Elemental Mod for MM7 -- v4.0 open beta

[Tomsod]

Would buying a stolen item worth 3000+ from black market also have been sufficient ?

Unfortunately yes, you're really supposed to steal it yourself, but fixing this would be too complicated. Stealing and then enchanting (to increase the price) may also work.

a "features" document might be needed at this point

Yes! Once I'm done fixing all these bugs, I'll probably start writing it.

Okay so now I need a lot more information.

• Monster Level is used in the vanilla Monster ID difficulty check (I forget how it's offset but once you get far enough in it's basically just Skill vs Monster Level), how is it used in the difficulty check in Elemental?
• What are the thresholds for getting more data from a monster?
• Why am I not backcredited for overshooting rank before meeting a monster for the first time (which is very likely to happen in the midgame now that training multipliers apply to bonuses)?
• Do peasants count at all?

In vanilla the check is just (monster level) vs. (skill + 10), with expert and master resp. doubling and tripling skill value, in addition to unlocking more info. (Also, for this skill, even in vanilla the rank multipler is applied to item/hireling bonuses.) GM always succeeds and also shows resistances. I retained the (hidden) vanilla multipliers, but instead of info amount being determined by rank, it's offset at +20/+10/0/-10 for the former N/E/M/G unlocks instead of the fixed +10.

Skill training works like this because it was the easiest (for me) way and it's really no big deal. Peasants also count.

CTD when trying to multi-cast Regeneration after resting

Thanks for the error log, this would be difficult to reproduce, but from the call stack I'm pretty sure what the problem is.

multi-casting regeneration works for me.

It seems to only sometimes cause crashes, basically I pass random garbage as the target monster, which is mostly fine because regeneration does not target monsters, but there's still some code for all spells that looks at that monster, and it may lead to a segfault.

[raekuul]

re ID Monster: It still bothers me that we can lose out on progress towards GM by overshooting but with those breakpoints losing progress to overshooting is mostly the player's fault for not using it regularly. There's enough monsters in the game.

re Multi-Cast Regeneration: It happens more reliably to me when cast in the Haunted Mansion, maybe this could be more easily reproduced on lower monster count maps like Wromthrax's Cave or The Small House?

re Disarm: ...wait a second the only classes that require disarming traps at all for their promotion are Sorcerer and Cleric, it's just those are the two most memorable ones because vanilla is badly balanced wrt grandmastery distributions so every playthrough hits those chests anyway. So I'm officially going to say "let Archer get E Disarm without promoting, alongside Thief and Ranger" so that PACS can actually open all their chests without blowing their faces off. But since Archer doesn't need Disarm to promote and you can just buy scrolls of immutability, this is one where I'm okay with how it is now and so this is just "I Would Like This" rather than "This Would Make It Better" (especially since Ranger can already get Expert Disarm without promoting, which is even sillier since Ranger has zero dependencies on any skills for their promotion - though this also gives me an excuse to run RCDS next time I want to go full magic)

(On the subject of "you can just buy scrolls now" - really glad that I can just buy scrolls of Water Walk whenever because now I am free to do Cleric before Sorcerer which helps immensely on routing)

[Lone_Wolf]

water breathing potions (expert alchemy) are a good substitute for water walking scrolls .

For avlee golem part fly + invisibility scroill works great, no need for TPK (even on hard, just don't try to fight more then 1 water elemental unless lvl 40 or so).

Don't think I've ever had a party without a thief.
Dual Dagger at GM is awesome , even when limited somewhat due to not having double armsmastery bonus.

[raekuul]

Part of it is just that I find that the thief is overspecialized at what they do (more so in vanilla than in Elemental, but that's more because Elemental makes it a point to give thief better combat abilities through their principal skills rather than any change to skill distribution), and part of it is that MM7 just is not well balanced across the four combinations of Light, Dark, Melee, and Magic (the School of Magic portion of Initiate -> Ninja is a good example of where it goes very horribly wrong in vanilla; Elemental is much more tolerable since now you can get equipment of Permanence to help keep your resistances intact).

re potions: this is one where I need to get used to Elemental's other systems. There is no excuse for me to not have a full stock of water walking potions when I'm ready to go to Tidewater, it's just... I'm so used to needing to build up my magic skills early so there's no wiggle room to also throw expert Alchemy into the mix (question - why can't knights learn alchemy, again? Not specifically in the context of Elemental but just generally, since that's an obvious weak point in their capabilities. Then again if you stick to just the main quests and ignore promotions/sidequests then the only time you need to fly or walk on water before you get wetsuits is if you choose Team Dark, for Clanker's Lab) but in Elemental you can still brew those potions without the rank, you just get halved duration in exchange.

In vanilla I basically only ever used Thief if I wanted to just skip the Blaster Guy Quest, which... meant any time I wanted to go sans Cleric, and I think part of that bias is bleeding back into Elemental. Talk about having to unlearn bad habits

[Tomsod]

re ID Monster: It still bothers me that we can lose out on progress towards GM by overshooting but with those breakpoints losing progress to overshooting is mostly the player's fault for not using it regularly. There's enough monsters in the game.

Generally, I fine-tuned the "practical experience" numbers based on what 3.0 playtesters (including myself) hit by the time they advanced to GM, and so far it holds well. In the latest run I had to ID just a few dozen extra monsters once I had the skill points to spare.

So I'm officially going to say "let Archer get E Disarm without promoting, alongside Thief and Ranger" so that PACS can actually open all their chests without blowing their faces off. But since Archer doesn't need Disarm to promote and you can just buy scrolls of immutability, this is one where I'm okay with how it is now and so this is just "I Would Like This" rather than "This Would Make It Better"

In vanilla it was second promotion instead of first, I think this is already good enough! Basically it's another choice in the starting party composition: pick a thief or ranger and have traps be no problem; pick a monk or archer and have to do their promotion ASAP; or have no rogue-types and just eat traps with telekinesis or something.

Don't think I've ever had a party without a thief.
Dual Dagger at GM is awesome , even when limited somewhat due to not having double armsmastery bonus.

Another player identified this as a balance problem: dual daggers might be a bit too strong now. I need to think on it, maybe nerf them later.

question - why can't knights learn alchemy, again? Not specifically in the context of Elemental but just generally, since that's an obvious weak point in their capabilities.

It's a flavor thing I think, they're not supposed to be any good at magic. I feel it's valid (although indeed bad for balance), so I kept it.

[Lone_Wolf]

I am now at level 35+, have done 3x 2nd promotion quests and cleaned out clanker's lab .

Some suggestions

Arena fights
Arena Knight/ Lord level give way to much money on easy.
I did arena fights at lvl 9 until I had enough points to become arena champion and get an artifact.
Although I did set diff to hard for the fights, I reset it to easy for the price money.
Those fights increased my money by approx 115k .

Recommendation : disable switching diff in arena

Spectral Weapon
It is very powerful for a low cost and also reduces the need for holy water by a lot .

Recommendation :
- increase magic resistance of undead
- make spectral weapon function like fire aura : low damage shift at normal. medium at expert , high at master spirit skill.

RDSM/RDSS
Their fire immunity (plus aggro) makes barrow downs, nighon tunnels and other zones with fire using monsters a lot easier .
The quality is also to high for the low level you can get it at.

Recommendation
Increase the time to create them from scales to 4 weeks or longer.
Allow partys that haven't got the scales to buy them for a substantial higher price.

Introduce an upgrade path for them
(RDSM will always have lightweight)

first stage medium AC, medium fire res
2nd stage increase AC to that of top regular item of its type, also increase fire res
3rd stage AC equal to best artifact of this type, fire immunity

2nd and 3rd stage upgrades would becone available after doing new quests.
Given dwarves affinity to fire (and their lack of quests) stone city and fire using monsters should be involved.
Possible quests : kill all gogs in barrow downs, kill all gogs in nighon tunnels .
Dwarven king could give 3 quests instead of 1 like this :
Proof you're worthy - kill all gogs in barrow downs
repairing castle requires miners/engineers that arte stuck in red dwarf mines - rescue dwarves
many troops are busy in nighon tunnels, king needs them to escort the workers for castle - kill all gogs in nighon tunnels
(extra reason to get to nighon early)

GM skills

Some GM skills are worth more then others and should be hard to get.
a few examples : armsmaster, merchant, Disarm, Alchemy, magic GMs
Several already have requirements, but they are to easy to fulfill .

Recommendation: Introduce strong additional requirements for them
possible for fire GM : get killed by incinerate spell

[raekuul]

I disagree somewhat with changing magic GMs from where they're at given the rank requirements have already been increased (is it weird that outside of Warlock!Earth the rank requirement is the one I have trouble meeting?) and currently they feel appropriate for the change in effectiveness, but I would like to see the Capstone spells locked by quests (in theory Divine Intervention already is since it's the Archmage promotion quest, but I was seeing it in the guild despite taking the Lich promotion quest which... feels like a bug but probably is intentional since I did side with Celeste on that save) - more sidequests is always a good thing.

wrt fire specifically, how many monsters even cast Incinerate?

[Lone_Wolf]

the rank requirement is the one I have trouble meeting?

No, it's harder for me then I'm used to also.
needing skill 12 means 23 extra skill points per magic skill. for the 5 magic skills a sorcerer typically has that means needing 115 sk extra (385 instead of 270)

Spliiting rank requirement & being able to buy GM spellbooks may be a better alternative then increasing rank requirement.

wrt fire specifically, how many monsters even cast Incinerate?

Spoiler

fire elementals & devil captains use them.

[raekuul]

re skill point totals: that's largely why I keep going with mixed parties like KCDS or PACS (or even the weird TMRD I did before, which worked out a lot better than I thought it would but there's no way in hell I'm taking that party through the dark side's ending) - even with the nerf to Regeneration (which I'm still getting used to), you don't need backup healers in MM7 like you did in MM6 simply because Immutability and Preservation Exist, and in Elemental it's even less important because multiple classes can get M and GM where it's needed. So by focusing characters on fewer spell schools it's less painful.

Granted, this is a moot point if you're making full use of the Learning skill, since then you do have the skill points to spare on backup healing. I'll post this PACS save file once I return the overthruster so that y'all can see just how much of a difference in power it makes (and how little power you actually need)

Progress Report - 1296000 Base EXP

Slew Wromthrax (+15000 to Heeroine the Crusader)
Troglodytes Routed
Haunted House Exorcised
Found the Tomb of Zokarr IV
Retrieved the Lantern of Light
Built A Golem (+15000 to Deid Mann the Wizard)
Sabotaged the Lift (+15000 to Dwniper the Warrior Mage) (Base EXP now includes First Promotion)
Rescued the Dwarves
Recovered Medusa's Mirror
Druid Altars Visited
Loren Steel Rescued
Riverstride Plans Delivered
Gave Trumpet to Arbiter
Griffin Slayer
Joined the Necromancers' Guild
Joined the Wizards' Guind
Stole Back the Lich Jars (+40000 to Deid Mann the Lich)
Rescued Alice Hargreives (+40000 to Heeroine the Hero)
Stole Back The Seasons' Stole
Purified the Altar of the Temple of the Moon (+40000 to Preservation? the Priest of the Light)
Recovered the Sniper's Belt (+40000 to Dwniper the Sniper) (Base EXP now includes Second Promotion)
Altar Pieces (Light)
Sabotaged Watchtower 6
Selected Judge Fairweather
Calmed the Trees
Returned and Reported to Lysander Sweet
Delivered Tears of the Ancients (The only reason this wasn't an intentional death was due to a GM TP scroll that I got stupidly lucky with)
Rooted out the Baa Cult from AvLee
Killed Tolberti
Haldir's Remains

[Tomsod]

Arena Knight/ Lord level give way to much money on easy.
I did arena fights at lvl 9 until I had enough points to become arena champion and get an artifact.
Although I did set diff to hard for the fights, I reset it to easy for the price money.
Those fights increased my money by approx 115k .

Recommendation : disable switching diff in arena

The problem is not difficulty, it's your low level. Money available to party grows roughly linearly with experience gained, while arena reward is based on level which grows sublinearly. Thus, the lower your level, the better arena rewards seem. Case in point, on level 30-ish the reward seems perfectly appropriate for me. What I should do is just reduce the arena money on low levels, maybe make it scale with fame instead.

Spectral Weapon
It is very powerful for a low cost and also reduces the need for holy water by a lot .

Recommendation :
- increase magic resistance of undead
- make spectral weapon function like fire aura : low damage shift at normal. medium at expert , high at master spirit skill.

Why does everyone think it's such a powerful spell? Apart from allowing fighters to deal with ghosts/oozes/etc., it just slightly increases average damage against only about half of monsters, which makes it more niche than e.g. Fire Aura. And because the increase is multiplicative, it doesn't really shine as a general buff until mid-late game (and then only on fighter classes). So there's no need to nerf it in early game further.

As for holy water, its damage is already more effective against most undead monsters (only ghosts have holy resistance equal to magic, for everyone else it's less), and also it boosts crit chance and you can even throw it. So Spectral Weapon is a worse budget option. I try to not lock the player into using any particular feature, so having a (worse) alternative to holy water is fine! I should revise ghost holy resistance though, it indeed doesn't make sense.

RDSM/RDSS
Their fire immunity (plus aggro) makes barrow downs, nighon tunnels and other zones with fire using monsters a lot easier .
The quality is also to high for the low level you can get it at.

Consider that you have to kill a red dragon at level 5 for it, with no fireball wand cheese unlike in vanilla. A single good item is already a massive nerf from the entire party drapped in relics that a shrewd vanilla player could get, so this is fine.

GM skills

Some GM skills are worth more then others and should be hard to get.
a few examples : armsmaster, merchant, Disarm, Alchemy, magic GMs
Several already have requirements, but they are to easy to fulfill .

Recommendation: Introduce strong additional requirements for them
possible for fire GM : get killed by incinerate spell

I kind of did that already! I don't want to touch magic skills any more, because if I'm adding mini-quests for any of them, for symmetry it has to be all of them, and there's no way I'm pulling it off. But if you have suggestions for other GM requirements, I'm all ears.

I would like to see the Capstone spells locked by quests (in theory Divine Intervention already is since it's the Archmage promotion quest, but I was seeing it in the guild despite taking the Lich promotion quest which... feels like a bug but probably is intentional since I did side with Celeste on that save) - more sidequests is always a good thing.

Except for Lloyd's Beacon maybe, none of the GM spells are really worth their own quest IMO. Isn't the vanilla arrangement where you must travel to remote corners of the world to visit the paramount elemental guilds enough?

DI available without the Archmage promotion is definitely a bug; I'll investigate that.

[raekuul]

Arguably the quest for LB is "arrange transportation to Evenmorn" but yeah, most of the capstones aren't worth it (Incinerate weirdly enough does become worth one due to the instakill chance)

[Lone_Wolf]

Arena Knight/ Lord level give way to much money on easy.
I did arena fights at lvl 9 until I had enough points to become arena champion and get an artifact.
Although I did set diff to hard for the fights, I reset it to easy for the price money.
Those fights increased my money by approx 115k .

Recommendation : disable switching diff in arena

The problem is not difficulty, it's your low level. Money available to party grows roughly linearly with experience gained, while arena reward is based on level which grows sublinearly. Thus, the lower your level, the better arena rewards seem. Case in point, on level 30-ish the reward seems perfectly appropriate for me. What I should do is just reduce the arena money on low levels, maybe make it scale with fame instead.

Lowering the arena rewards for lower levels seems like a good idea.
Maybe something like L1-5 pays 25% , L6-10 50%, L10-20 75% , above L20 100% .

I have the impression winning arena fights does increase taxes you get from H town hall substantially .
Is that correct ?

I'll look into the non magic GMs.

Throwing knives
My goblin assassin is now at GM dagger 10 with might 104 and gets higher DPS with a boomerang knife of the dragon then with expert bow + griffin bow of the dragon for short range combat like in dungeons.

For my elven archmage with same stats but Master Dagger 7 it's slightly worse then expert bow.

For outdoors combat the results are much worse due to the low range.
If you want to make throwing knives more competive, consider increasing the minimum distance for them.

[raekuul]

re spectral weapon: I think you misunderstand our point. It's overpowering not because it's numerically powerful but because it lets us go back to vanilla strats - there's nothing that's immune to both Magic and Physical, which between SW and Bless and Heroism allows us to just kinda pretend everybody's a Knight. Which is kind of stupidly important in the early game when you don't have the SP to kill everything properly using spells and can't just rest to recover SP on the spot (and have to deal with a bunch of undead who are immune to both of Water's damage types).

It's definitely suboptimal, yes, but it's the Brute Force Solution. In a situation where the optimal solution requires far more preparation work.

E: The Big Thing is that resistances don't actually matter - since they're a percentage chance to reduce damage rather than a flat reduction, then short of immunity the monster will, eventually, take that full 182 critical physical/magic damage that my archer is throwing around with their Savage Spear of the Wraith while backed up with GM Hour of Power. This more than anything else is why we keep saying that Spectral Weapon is overpowered since it allows us the full damage range of the weapon.

re arena rewards: I'm okay with graduated gold rewards, but make the 100% breakpoint level 30 instead of level 20. Level 20 is when you have a whole bunch of Game open up to you all at once.

[raekuul]

So I found another get rich quick scheme - put all the money in the bank, then serve a prison term. 52 weeks' worth of interest, all for the low low cost of three armageddon spells in the Tularean Forest. (For some reason I remember your money being confiscated when you were sentenced to prison? but that might just be the mandela effect). Just don't do it between rescuing the dwarves and choosing an arbiter.

anyway here's my save file.

[Lone_Wolf]

* When a stat buff changes max HP or SP, the current value adjusts accordingly.

Tested low level party (3 chars at full health/sp, one wounded and some sp used) with Day of the Gods pedestal and works as intended.

For a lvl 35 party the DoG spell has the same effect.
Do I need to test with attrib boosts from Items / potions also ?

re : prison
Some games give skill penalties for being in jail, maybe that needs to be implemented ?

weekly interest can be abused easily, disable compound interest ?

[raekuul]

or confiscate banked funds while in prison, to discourage it. normally you only pull the jail sentence at the very end, to negate stealing the tapestry, and at that point losing the banked money doesn't matter.

[Tomsod]

Throwing knives
My goblin assassin is now at GM dagger 10 with might 104 and gets higher DPS with a boomerang knife of the dragon then with expert bow + griffin bow of the dragon for short range combat like in dungeons.

For my elven archmage with same stats but Master Dagger 7 it's slightly worse then expert bow.

For outdoors combat the results are much worse due to the low range.
If you want to make throwing knives more competive, consider increasing the minimum distance for them.

Thieves are just about the only class for which knives are unquestionably superior to bows, although my monk also did fine with them. Generally, they're not supposed to always be competitive with bows, the main motivation was to provide a ranged option to non-elven druids and sorcerers.

Range for thrown knives also increases with Might; with midgame stats they worked good enough for me, especially against melee enemies who would charge at the party. They sometimes fail to snipe very distant monsters, especially with a small hitbox, but at that range there's an attack chance penalty anyway.

That said, when I first added them, I expected to later enable aiming over a monster to compensate for gravity; this ended up only implemented for spells (including pseudo-spells like thrown bottles for which it does help), not missile attacks. Is it really that bad in your experience?

re spectral weapon: I think you misunderstand our point. It's overpowering not because it's numerically powerful but because it lets us go back to vanilla strats - there's nothing that's immune to both Magic and Physical, which between SW and Bless and Heroism allows us to just kinda pretend everybody's a Knight. Which is kind of stupidly important in the early game when you don't have the SP to kill everything properly using spells and can't just rest to recover SP on the spot (and have to deal with a bunch of undead who are immune to both of Water's damage types).

It's definitely suboptimal, yes, but it's the Brute Force Solution. In a situation where the optimal solution requires far more preparation work.

I see. Would it help if I reduced enchantment duration below Master? Then at least it wouldn't be so cheap.

So I found another get rich quick scheme - put all the money in the bank, then serve a prison term. 52 weeks' worth of interest, all for the low low cost of three armageddon spells in the Tularean Forest. (For some reason I remember your money being confiscated when you were sentenced to prison? but that might just be the mandela effect). Just don't do it between rescuing the dwarves and choosing an arbiter.

Well, compared to spending a lot of time any other way, this just requires fewer key presses. Remember that wasted time results in lower final score; for me this is penalty enough! Nevertheless, confiscating bank money after a prison term does sound sensible.

* When a stat buff changes max HP or SP, the current value adjusts accordingly.

Tested low level party (3 chars at full health/sp, one wounded and some sp used) with Day of the Gods pedestal and works as intended.

For a lvl 35 party the DoG spell has the same effect.
Do I need to test with attrib boosts from Items / potions also ?

Items shouldn't work because theirs are semi-permanent boosts, not temporary ("green") ones. Either way it seems to work fine in most basic scenarios, I was hoping someone stumbles upon some obscure happenstance where things get weird for some reason.

[Lone_Wolf]

re spectral weapon

I see. Would it help if I reduced enchantment duration below Master? Then at least it wouldn't be so cheap.

It would help if the duration was more like that of bless & heroism.
I do think that making some monsters immune to spectral weapon would also help.
Giving Shades & Wights immunity to magic damage would do that. (there still would be 3 options to hurt them : fire , elec, holy water )
(giving that imm to lichs might be too much).

re throwing knives
I"ll test with higher might values like 215 , 315 390, 440 & 500 and let you know.
A monk can only get dagger Normal, does E/M/GM dagger skill not influence the throwing knives ?

re arena
Thresholds for getting stronger monsters in arena appears to be 10 - 15 - 20 - 30 .
This suggests 5 stages of reward.
A possible schema : 1-9 25% , 10-14 40% , 15-19 60%, 20-29 80, 30+ 100% .

[Lone_Wolf]

Throwing Knives

Tested with thief L1 & sorcerer L1 and only might seems to influence distance .
With might 178 (might effect +20) distance difference was still noticeable.
For 285 (might effect +25 ) the difference with bow distance was small.
Might 390 (+28) and 500(+30) knives & bow distance appeared to be the same .

No sign of race making a difference apart from a different starting value for might.

So eventually knives distance gets equal to bow distance. Is reaching that level realistic ?

Spoiler

Strongest Catalyst has power 75 .
alchemy skill GM 10
Item of +25 alchemy
Clankers amulet +10 alchemy
Herbalist +4 alchemy
Apothecary +8 alchemy

That amounts to power 132 .

Day of the gods at light GM 12
of light item +6
attrib 10 + 18*4 = 82

Without cheating you can add 214 might ( 262 with light 20).
Adding an item of the dragon and one item of +25 might adds another 50.
total 264 / 314

So 285 is reachable, the higher values can only be reached by stacking might items or having very high light skill .

Dark parties without access to GM light though will have trouble getting to 285 .

I'd prefer if knives distance would be equal to bow distance earlier, like at 178 (might effect +20) .
That's high enough to be a challenge but should be reachable for endgame parties regardless of setup/alignment .

[raekuul]

re spectral weapon: I would be fine with reducing the duration, as then I would need to pay upkeep (as it were) to maintain vanilla strats, which is in line with the other buffs from Spirit magic.

I'd actually be okay with putting magic immunity on Liches, to make them in line with MM6 liches, but since liches aren't immune to physical it doesn't affect Spectral Weapon use in The Pit/Castle Gloaming/Tomb of the Master. Shades being immune to magic would, but then that would defeat the original goal of Spectral Weapon in the first place!

Question: Pain Reflection reflects the damage type of the original attack, right?

re score: oh right people do play for score. I typically don't (despite my wanting to minimize day count I typically only try to minimize day count, not maximize score), so jail typically isn't something I do but on this past run I was already exiting the training center after every level in order to maximize gains from interest so I figured I'd burn jail time and get some region resets (which made doing my 2nd promotions interesting as it meant I couldn't actually do that. Hooray for Overland Nighon).

re might: Are those the base values or the racially-adjusted ones? Pure Stat potions affect the base stats which means they're multiplied by racial modifiers (rip elf thieves)