Background

A while ago I played through Broken World again, taking the same Fist of Stone route with Osric that I took at my uncle when I first played the game. I was playing at my uncle too. This time it was in a full party, and everyone was re-specialized for shields. I wanted tankiness, and by Xeria I'd have it.

As usual, I have a distaste for missing out skill points from quests. EXP differences I can smooth out with time and a little effort, but permanently missing skill points? That's where I draw the line.

So I downloaded Retroactive Skill Point Rewards, and the game was on.

Previously I was playing pets only, and I had to deal with the Undead Azunite Archer bug that crept in during development. There was one fix far and wide, LadyFemme's BW Monsters Improvements and Fixes for DS2 and Broken World and so it got installed. Then I got a near-wipe from a mimic and an actual wipe for my pet team when their handler got grave beamed by a bone minion, despite defending with steal magic. It turned out that Resists are in fact critical, especially death resistance. So I made sure to have a few pieces equipped, and it got somewhat more manageable.

Additionally, given the vast number of urns, almost every room would have a bone minion or two, (sometimes at the same time if I reacted slowly) and with their boosted power, clearing turned into a very risky slog. The bosses becoming even more spongy on top of them having high power resistance and armor didn't help either. This is what the big numbers of single-target powers are for, for goodness' sake!

The straw that broke the camel's back was the Vai'kesh Argir. He could heal endlessly, and the powers didn't harm him nearly enough to either spike through the healing, or to kill him through attrition. He was literally unkillable, and as far as I can tell LadyFemme did not succeed in these design goals, as I had a solid damage setup (Warcry+Crit+Mortal wound) on even my shield party, and it wasn't enough.

That's when I had enough and took matters into my own hands.

At first I kept things simple: Chipped off some 2/3 of Argir's healing and 1/3 of it's health. It was just enough. However, given the extreme tankiness of other bosses, something else bothered me: What's the point of powers when they are barely worth 3-4 single attacks against the enemies one would expect to use them on? You try the power out, see the target turning into fine paste, see the miniboss with a chunk of it's health gone or nearly killed, then surely it makes sense to use it for the big bosses.

In order to make that work, I went into the rules and disabled the power resistance stat from working. From then on, powers were at full effect.

In the meanwhile I had an experimental blood assassin trio with the premade Hadrian run through most of the first act of BW, finding how much "all roads lead to Rome", how little room there is for specialization in the specialties, how much one is directed towards spreading thin, and how little bonus there is in actually going deep into a particular passive. Take Survival as an example: In vanilla DS2, 5 points, or 1 point and 2x +2 adders will give you exactly half the benefit of getting it up to level 20. Ideally you spend one point, or just get two items to boost it to level 4 without spending a single point. In BW the sweet spot is level 6 instead. Blood Assassin's shred blood is around level 7, and the list goes on.

For someone who enjoys experimenting and replaying content with various builds in search of different experiences, this is just unacceptable. First off, diminishing returns hit anyways with flat increases, as each subsequent level, even though it's in absolute values the same as the previous, gives a smaller total compared to what has been achieved so far.

For example, an increase of 50% when added to the base value of 100% is the same, 150% of the original. Adding it to a base value of 1000% will only be a 5% relative increase, and a mere 2.5% when added to a base value of 2000%.

understanding this, I set out to make all specialties more fun. The way to do it was to smooth out the progression: Fewer front-loaded into the system at start, and higher increases at the end of the spectrum, to really make it worth going all the way. Additionally, it has smaller increases in the middle since that's when you get the levels in powers from them.

Take for example Toughness - the below comparison might do it justice.

Diminishing returns removed, there is a considerable bump between 15 and 20, making it more than worth for characters who finish building either Staggering Blow or Provoke to keep going either with skill points, or gear. There is a relatively diminishing part post lvl 20, but it going from 30% to 40% is still a considerable boost, as the relative value of each additional resistance increases with each point of resistance you already have: Adding 20% to 20% resistance cuts down incoming damage of that type by 1/4. Adding the same 20% to 60% resistance cuts the incoming damage by half! Each point of resistance is worth twice as much as in the previous example.

I worked in the same fashion with other skills: Weaker starts with bumps coming after you finish building for powers. It was in many ways hitting myself with a nerf bat, but also making the future level ups more interesting and worth looking forward to. They also rejoin the other curve and go above them in the 20-30 range which is determined by equipment.

One particular type of skill I worked on was the multiclass proc from Blood Assassin and Fist of Stone: Shred Blood, which procs a bleed not unlike the original ranged Bleed skill, and Quake, which procs a small AoE in melee. Both scale from intelligence, and have a keystone skill improving them. These were also treated as the best passive skills for ranged and melee respectively.

I opted to make them different from each other, and also to open up playstyles which let them scale the damage with dexterity and strength, respectively.

For Blood Assassin, the keystone was the key. Literally. Once that skill is taken, 25 + 10% of dex is added to Shred Blood damage, on top of the entirety of Bleed's damage, which scales with dexterity. As far as I can tell the two are separate effects, and can be stacked on the same target, making it very lucrative for throwers.

For the Fist of Stone, a less complicated approach was taken: Tremor increases tremor chance and adds intelligence scaling to tremor damage, while quake improves on the percent of intelligence, and adds strength scaling of it's own. Looking back at it I'm not satisfied, since all roads lead to going nuts in both of them, whether you want to scale strength or intelligence, but conceptually it's stable and at most needs fine tuning.

All this considered, it was time to take this out for a ride.

Mami the Blood Assassin

Mami's concept was simple: Take the speedrun to Aman'lu as a base, and apply the lessons learned to make a fun blood assassin, with a full blood assassin party. The main technique was machine gunning: using the stop command to cancel the reload of a crossbow, massively increasing rate of fire. Since crossbows are already sporting high base damage, it's easy to see how this is head and shoulders above other ranged builds. It has the strongest nukes, good at triggering procs, and ridiculous base damage output.

For start I played around with Deru, adding Vix when he became available. As usual, my resists were horrendous, and any enemy that could reasonably hit, or autohit from a distance was a threat. Fortunately Bow/Crossbow characters are amazing at stuns, and whenever a nasty target appeared, I'd nuke the entourage with Thunderous Shot and mopped up the rest with machine gunning. This party probably had the easiest time with the Vulks in the southern greylin jungle, and I even caught a lucky break with the King Scorpion rolling as the boss in eastern greylin jungle.

Vix adding a third nuke and another 50% DPS was a welcome sight as well. Some of his points are unoptimized, but thanks to retroactive skill points I still had enough to play with.

In-party specialization-wise Deru and Vix already had their pre-spent points "wasted" in their default passives, so Mami put hers to use with the combat magic passive Debilitate, for stronger curses later on. I have plans of having one of them go into Shred Blood, probably Vix since he already has quick draw, and should be able to get and make use of bleed without too much extra investment. I am not sure about it however, as I'm worried the others will override it even at lowered chances. Still this is to be decided later on, and I might even go digging for the relevant parts later on, since it should be a viable choice by design.

Gearwise I learned from Osric's experience, grabbing vai'kesh figurines easily via the shoplist mod, and slammed them into rings. This made sure I had plenty of death resistance for all the nasty undodgeable things. Sure it ended up with me lacking in fire and ice resists, but such is to be expected this early in the game. All in all it was worth it, especially once the Bone Minions and Windstone Fortress Mages/Sorceresses showed up.

Onto the bosses:

As I said earlier, there was no Ancient Vulk, and the Scorpion was no threat. The Windstone Fortress Grand Wizard usually gave me trouble, but this time withered under the combined take aims of 3 ranged characters, only getting 2 ineffective grave beams off against high resistances. A retake of the fight had me hit by infect, and that almost killed me in 3 ticks. It looks like Infect isn't affected by death resistance. It should be fixed in a later version. It can't be overemphasized how important Spirit Embrace is at this point of the game.

For the act boss, Giant Trilisk was anti-climatic. The black smoke was apparently death damage, and it did less damage than I could heal with potion regeneration. Vitalus had 13k hp, the others had 8k-8k each. Machinegunning ate through them with no problem, and the three Take Aims killed off most of Vitalus' hp. This one will likely need a health boost even if I deal with the machinegunning situation.

Remember, Mami's crit chance is nerfed, and same with both arrow range and later on shockwave minimum range. Her Biting Arrow skill is on par with the unmodded game and a nerf from Vanilla.

Mami will get few hits of the nerf bat and see you in Act 2.