I like this mod also but am I the only one who thinks the netherling's damage is way off the chart. They take all the fun out of the game by doing 800 damage at level 10

I tried to change them in GUTS but even though the tooltip shows the reduced damage .. the little purple bastards still do 600 - 800 damage.

It is driving me nuts that i cannot change this ...

Yeah, this is a dead mod, so feel free to ignore this if you're expecting actual changes.

I'm still interested in its design though, and it's definitely not perfect, but I'm still pretty happy with out it turned out. The original intent was indeed some kind of Lovecraftian sanity meter, but that sort of fell apart after it led me to a neat little gameplay loop. It's no longer supposed to be this thing that brutally punishes you if you mess up, just something to guide the class towards a particular play style.

The "neutral" playstyle of this class isn't a caster or melee fighter or even both at once, it's cycling between them. You cast spells until you can't anymore, then fight in melee until you can't anymore. Charge normally only goes up unless you wait around (boring!) or use a skill to force it down (less boring!), so I needed an easily accessible charge dump to complete that loop from melee back to casting, while also preventing a lot of standing around. I admit Fusion of Flesh is an extremely generous charge dump, but it serves exactly the role it's supposed to and prevents half of the class from being incredibly boring, which would have been a far worse sin. It's pretty much the glue holding everything together and I want it to be on every single hotbar.

Playing as a pure caster is actually going against a lot of grains here. If you consider high charge "bad," that means you're fighting against the charge bar and its natural inclination to fill up, so it becomes a persistant problem with only temporary solutions. Running out of mana is a natural and valuable threat to push you to keep your charge down. I absolutely could have been more heavy-handed about it, but too much just makes entire playstyles feel forced or frustrating, and I don't want that either. If you really want to roll with the idea of "charge as a punishment," try using Mind Blast as your charge dump instead. It makes things a lot trickier to deal with.

On the other hand, melee is much more straightforward, but also a lot harder to make interesting. Once "high charge" got around to meaning "melee combat," getting stuck with exorbitant mana costs just for doing your job correctly felt really ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Flesh skills wound up with lower mana costs, but that means mana is no longer a real downside. Charge is pure gravy to them, adding too much charge scaling makes that even worse, and more charge spenders help but also make them feel like an Engineer knockoff. I never got around to adding a proper downside to high charge melee nethermancers, but I did have ideas. The latest was to condense some of Flesh's benefits into a single super-buff fueled by charge, giving a sort of high-speed "rampage" playstyle and making charge dumps break up your momentum a little harder.

Awww. I guess I came in too late on this one. Oh well, I enjoy it none the less.

Thanks so much for responding!