Dark Oppressor Class concerns/tweaks discussion
Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2023 9:01 pm
This breath, the Dark Oppressor class has gotten a lot of improvements relative to the prior breath. I did most of the core design of these changes in the buildup to breath launch, and am pleased to see how well-received and popular a class the Breath 5 DO is. That said, looking at my assumptions about how this would play out in predesign relative to how it has actually played out reveals that not all of my predictions came true. In addition, some tweaks and concerns have come to mind since Breath launch as to how the class works and what could be better. I'd like to get these out of my head and put them here to open them for discussion and give players an idea of what might change with this class in the future.
The topics that have stood out most (to me at least) are:
Call Demons duration time - It'd be better if the options (and costs) were tied to how many Vassals you summon rather than scaled directly with time, with much more forgiving durations. The reason is that this is a casual game which should be more forgiving of not being constantly online in predictable ways. Currently it's possible to spend 5 DP to summon the strongest raid team in the game if your raiders are all Lifestyle Gamers who can sit on Discord live waiting for the ping - and possible to spend 50 DP to summon no one if you were trying to summon a person who had to answer a phone call for 11 minutes. I'd much prefer if this had (totally spitballing numbers here) Minor/Major/Greater summonings to summon 2/4/8 Vassals for 15/30/60 DP, with a duration of an hour or two to respond to the call.
Overlord Vassal Cap - So when Overlordship was originally conceived, it required Legion Master and your Vassal pool expanded with skills in the Vassals tree - your capacity to have Vassals gradually grew as you got Vassals, Thrall/Priesthood, then Legion Master and finally Overlord with the ultimate 15-member Vassal pool. Because Legion Master was too specific a build demand for what turned out to be quite a popular feature, the Legion Master requirement was dropped - but Overlordship getting you a 15-member Vassal pool remained, allowing Overlords to skip the incremental skills.
I consider this an oversight and a de facto bug. Ideally, Overlordship should advance your vassal pool size "one step" up from whatever your skills allow instead of going straight to the cap.
Dark Power Decay - 1 DP per day of DP decay is a pre-predesign number that was put out there so that decay would exist, before Dark Power had been played out to give us an idea of what DP generation per day for successful Dark Oppressors would be. In practice, this decay rate doesn't impact anyone and isn't an incentive to become an Overlord to protect it. If anything it's the reverse - some of the most successful DP collectors have been incentivized not to become Overlords because they don't want to lose their DP hoards to usurpation.
I'd like to adjust DP decay upward to account for the actual rate of DP gain. Possibly this should be a percentage instead of a flat amount. On the flip side, it'd be helpful if there was more stuff you could do with DP as an Overlord, possibly to temporarily enhance your lands in some way. A concept for Overlords using their power to alter the tile types of lands they control was floated in predesign, but didn't make it to final development because of how complicated it seemed to be at the time and how much stuff we had to get coded for breath launch.
I'm aware that there are some folks whose play experience might be adversely impacted. Perhaps an increase to DP decay ought to be accompanied by a cap on the amount of DP that can be taken from an Overlord in a single usurpation.
Priesthood and Thrall "spells" - Dark Priesthood is a contender for the most powerful skill in the game, because summoning vassals and resurrecting vassals are both insanely awesome abilities that are easily each worth 60 CP on their own. This has absolutely no contest with Command Thrall and it means there's one right way to play a Dark Power-using raider. These two abilities really ought to be separate skills and in the long run, the DP-spending expansion pack elements of Dark Priesthood (and Command Thrall) generally should really all be broken out into individual skills that Dark Oppressors can pick and choose between.
Command Thrall - Others have noted (and I agree) that Possessed Thralls ought to be rejuvable. I'd add though that there should be a cap of how many you can have. These abilities don't really need to be mutually exclusive with Dark Priesthood abilities either - sure, summoning vassal corpses and then resurrecting them is strong but ideally DP costs can be tweaked to match that strength.
Intimidating Aura - This skill is just really, really good (I say as the player of an Aura DO) because in practice there's no way to counter it. The only thing that can shut down an Aura is an Elementalist with Rebalance Area, who has to be active to defend against a raid - so in practice this never happens. Either Lead Paint needs to work on Auras, or Rebalance Area needs to be have a passive chance to trigger, or Rebalance Area needs to be something the Elementalist can prep like Shield of Faith. If any of these happen it'd be okay to lower the AP/MP cost of Aura accordingly.
I have a similar concern about Harbinger Nimbuses (Nimbi?).
Overlordship and non-Stygia planes - I've heard a lot about how much impact Overlordship has on the territory war when Evil gets something like that but the other alignments don't. I disagree with part of the notion that it's winning the war, because the actual mechanics benefit for Team Evil of a half-dozen characters getting superpowers under very limited circumstances is very small - but the morale impact is enormous. I'd agree that other sides ought to get more ways to mark their influence on a neighborhood (though "personalistic rule by one character" is very much on-brand for Evil - Good and Unaligned not so much!) but until/unless more such mechanics exist it may be a good idea for Overlordship of non-Stygia realms to have fewer mechanics effects than Overlordship in Stygia. After all, Hades Tol has been gripped by the dark gods to eternity past but you just took over Belmont Court last Tuesday - logically it won't be as efficient to rule.
I'm open to debate and ideas on this one, not least because of the aforementioned mechanics vs morale/flavor gulf.
Horns Tree - Others have noted that this isn't competitive with spells or stuff-you-can-enchant and I'd agree. It could use a numbers buff, as could Doomsights.
The topics that have stood out most (to me at least) are:
Call Demons duration time - It'd be better if the options (and costs) were tied to how many Vassals you summon rather than scaled directly with time, with much more forgiving durations. The reason is that this is a casual game which should be more forgiving of not being constantly online in predictable ways. Currently it's possible to spend 5 DP to summon the strongest raid team in the game if your raiders are all Lifestyle Gamers who can sit on Discord live waiting for the ping - and possible to spend 50 DP to summon no one if you were trying to summon a person who had to answer a phone call for 11 minutes. I'd much prefer if this had (totally spitballing numbers here) Minor/Major/Greater summonings to summon 2/4/8 Vassals for 15/30/60 DP, with a duration of an hour or two to respond to the call.
Overlord Vassal Cap - So when Overlordship was originally conceived, it required Legion Master and your Vassal pool expanded with skills in the Vassals tree - your capacity to have Vassals gradually grew as you got Vassals, Thrall/Priesthood, then Legion Master and finally Overlord with the ultimate 15-member Vassal pool. Because Legion Master was too specific a build demand for what turned out to be quite a popular feature, the Legion Master requirement was dropped - but Overlordship getting you a 15-member Vassal pool remained, allowing Overlords to skip the incremental skills.
I consider this an oversight and a de facto bug. Ideally, Overlordship should advance your vassal pool size "one step" up from whatever your skills allow instead of going straight to the cap.
Dark Power Decay - 1 DP per day of DP decay is a pre-predesign number that was put out there so that decay would exist, before Dark Power had been played out to give us an idea of what DP generation per day for successful Dark Oppressors would be. In practice, this decay rate doesn't impact anyone and isn't an incentive to become an Overlord to protect it. If anything it's the reverse - some of the most successful DP collectors have been incentivized not to become Overlords because they don't want to lose their DP hoards to usurpation.
I'd like to adjust DP decay upward to account for the actual rate of DP gain. Possibly this should be a percentage instead of a flat amount. On the flip side, it'd be helpful if there was more stuff you could do with DP as an Overlord, possibly to temporarily enhance your lands in some way. A concept for Overlords using their power to alter the tile types of lands they control was floated in predesign, but didn't make it to final development because of how complicated it seemed to be at the time and how much stuff we had to get coded for breath launch.
I'm aware that there are some folks whose play experience might be adversely impacted. Perhaps an increase to DP decay ought to be accompanied by a cap on the amount of DP that can be taken from an Overlord in a single usurpation.
Priesthood and Thrall "spells" - Dark Priesthood is a contender for the most powerful skill in the game, because summoning vassals and resurrecting vassals are both insanely awesome abilities that are easily each worth 60 CP on their own. This has absolutely no contest with Command Thrall and it means there's one right way to play a Dark Power-using raider. These two abilities really ought to be separate skills and in the long run, the DP-spending expansion pack elements of Dark Priesthood (and Command Thrall) generally should really all be broken out into individual skills that Dark Oppressors can pick and choose between.
Command Thrall - Others have noted (and I agree) that Possessed Thralls ought to be rejuvable. I'd add though that there should be a cap of how many you can have. These abilities don't really need to be mutually exclusive with Dark Priesthood abilities either - sure, summoning vassal corpses and then resurrecting them is strong but ideally DP costs can be tweaked to match that strength.
Intimidating Aura - This skill is just really, really good (I say as the player of an Aura DO) because in practice there's no way to counter it. The only thing that can shut down an Aura is an Elementalist with Rebalance Area, who has to be active to defend against a raid - so in practice this never happens. Either Lead Paint needs to work on Auras, or Rebalance Area needs to be have a passive chance to trigger, or Rebalance Area needs to be something the Elementalist can prep like Shield of Faith. If any of these happen it'd be okay to lower the AP/MP cost of Aura accordingly.
I have a similar concern about Harbinger Nimbuses (Nimbi?).
Overlordship and non-Stygia planes - I've heard a lot about how much impact Overlordship has on the territory war when Evil gets something like that but the other alignments don't. I disagree with part of the notion that it's winning the war, because the actual mechanics benefit for Team Evil of a half-dozen characters getting superpowers under very limited circumstances is very small - but the morale impact is enormous. I'd agree that other sides ought to get more ways to mark their influence on a neighborhood (though "personalistic rule by one character" is very much on-brand for Evil - Good and Unaligned not so much!) but until/unless more such mechanics exist it may be a good idea for Overlordship of non-Stygia realms to have fewer mechanics effects than Overlordship in Stygia. After all, Hades Tol has been gripped by the dark gods to eternity past but you just took over Belmont Court last Tuesday - logically it won't be as efficient to rule.
I'm open to debate and ideas on this one, not least because of the aforementioned mechanics vs morale/flavor gulf.
Horns Tree - Others have noted that this isn't competitive with spells or stuff-you-can-enchant and I'd agree. It could use a numbers buff, as could Doomsights.