Help with character build Cipher/thief

[Wotcha]

To be clear, Psychovampiric Shield and other such transfer-oriented buff/debuff spells DO continue through their full duration even if the enemy dies... but only if the enemy's corpse still exists.  If the enemy in question dies of Disintegrate (which destroys the body on death), PVS and other such spells end immediately.  That also goes for when the enemy is gibbed by a crit on death (because you foolishly hadn't turned that off yet), or the body gets consumed by Flesh Communion or similar.

[Boeroer]

Good to know. So no White Worms when the cipher's attending the party!

[thelee]

2 hours ago, Wotcha said:

To be clear, Psychovampiric Shield and other such transfer-oriented buff/debuff spells DO continue through their full duration even if the enemy dies... but only if the enemy's corpse still exists.  If the enemy in question dies of Disintegrate (which destroys the body on death), PVS and other such spells end immediately.  That also goes for when the enemy is gibbed by a crit on death (because you foolishly hadn't turned that off yet), or the body gets consumed by Flesh Communion or similar.

wow, did not know that. boy that gib-on-crit-death option is the biggest (only?) "not actually a purely cosmetic option" trap setting in the game.

 

(personally i leave it on just for the extra challenge, but man what a way to confuse and/or screw over less-plugged-in players)

Edited November 11, 2019 by thelee

[Wotcha]

1 hour ago, thelee said:

wow, did not know that. boy that gib-on-crit-death option is the biggest (only?) "not actually a purely cosmetic option" trap setting in the game.

 

(personally i leave it on just for the extra challenge, but man what a way to confuse and/or screw over less-plugged-in players)

I tested this very thoroughly back when I was more actively working on my cipher mod, which has been sadly languishing while I've been otherwise occupied by life.  I hope to get back to it with some fresh eyes now that I've had a break.

As it stands now, there's no way to refresh the buff except by casting it again at the same target.  If you cast it on another target, the other target gets the debuff, but the caster's duration remains tied exclusively to the first target's remaining duration.  So if the first target goes down, you are doomed to have some kind of downtime on your buff.  Either immediately because the target got gibbed, or because eventually the duration on the now-dead first target will tick down to zero, and until it does, you can't get a new duration by affecting any other targets.  If you're relying on those buffs to be tanky, well, sucks to be you.

I have a technique that I want to try, to make these transfer spells a little less flaky.  The idea would be to turn the spell transfer itself into a stackable buff.  That buff does nothing at all, so it can stack without causing any weird scaling effects.  There would be another, invisible buff, which would become visible and take its effect (NON-stackably) if the number of the stacks of that specific do-nothing buff is greater than zero.  What this does is tie the caster buff to the presence of ANY enemies that have the debuff on them, for only as long as any enemies have the debuff.  That makes the buff easily persistable without gaps if the player just takes care to get the debuff spread to another target before the first one dies.  If the debuff ticks down on all enemies, the buff disappears, as one would expect.

This may all sound needlessly complicated, but I think it's the only way to get a non-flaky behavior for the transfer spells.  I tried every combo of flags that I could think of within the existing framework, to coerce the engine into decent behavior.  No dice.  I like the flavor of these transfer effects, I'd like their mechanics to not be quite so grossly inferior to their equivalents that other classes have.

[Boeroer]

Interesting. But afaik you can stack Time Parasite's duration just fine when casting it onto different enemies. 

[Wotcha]

6 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Interesting. But afaik you can stack Time Parasite's duration just fine when casting it onto different enemies. 

Correct! because Time Parasite has full buff stacking mechanics, which do basically work as expected duration-wise (and why I want to use them).  But full buff stacking mechanics for, say, Borrowed Instincts, would result in +20 acc and all defenses for EACH target affected, which is problematic to say the least.

The idea here is to try to take advantage of the proper duration mechanics for fully stacking buffs on transfer attacks, but to decouple the buff stacking from the buff effect.