Forum

Indeed, Ecas needs more cool animations for their skills.


Yep, this would make it really useful.


Amen to that. Hunter was perfect before the Brakmar patch, the only "improvement" we have now is custom zone markers, all the rest, animation, damage, Eca positioning when hunter is triggered, is much worse than before. Plus there's a lot of bugs too, like Eca remaining in it's position, when effect is triggered, attacking without facing the enemy etc.



Not this is an interesting one. While I don't think card effect that lasts for 1 turn is worth it, the Luck Gauge is pretty much what Eca needs. Here's the idea of how it could work:

Luck Gauge would go up to 50 luck points(maybe with the possibility to increase the max value with a passive skill), with each point adding to a % chance of something good happening to Eca. Critical hits, earth spell positive effects, passive skills, etc etc -- all those would be boosted by Luck Gauge. That way default Luck Gauge, if filled up to the max, would give Eca +50% more chance to gain a positive effect in any random event, triggered by Eca. In other words, cnahces of Wining Shi-Fu-Miaow or Eca scoring a critical hit *would* gain a boost but his enemy failing his skill or scoring a crit failure would *not* suffer any penalties.

In the beginning of the battle luck gauge is set to 0(or some higher value if there would be a way, a skill or something, to boost that, similar to Sac's angrr boost). Eca would have some way to boost his Luck Gauge, I was thinking about adding some luck each time Eca's skill or effect that has a % chance of working is triggered. It would be most earth spells and some passive skills, like Flealine Army or Paws Off. Luck could also be slightly increased on each critical hit. As for decreasing, it could be simple "N luck points per turn" or a more complex thing, like decreasing each time something "unlucky" happens, like critical failure or earth spell's negative effect is triggered.

Alternatively, if the Luck Gauge would be too strong working this way, it could be made to require manual activation to boost luck for 1 turn, after which it is dropped back to 0.

I think that it would make Eca a true master of luck and let a lot of spells, mentioned in this thread as useless/broken(Cat Tree for example), to become much more useful.

Regarding Eca earth skills in general.

What if instead of 5 random spells, eca has an access to the whole pool of earth spells, but in a way a one-armed bandit works. So every turn or maybe every fight eca gets 5 random earth spells.

Should they be rolled every turn, make them all cost 1 AP, but make them accessible only once per turn. This way eca could roll 5 "three cards" or 3"Shi-Fu-Miaow" and "Jackpot" and "Roulette".

Either way my proposition is keep all 10 earth spells, don't limit him to 5 spells only, but make all 10 be randomly accessible.

Because re-rolling a character just because of the bet earth spell set is not fun.

When I think about a water Eca I think that they must be some kind of bad status spammer and critical hits/failure enhancer, I don't think the lifestealer concept fits it that well. I wouldn't mind if there was a total remake of the water branch.

@Random spells
I don't know if that's a good idea because you will need to adapt so fast to your skills in a short time, that you can't analize the battle well, you will spend too much time thinking about the skills. If there is one random spell every turn, that would be more playable.

@Luck Gauge
Now that's something really interesting. Fits so well the luck manipulation role of the ecaflips! I will read better, think and reply again.


This post has been edited by Trololocke - October 27, 2011, 05:22:47.

Well the gauge is similar to sacrier's so it shouldn't be hard to implement in game, but if ecaflips have a luck gauge, it could be made for other classes too like:
Ecaflips would have luck, that would be used by making of a good card appear or a critical hit, and would recharge with critical failures or bad cards, and could be boosted by certain spells.
Xelor could have time that would increase if enemies would lose AP and be used for a wind spell instead of 3 and 9am.
Cra's could have concentration that would increase if he would stay out of contact and lost if he takes damage and would boost his range or critical a bit.
Sadidas could have life or plants or seeds that would regenerate, probably would have point instead of %, start with full, would regenerate and be used for dolls.
Sram could have sneakiness witch would increase when stealthed or behind enemies, would increase backstab or critical.
Euntrofs could have perception, witch would increase when in contact, and would boost prospecting when full.
Iops could have stupidity or recklesness that would increase when stunned or damaged or something, could increase damage and critical failures(would be a good idea for a suport spell too).
Rouges could have gunpowder, that would increase by AP left by the end of their turn, and boost bomb damage or bomb critical.
Fecas could have an autoshield or something, that could be increased by using shields and lower every few turns, and would boost resistances but lower dodge or atack(could also be a suport spell that would sacrifice MP for resistance).
Pandawas could have a merry gauge that would work like before.
Enripsas could have healing, that would increase slowly when using water spells, and would boost healing when full, would be usefull for really long fights.
Idk. for masqeriders though.

I have a water Eca, currently at Level 41. I really think there's nothing really bad with the water branch to the point of being remade (as Trololocke said). It would be really sad if every single branch followed the same concept and the same kind of attack. I think it fits the Eca really well. The earth branch deals with luck; cards, dices, etc. Air is all about cat abilities, like scratching things, jumping, etc. And water is also about the world of cats, since Ecas are cats, and cats have fleas. What were you expecting? That you'd lick yourself, then form a fur ball, just to throw at your opponent? It's not nice. Plus, we can survive for a really long time in battle with lifesteal abilities. I wouldn't be able to solo without it.

Sure, I agree that there's lot of room for improvement. Rough Tongue is kind of useless and need to be improved (the idea to steal buffs and debuffs is amazing). And I also agree with prespicboy. Fleeches will get too overpowered if it was triggered at every single hit. I think a little damage boost and adding support will do a nice job to Water Ecas. It's painfully hard to level up at the beginning with the ridiculous damage Water Ecas do.

Currently, there's only one skill of the water branch that gives support. As pointed before, RT could be improved to support allies. We could heal allies inside Fleeches (with no need for them to attack the monster inside the area), or we could also link a Flea to a partner and redirect the healing effect of Flea Love to him. There's a lot of ways to improve this branch of spells.

About the Earth Spell-set, well, being random makes sense, but it's still ridiculous. I think being able to chose would be more suitable. e.g. You Level Up, then your Gemlim says "Wee, you've received a spell from the God Ecaflip. If you'd like to keep it, just use the next time!". That said, if you use your new spell in the next fight, it'll receive XP, and the spell will be kept. If you don't, you'll lose experience as a form of punishment from the God or something like that and the spell will be removed. Of course this is pretty dumb, and can be changed for whatever is more suitable, but it's a different approach to random spells every battle, or the actual system.

Well, about the Luck Gauge, I don't think it would be a good idea the way Siilk described. The whole idea is good overall, but I also think it's kind of improper. Improving Tarot would be way better than a whole new system for Ecas.

To summarize, I think there's no need for complete changes (like the luck gauge or remaking the water branch), just improvements. I don't need to say that Tarot is broken, that Hunter needs to be fixed, that Ecas need new animations for the Water Branch, that Tree Cat and Bow Meow is useless, and that the Earth Spell-set have to be changed for a better system. I think this is pretty much points that every one agrees that needs to be improved.

I don't think I added much to the discussion, but it's nice to give a different view of things. Also, sorry for my bad english. I'm not American, nor British.

If you are a water eca you have to recognize that water ecas are very weak if you compare to other classes. While they can play a good 1v1, in a group or killing monsters they are useless. While a normal fight could take 10 turns, the eca will take 20+ and the xp still the same, it's terrible to leveling.

-They have a weak heal and weak damage. Enis, to give you an example, have a much stronger heal (not to mention his support abilities) and can deal a very good DPT when need.
-They can't tank damage well with this self heal because it's pity HP gain and great dependance on water damage and WP. Their survivability depends greatly on the water damage they cause, take this out and they are done.
-They can't attract attention that well on a party, also, to trigger allergy, because they are not dangerous enough to deserve being focused and can't hold the enemies on their places. And the only way they had to do that (Hunter+Paws Off) now is only good to show your back/sides to your enemy.
-They can't even give critical well because Fleahopper a melee only skill.
-And no, they are far from being jack-of-all-trades.

Well, basically they suck, except when it's 1v1, where they can outlive the enemy in a slow pace, but there are other classes that do that also (maybe better).

About supporting, Fleeches, Fleabag and Fleahopper are the ones that are expect to do that. If the ally don't have water attack OR the enemy have good water resistance (what is very normal), both Fleeches and Fleabag are useless and are not worth the AP wasted to try to support. If your party members or enemies are ranged, Fleahopper are completely useless also. So, you can only support with all you have someone that is melee, have water attack, and against enemies that don't have water resist. Pretty situational.

About being a support branch for Air and Earth. How is that possible?

-Fleeches 4ap cost makes it unworth the use it's a Three Cards for Earth or 4 Claw Attacks for Air. It's even worst if you remember you don't have so good water equipments, water is your secondary, so your damage and heal will be lower.

-Fleahopper needs to be used at melee range from the enemy, while Earth plays mainly at mid range, so this is not very sinergistic. Air branch loses 3 attacks to win a little critical, it is too much. With 2ap from rabies, it's 5ap, in 8ap mode you have only 3 hits with a critical chance. No, no, no.

-Fleabag can have a situational use when you are trying to escape, but still, it's not that good.

-Flea Love will be nice if it wasn't bugged and makes you lose 2wp sometimes, but remember, it takes away 2wp from you for two turns. Both Earth and Air are wp users. Imagine if when that opportunity to use rabies and rape the enemy or you got a +98%atk card but can't use Three Cards because the targets are under Flea Love. You can't play fully your main element because you have to ration your WP and, when it ends, the reason why you become a water hibrid is over, and you become a weaker version of your main element. This wp problem is a terrible flaw on the sinergy of Flea Love and other branchs, don't tell this is "luck, may you have the wp or may not" because it's not.

And the WP cost of water spells makes Cat Tree and Black Bow Meow ridiculously useless.

I'm starting to convince me that the devs wants us to don't play as main water and even less as a full water.

===================================
About luck gauge.

Do you know when something very very lucky happens and you say you wasted all your luck on it? That's what I understand about the 'luck' gauge. My idea is something like that:

Luck gauge: varies from -x to x.
When Luck > 0, you receive God Ecaflip bonus, it gives you a passive positive bonus, depending how much luck you have.

When Luck < 0, you receive the God Ouginak bonus, it gives you a negative buff, but some of your attacks brings bad luck to your enemies.

When your meter fills up, the respective god gives you a buff for that turn. Examples can be Ecaflip heavily increases some chance based attacks, gives more critical, etc. With that buff you are a lucky bastard. God Ouginak turns you on such an unlucky person that your bad luck is contagious! For example, it could give you +100 critical failure, but it is divided for each one that is on a 2 cell radius. Something like that, or strong bad luck effects through attacks, i don't know.

That way, the Ecaflip and Ouginak Tarot cards could give +50/-50 to the luck gauge, for example.


This post has been edited by Trololocke - October 27, 2011, 22:23:11.

As I said: "It's painfully hard to level up at the beginning with the ridiculous damage Water Ecas do". I am well aware of how weak water Ecas are. I didn't say anything good about them at any moment, specially being a jack-of-all-trades. I just said I think the concept of fleas and stuff fits the character well. I only disagreed about what you said of a remake. I think improving and fixing what we have is way better than doing a remake of a single branch of spells or introducing new mechanics. For me, improving Tarot, damage and other things are far more important.

I don't like people saying that we don't need damage because we are a support class. A support what? We can't support anyone properly. The only thing you may consider a support (a buff) is Tarot, that can give damage or critical hit to allies, but so do the monsters. We can only buff ourselves. See the Feca, for example. He's freaking strong for a supposed support class. Talk about being unfair. I think the devs hate Ecas in general. I'm pretty sure of this now since they made the God Ecaflip status last only one turn.

@Luck Gauge:
Well, the way you described now, Trololocke, is more interesting.

I hope this topic keeps going on.

Well, I do like the system where you get random spells in your earth eca. It depends on luck, after all. But, like Trololocke said, one random spell in only one slot would be nice, but then you'll adapt for using only 4 skills, if you play long enough. But then again, I like the idea. Well, at least to help the Eca, I think that the "possibles" next spells should appear for him. For example, let's say he can get Lottery, Three Cards or Roulette next turn. Then those spells would show somewhere in the screen and in the next turn the eca would get one of them.
The only problem I see is how to level this skill. If you level up the slot, in the end you'll level up 6 skills using only one and probably a lot of ecas would spam that. But if you get xp/6 or get the xp separatedly for each spell, it would level up really slow and then, like I said, the eca would adapt of using only 4 skills. MAYBE, if there's one random spell per BATTLE instead per TURN, the eca will still get normal xp for this spell and it'd help this problem a little. In fact, the xp can be slightly increased, so the "random spell" would not stay behind the others. Not that much, at least.
And about the luck gauge, it's a good idea.

You know Trololocke, you are really underestimating water ecas way too much. I'm a level 57 Water Eca and just a few days ago i've defeated an Air Eca level 63(Yes! Thats right, 63 pure air). And also I've proven that water ecas makes good tankers example against Kraloves, did you know that using hunter at enemies in your lock range the enemies will NOT move. Sure Water Ecas are really weak at the early levels but once you can use a full cloudy set(and if you can, use a crocobur), you'll be able to see a HUGE difference in power and thats where you'll love your water eca. At my point of level most mobs can't kill me even past lvl 60s well the only possibility that i'll die is from the card itself.

Anyway your idea for the Luck Gauge seems really good. The Minus for God Ougi and Plus for God Eca but this means that each card would have another additional effect compared to what it is now(Each card have 3 different effects excluding the god cards which have only 2 effects), so if this idea gets implemented the cards would have 4 differents effects or maybe what you mean is improved effects is it?

I think luck would be regained with unlucky stuff like CF or bad earth spell effect and would be used by CH or good spell effect, bad luck would give a small % CF to enemies and good luck would increase your and allies CH %. Maybe a suport with luck start boost.

Regarding a random earth spells. There are 10 of them. the amount of slots is 5. So every slot can be dedicated to only 2 spells.
1 slot - Shi-Fu-Miaow or Heads or Tail
2nd - 421 or Craps
3rd - Jackpot or Roulette
4rth - Lottery or 3 cards
and 5th - All In or All or Nothing

(those combos are a subject to change of cause, the idea that one slot should contain a spells that are not really needed to be available both)

So wherever you use a 1st slot, both spells are growing, same with the rest of slots.

Now if a random skill generation should be per fight or per turn, I think per fight is a way to go.


This post has been edited by Mironov - October 28, 2011, 20:44:25.

Just something I would like to add: the cost of Jackpot. You see, rogue has a spell with better range and that does not need line of sight for the cost of 3 ap, and Jackpot costs 6. I will not say that Jackpot is a bad spell, I like it, I just think it should cost 5 ap, like Lottery.

About the Luck Gauge idea and the God Ecaflip/Ouginak bonuses it can give, i was wondering how it could work.

- One of the ideas will make Eca's very similar to Sacrier (associate Water skills directly with Ouginak effects and -luck and Air to Ecaflip bonuses and +luck), so I left it, since it don't help to make Eca's gameplay more interesting.

- Another idea will need to remake some passives, what I am about 101% sure the developers won't do it. I will take 2 passives as Eca/Ougi boosters, so that way we can build a Ecaflip that deals with good luck, other that deals with bad luck and a third one that uses both, this can add lots of build variations! But... remake 2 passives is something that takes some work and I don't know if it is possible.

- The more doable is making that luck gauge a factor of the Tarot Card of Fate. Each card gives luck or takes luck, and some elemental spells can affect the next result of luck gain/loss. The cards remain unchanged, except maybe for god ecaflip/ouginak +3ap/-3ap. Just that.What I think about the buffs is pretty obvious: they are passive status that you gain once your luck are other than 0.

When positive, the Ecaflip buff will give you good things (like critical, hp regen, dodge, lock, damage, mp, ap)... i don't know how much neither at which pace, it's only an idea. When the luck hits the max, by one turn you can win +3ap, +3mp, bonus critical and critical damage, increased chance in earth spells, an easier Double or Quit, and can give some bonus to your party also, maybe to allies in the area around you. Things like that, positive effects.

When the luck is negative, Ouginak will give you some debuffs effects (ex: -crit, -dodge, hp degen, reduced damage, chance to your spells heal all damage they just did) but your attacks also have a chance to give your enemy one of your effects (or also other things like increase Flea Love or Allergy chance). When your gauge hits the lowest possible, for one turn you become a kind of super bad status spammer, like the example I said before (gives you +100 critical failure, but divide it with the enemies that get close to you). He will have bad luck, but their enemies will have it even worse.

After this turn your luck goes to 0 and you can't win luck, if reached max, or lose luck, if reached the minimum, by a determined number of turns. They will be different buffs from the ones when it are not maxed, so they will not stack. They can even add graphic effects to the ecaflip on max/min luck mode, like the Feca rainbow armor.

Well, that was my idea. Thoughts?


This post has been edited by Trololocke - October 29, 2011, 04:36:43.

Things I was seeing with my water Eca:

• Allergy sucks. Against a high resistance enemy it does very poor damage (1 damage against almost full hp Kralove, 11 to almost full hp Kralove with Fleabag effect)
• Allergy occurs only with Flea Love and Fleahopper. What?! Fleeches and Fleabag need to trigger it also.
• Allergy damage does not trigger Fleeches anymore, something was changed.
• All the old Flea Love bugs still there: wp loss if kill enemy with it, eternal Flea Love status on you if casted on a kralove with seduction.
• I read someone talking in previous versions about double Paws Off (cast hunter at enemy's back, he walks to you, you paws off him to the hunter, jump then paws off again). It would be nice if it worked, but as he steps on the Hunter he uses the PM, before the eca jumps, so it cannot trigger the Paws Off. Please make the pm be used after the eca jump xD
• Allergy is way too situational and is useless to Fleahopper. It's the weakest lifesteal spell, so if you are casting Fleahopper it's because there are another melee ally on the lock range of the enemy that can use the critical bonus. If this is true, and Allergy proceeds, the enemy can simply choose to not attack you and attack your ally instead. This makes no sense.
• And yes, Fleeches and Fleabag damage needs to be based on the Ecaflip's damage, not the ally. Sometimes it's damage is just ridiculous because the ally don't have a water branch

I don't think Ecaflip should have anything which tries to emulate Sacrier's Angrrr... it becomes far removed from the concept of "luck" and makes it just another number, as well as diluting Sacrier's unique mechanic.

Using it solely for Tarot would be a waste as well, and it really seems to be something which is a different spell all together. Trying to fix Tarot by lumbering it with even more complicated systems just makes the spell a mess. Frankly I think removing the Ecaflip/Ouginak cards from Tarot, while tweaking some of the negative effects, would be a better solution.

About the Tarot, when I said that I didn't think on a literal gauge, but more on a mechanical thing.But yeah I agree with you, it's a bad idea overall mainly because the work it will need until be good enough (work that apparently the devs don't have to waste with Ecaflips). It is better to work with more simple ideas.

Btw, I have totally forgot about the Mangy Cat and Fleahopper ideas on the OP. I like it Maybe I will add the actual '-10% actual hp water damage when the Ecaflip is damaged' effect to Allergy, but it's still good as it is.

And about the Fleahopper nobody answered me.


Will it be very strong or is it ok?


EDIT: More feedback about mangy cat/allergy, please?

Quote

Mangy Cat:
Flea spells can trigger Allergy on the target (32%).

Allergy:
The target becomes allergic to the Ecaflip and every Water* attack he receives while on this state give one of the following negative effect:

• +1~10% critical failure
• -5~15% atk
• -10~25 lock
• -5~15% resist water
• -10~32 critical chance
• turns 10% of damage into heal
• some other cool effect i can't think now because it's late.

Stacks max of 3 times. Or don't stack at all, I don't know. Last one turn.

* I said 'water' to include Rough Tongue.

Please don't judge numbers, as they are easily adjustable. And my idea is that if Fleeches and Fleabag could trigger this Allergy, the skills the way they are now can be much more useful for your teammates. Basically you are giving a little lifesteal and a bad status chance for your allies, this can be very cool.


This post has been edited by Trololocke - October 31, 2011, 06:47:57.