Extreme AM Report

okay so here goes... the fireball takes about 2 seconds between shots and around 3 to 4 shots to kill a monster, the chain lightning has a very short range so most of the time it only hits 1 monster and takes around 2 to 3 hits to kill one monster.
As for the beam it kills any monster in 2 shots with around half a second between shots making it the most convenient artifact for this subclass. It kills this way because of the piercing damage it has.

I think the fireball for being able to shoot every 2 seconds should deal way more damage, have splash damage and have a burning effect if possible, it is underpowered in its current state. But I must admit its visuals are nice. As for the chain lightning I would suggest decreasing the time it hits a monster from instantaneous to every half a second, and the chain lightning really needs a boost in damage, perhaps kills the first monster (excluding titans, queens, and probably warlords) and weakens the rest since it also has a timer of about 1 second to 2 seconds. I think the beam shooting time should be increased from half a second to 1 full second, to make it less of a spam.

I think the Beam is fine as is. I agree that the Chain lightning needs a bigger spread and more damage, I think a bigger drain on Adren would be a fine trade off. The fireball speed and delay are slow, but the ball goes a long way. The idea i have is shorten the Beam distance and decrease fireball delay and increase speed. Sometimes you cant hit a gas bag or warlord with the beam as its to far away and the fireball takes to long to get to the target. If we could shoot more fireballs in a spread we have a chance to hit distant targets and would make the beam vs fireball more of a option.

I would have to say that I am kinda between Ratar and Elite in some regards, and I suspect dead on in others.

First, I have found the fireball to be pretty much worthless, given its speed and damage. I don't think I have managed to kill even a pupae, much less a warlord, queen, or titan. I have stood what I would have guessed might be 100-150 ft away from the latter and had them teleport away before the fireball got there.

On the chain lightning, it has been a bit more successful in early rounds, where I might hit the first of several skaarj and had it go on to damage some others following it. But even then, it tends to be fairly ineffective in the long run, given that it can be easily overwhelmed and the EAM overrun. I find that the rod is a much better choice for the earlier waves.

Finally, we come to the beam. Yes, it can at times be "spammy" as Elite says, but I am finding it still has some issues. Yes, I can at times, such as on titan waves, end up with a repeating Holy S*** run. But I also have to be extremely careful. There are times that I have been swamped by the monsters, be they skaarj or titans, and I end up getting the message that it cannot be reused at that time. I have also found that I can, sprees not withstanding, run out of adren, particularly at later waves. Having a double makes no difference. It is not a case of me missing much either. Last night on hanger, I was picking off nali and skaarj at the range of the beam (i.e. just showing up on my radar) with about a 95% success rate, but I have had times where it just does not seem to fire, even against titans at less than a 100ft range. I have even gotten back my sniper aim, and can pick off the red flies about 50% of the time. And I am not necessarily having adren chewed up by the shields either when I run out of adren. Of course, I have lost count of the number of times when I did get swarmed over by titans or warlords, could not kill them between my weapon and the beam fast enough, I get stoned and die, then come back from ghosting with no adren, to die all the faster.

BTW... in terms of my scores... they are more consistent, but only about 15% or so better on average, primarily due to my shift to the beam (thanks Elite!), with its longer range when compared to my preferred weapons of a flak, RL or shock. OH... and I don't know about others like Elite and Ratar, but I have switched from preferring an E+4 flak to a Lucky... the spawning of adren, doubles and health, along with ammo from time to time.

Well... time to play some more.

Thanks for the feedback guys. It is really useful getting three of you to chip in. Makes the outcome a lot more balanced.

First the fireball. My intention was to make it like the WMs rocket launcher i.e. a weapon the AM could fire lots, cheaply, and doing just standard damage. Because I didn't want to have fireballs spamming the visuals, I thought make it fire half as often, but doing twice the damage. So I pitched it at 240 damage every 1.5 secs for an Extreme AM. An Extreme WM will fire a rocket every 0.6 secs, for around 140 damage - so I suppose the fireball is a bit underpowered by comparison. So I will increase. There is also a difference in that the WM can keep his finger on the fire button, and the rocket will fire asap, whereas the the AM will usually be at least 0.2 secs behind when it could fire. So again, perhaps a slight increase to compensate.

By the way, the fireball goes significantly faster than a rocket, but you can't batch fire them in threes.

The chain lightning I will try to change so the stepping is time delayed - it should look slightly better. I will increase the step range, but will have to change it so it doesn't step back to a previously hit enemy. At the moment, it usually bounces from the target to another enemy, then back again. In the new version it will hit the target harder, then bounce to adjacent enemies (one hit only), then on to others that haven't been hit yet. It should make it more consistent in the damage it does.

At the moment, I will leave Beam alone - but in the future at some time it might need a slight nerf.

On the whole, at the moment I think the Extreme AM might be slightly too powerful, but I will not nerf it quite yet. What are your thoughts?

I think the scores show a pretty balanced Char. Nice as is but I agree with the current weapon tweaks.

Elite if you have the time, go for an insane score and see if you can outdo your already crazy high scores.

Spacey, dont forget, when your swamped the blast is a key player, also I agree that a lucky stomps the energy for the extremeAM.

I would, but I am having problems getting my keybinds for artifacts working. I don't know if perhaps it is the fact that I re-used the aliases for things like InventoryActivate and InventoryNext, and made sure I was using ActivateItem and NextItem. I will be posting a message probably tomorrow to discuss this on the artifacts binding thread.

I just use scroll to get to the blast from the beam. Just 2 clicks

I have a concern about the strength of the Extreme AM subclass.

Initially people didn't know how to use it, and so it had to be boosted a bit. Now people are getting the hang of it, I suspect it may be getting a bit too powerful.

What do others think?

haven't gotten the impression that they are overpowered as an outsider (AM only lvl 170)
but I haven't seen any double/triple "abuse" attempts yet and that tends to be a real teller

Szlat wrote:

I have a concern about the strength of the Extreme AM subclass.

Initially people didn't know how to use it, and so it had to be boosted a bit. Now people are getting the hang of it, I suspect it may be getting a bit too powerful.

What do others think?

My scores run about the same as my regular AM. I thought we decided it was pretty balanced?

BTW, Road, the double and triple have no effect on the bolt, beam or blast, which are the main weapons of this class.

Ratar_Killer wrote:

BTW, Road, the double and triple have no effect on the bolt, beam or blast, which are the main weapons of this class.

what about rod,fireball,chain lighting ?
I'm itching to try out the EAM class maybe I'll have to get my AM to lvl 200 to try it out

RoadKill v3.4 wrote:

Ratar_Killer wrote:

BTW, Road, the double and triple have no effect on the bolt, beam or blast, which are the main weapons of this class.

what about rod,fireball,chain lighting ?

Rod, MegaBlast and FireBall are affected by the double/triple.
Beam, Bolt and Chain Lightning are not affected.

(The policy I followed was that either it was "special" and so bypassed DB/DR/abilities, and hence should also bypass DD, or it was "normal" and so should be affected by them all. Rod is the funny one that doesn't fit the rule).

Szlat wrote:

RoadKill v3.4 wrote:

Ratar_Killer wrote:

BTW, Road, the double and triple have no effect on the bolt, beam or blast, which are the main weapons of this class.

what about rod,fireball,chain lighting ?

Rod, MegaBlast and FireBall are affected by the double/triple.
Beam, Bolt and Chain Lightning are not affected.

(The policy I followed was that either it was "special" and so bypassed DB/DR/abilities, and hence should also bypass DD, or it was "normal" and so should be affected by them all. Rod is the funny one that doesn't fit the rule).

Triple megablast!!!! O i'm trying that out today

Ratar_Killer wrote:

Triple megablast!!!! O i'm trying that out today

Bear in mind that the triple damage artifact only does double damage in invasion.

Szlat wrote:

Bear in mind that the triple damage artifact only does double damage in invasion.

that explains a lot, it never quite felt like triple damage. That should be in the wiki haha.