Great mod, looks super interesting!
I have a suggestion that applies to all of your mods, but I feel that the vendors shouldn't be able to sell all the skill books from the start, and, like the rest of them, gradually add skills to their collection as you level up. I imagine it would help to both keep the mod with the theme of the game, but also keep gameplay consistent.

Unless I've horribly misunderstood something and I'm an idiot sorry

Is conduit being a 4 turn CD set in stone? I feel like it being one of only two (the other requiring magic armor to be broken already) methods of applying the core new mechanic of aerotheurge makes the importance of this spell very high, yet the cooldown frequently feels too long for how necessary it is. Would a 3 turn CD be more appropriate or do you think that would make it too powerful?

Originally posted by Geno Killer:

Great mod, looks super interesting!
I have a suggestion that applies to all of your mods, but I feel that the vendors shouldn't be able to sell all the skill books from the start, and, like the rest of them, gradually add skills to their collection as you level up. I imagine it would help to both keep the mod with the theme of the game, but also keep gameplay consistent.

Unless I've horribly misunderstood something and I'm an idiot sorry

They don't sell all the skillbooks at once, same goes for all of my mods. They follow the same level curve as other vendors.

Originally posted by Kommandant Viy:

Is conduit being a 4 turn CD set in stone? I feel like it being one of only two (the other requiring magic armor to be broken already) methods of applying the core new mechanic of aerotheurge makes the importance of this spell very high, yet the cooldown frequently feels too long for how necessary it is. Would a 3 turn CD be more appropriate or do you think that would make it too powerful?

It's a very strong ability, so I felt a 4CD was justified. I didn't really want it to have 100% uptime for balance reasons. Will keep an eye on it, however!

Out of curiosity, is there a reason why you need to use new npcs to sell the skill books and not just use the ones already in the game?

Originally posted by NdranC:

Out of curiosity, is there a reason why you need to use new npcs to sell the skill books and not just use the ones already in the game?

For compatability issues. Adding my skills to existing vendors will cause my classes to become incompatible with any mods which modify those characters in any way.

Any chance of adding a 1 handed variety of the thunder hammer? (like the artwork of thor). anyway love the mod and the concept.

Originally posted by Private N.d.Z:

Any chance of adding a 1 handed variety of the thunder hammer? (like the artwork of thor). anyway love the mod and the concept.

I would like this too, actually. Not a super high priority but I always wanted to dual wield hammers as beast, and this would make it potentially viable

So I used crafting overhaul to make two unique aerotheurge swords that scale with int, as per the suggestion of a commenter here (whose comment seems to have disappeared?), and then used vanity mod to change their appearance to a more proper dwarven axe and hammer, and I have to say its working out pretty nicely.

It does less single target damage than the stormhammer, and you lose a bit of versatility without the ranged attack it comes with, but in exchange you get some pretty ridiculous AoE potential with Volt Swings (and Master of Volts is hilariously strong with this), because basic attacks trigger it twice, and the dual wield flurry attack triggers it a whopping three times in one move.

So, in short, though harder to acquire than simply buying a stronger stormhammer, dual wielding air-based int one handers offers a slightly alternative style to the stormhammer, giving you much stronger melee cleave in exchange for slightly lower single target damage and less range.


EDIT: Thanks for the one-handed stormhammers!

The class changes and improvements are gold. But i have one gripe with this and your other mods, and thats the added weapons. Dont get me wrong i like the design i just think when downloading all your mods the amount of weapons gets a bit insane and would really love it if you had versions of the mods that did not include the weapons and just included the skill changes.

Thanks.

why not just not buy the weapons? as far as I'm aware theyre only available from the vendors and not from random loot or things like that

Originally posted by Homeless0alien:

The class changes and improvements are gold. But i have one gripe with this and your other mods, and thats the added weapons. Dont get me wrong i like the design i just think when downloading all your mods the amount of weapons gets a bit insane and would really love it if you had versions of the mods that did not include the weapons and just included the skill changes.

Thanks.

Hey there! Thanks for the kind words :)

Regarding new weapons and their availability, I feel these are at the right levels. The new weapon types are only available at the new vendors, i.e. not found on enemy loot inventories, so their appearance rate is slightly higher than most basegame vendors. Additionally, their appearance rate is pseudo-randomised, so there are a few scenarios where the number of weapons is lower than others.

Creating separate add-ons for weapons will only increase load times, something which is already high given the number of mods currently available for definitive edition. They are also part of the core experience for these mods, especially for melee-playstyles, so I'm reluctant to move them into add-ons.

The simplest solution is to just ignore the new weapons, in your case.

Thanks for taking the time to leave your thoughts :)

Love the overhauls and noticed that you recently updated the pyro one, so I thought I'd make some suggestions for aero too.

I've been playing with the overhaul in my current 4-man playthrough where I tried to spec one of my characters as the "Thunderlord" archetype, dual wielding thunder hammers and relying mostly on Voltmaster to do loads of aero damage at close range.

One of the skills related to this playstyle that I think is in great need of a buff is Lightning Warp.

The main issue with Lightning Warp is that it does way too little damage in way too small a radius to justify using 2 AP for a movement ability. Even if it was 1 AP I'd find it difficult to justify using it over Tactical Retreat if that's not on CD. It just offers too little in terms of secondary effects, and if I want to take advantage of the conductive status I have to spend another AP to cast that on someone.

One possibility to buff it is to have it grant an additional status effect to the user, like Uncanny Evasion, which would make it an incredibly strong ability deserving of a 2 AP cost (def not 3 though), or Stratuswalk as a 1 AP skill.

The other possibility is to buff its prowess as more of a direct offensive tool by increasing its damage and possibly its radius. The damage increase will have to be fairly significant to justify a 2 AP cost as it's currently very weak compared to other abilities, but not as powerful as Electric Discharge or Shocking Touch, of course. If you'd rather keep it as a light-hitting move, I'd definitely reduce it to 1 AP, but still maybe increase the damage/or radius to justify a spot over Tactical Retreat.

I have suggestions for a few other abilities as well, but I'll make separate posts for them later in the week.

The second skill I think is in need of buffs is Stormy Bellow/Roaring Thunder. I'd like to mention that I'm a big fan of the design for this one.

This is another case of too little damage and too high of an AP cost. For 2 AP, it does *very*( little damage, less than than all of the 1 AP damage skills (Pressurize, Vaporize, Vacuum Touch, Overcast) by a decent bit, 2 of which also do AOE damage, so you're more or less using it for the utility that comes with the immunities and static clounds.

While the immunities can be quite useful, they are also very situational. I have trouble justifiying even a memory slot for it when I can just horde Armor of Frost scrolls, and I already find it difficult to justify using 2 AP for a primarily utility spell that's not Teleportation.

The static cloud aspect is really neat, but because the spell does so little damage, it's hard to take advantage of clouds' shocking/stunning effects since you'll have a hard time removing magic armor in the first place.

All in all, I think it's biggest issue is the damage/AP cost. It'd need a pretty hefty damage increase to be worth 2 AP, and at that point it'd be too powerful alongside all the extra stuff.

I'd suggest lowering the cost to 1 AP and bump its damage up to around the same ballpark as Pressurize and Vaporize. My justification for the damage-utility ratio compared to those other 2 skills would be that they're still much easier to target while Stormy Bellow will be more restricted by its range.

My next focus is on Thunder Jump, though there's not too much to say.

It's a perfect spell to go with the Thunderlord playstyle--but when you're using Thunderhammers and Voltmaster, it ends up getting overshadowed by the base game's Blitz Attack. The reason being that they both behave almost identically with the same range and movement mechanics, but Blitz Attack triggers Master of Volts.

Sure, Thunder Jump does more direct damage and can benefit from Conductive, but Master of Volts will still end up adding on more damage at greater range while retaining the capacity to shock/stun.

I'm not entirely sure how I much you can/need change to improve Thundering Jump. Maybe adding the amount of targets it can hit to 3 or 4?

However, I think my balance suggestion to the next skill I'll touch on (which probably should have came earlier, in hindsight), Conduit, will help a lot.

As a side note: I thought it was odd that Volt Swings/Master of Volts wasn't apart of the Thunderlord's core skills as it fits in there perfectly (Thunderbrand really doesn't hold up in comparison).

The new conductive status itself is very cool and fitting for the skill tree, but the requirement of applying it mainly through Conduit is a bit restrictive. My reasoning, however, is not the cooldown being too long, but the AP cost being too high. Even though it only costs 1 AP, Conduit suffers stiff competition from another skill that also serves to enhance the power of aero spells--Rain.

Although it doesn't add additional AOE damage (and other effects) to certain spells, Rain affects enemies in a large AOE, reducing air resistance to multiple targets and opens them up to be stunned with only one application of shocked once their magic armor is destroyed. The additional water puddles also opens up the potential to create shocked puddles to further stun enemies.

Furthermore, the fact that Conductive only applies to one enemy means that it loses value once the initial target dies, which wouldn't take long given the reduced resistance and the fact they have to be the main target of a spell to take advantage of the extra effect in the first place.

The AOE damage from hitting conductive enemies is nice and adds some extra kick to single target skills, but they're not powerful enough to pass on just using rain to lower the resistance on a bunch of enemies and using an AOE spell to hit everyone extra hard while stunning them at the same time (or hit them separately with multiple spells).

So the options for buffing Conduit are:

1. Taking away its AP cost to open up more opportunities to use it during fights--the simplest solution.

2. Buffing the conductive effect to give it more reasons to use over rain. Some possibilities I've thought of are (oh boy a list within a list):
- Increase the amount of air resistance it reduces to give it a niche in bursting down a particularly resilient enemy
- Increase the amount of AOE damage conductive spells do to compensate for non-conductive enemies not being affected by a lowered resistance
- Let the AOE damage from conductive attacks to also apply shocked to enemies without magic armor and make it so that applying shocked to a conductive enemy causes them to be stunned.

3. Conduit applies conductive in an AOE (kind of like an aero version of Bleed Fire). My least favorite option, as I think it has the highest chance of making it too strong or be a "better Rain" for aero users.