fan of knives effect

Nerf damage on Assault

Assault:  Damage reduced on all 3 hits.  This has only been ignored so long because the classes with it were pretty weak.  Also, Shield Slam's creation way back was a huge buff to how often you can get double damage skill rotations off.  Bulwark actually does the highest damage of almost any of the melee classes through T1-2 even with this nerf heh.  Would still be true with the old -20% phys damage.  But, the stamina gate is noticable.

Shield Slam:  Damage increased, was just fairly low.

Repulsion:  Now does a shield attack for decent damage and if a target is hit resets Rush's cooldown.  Thematically awkward, but mechanically plays very well.  Knock shit away from you to open a path then charge something.

Shield Expertise:  Standard scaling functions added to the save gain, numbers are about the same for PCs.


See merge request !396

Misc Artifact Buffs

Buffed Pick of Dwarven Emperors to have lv 4 Auger. Nithan's Force loses Auger and arcane property, gains lv4 Bull Shot. Ureslak's Molted Scales gain +5% to all res caps and +100 life to reinforce its theme and usefulness.

See merge request !397

Display negative life in the UI instead of ???

Display negative life instead of ???.  I'm pretty sure I fixed this forever ago, so on the off chance it was reverted intentionally, I'll re-make the argument here.

Firstly, the reason I'm doing this now is because its actively making my test character gameplay a lot less fun.

The use of die_at has gradually inflated.  Importantly, Heroism is a tool experienced players use almost universally, but at the same time I thought I fixed this display issue I also added it on randarts as a power.  It has shown up more and more on talents as well.  The use of die_at is done not because it makes the UI actively hostile, but because its a unique form of life that has specific interactions with max_life and/or for theme.

Additionally, it is inconsistent to give completely information in the combat log but not on the life display.  This leads to encouraging people to look through the hard to read combat log to estimate what their life is at.  Which is exactly what we do, and why I've gotten several complaints about it when I'm active in chat.

If this has to stay, I'll re-do Heroism and delete the randart powers and such so it can stay limited to classes deemed acceptable to have hostile UI as a balance mechanic or whatever the design goal is.

See merge request !395

WeaponCritPower

Added support for .crit_power (percent) field to weapon combat, which adds to the critical multiple for (only) attacks with the weapon.

Applies to melee, unarmed, shield, and ranged attacks.  Object descriptions and character sheet updated.

Throwing Knives talent uses this new field (to avoid permanent changes to crit power on errors).

Slightly nerfed Lure durability so normal NPC's can more easily kill it at high level.

See merge request !392

Switched Pulverizing Auger and Stone Skin spots

Raise damage on Shield Slam

Add scaling functions to Shield Expertise save bonuses.

Add an attack and a rush cooldown refresh to Repulsion

Buffed Pick of Dwarven Emperors to have lv 4 Auger. Nithan's Force loses Auger and arcane property, gains lv4 Bull Shot. Ureslak's Molted Scales gain +5% to all res caps and +100 life to reinforce its theme and usefulness.

Necro buffs

Few QoL changes and buffs to Necromancer. Empathy now helps minions not kill each other. Level 3 and up of Aura Mastery has a 25% chance to return souls from minions on death if they're inside the aura. Animus Hoarder is passive to reduce mana and soul strains early. Chill of the Tomb has a 100% chance to create a wisp if it kills a friendly necrotic minion while Will o' the Wisp is sustained for synergy. Lowered overall mana costs and cooldowns on non-locked trees slightly to prevent as many dead turns. Possibly more tweaks later, but this is it for now.

See merge request !393

Necrotic minions killed by Chill of the Tomb create wisps 100% of the time if Will o' the Wisp is sustained. Synergy, very fun!

Added support for .crit_power (percent) field to weapon combat, which adds to the critical multiple for (only) attacks with the weapon.
Applies to melee, unarmed, shield, and ranged attacks.  Object descriptions and character sheet updated.

Throwing Knives talent uses this new field (to avoid permanent changes to crit power on errors).

Slightly nerfed Lure durability so normal NPC's can more easily kill it at high level.

Heal Scaling Update

Various adjustments to healing/anti-healing debuff balance for the changes to healing_factor from increased Constitution.

Moved callbackOnHeal callback trigger to beginning of Actor:onHeal.  This allows callbacks to trigger correctly before Bloodlock and Solipsism are checked and sort themselves with callback priorities.

Added documentation to the callback control functions.

Adjusted healing_factor bonus for improving Constitution (limited to +150%), to match limit scaling of anti-healing debuffs and prevent runaway healing effects on high level randbosses.

Talent Changes:
One With Nature: Fixed cooldown.  Slow scaling of nb of infusions affected (small nerf) and cooldown adjustment (small buff at low talent levels).

Healing Nexus:  Converted to use callbackOnHeal (with high, -5, priority).  Rescale radius and equilibrium gains.  Duration (<20 turns) and percent heal stolen (<100%) have reasonable limits.  Heals stolen are based on the raw heal value (no compounded healing_factor effects).  Debuff is applied only to others, while a buff is applied to the user (fixes interaction with buff/debuff affecting abilities).  Buff improves all healing received by up to +100%, instead of creating a new heal so equilibrium is only gained once per heal stolen.

Healing Inversion: Conversion to Blight damage uses raw healing value, triggered after (most) other healing effects (callback priority +1).

Bathe In Light: healing buff limited < + 100%.

Poison Storm: Insidious Blight healing penaltiy limited (to -150%), Crippling Blight fail chance limited (to 50%)

Epidemic: healing penalty buffed (to -150% healing)

Insidious Poison: healing penalty buffed (to -150% healing)

Slash: healing penalty buffed (to -150% healing)

Bleeding Edge: healing penalty buffed (to -150% healing)

Golem Resilience: healing_factor buff limited to +100% healing

Unstoppable: Buff sets the "no_healing" attribute, description clarified.

Throwing Knives: Fix talent learn/unlearn abuse

INSIDIOUS_POISON damage type: has built in healing_factor limit (to -150%).

HEALING_POWER damage type: has built in healing_factor limit (to +100%).

BLIGHT_POISON damage type: has built in limits for effects set:

	INSIDIOUS_BLIGHT: healing_factor (to -150%)

	CRIPPLING_BLIGHT: fail chance (to 50%)
	
RANDOM_POISON damage type: has built in limits for effects set:

	INSIDIUS_POISON: healing_factor (to -150%)

	CRIPPLING_POISON: fail chance (to 50%)

	NUMBING_POISON: damage penalty rescaled (0.75 power)

	
Evisceration weapon ego:  Bleeding damage and healing penalty take weapon skill into account.  Healing penalty limited (to -150%).  Effects displayed in object description.

Barbed ammo ego:  Bleeding damage and healing penalty take weapon skill into account.  Healing penalty limited (to -150%).  Effects displayed in object description.


Misc:
May leave the level immediately after a kill in developer mode.

See merge request !388

Poison sanity

Poison, Stoning Poison, and Deadly Poison, on merge automatically set their max power to 5x the power set by default.  This means that their damage cannot stack more than 5x times unless explicitly specified.

Poisonous Bite is an unarmed attack (prevents stacking of weapon bonuses with its built in multiplier).

Nerfed Toxic Death Radius slightly.  These changes will hopefully control potential runaway poison spreading.


See merge request !391

Bulwhat?

Continuing attempts to remove high armor edge cases early game, this time Shield Wall paired with expanding access to APR via itemization.  Since Bulwark is already very weak and SW has been its only really selling point this also attempts to compensate them with various misc buffs.

Shield Wall:  This was at the top of the randboss armor problem list both at low levels and high levels.  Early on it regularly 0s weapon class damage when paired with just about anything.  It also scales incredibly well, and from the PC perspective trivializes weapon damage in a degenerate way.  This removes the false choice physical damage reduction, greatly reduces the early armor and late game armor scaling, and adds a block value bonus.  Cooldown is also reduced because a primary defense going down for 30 turns is ridiculous.

Last Stand:  Weird talent.  Scales very well but takes a turn to activate and deactivate.  The concept of exchanging mobility for tankiness is good, so dropping this to 6 cooldown from 30 should help Bulwark a bit.

Life Rating:  Up to 6 from 2.  Since Shield Wall had to lose a lot of power a larger base life pool is a similarly passive replacement.  We don't have a lot of large base health pools on just about anything as is, may as well give it to someone.

Items:  Raised APR values and lowered minimum level on several APR egos, and added a new greater egos with APR+Physical Penetration+Accuracy for weapons.  APR is a very hard stat to get right now.

Scaling:  Increased the power of the Combat Accuracy and Heavy Armor Training scaling to 0.75.

See merge request !390

Poison, Stoning Poison, and Deadly Poison, on merge automatically set their max_power to 5x the power set by default.  This means that their damage cannot stack more than 5x times by default.

Poisonous Bite is an unarmed attack (prevents stacking of weapon bonuses with built in multiplier).