This is getting me tempted to post about my recent experience playing CBN...in a nutshell, I picked a mage hunter in Seeker of the Arcane scenario. To keep things interesting (and get lots of easy points) I picked Wayfarer, so I've been basically living off whatever I can cram into what's basically just a vehicle trunk with sled runners slapped on it.
I started of with just the basic mage hunter kit of hammer, mask, and cloak. Over the course of about an in-gane year (at 14-day seasons, mind) I've managed to tactical-ify my armor a bit with a survivor helm and boots, a survivor backpack, and a survivor harness. The last one in particular I've found to be essential, as I carry a Saiga-12 for plinking the enemies that're too spicy to take on in melee. Normally a shotgun, even with slugs, isn't great for nasty critters. But with a lil silver shot, salt, and dull essence, mid-level arcanist characters can load a shotgun with something that deals fire-type damage.
It's given me a lot of opportunity to playtest my mods, at least. Lessons I've learned over the course of playing:
- Summoned shadows are fuckin' deadly if you start off with only the basic combat skills mage hunters start with. Led to a slight tweak to their bonus cold-type damage, and an extra arcana-focused buff to the Cleansing Flame martial art that gives damage resistances to exotic damage types if you're in the thick of it.
- Mage hunters with no extra combat skills don't benefit from the Via Gladium et Malleo martial art much at all because every buff except the on-move one is out of reach.
- The material demand for earth talismans was a bit excessive at first, even if it's an instant shelter it's not portable once plopped down.
- Being able to take the candle of warding back down intact after placing it is EXTREMELY useful for QoL since it basically makes it a portable source of infinite fire.
- Anvil quality and a forge are a giant pain in the ass for characters who have to travel light. That's what led to making the transmutation crucible and making thermic essence cutter double as an oxy torch for recipes (though the can forge from Cataclysm++ is a much better option and still fairly light).
- Certain spells were problematic to use. Shockstorm needed some tweaking to keep the user from zapping themselves all the time, Healing generated an unreasonable amount of the burnout effect, etc.
- Various other misc rebalancing things, like realizing the essence cost to transmutate metals was basically being paid twice, realizing platinum made sense as a good alternative to silver for making purifying shot, realizing how hard it is to balance the cyclopean mirror's primary niche as a magic floating shield, etc.
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Topic: The Cataclysm games thread. (Read 114159 times)