Pirate + Ascetic

[MTaur]

Has anyone tried the extra classes yet?

Pirate has a bit of extra flavor text, and is a little more fleshed out.  (Also, I should probably go back and let the pistol/1Hmelee work regardless of L/R mixup.  Guts prerequisite code uses "or" logic, so it's trivial to do it that way.  For now, pistol right only as described)

Ascetic has some spikey health recovery that might give it some advantage fighting against the restoration nerfs in the overall mod.  It was almost necessary just because the class playstyle favors dipping a bit low at times in the first place, and the passive alone doesn't get you up to 50-60% between fights fast enough without tons of regeneration gear.  There's a weird zen-like quality to lower levels - everything is so slow and deliberate, and you can see how much of a difference individual skill casts make.  It feels like it's missing something overall, but it still sort of holds together thematically.

The shadows and shadow summoning are kept for both classes.  Ghost pirates are kind of a thing as it is, and ascetics communing with spirits should be pretty reasonable.  I'm not sure if either should have custom tweaks I haven't considered yet, though.

[Khazad]

I played a little bit of both, but haven't yet made it very far on either.  Most of my recent "TL2 time" has been for TL1CP stuff, though.

[MTaur]

I played a little bit of both, but haven't yet made it very far on either.  Most of my recent "TL2 time" has been for TL1CP stuff, though.

The forum has been very active on TL1CP lately, yeah.  Finding Destroyer-only set gear does highlight some of the dangerous of class expansion, though... X-D

(It might be fun to remix them in this style later on, if permitted)

[MTaur]

I've thought about giving Pirate a little more incentive to stay in melee a little longer, but no real ideas at the moment.  Pirate Handshake is worth it, but that's a 30 second cooldown.  And Cutlass Sweep is nice, but usually is more reactive than something worth engaging for.

Ascetic drags a bit before 15.

[MTaur]

Ascetic had a buff to Sacrifice today.  I was thinking about it, and the mechanic was too unstable.  (You lose about 50% current HP over 3 seconds, while gaining about 75% max HP over 15 seconds)  It's extremely strong, but its best use cases are on the edge of suicidal.

The latest patch grants a 25% max HP shield for 5 seconds (which does not interact with the 50% current HP health loss, since "HP RECHARGE PLAYER" doesn't interact with damage shields; luckily, this is intentional anyway)

So there is a significant margin for playing to maximize the ascetic passive bonuses for being on low health, while getting the most out of Sacrifice, and not necessarily dying.  It's still risky, but not to the point of being self-defeating.  It's also highly unlikey to do more harm than good (only very rapid 100-to-0 scenarios with odd timing are the rare exception).

It's still probably the hardest class to play well, and it can be a bit hard to combo spells without +mana gear to get your pool up.  Not being able to fire off two pacts and your best damage skills back-to-back is a bit of a problem, but I don't know if I'm going to leave that alone as a gear and stat point issue.

Ascetic was always a highly experimental class that started with the passive concept.  At the moment, the use of active skills to hang on seems like a much more stable idea than buffing the base passive.  Healing that gets stronger near 0 health is ok up to a certain point, but it needs to not be the only mechanism.