WildSam wrote:I just tried BoB online, because rework looks sweet.
Leveled up Evo to 15 solely for BoB. And it feels pretty weak, because I found 2 Boxes in Orc:4 and were at V when got enough skill to try them out.
That gave me chimeras like Wolf/Ice Beast/Ice Beast or like Yak/Cob/Bat which not anywhere close to "cool" at Vaults.
Btw at same moment (and same skill level) elemental evokers are nice even at V:5, so I guess problem really in BoB.
I think 15 Evo is enough to make something related cool (15 long blades make me swing demon blade almost perfectly and with 15 of some magic school i can cast lowlevel spells in GDA with 15 Int).
May be I just was unlucky with RNG, but there is feedback: please make BoB more reliable/strong on lower skill levels because it's already finite and temporary and not really strong, while conception is nice.
Yes, my impression so far and particularly from arena tests has been that it doesn't perform well against a lot of things after a certain point. Although it depends whether your server had the bugfix that allowed them to get proper AC/EV! However comparing it to the other evokers isn't necessarily useful: remember you can release multiple beasts, and they'll stay with you for quite a while (I might increase this a bit again), whereas the evokers are one-off effects that you have to wait for (and their recharge times are a bit skewed currently as well, and they are not necessarily remotely balanced!)
One possibility is scaling the beasts up according to a combination of depth and evo rather than just evo, this was in the original wiki proposal but I wanted to see how it worked with just evo, because basing the effect on where in the dungeon you were seemed a bit odd to me.
There are still some improvements to be made in how the beasts benefit from their constituent parts. They could end up getting more attacks, better AC, etc. Also I think resists aren't currently being applied, so a dragon chimera would not actually have rF right now. Maybe I should fix that and reinstate some of the more unusual monsters that used to be in it (e.g. hell hounds, hell hogs, apis) so you will get things with useful resists at higher levels.
Having said that I'm quite pleased with the changes I've made so far in construction: you can get some strong combinations of damage
and speed if the right components come out. Of course the thing has to survive long enough to actually do the damage.
Importantly, I do not think you should expect these things to kill everything for you, especially not somewhere like V; but if you fight alongside them and keep them alive (and don't forget to haste them) then they could seriously increase your damage output if you have some good combinations of heads.
Anyway, thanks for the great feedback, I'll probably adjust the scale a bit in light of this; at 15 Evo it'd be good to start getting some slightly more impressive creations I think (although I do still want to make it worthwhile getting evo much higher than that!)