duvessa wrote:delarado wrote:Rast wrote:Why does CBOE still exist in 2018?
Why wouldn't it?
It's one of countless MP recovery abilities (potions of magic, potions of ambrosia, staff of energy, staff of Wucad Mu, sublimation of blood, like half the gods...), it's crap for the overwhelming majority of characters, and it's by far the most complicated of them - its effect depends on your Evocations skill
and your current MP, and for some reason it has three separate failure effects.
Potion of magic - Doesn't work with necromutation. Generally very rare.
Potion of ambrosia - Doesn't work with necromutation. Not something you can use in a fight.
Staff of Wucad Mu - I've found one; Ever.
Sublimination of blood - doesn't work with necromutation
Half the gods...I suppose, but is very limited.
The character that made me realise this is with Vehumet so I Get an MP refund. However, I still find myself only able to kill 3 or 4 higher level enemies before I have to run for the hills. I have 26 spellcasting, nearly 50 intelligence, max spell power on all of my fire spells and a +10MP item of armor. This isn't a problem you get with melee characters, you run when you get to low HP - which would happen a lot later with the sort of enemies I have to run from when I have a lot more offensive power.
You mention CBOE is crap for the overwhelming majority of characters and I don't disagree that it probably is, but it could be very useful for a lot of character builds. I'm not really proposing changes to CBOE (Unless you just want to remove the possibility of confusion effect, or make it negatable by MR like every other confusion attack in the game) I'm proposing changes to Necromutation to allow you to get out of the confusion status.
Now that clarity isn't a thing you can have, I Feel like something needs to change here...
With the hunger mechnanic, casting spells that you will need to use to do anything other than a 3 rune game means you will run out of food. The only way you can get around this now is using a spell that means you can be unavoidably killed because certain items were removed from the game (Clarity). Fight lots of enemies at once... You run out of food and MP and die by starvation or being killed by monsters you are defenseless against because you can't reliably recover mana. Pick them off one by one, you run out of food faster (due to higher turn count) and die.
It's fine if nobody agrees with me, I just think with other extended capable builds you have ways that are reliable and reusable to get you through the game... Berserk...Heroism/finesse... etc etc. There are a lot of abilities that allow you to massively improve your offensive powers without any real drawback, except piety loss (Which is regained by killing enemies ) Imagine if heroism had a random chance to paralyze you?
A good melee build can literally stand in a choke point, or even out in the open at times, and tab almost all day long with selective use of the correct god given abilities. A character that relies on conjurations cannot do this because they will run out of both food and MP very quickly.
However, blasters in extended have two very finite resource pools that limit their killing potential (MP and food)
Previously, Necromutation and CBOE With clarity was a good way of dealing with this. It allowed you to keep going if used right, but still had a very real possiblity of getting you into trouble that meant it wasn't game breakingly overpowered (Ending up with 0 mana or stat drain in a big fight)
Now, you pretty much have to kill 2-3 enemies and retreat and rest. Or use CBOE on a different floor - neither of which are really an option in places like the abyss or hell.