Quote from: Antifringe on 14 June 2020, 20:47:11

Random feedback: I ran into a crazy powerful satyr hero shortly after the dowry quest.  He was a lightning shaman with a rapid fire ball lightning attack and an undodgeable stun attack.  His regen was high enough that I couldn't keep pace with it and dodge his attacks at the same time.  I don't mind weird, out-of-depth encounters from time to time, but this guy seemed a bit extreme.  The design is good, it just felt way too soon.  I'd have to have strong resistances in both lightning and stun to fight him, and there's just no way to do that when you only have access to Helos.

It's extremely difficult to do anything with this kind of comment, without a screenshot of the precise location, and if possible the real name of the hero. I guess it was Karato, but he just can't spawn in this location, or I don't know how.

Noted.  I tried to find him again, but hero spawns are rare. 

New issue.  These guys:



are too much.  They have a fast firing lightning attack that does a lot of damage.  They either have a huge health pool or huge resistances, because a full DoT that two shots most champions only took about 8% of their health off.  But the biggest problem is that there are way, way too many of them.  They're about as strong as heroes, and there are 16 of them at once!  I tried kiting some away from the pack, but even the four that I managed to peel off were too much.  You can't really attack much, because you have ot be constantly dodging the converging waves of lightning blasts, and their regen makes guerilla tactics worthless.

I think one or two would be fine as a "mini boss" encounter, but sixteen seems unworkable.  This encounter happens right before reaching Megara.

I didn't notice the RR in Aphotic Mixture.  That definitely helps.  It's in the top tier though, so it'll be a while.  Still, it's total RR, which is really strong.

Flash Powder isn't bad in isolation, it just feels weak compared to what other masteries do at similar tiers.  I was wanting to stay mono-Occult for a while, mostly because it's my least familiar mastery, but I'm not sure that idea is really going to work.

Tauceti:  Good call on Smoke Screen.  I had glanced at it, saw the one second duration, and felt very "meh" about it.  I took a closer look, and noticed that it's a 20 METER RADIUS CLOUD HOLY MOLY.  So yeah, that looks really useful.  I'll respec into that.

Hello!  I joined the beta several months ago, full intending to be a good tester, but then COVID-19 happened and I had other priorities.

It's a bit late, but I have the time and energy now. 

I'm playing an Occultist, with an eye towards expanding into warfare.  The idea is to try out a DoT build.  DoT builds didn't really work well in original TQ, and poison DoT were especially bad.  TQAE allows DoTs to scale with player stats, which is huge, basically doubling their power by the time you hit Legendary.

Some of you might not know this, but the Occultist was the beginning of what is now Soulvizier.  Munderbunny, the OG creator, started out by remaking the Rogue mastery into something a bit more viable.  Once he had finished, he found himself with a knowledge base and skillset that lent itself to reworking the other masteries, leading to Underlord.  Underlord then got modded (a "mod-mod") into Soulvizier.  And now SOA is keeping the torch lit by carrying it over into Anniversary Edition. Thanks SOA!

Anyways, DoTs work now, but a Occultist-centric one might not.  The problem is that Bleed, Poison, and Vitality are all heavily resisted by Undead and Automatons, which is a huge slice of the monster pie. 

Thoughts as I play through the first half of ACt I:

-Holy cow, a monster hero in Helos!!!!  I drew the C_ Sow (don't remember the full name), which I'm pretty sure is a SZ original.  Fighting it at level 2 was impossible, so I lamely kited it into the invincaguards.  From a strict balance perspective, hros probably shouldn't spawn here, but it was so cool and exciting that I think it should be kept regardless.

-Found another new hero right after Helos, a new satyr one (Paterous or something like that).  Melee dude with Onslaught and maybe some other Warfare skills.  It's cool that heroes are more common now. 

-First death happened shortly after the medicine wagon, when I run into Direflock, the a new crow hero.  Really hard monster for a kiting build like mine.  He summons adds, and the adds are PERMANENT.  They're also faster than you, so they get to nip at your heels as you try to run away.  I finally beat him by getting the animation timings near perfect.  You want them to start their attack at the edge of their range, not when they're on top of you.  There's a little dance you have to do to make that happen.

-First feeling of frustration happened at the optional undead area right before the Spartan Camp.  I knew that a build leaning into poison, bleed and vitalty decay would have a hard time here, but I was hoping it would be okay.  It really wasn't. I'm not looking forward to the undead heavy areas later in the game.  I think that if Occultist is going to lean into poison as a primary damage type, it needs a good "in-house" was of reducing poison resistance.  Waiting until Act III to get Shen Dongs's Dark Medicine doesn't count as a solution.

I know that you get some RR from the Darkling skill tree, but it can't be spammed and is unreliable.  It's also super disappointing that you have to invest in pet skills to get basic support for poison.  I don't want pets, I just want a DoT build that uses moblity to get in and out of trouble while my opponents gradually melt away!

-Flash Powder feels weak, especially when I'm looking at the possibility of getting War Horn from Warfare instead.  The horn has a much better radius and applies a 100% stun.  Flashpowder is a smaller radius and has 35% of inflicting confusion, which is another way of saying it has a 65% of doing nothing :/   It gets better with more points, but it feels lame that you have to max it out before to because even slightly reliable.

-What if Flash Powder also carried a poison resistance reduction effect?  That would solve several problems.

-On normal flesh and blood monsters, being able to stack poison with bleed with vitality damage all at once feels good and is fun.  It's not very strong, mind you, but it works.

-I love the increased hero spawns, but I kind of wish there were even more.  Back in the day, I made a personal mod that cranked the hero spawn WAY up.  It was too much really, but a side effect is that heroes oftentimes spawned in clumps.  Like, you would get all three elemental skeleton heroes in a single spawn. These "hero clumps" were as tough as boss rights and were really fun.  Years later, Grim Dawn ended up doing a similar thing, but on purpose.   

-It's probably outside the scope of this project, but a thing I always wanted in TQ was more interactions with the various caves, tombs and other side dungeons.  Too many of them are just random dead ends with no quests, lore or memorable interactions.  I usually skip them because they just aren't interesting enough.  If I could wave a wand and do it, I would make every one of these things have something special.  Maybe a quest, maybe a lore note explaining what this place is and why it's like this, or maybe a unique purple boss hiding in the last room.  Just something to make it feel like the place belongs to the world and is doing something.

Anyways, love the mod.  Underlord was one of my all time favorite mods and I'm glad to see it being maintained and improved!

EDIT: Oh yeah, forgot to talk about the wraith...

So the reworked wraith monster (yellow champion-tier undead monster) really caught me by surprise.  He summons skeletons now.  Two per summons, the summons are permanent, and if they have a limit, it must be very high.  He also has a slow moving wave projectile that petrifies you if it connects.   That's definitely a SV addition, I don' think that any monsters before Act IV had access to that effect in IT or Underlord. 

Anyways, I thought it was a cool design that really helped redefine the encounter.  Can't believe he's just a champion, the hero wraiths must be crazy.

He was VERY hard for my poor occultist.  He resists all three of my DoTs, so I was left with just my weapon's base damage.  His adds made it hard to focus him with my throwing knives and precision strikes, and he tended to hold onto his petrify attack until I got close, which made attacking very hard.  I learned that I had to feint an attack to pull his petrify spell, and then quickly dive in with precision strike, and then run away.  Each time I did this, he summoned two more skeletons :_( . I beat him, but he was harder than most heroes.

I can start looking for +Damage to Undead gear, but
1)  That's hard to do reliably if you're not twinking
2)  It won't help when I run into automatons.

Quote from: Antifringe on 29 January 2020, 10:21:37

Holy moly!  I was a huge fan of Munderbunny's mod back in the day.  I did a quick search to see if Underlord/Soulvizier ever made it to AE, and here I am, looking a port that is current up to the most recent patch.  This is way beyond my expectations.

Only problem though, is I can't find the download link.  Where are you guys hosting this?

That's because the mod is currently in a private beta (inscriptions are closed). I don't have a planned date for public release. Maybe in a month or so (no promises).

That explains it.  Can't say I'm not disappointed but I respect your decision to keep the beta closed.  Bought AE when it came out, and just couldn't get into it without the Underlord/Soul Vizier skills trees. One of the best mods I've ever seen in any game.

I'm jazzed that it's being ported over and that development is so active.  I didn't think that there was any way this mod would live again.