Quote from: MTaur on July 11, 2016, 03:52:48 pm

Anyway, I haven't done this as long or as deeply as everyone else, but I've trial-and-errored a few things together.  Guts is pretty clunky and finicky, restricting what you can do to a relatively rigid scheme that allows some things but not others.  I don't know much about how to incorporate randomness, but I do know that this page more or less says more or less what stats can be read by skills:

http://docs.runicgames.com/wiki/Static_Stats

What's weird is that you have to turn on a "stat watcher" for these to work in your mod.  It took me hours to figure this out once when I couldn't figure out why a mod wasn't working.

EXECUTE CHANCE or maybe EXECUTE CHANCE STAT is what you would want to read.  I don't know how to use this in conjunction with randomness, though.  You could easily have skills that scaled only off of skill level and execute chance, though.  Someone else with more knowledge may be able to say more, but I've had trouble getting logic from different components to talk to each other and do their thing in the past.

If you had a skill that scaled off of skill level and execute chance, then I think it would also scale off of STR or FOC depending on whether the damage was physical or magical.  As far as I know, there isn't a good way to have skills scale in an arbitrary multivariable function sort of way - you can pick one "stat watcher" stat, and then you get that times a number in a fixed random uniform range, times built-in damage multipliers (which I think are totally hard-coded, but I could be wrong).  The way that your skill scales off of the watched stat could be non-linear, which you can do by constructing the graph of such a function in the Graphs editor.

I checked out your link - very interesting.  I didn't see an entry for execute, but it looks like focus appears as "magic", so if it would let me plug that into a formula I could at least simulate what you get from the raw stat (   ((0.2002-0.0002*PLAYER MAGIC STAT)*PLAYER MAGIC STAT) or something like that, per
http://torchlight.wikia.com/wiki/Stats_(T2)#Focus); you'd lose the +execute% bonuses from gear, but I could maybe offset that loss with an incremental gain per skill point, like say +3% per skill point spent.

Thanks again for the input - and yes, I was talking about the Dread Pirate mod from BemusedBear (at least that was the name listed on the mod); do you know if he posts here on torchmodders?

ctrl-F, execute is in there, but there are two stats with similar names, and I don't understand the difference between them.

I don't know how to do fancy things.  I had enough trouble getting relatively simple things to work, and I usually stumble and need two or three tries.  Mostly it's monkey see, monkey do stuff working from the vanilla files.  Some of the veterans know a lot more and they might be able to help (or better figure out what can and can't be done).

I never got very far in Elite.  Just couldn't get the DPS out enough to get far even in Act 1.  It may have been a pacing and farming issue.  I don't remember whether I was playing modded or not, but it sounds like unmodded would be more manageable (assuming you can farm enough gold)

I'm not a big fan of one-shotting or two-shotting.  "When everything is OP, nothing will be" is kind of the feeling I have about that sort of arms race.  Damage amounts tend to be 0 or 100 in the scheme they have going.  But it might be very hard to get equivalent balance just with graphs and potions if equipment has its own ideas about everything.  Especially with so much flat damage reduction in the game, which tends to be extremely delicate.  It tends to be OP or useless...

It's kind of odd how the resistance potions grant a flat amount, and there is only one version.  They're really good in the first two acts of Normal when you run into that sort of enemy, and then they fall off...  At least there are only five kinds.  It drives me nuts when modern RPGs make you maximize fourteen different varieties of damage resistance just to be viable...

Unless you're talking of a different mod, mine's the only one I know of that has a pirate.

Anyway, I haven't done this as long or as deeply as everyone else, but I've trial-and-errored a few things together.  Guts is pretty clunky and finicky, restricting what you can do to a relatively rigid scheme that allows some things but not others.  I don't know much about how to incorporate randomness, but I do know that this page more or less says more or less what stats can be read by skills:

http://docs.runicgames.com/wiki/Static_Stats

What's weird is that you have to turn on a "stat watcher" for these to work in your mod.  It took me hours to figure this out once when I couldn't figure out why a mod wasn't working.

EXECUTE CHANCE or maybe EXECUTE CHANCE STAT is what you would want to read.  I don't know how to use this in conjunction with randomness, though.  You could easily have skills that scaled only off of skill level and execute chance, though.  Someone else with more knowledge may be able to say more, but I've had trouble getting logic from different components to talk to each other and do their thing in the past.

If you had a skill that scaled off of skill level and execute chance, then I think it would also scale off of STR or FOC depending on whether the damage was physical or magical.  As far as I know, there isn't a good way to have skills scale in an arbitrary multivariable function sort of way - you can pick one "stat watcher" stat, and then you get that times a number in a fixed random uniform range, times built-in damage multipliers (which I think are totally hard-coded, but I could be wrong).  The way that your skill scales off of the watched stat could be non-linear, which you can do by constructing the graph of such a function in the Graphs editor.

The biggest issue I have with the Pirate class as it stands now, though, is that there isn't enough incentive to spend much time in melee, and I ran out of ideas for what to add.  So it's mostly a shooter, but Cutlass Sweep is decent, and Pirate Handshake is a nice dirty trick to have available from time to time.  I've also wondered if the class would have enough defenses even if it had more melee skills anyway, and if not, what sort of tweak might fix help.  An extra effect on Skull Mug (so far, it's a regeneration buff granted by kills) could help, but my two custom classes have a fair number of mandatory skills as is, where vanilla classes don't seem to put as much weight on passive skills.

The potions are fast enough that you can generally start walking to the next place soon, but still a lot slower than vanilla.  I forget the numbers exactly.  You could achieve similar just by level-locking the vanilla potions, but it would still be a gold sink, and once every 8 seconds got a bit tiring for me.  They also tend to outscale their costs.

The 15-minute potions are only about half as strong as the same level 30-second potion, but are more gold efficient overall (they also tend to drop more often than once every 15 minutes).  They also fizzle when you die, so when you're having a hard time, you have double incentives to use the 30-second ones anyway.

Hey,

I haven't been working on or playing TL2 lately, but I've kept a tab open in the browser.  I saw one of your other posts before I even saw this one.  It sounded like we had some of the same issues with vanilla.

Feel free to make new branches of the mod if you want to push it further.  (For one thing, the icons I have for them are pretty derpy and rushed)

The mod (without the "beta graphs" mod tacked on) is fairly well-balanced for the earlier acts, and gets somewhat punishing on Veteran somewhere around the Forest act and gradually gets worse.  The "beta graphs" add-on tries to fix this, but actually makes the Tundra slightly too hard, and only somewhat fixes the late-game.  It will take a lot more work, which may or may not actually happen...

Veterans have probably encountered this already, but whenever a modded skill grants bonus stat points, the game can sometimes crash when you spend stat points.  It seems to have something to do with checking equipment pre-reqs.

The bug has been known for a long time, so I guess Runic won't be fixing it.

Anyway, my two bonus classes heavily use bonus stat points.  You can avoid the crash by unequipping everything before spending stat points.  If you feel lucky, you can just save your game first and hope it doesn't crash.

That seems to be the only problem.  Bonus stat points are nice to have, so I'm keeping them.

...but for levels 1-35 or so, it should be fairly decent overall.  The potion nerf is pretty bearable up until somewhere around the forest act.