I love this skill, it's my favorite. I acknowledge changing it might not be the highest priority, but just throwing this in the mix because I think it could still use some refinement.
Rationale:
The level of reward to the DO is decent. Potentially a pet as well as xp, which are both useful enough. XP might be a bit overtuned, but that's not really the point of this suggestion. The reward to the pactee is awesome: a shiny skill they couldn't otherwise get. I feel like there are some issues, however:
- The lingering pact debt, where the pact is fully used and the pactee is as deep in debt as it's possible to be. At this point, the DO has nothing further to gain from the pact, so why keep it? I just revoke the pacts once they're empty, because I have nothing to gain from holding people to their debts (and in fact it makes no difference if I do so). It should feel like a release from punishment if/when the DO does this
- The lingering pact items - useless, undroppable 'dark pact to stygia' items that can rapidly accumulate and weight 1 each. An annoying, sort of unsatisfying downside to using the skill. They also don't say how many respawns outstanding. If you go out of your way to not die, at all, you can accumulate a lot of these, completely bricking your inventory for what might end up being a very long time
- There isn't something like a 'the first taste is free muahahaha' mechanic, which I think could be nice!
- The way debts accumulate is currently a bit inconsistent, you should only ever be paying off one demand at a time
- You can be 5/6 to repaying one demand and use a pact, and your progress will reset. This doesn't seem right to me
- There isn't a 'get yourself deeper in debt to escape the defecits of the pact' function!
Goals:
- Assign more of the DO reward to the slow repayment of pacts, so that for selfish reasons I might hold my debt over the pactee instead of just assigning a new pact, or I might beneficently choose to allow my supplicant to be free from their infernal debt
- Make the paying off of pacts more transparent, consistent, and don't reward gaming the system
- Don't increase the power of the skill in any appreciable way.
Implementation suggestion:
- Show demands as the total number of deaths required to pay off the pact, rather than the current measure of 'demands' which is a bit esoteric. This will facilitate not having the duration 'refreshed' when a new pact is used, because a single int can track deaths required and they can add like normal numbers (because, when you really think about it, they are normal numbers
)- Change the debt structure, so the number of deaths starts at 1 for 2 uses, the 2 for 2 uses, then 3 for the final uses, totaling 12 deaths
- Track it properly, so you're only paying down one debt from one pact at at time
- During 'pact debt', the pactee temporarily loses access to a random T2 skill or spell (not spellcasting or alchemy) for 12 hours. Or a different deficit. Withdrawal of some kind, anyway. Using another pact obviously overwrites this, providing the skill back, at least until you find yourself in debt once more...
- When the pactee is blessed by visiting the infernal plains, they lose 6 mp/hp, and the DO gains 1/3 the lost value. This is the long term payoff for the DO keeping active, empty pacts
- Reduce the weight of revoked/empty pacts to 0 because inventory management is hard enough as it is QQ
Summary: The overall effect of these changes would be no significant change in power for the skill. The key benefits are not increased, while the deficits are smoothed out a little in terms of inventory and increased slightly in other areas. Depending on how you use the skill, the total volume of Stygian respawns will probably not actually change from the way it currently works. Getting out of debt will be easier if you've used a few pacts, slightly potentially harder if you've several pacts, but just going hard into debt and doubling down on selling your soul won't create weird inventory issues.
Okay pact tract complete.