Posted January 31, 2023 Was chatting with a friend about upcoming holy sites and the topic of mindstealer came up after reading "in exchange for a powerful Mind Stealer-like effect, using the creature template to determine possible skills" in the notes and we kind of laughed and said "so it's going to give absolutely nothing?" In its current state, mind stealer is a mildly interesting enchant, stealing a percentage of the difference between your skill and the mobs skill (roughly 1/1000 of the difference at 100 power), however it has some issues - Mobs have a very small range of skills, the vast majority of mobs have characteristics and weaponless fighting, no weapon skills, no stance skills, they don't even have fighting. The exceptions are trolls which have clubs, rift casters have channelling and the goblin leader who has shortsword/medium metal shield. It obviously doesn't make sense for a pig to give you weapon smithing or whatever, but mobs should have stance skills and the humanoids should have some basic knowledge seeing as they're knowledgeable enough to cook and record recipes (especially with the upcoming goblin camps showing they can use weaponry + probably craft them) - Skills and characteristics have the same % stolen, so IF they even had skills to steal, it's going to be a comically low amount as it's balanced around characteristics. After ~90k kills with 90-105 mindstealer i've gone from 19 to 39 weaponless fighting, and that has mobs with as high as 70 weaponless, and i'm only ever stealing weaponless from every mob but 1 in the game. - Conditions such as champion don't directly change characteristics or skills, so they don't increase mindstealing even though it'd make sense for a champion to be stronger and therefore worth more to mindsteal (and the holy site version seems to agree with champ being worth more and diseased being worth less) - Mobs for the most part have very low characteristics, there isn't a single common mob that has 20+ mind logic and only scorpions have over 20 mind speed sitting at 25, which is ironic considering it's called mindstealer and it's basically impossible to ever steal mind. Most characteristics top out at ~40's for common mobs, and since the skillgain and steal chance are based off the difference between your skill and theirs, they need to be 10+ levels over you to get a decent skill tick (and you'll never get anything if you're above them), so past low 30's mindstealing gains are extremely low. The exception to this is soul strength, which due to taming difficulty using soul strength (and tbh was probably forgotten by rolf when he added mindstealer), has a variety of super high soul strength mobs, with hell horses having 72 and lava fiends having a massive 90 soul strength, and the steal doesn't follow the general curve for skills, you'll get massive ticks such as Soul strength increased by 0.0157 to 75.0202 which is roughly 3 hours of mining worth stolen off a single lava fiend which is a bit absurd I'm not really sure how i'd go about balancing it, but mind stealer should have some value past 30 characteristics, actually steal skills at a reasonable value and have a variety of skills not just weaponless, be modified by mob conditions and probably follow the actual skillgain curve at super high characteristics when fighting also super high characteristic mobs. Right now it's only really useful on a freshly spawned toon or a priest alt killing glue tier hellhorses, diminishes quickly then curves back up quite a bit for pvp-orientated grinders wanting a lot of soul strength. There's no reason not to get it on a weapon since it doesn't block any other casts, but there's also not really a lot of reason to get it either 9 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
