Keystone Brainstorming

"

Qarl wrote:

We need a really good offensive damage based caster keystone.

General rules we have for keystones:

- They are absolutes when the rest of the game is generally about transitive values. So goods words for that are "never", "always", "all" etc.

- If you have something massively overpowered, try thinking of "what would I need to do to allow us to put something so OP in the game".

- Negatives trump positives, so if a keystone conflicts with another, the negative one wins

- They shouldn't become the only way they build a character, so not having it needs to be roughly as viable as not having it

- They shouldn't be self supporting, they should require other elements of a characters build to make them viable (gear and/or other passives)

Feel free to tell how we have failed to follow out own guidelines on the keystones we do have in the game.

I posted this earlier:

"

Dreggon wrote:

Ethereal
-15% physical damage dealt
-15% physical damage taken
+15% spell damage dealt
+33% spell damage taken
Can walk through enemies as if they weren't there

I think it fits in with what you're looking for - it has a clear upside (reduced physical damage taken, increased spell damage dealt) while having a small downside (-15% physical damage dealt) and a situationally devastating downside (+33% spell damage taken). And a nice little no-clip as flavour. You could definitely tweak the numbers, but I REALLY want no-clip.

Feedback time!

"

Qarl wrote:

Feel free to tell how we have failed to follow out own guidelines on the keystones we do have in the game.

Let's start with Minion Instability. I like this because it makes my minions explode.

"

Qarl wrote:

- If you have something massively overpowered, try thinking of "what would I need to do to allow us to put something so OP in the game".

- They shouldn't become the only way they build a character, so not having it needs to be roughly as viable as not having it

- They shouldn't be self supporting, they should require other elements of a characters build to make them viable (gear and/or other passives)

1. If your minion stays alive, you win because hey, it's still standing. If your minion dies, it takes everything with it so hey, you win again. You can always summon more.

2. I don't know any summoner builds that don't take Minion Instability. If it had some downsides, such as reduced damage (I hate posting this, but for the sake of balance...), reduced life, increased attack speed (reflecting the fact that they're unstable) and had a countdown once they reached 35% life before they explode - say 5 seconds? - there would be incentive to get it and valid reasons not to.

3. I don't need to get +minion life or anything like that. I use +minion damage so they do more damage, but that's it. If I got +minion life it would take longer for my zombies to explode, which I don't want.

"

Qarl wrote:

Two archer keystones, that are different to each other, such that a viable bow user could have one or the other, or neither, and all three would be viable and different builds.

Have you actually decided what these are going to be? It is OK to bounce your ideas off us before putting them into alpha/beta so we can catch stuff like Chaos Inoculation before it gets put into the game (+20% energy shield was extremely low considering you lose all your HP)

"

Qarl wrote:

We also have a small collections of keystone ideas we love, but will never ever go in the game.

As mentioned above, I'd love to hear some of these. We can refine them for you! :D

let's see for a caster.

- Add "insert an effect" when your health is at it's max.

- When your energy shield hit 0, deal 33% of your max energy shield to everything in a 15 yards radius per element ( 33% light, 33% frost and 33% fire, all of which are affected by spell damage).

- Always crit, never die (ok, that's a troll suggestion :P)

- All your spells are also considered frost spells in addition to their current element, secondary effects cannot be applied.

- All your spells are 100% bigger (not radius, bigger graphic. This would make a fireball have a easier time to land and explode on multiple enemies, same with spark, ice spear and so on)

Let's say you cast a fireball.

The fireball is considered a frost and a fire spell. Meaning it will deal both elements and benefit from + fire damage nodes and from + ice damage node. Wouldn't benefit twice from spell damage node though.

If you played world of warcraft, think frostfire bolt.

So how do you guys review these masses of suggestions? Hold a general tea time meeting while reading the entire list?

Anyways, moar spellcasting:

Energy Drain
Critical hits no longer do extra damage. Instead, you gain a buff based on the damage that-would-have-been-dealt (capped at damage dealt to single target). Additional crits before expiration of the buff refresh duration, and if higher value, replace the bonus.

Buff: well, lol, anything that can be thought balanced. I was thinking effectively an array of bonuses such as -% skill cost, or +% mana regenration, +% spell damage, +% cast speed, etc. Basically, what a fully stacked power charge build would have.

Of course, this is a passive that would make sense if charges were reworked to do something more interesting/unique.

Aura
Conceptually, replace a spell school with an aura. You give up the ability to use gems of a particular element alignment, in exchange gain an aura effect. Ex:

Cold: Chills all enemies within x meters.
Lightning: Incrementally drain enemy resists as long as they are within range (for example -3% elemental resists per second).
Fire: Deals % of max life per second.

I think the downside to such a skill would be more point investment of being buried in some corner; at least until more skill gems are added and losing some of the more utility oriented elemental skills hurt.

Elemental Balance
Every elemental damage spell now evenly splits its damage into 3 elements. So, Cold snap would do 1/3rd of its damage as fire, 1/3rd of its damage as lightning.

Downside is lessened effectiveness of status effects and single elements % damage gear.

Geo-Witchery
Elemental Crits now apply a status effect to the patch of ground under the victim instead of on the victim. Increased by +AoE.

I got a couple of ideas for ranger keystones.

Grapeshot

Doubles the amount of arrows fired
Reduces attack speed by 50%


Going Ballistic

Arrows have an additional 25% chance to cause knock-back
Accuracy cannot exceed 80%

"

konfeta wrote:

So how do you guys review these masses of suggestions? Hold a general tea time meeting while reading the entire list?

IM and shared documents tend to be used for these kind of discussions.

So IMing an idea of interest to someone else to see if they have a positive reaction, and then adding ideas with some legs to a common document for more comments, and looking at later.

Hmm. "ideas with some legs."

Quick question before I accidentally wall-of-text-crit another such concept, would "Keystone Passives as Gateway Passives" qualify as an idea that has a chance of being develops; or should I just worry about regular one point keystones?

Speaking of which:

Doppelganger
Reduces total HP and Energy Shield by 75%. Spawns an invulnerable, untargettable copy of your character controlled by an A.I. that casts the spells bound to your left and right mouse button.

Depending on quality of the A.I. script, may or may not need an additional penalty. Otherwise, an extreme trade off in terms of defense for sake of a phantom that boosts your firepower in an uncontrollable fashion.

Here's some random archer keystones...

1) Sniper
- Significantly lower attack speed
- Significantly more damage
- Cannot have any additional projectiles

A build that would require either stacking damage so 1-shot kills and +piercing to handle groups. Critical hits would be more significant too which I think is lacking for most bow builds. You'd want a value range that is significant (like at least 50%/50%) but could go lesser or higher based on your needs to balance.

2) Skirmisher
- You can fire bows while moving
- Arrows have 50% range

Not sure this is entirely possible given animation requirements. The basic idea is it forces you to get closer but you are more mobile with your attacks. Another option is the attack animation speed is 0 or instantaneous but keep the rate of fire normal.

3) Jungle Archer or Needler
-Critical hits with a bow poison
-Mobs affected by poison take 50% damage

The build would focus on either using poison arrow to keep mobs poisoned or high critical rate to poison that route. Less "spray and pray" and more conscious attacking as a bow user. It'd also be kinda neat if 50% of your damage was converted to a poison DoT which had a small bonus (so 50% of your total gets 25% bonus damage but occurs over a duration). This build then would kind of focus on hitting everyone at least once to land the poison so it could tick away over time - lots of controlling with curses but high damage.

So technically you could have all 3 combined, all separate, or no need for any of them :) Hopefully that matched your requirements...