I have a small amount of distaste for characters that bounce around the party like it's nobodies buisiness, as I find it no small amount of tedious forcibly making a team around a character who is bleed centric as the samurai. Noting that samurai are extensively just played up mercenaries, heavy calvary and spearmen I do not believe this fit's the general persona of the samurai.

If I were to change anything, I would make this a more stationary 1-2 High health tank, with a few niche movement sets for some of his changeable skills. In the line of a Hellion without the self debuffs, perhaps?

This character also does not play well with many vanilla heroes as a sidenote, although he can perform well enough with other more modded parties where the modder (You've Done something simmilar to this with the lord's blade) Designs a moveset where the character hops around to a disorienting degree.

Originally posted by Dr. Nolegs:

Noting that samurai are extensively just played up mercenaries, heavy calvary and spearmen I do not believe this fit's the general persona of the samurai.

If I were to change anything, I would make this a more stationary 1-2 High health tank, with a few niche movement sets for some of his changeable skills. In the line of a Hellion without the self debuffs, perhaps?.

Not really the place to criticize other's criticisms I know but, the point of this character is not to be really a samurai. This is based off of a Dark Souls 2 boss, Sir Alonne, who is a character which fights with a lot of movement. Another aspect of the character design is concept of a Youtou, which is a japanese legend that blades that kill too much become evil and thirsty for blood. So in that, I think the mod does a very good job of capturing these thematic concepts.

Onto my own suggestions:

As I said before, you've done a really great job capturing the feel of Sir Alonne. You've got just about every move he uses in his fight, and I like that you tried to incorperate more of the youtou aspects into his mechanics, and that you've read Hagakure to gain lines to flesh out a personality, its a great book.

That being said I do have a few things to say about him in no particular order:
- Self bleed. Okay so even thought you tried to make having the samurai bleed a good thing it ends up not being worth it. Basically the only benefit it provides is +5 dodge after using elegant strike and with the healing from soul harvest (which doesn't work consistantly in my experience). It even has NEGATIVE synergy with his riposte move, which is the one move you'd really like more dodge so you can get an extra attack in for free. I'd say choose wether you want the self bleed to be a postive thing (want to inflict to gain bonuses) or a negitive thing (higher price for more powerful moves). Right now it doesn't really work too well either way, so scrapping it and rebalancing based on that is also fine.

- The bleed item he gives you is pretty clunky and useless for the above reason of self bleed being bad. Same suggestion applies. If you do want make self bleed good, maybe attatch it to another ability instead of taking up item slots.

- It's hard to justify using bewitched bloodthirst. It's main benefit is the nice damage increase (armor pen included), but it just turns out to be bad in almost every case aside from maybe CoM. You spend one turn hurting youself for a lot of damage, majorly stressing your party, and giving yourself a decent bleed that can't be cured (meaning you can bandage any further bleeds that will stack on him. I get the idea is that you want to take damage to gain more, then just heal with soul harvest. But it doesn't really make sense to do that when you can just deal damage with your other moves, start stacking bleed chance, and not do all the damage. Pull back a little on negative uses. Lower/remove the party stress though it could maybe stress him a bit. You have to keep in mind there's a character who whips himself contstantly and is a crazy masochist zealot, but he doesn't stress anyone out, so a little impaling isn't that bad. As for self damage, it's too high. Turn down the flat health damage and lower the bleed damage if you're gonna keep it the whole battle. Of course you can make the buff weaker, but basically just make it so I'm more inclined to want to use this move. Think Abom's transform, I have it if I need more damage but probably don't want to do it all the time in a long run.

- Parry is kinda useless. Gaining riposte isn't worth not doing anything for a turn, and you lose the dodge buff if you're bleeding. The riposte damage penalty is pretty low which is nice but still not worth it. There are a few ways to buff this move. You could either have it inflict bleed upon use but low damage (think MaA riposte) as one way. You could also have it do no intial damage like currently, but inflict bleed upon riposte so you can spread the bleed around and have nice targets to gliding stab or soul harvest when his turn rolls around again. I would also consider either removing the back 1, or changing it to forward 1 (putting him closer to front ranks, where he'll be targeted more often). Though if you choose the second route of buffing, it might be okay to keep the back move to help set up for the aforementioned gliding stab/soulharvest. I find the back 1 kinda unneeded in its current state

- His bleeds are too short. For a character that largely wants to be self-sufficient and wants to stack bleed to trigger his passive, he's really bad at it. Even though the bleeds are powerful (up to 9 per turn wow), the one round duration doesn't let you stack with his best abilities, and make use of gliding stabs +10% vs bleed, or benefit from the dodge bonus from elegant strike cause enemies do not bleed for long. He can do well in a bleed team, but this doesn't mean that he should be forced into just a few comps each time. This one isn't too big, but maybe turning down the damage by half and making it last 2 rounds would help with the stacking and passive procs. If he gets better ways to spread bleeds (right now he only really has backslash) this might not be needed.

- He does move a little too much. Having movement abilities is cool, but there's only one move that doesn't move him. Two moves move two spaces, and one even moves three. This can vary from being extremely disruptive to a party with less mobile heroes (namely vanilla hereos who tend to only have one or two, short movement abilities), to preventing interesting comboes such as an infinite holy lance - gliding stab loop for example. I think he should have at least one "core" move that doesn't move him so much, and perhap turn down some of the move distances by 1, so as not to be so distruptive.

- Bushido is interesting but +70% stress gained is soooo bad I don't want to use it. Too risky. (I'll cover this in a bit with a more bit suggestion)

- Honor is bad. Health removal cost could very well put you back into death's door right after you cure it. (Same as Bushido)

- Scrub the floor is actully pretty good. Themetically it's a little off though. I know it's a little reference to Alonne's pristine floors, but I feel like the scrubing would make people more stressed that relax them. You could maybe change this to "Tea ceremony", a very important practice amoung samurai and more thematically fitting with a stress buff and crit (calming the mind for strength trope). Maybe move "Scrub the floor" to Sudoku, as it might fit those buffs better. Then it would be more like mr. miyagi trope, where the party scrubs to gain insight but might become frustrated by its tedium.

- Sudoku is too risky. Though the buffs are good, I don't want to be stressing out my party +20 during the one time on a long, stressful mission where I want to be healing a ton of stress. Maybe tone down the stress chance a fair amount (25% maybe?) if you want to keep the stress that high. That or lower the stress it causes.

- Bewitch blade's curse is solid but a little boring. Maybe you could up the time cost, and add a small bonus damage to bleeding or something like that.

- Backslash is a needed move, but a little underwhelming. It has a decent -dmg% on it

Some other suggestions:

-You could incorperate Alonne's ranged "dark moonlight slash" attack into his movelist to give a little more variation to what is largely "hit them with the sword". I think you could probably even just turn piercing assault into this. You could also experiment with giving it other properties; maybe it hits multiple targets, maybe it suffles, or clears corpses, who knows? Either way I think it's a good and cool fit to help combat some of the overlap between moves usage, and add just a little more utility then just single target damage.

- I like that you've tried to incoperate Bushido as a concept into his character, but it's really only present in his largely bad camp skills. I propose removing the camp skills and doing something with his death's door stuff. There's a few things you could do to represent this idea of embracing death, and of incredible will and posterity. Doing something like what the flagellant does when he goes down could be cool. A simple one would be making him gain buffs on death's door like flagellant, but not do the aoe heal. Another could be he does a bark and heals stress upon hitting death's door as opposed to stressing everyone. You could do both. Another idea I like is he enters a 100% damage riposte upon death's door so he damages any that try to end him. You could also do something similar by having him deal massive damage to the enemy that does the killing blow (rip if he dies to dots), and having a chance to bleed them.
There's a lot of ideas to play around with to make bushido more a part of gameplay than just relating it to two bad camp skills.

- Another suggestion I have is to play up his battle with the sword's bloodlust and his will. Maybe give him a unique virture (he conquers the sword) and unique affliction (he succumbs to the blade's bloodlust). I know you play with this idea a little with some of his trinkets but I think it could be cool to make the virtue/affliction more consistant to plan around and maybe make a build out of.

- Finally I just have a few graphical suggestions. These are really just fluff, but they might make the character come to life more. He currently reuses a lot of animations, which is largely fine as they fit so well, but a little love goes a long way. His soul harvest I think could get a unique stab animation with the purple glow similar to the implaing type move he uses in his fight. You could probably just use the holy lance animation with the glow replaced to purple-y tbh. Elegant strike could have a animation more like the upward slash-dash alonne uses. As for parry if you don't change it into an attacking move with riposte, then maybe a more readying stance like what he has for his promo art (the one you see beind the skills for the guild/blacksmith). If you do change it to an attack, then give it elegant strikes current animation. If you change piercing strike into a more utility move, then go with that moonlight slash, ranged attack change, i think it'd be cool. If you don't change it at all, maybe an animation more like alonne's jummping downward slash/like Samurai Jacks tremendous horse cut.

Anyways, that it, I swear. I'm sorry for the exhaustive post but I'm a big fan of your mod, and dark souls in general. Sir Alonne is my favorite souls boss and I love samurai, and yeah. I just have a lot of ideas to improve the mod a little. I'm not suggestioning to implement all or even any of these changes. It was basically a dump of all the ideas I had. Some would become redundant if all added together and I also wouldn't want him to become too overpowered as a lot of the suggested changes are buffs. He's not bad by any means, just kinda lackluster. I don't know that I would enjoy playing him so much if these moves were on another character. I hope I help in some way. Good luck to you!

Thanks for the feedback! It's really good. I wish I had this in beta phase/development hell.

1) I had the Dark Crescent ranged attack earlier in the beta. I'm largely alone on the art, outside of hiring an artist. I have absolutely 0 inclination to buy Spine, nor access to someone with Spine skills.

This means my toolkit is limited to vanilla assets, reskins aside. I will search for a good curve to use as offensive art, but unless it's custom drawn, it likely isn't that good. I might be able to do something with the stress effect shape(s).

The move was an ability which acted as a stress heal, and the damage done would be triggered by the amount of stress possessed. So it would be a means of purifying the blade + self.

Not sure which ability I'd replace it with, but I'd probably just add it as an 8th ability.

2) Unique afflictions/virtues are not affected by resolve %. I'll check if I can make an affliction/heroism triggered by an effect, but I don't know if that's possible.

This means having 2 unique afflictions will always have the same % chance of happening. Bummer.

3) Sudoku's stress % can be lowered, sure.

4) I can remove the health cost on Honor.

5) Bushido can come down to 50%.

6) I'll rework Elegant Strike to not move Sir Alonne.

7) Bleeds will remain short. They're a reinterpretation of the katana bleed effect from Dark Souls. I'll see if I can make it do a % of the enemy's health in damage, but I thought the flat effect would be more balanced for boss fights & trash.

This is actually a very strong passive against bleedable enemies. Once he has the buff stacked high enough, he can gain a permanent +N to his damage output.

He is not a bleed stacker. He stacks a bleed % buff.

8) Tea Ceremony is a cool aesthetic change. I'll see what art I can procure for that thematic switch.

9) Which moves do you recommend reducing the movement on? I'll reduce Backslash by 1, and Soul Harvest by 1, and make Elegant Strike static.

10) I wanted to portray the Samurai and blade in conflict, which is why you see the self-bleed as a boon and a detriment through-out the character.

The items portray this better than the abilities, I think, which is where I might like more feedback. It doesn't need to be a bleed effect, but here's a big question:

How can we make the abilities reflect the conflict between nobility and bloodlust more?

I've updated the movement & some of the camp abilities.

I will look at secondary effects on his abilities in time.

1) I was actually thinking keep Soul harvest at 3 and changing gliding stab to 1 move, as soul harvest is one of his best moves I think it should be something that works great for repositioning to the front but requires some shuffling to be used again. Aside from that the other changes seem good.

2) Just spitballing, a few ideas. You could have an important move or two (maybe soul harvest would fit best thematically without adding moves) to have a percent chance to target random that scales with stress level?
It is a pretty hard idea to implement but basically I think the best way to do it is with stress conditions. Using more of the blades power lures the samurai closer to being consumed by the bloodlust. This is why I think it would be a good usage of affliction to further depict him as fallen to the blade in that state, though it really is kinda unfortunate if it means he can never gain virtue given he has a view virutue chance and viture state buff mechanics. Maybe he's also also more resistant to stress damage naturally but weak to the stress he inflicts on himself (naturally strong will vs blade's bloodlust).

Of course if you made self-stres more of a mechanic then there would probably be a more strong need for moves that "purge the blade" and heal the stress. Maybe something that too gains damage scaling with stress level, making bringing him closer to the edge more beneficial but also risky as ending a turn so close to affliction could end up breaking him in the enemies turn. You could then also make the purging moves unusable while afflicted.

Here are thoughts in no particular order.

Thematically, I'd like gliding stab to remain at 2 movement forward. It has a ton of potential bonus damage based on self-bleed and enemy bleed, so I'd rather leave it less spammable. Also, Sir Alonne's thrust covers a lot of ground in DS2. It stays closer to that game's portrayal if I leave it at 2.

A "Purge the Blade" mechanic would be cool. Originally, I was going to have bleeds awaken offensive mechanics and disable defensive ones. This fits with the theme of Youtou, but so does stress as a representation of inner conflict.

I agree an affliction/heroism trait would work really well here. It's highly unfortunate I can't give him unique Traits without locking the % it happens, thus removing the utility of resolve trinkets & camp abilities. One thing I could do is give his abilities unique properties if afflicted vs heroic. It was the initial plan for Abysswalker. Speaking of...

I've already used stress as a secondary resource for Abysswalker. I'm not sure I'd like to copy that mechanic for Samurai, though it would be appropriate.

I could try to make him self-stress when bleeding while also gaining some benefits from bleeding on each ability, and destress with moves like Parry & Elegant Strike. Those moves could gain bonuses based on his stress level, encouraging people to raise and lower stress.

Thoughts?

That's fine keeping the movement how you want.

If you can do this, please do. It sounds interesting and unique. I know you already did abysswalker with stress as a resource but I suggested it as possibly the easiest and most intuitive way to implement the blade vs. boi mechanics. But if you have something that doesn't retread the ground abysswalker does, then please go for it.

Concerning stress as a resource, now that I think of it I don't know that it makes sense to have a virute vs affliction deal, If you lean towards using stress as a negative on his moves. If we define stress as falling to the blade's allure, then fully falling would be the affliction. It wouldn't make sense to basically succumb to the power only to suddenly be okay and resist it. Maybe just give him an 100% chance unique affliction, and rework his kit a little to help kee him in a sane state.

You can still keep certain +damage while afflicted mechanics from rings and such, to symbolize falling 100% to its power to gain more strength at the cost of control.

For stress and abilities, maybe something like you have your moves that have a bleed chance also can deal more damage vs bleeding and more damage if bleeding self but it stresses him when he hits while there's blood. So the gameplay would be pushing his bleed proc passive for more damage at the cost of stress which you then have to heal via a de-stress move that removes the stacks of bleed % buffs.

So based on these ideas, I think the following moves would need to exist in some way:
- Moves that cause self bleed
- Moves that cause enemy bleed
- Moves that add damage if bleeding/attacking bleeding
- Moves that add stress when attacking while bleeding/attacking bleeding
- Moves that is weak offensively, and is any combination of heal stress, heal health, remove self bleed. (maybe you could also have it only be usable vs a bleeder and it consumes the bleed?)
Stuff like this in varying combinations and amounts would help portay the blood lust as both a boon and a curse.

As for what moves should de-stress, I think parry is a good one as it gives the move more purpose than its curerent state. I don't think elegant strike would be a good one for it though since it's already pretty bread & butter being one of two moves that trigger his passive. It seems a little much to make an attack the does full damage, plus bleed, plus passive damage, also heal stress.

An idea:

I can place more powerful buffs/effects which require bleeding on his abilities. However, they'll also have a bleeding requisite self-stress effect & stack a resolve debuff. Durations are something I'll need to think about, but I'm thinking the debuffs should last a few fights.

This way, he can still have Virtue & Affliction, and still have that value in his equipment, but have a related mechanic too.

Hey sorry I didn't get a chance to play DD for awhile, but I returned recently and have been having a lot of fun with the updated class.

I like the trinkets he has, and they seem to work well gameplay wise and with theme.
The ring-combo is cool for changing up his role and usage in a part, and the soul/blade set is very thematic and powerful! I haven't seen anything yet, so i'm not sure if its implemented, but I hope there's some plans for CC and CoM trinkets.

The new stress mechanics are very nice, and I think its a good trade off for a previously really powerful attacker.

I do think it is a little hard to deal with stress still though. Bloodlust is a good way to gain a lot of benefit but it also has trade-off, while is more tame counterpart for stress management is still a little too weak imo.

The amount it heals is good, but its still hard to use because the riposte will do -40% less damage with each use. I don't know why its a debuff, and not just a -40% riposte like other heroes. The -3 dodge still doesn't feel nice. It further decentivizes using the special item (which I never use cause there isn't a good benefit for making yourself bleed), and makes it a less good defensive option. I still think a good way to add use to Zen would be to give it a really small bleed (2 or even 1 dmg) on riposte. This way, zen doesnt feel as much like wasted turn when he comes back next turn with hopefully a few bleeding targets to use soul harvest or gliding stab on.

Like I mention earlier there isn't a good incentive to make himself bleed. The dodge and speed are not worth the high bleed damage you take each turn. Especially when it has reverse synergy with one of his moves. Maybe give him higher bleed chance when bleeding, or a small crit chance boost to help with stress. That or maybe make the buffs last longer. As of now I do not use the item and always just discard it at the start of a mission, and the self bleed bonuses only rarely come into play when the enemy bleeds him. And those buffs are also short lived,

One thing that I think is a bug, is that soul harvest doesn't seem to work as intended vs bleeding targets. As far as I can tell he doesn't receive +4 healing vs bleed in any circumstance. (though you do still receive the healing bonus when the samurai is bleeding, so that works).

Still though, been having a lot of fun with him and I'm happy to have him in my parties.

Also reading your most recent idea, I don't think that's a good idea. That's a lot of negatives for a benefit.

You must be taking a certain amount of damage each turn (which can increase depending on enemies), and taking stress damage, and getting debuffs that will last mutliple battles, and can likely stack to last even longer when you want to make use of the proposed buffs.

I'm not really sure how to make the self-bleed mechanics feel good, but an idea that could play up the blade vs soul mechanic is to have moves buff/debuff virtue chance? Meaning that based on how much of the blades/his own will's power the samurai uses over the course of a quest, will greatly influence how all that stress he's racking up results in.

I live in Shanghai, so the Chinese firewall keeps me from regularly uploading and commenting. This message comes from my phone. My laptop has little to no access with the outside world.

I can buy games on Steam, but no other option is available.

Modifying Zen and stacking resolve (de)buffs is something I have implemented, but can not upload due to the Great Firewall. Same with Royal Aegis updates. My VPN has been unreliable for a while, now.

Updates will probably come next time I leave China.

Sad to hear that you cannot update the mods, but I'm glad to see you're not dead (lol) and I look forward to the changes.

China's unpredictable for vpns right now. Normally, I have about 10kbits upload and download when I use a vpn (on a good day). Doesn't matter what brand. That's on a good day. Meanwhile, I have 60mbits up and down for anything within China.

After several hours of trial and error, I managed to upload a Hero fix. But I can't spare time like that very often.

Altering dodge:riposte's damage ratio were probably move into right direction but lunge is better than harvest was only because it is not bugged. Neither idea behind new move and properties please me.
20% damage bonus ? Nice but lack of bleed chance bonus is against idea of his passive. Overally I suspect this skill would be a little too good if it had chances to cause bleed, increase bleed chance or both but I would be happier if vulnerability debuff were just lowered and it could at least increase his bleed chance. Push is interesting idea but Samurai has trinkets which provide it already. In place of this skill I would gladly saw more Alonne like impale which were small heal + damage buff and probably in DD mechanic should be stunning both enemy and Samurai for 1 turn because in DS2 animation were pretty long.

The move is a set-up ability.

That's 20% damage bonus everybody gets on that target. That's quite different, and this is his only "team-play" ability at the moment. Since he attacks with his leg, I think a no-bleed passive is fine.

I might add the bleed chance % to it (Not the effect of a bleed, but the stacking buff), but certainly no bleed.

I'll wait for more feedback before changing anything.