a little burned out on it now, but I might consider a final balance pass or two if I get feedback, or if someone wants to publish a changed version.

My overall gripes with T2 are addressed by these modifications:

1.  Potions - massively nerfed recovery rates are used in this mod.  Potions now last for 30 seconds, but I don't remember if the total amount is more or less.  Level restrictions also apply.  Additionally, there are Philosopher potions, about half as powerful, but they last for 15 minutes for farming convenience.  (Rejuvenation potions are supposed to be disabled, but I don't think the .mod file itself contains this - I think a separate .dat file, not included, is what does that.  If you choose to use the purple stuff, just realize you're bending the house rules for the mod)  (Small bug:  Potions don't work if you try to use them while at full health and/or mana.)

2.  Cooldowns - Some skills are designated as DPS and cost less mana now.  Others are designated as burst and/or CC skills, usually costing more mana and having significant cooldowns, but often bringing significantly more damage to the table.  Hit-and-run might be a little bit over-tuned in this mod, in hindsight, but I tried not to overdo it.  I also recently started lengthening some of the shorter animation times by 50-150%, but not every skill has been looked at for this last change.

3.  One-shotting - (Elite left unchanged)  All enemies do 12.5% less damage, and Normal enemies have 60% more health.  Normal enemies grant an extra 10% XP as compensation.  It is more difficult to one-shot things, and a little bit was needed in return to help the player survive, especially with potions being much weaker.

Health regeneration gear is now more valuable, and perhaps mana regeneration, to a lesser extent.  Why would you bother when you can get 40x as much by spamming the 1 and 2 keys?  Now you can't!

I also modified Arcbeam, Rapid Fire, and Magma Spear so that they do not lock on to the first target, but unfortunately they often shoot straight into the ground on non-flat levels.  I do not have a fix for this yet, so they should be avoided (or respecced at will with the console)

New classes:  These are mostly Frankenstein classes.  Nothing too ambitious, but some of the new passives are kind of fun.  Both of them sort of hyperscale, maybe a little too much, but I'm not sure.  I wanted to have some sort of analog to Akimbo, and I wanted to mitigate equipment requirements for hybrid characters, while leaving room for decent armor.

Hyperscaling - Both of my classes have scaling bonuses.  VIT and STR scale off each other by 10-50% depending on passive level, and DEX and FOC scale off each other by 10-30%.  The VIT/STR thing is because VIT is generally regarded as a weak stat.

Pirate -  Requires a right-hand pistol and a left-hand melee for many skills and passives.  Sort of a mid-range fighter based largely on Outlander, but has goodies like the Engineer's Cannon Blast (with big damage and cooldown, but with a shortened range), the Embermage's Implosion, and the Berserker's Rupture (renamed Pirate Handshake).  Skull Mug restores 1/1.5/2% max health and mana per second for 1/1.25/1.5/.../4.25/5 seconds after killing a unit.  As a dual-wielding bonus, melee damage scales off of ranged damage and vice-versa.  I forget how much - something like 10-30%.

Ascetic -  I wanted to give Bow and Polearm some love.  I made Crossbow elligible to, even if it bends the theme slightly, because Outlander proper would generally prefer pistols or shotgun.  Anyway, this class gains or loses health, trending toward 50 or 60% or so, losing 1 or 2%/sec from maximum and gaining about 3%/sec from near death.  The class gets damage bonuses based on missing health and mana %, and suffers -70% potion effectiveness.  Additionally, the class starts with +20% damage and -20% attack and cast speed, gaining back up to 15% speed based on passive level.  As an archer, the class shoots Rupture on a lengthy channel (1.5 seconds or so), renamed as Kill Shot.  The class also has Stormclaw procs on both melee and ranged attacks.  In melee, Flame Hammer, Ember Hammer, and Onslaught do most of the work.  Sandstorm is sort of nice for both.

Overall, Ascetic does slow, deliberate strikes.  Pacts do a lot of the heavy lifting, especially in melee, where an Outlander wouldn't necessarily have to bother with pacts because they can just vault and spam.  To speed up play a bit and to compensate for the -70% potion penalty, I added Sacrifice, which drains roughly 50% current health over 3 seconds while regenerating 75% maximum health over 15 seconds.  The class does not have Rapid Fire, and I might remove Ricochet later, but I decided to leave it in for now - Shadowshot was a little bit lonely as a mouse-button bow skill, and I didn't feel like Ricochet would feel good on a cooldown timer.

I considered slowing down the animation on Ricochet, but I didn't for now.

Anyway, I would appreciate some tester feedback on the whole.  Unfortunately, some of my custom classes directly refer to the base class skills and affixes, so it would take extra work to separate them out thoroughly.  Since all of my mods are designed to work together regardless, it seemed like the best thing to do anyway, but further work would be needed if you wanted to keep the base classes one way and let these custom classes be as presented in this mod.

One last thing - I didn't bother with portraits.  I couldn't find any resources for portraits which would look good on the menu next to the defaults.  For now, you just have to hover the cursor and read.

Welcome MTaur, and thanks for sharing these mods!  Will definitely try them out sometime

Thanks for the replies.  I didn't think any communities were active.  I'm really just looking to finish this one up, and then I might be burned out for a while.

I'm still having trouble getting channeled AoE skills to work right, though - I got them to follow the cursor by setting target type to Position, but this messes up depth and causes shots to go into the ground on non-flat levels.

That's the biggest problem.  The non-programming issue is that I'm not so sure about the overall balance, because I've never been a top tier gamer or had much skill at min-maxing.  Personally, I'd rather have things be balanced in as many settings as possible, but extreme-case min-max exploits should be avoided anyway.

Quote from: MTaur on June 09, 2016, 09:52:51 pm

I'm still having trouble getting channeled AoE skills to work right, though - I got them to follow the cursor by setting target type to Position, but this messes up depth and causes shots to go into the ground on non-flat levels.

Do you mean these skills from your first post?

Quote

I also modified Arcbeam, Rapid Fire, and Magma Spear so that they do not lock on to the first target, but unfortunately they often shoot straight into the ground on non-flat levels.

Rapid Fire and Magma Spear are already missiles, and their issues could be mitigated to some extent with target homing/ricochet (because they don't have it by default).  Doing this will change the balance and feel of the skills, however.

Arcbeam: I haven't used this before, but try adding in a <BOOL>ORIENTTOTARGET:true tag in the main EVENT_TRIGGER_THREE block (the one that deals damage).  If it works as the description says, it should orient the damage shape and particles to whatever target you have selected.

The default behavior is functional but annoying - it continues to fire at the original target, even if you just want to keep firing at your cursor.  I changed the behavior so that it hits enemies, but it no longer chooses a target.  The downside is that depth gets messed up and shots go into the ground.  If you start with no target, then the following behavior is what I like.  The locking is something I want to get rid of, but the trigger I used to get rid of it causes shots to go into the ground.

I think I might not understand.  Do you mean that you can continue to fire it as a non-locked skillshot, but modify it so that it homes like Shadow Bolt after it's released?  That would sort of help.  I take it the real fix is in the base code, and not Guts moddable?

Yes, adding homing is only kind of a workaround for the missile-based skills.  It doesn't work for Arc Beam though, and without a target it won't adjust itself around obstacles.

But giving missiles/layouts true situational awareness (i.e. auto-orient stuff to avoid obstacles/ground collision) would be beyond the scope of GUTS.

It's unfortunate that shooting uphill didn't come standard.  I might try the fixes sometime.

Indeed, the AI for missiles/layouts is rather basic.  You can code them to shoot uphill (like the ratlin/goblin archers), but then they'll always do that in any situation. 

Furthermore, there's no way to access player orientation/position relative to your surroundings in GUTS, so you can't adjust between different layouts even if you had different ones for different situations.

Actually, I missed something for missiles - you CAN have them follow the ground (for example, like shockbolts).  Just set "Track Ground" to true in the missile editor options.

Nice.  I looked up more on an old missiles tutorial, and it sounds like it will fail to shoot over gaps now.  But it sounds a lot better than what it's doing now.

I might try the TRIGGER3 thing on Arcbeam, too.  The problem with what I did is that the character turns slowly and a VFX particle shoots straight out, but the laser itself instantly goes to the cursor from a point in front of the caster, leaving the player and VFX particle to slowly play catch-up.  It works, but looks really stupid.

I think FOLLOW GROUND: TRUE with GROUND OFFSET: 1 or 1.5 seems to work ok.  I don't know what my issue is, but TRACK GROUND didn't seem to do anything for me.

Arcbeam still has that silly behavior where the beam acts independently from the player and background particles.