Essence Costs in AB Files

Darklyre

So after playing with the various skills yesterday, I noticed that Necromancy has a very straightforward AB file. Your Essence ability gives you a % of essence remaining, and each ability in Necromancy lists the % cost for use.

Why aren't the other essence skills like this?

With Groves, I can see why there's no % cost, because groves and staves have different totals, and a Lupine Plinth changes the total in the grove. However, Occultism's Karma uses a straight % tracker, but the skills don't list the karma cost at all and you have to use Karma to figure out the costs. Devotion uses both % and a number when you Perform Enlightenment, but some skills will list just the numerical cost while others list the percentage costs and others list both.

My suggestion is to redo the Occultism and Devotion AB files and tracking abilities to match the Necromancy ones and just use % costs, or list both % and number. Obviously it's been working for a long time, so it's not absolutely necessary, but I think it'd be less confusing when trying to check how much X ability takes out of your essence.

Antonius

Your current/overall Devotion pool is measured primarily as a number, not a percentage, so listing percentages in AB files is pretty meaningless. You'd also end up with a lot of fractional percentage costs if you tried converting them to work that way, and I really don't see any benefit to it whatsoever.

Darklyre

Antonius said:

Your current/overall Devotion pool is measured primarily as a number, not a percentage, so listing percentages in AB files is pretty meaningless. You'd also end up with a lot of fractional percentage costs if you tried converting them to work that way, and I really don't see any benefit to it whatsoever.

Are Devotion and Necromancy so different from each other that having a similar essence cost system doesn't work?

Antonius

As they currently are, yes. In order to squash Devotion into using a percentage cost you'd likely have to unnecessarily readjust costs on abilities, which would be a major downgrade. I really don't see any potential gain from this as far as Devotion is concerned; nobody seems to be struggling with the system as it is currently, and knowing that you have for example 45% Devotion and your ability uses 0.23% of that isn't any better than knowing you have 29250 Devotion and your ability uses 150 of that.

Achilles

Unnecessary to add this.  People would code a script to convert the % of devotion left if you removed it from enlightenment for instance.

Devotion regen needs a couple of tweaks (and the event took out the only way to regain devotion rapidly besides QQing for 8 hours).  Its also a pain for non-artied people to get to the flame that needs to be looked at.

Xith

Necro has it. Devo uses numbers. Karma doesn't regenerate on its own, so using the skills to learn their costs sounds wasteful, but they're also supposed to be secretive and teach each other, so fitting.

Rispok

Xith said:

Necro has it. Devo uses numbers. Karma doesn't regenerate on its own, so using the skills to learn their costs sounds wasteful, but they're also supposed to be secretive and teach each other, so fitting.

My Karma regenerated during the demigod event, because Karma is the exact same as Essence, just girlier and with some lipstick. Thus I had 100% karma at the start, and was able to mog and make pacts on the Chaos Plane. Devotion numbers were different completely, however.

Eld

Rispok said:

Xith said:

Necro has it. Devo uses numbers. Karma doesn't regenerate on its own, so using the skills to learn their costs sounds wasteful, but they're also supposed to be secretive and teach each other, so fitting.

My Karma regenerated during the demigod event, because Karma is the exact same as Essence, just girlier and with some lipstick. Thus I had 100% karma at the start, and was able to mog and make pacts on the Chaos Plane. Devotion numbers were different completely, however.

Karma regenerated during the event, but that's not normally the case for Occultists, I think. You have to get it from studying karma items, or from whatever the people in the Occultists house do with the Eschaton. I assume that the automatic regeneration was a bug to do with interactions between skills that one character couldn't normally have at the same time, like shamans losing vodun, non-blademasters losing parry, blademasters losing raze, and so on.

Arador

I do not see why not. You can list the % of total devotion used. Why try and keep things obscure?