Underrail is not an MMO. It's perfectly fine to have for some build to be more powerful than others. Having an easier, relatively more powerful class is a smart design choice to give new player a good game experience and make great financial sense for Stygian Software. Psi is fine as it's right now and I wouldn't change a thing.
To me it seems like temporal psi was designed with the dominating difficulty in mind, with the result that it's overpowered on lower difficulties.
It always seemed to me like it was an effort to bridge the power gap between psi builds and everything else. The result of course was that full psi got nonlinearly even more powerful compared to other builds, but adding in Temporal Manipulation on a 3 Will build with only 60-70 points to spare does get you somewhere near the power of a pre-expansion tri-school psi build.
Probably it would have been better in the sense of general build balance to make Temporal Manipulation somehow something other than psi - sort of like in Tales of Maj'Eyal how there are mutually exclusive special ability sources, if TM had been somehow designed to not work well with the main three psi schools, then there might be be less whining from the "psi is too OP" crowd. But what it really does, really well, is allow non-psi builds to exchange a little bit of health for a whole lot of power and utility. You get a lot of increased build potential for very little cost in skill points, no cost in stat points, and a small cost in health points and vulnerability to psionic inhibition.
Strongly disagree. What should have happen is something that would bridge the power gap between psi and non-psi build in order to encourage diversified game-play, increasing replay-ability. The cost benefit analysis is so tilt toward psi it's not even funny. On the psi side we have a massive array of crowd control and utility abilities, and on the other side we have ... 25% health. So naturally especially on dominating difficulty we have psi hybrid everything, leading to the same boring gameplay. Show me any non-psi build and I can make it better by making it a psi hybrid build. You got to offer something for players to choose a non-psi build. Pre-nerfed Quick Tinkering fits this role perfectly.
But why then the recent change to yet again weaken quick tinkering (and therefore builds that use traps)? Doesn't make sense.
Well, "traps" isn't a build. I'm sure someone probably made a joke build that only used traps, but really, really edge cases round to zero. Traps don't make a build, they augment an existing build. Low-Will TM also isn't a build, it augments an existing build. And low-Will TM plus Quick Tinkering and Future Orientation meant instant traps every turn. That's why QT got nerfed - because there's no reason not to go into TM to LTI, and that was too much. It's why LTI was nerfed, too, before release; it was too much. Makes perfect sense.
You and I have very different definition for perfect sense. There are dozens of different and better ways to change Quick Tinkering:
- Use of QT immediately trigger the cooldown for LTI and vice versa.
- QT now impose a max WIL limit of 7 so you can still take feats like Stoicism. Disable the option to pick Increase WIL feat. You cannot assign ability points to WIL once you reach a base WIL of 7. If your base WIL is 8 or higher you can't pick QT. This change will make pure psi build avoid QT like the plague.
- Use of QT immediately disable all psi abilities for the turn and vice versa.
- Use of QT trigger a psi skill penalty of 100
... and so on.
But no, let's nerf QT to the ground, makes perfect sense.
That's where we disagree. Should every feat or ability or item that is overpowered when combined with temporal psi get nerfed? Like grenadier with lti for example. Or adrenaline with ptc.
The result of such "balancing" is that psi-utilizing builds get more powerful at the cost of non-psi builds. So no, it doesn't make sense to me.
It was pretty OP without temporal powers anyway.
It always seemed to me like it was an effort to bridge the power gap between psi builds and everything else.
Wee need to make a gap between psi and non psi less. Gotcha, let's make another psi discipline. I guess i can see the logic. If everyone is a psi, there is no gap.
Couldn't have said it better myself. We need more feats/weapons/armors/whatever that are exclusive to non-psi build. What we don't need is more powerful psi and/or nerf psi to the ground.
QT is only OP when you have a room/choke point with a 1 tile exit. I already see some expedition map being anti-QT (let's see you QT while riding a jetski. Some native maps have no single tile chokepoint and have 2 tile wide walkway). The mechanics are already in place to punish one trick pony QT build: Coil Spiders are immune to immobilization. The only way to stop them in their track is Cryoliquid Blob Trap.
A better way would be:
More maps without 1 tile wide chokepoint
A mix of enemy type (immune to immobilization, immune to frozen, regular) with subtle graphic hint around mid ~ late game on the same map so it's more of a rock paper scissor sort of deal which would be much more fun. Remember traps are already heavy and now you need to carry even more different types of traps.
Imho QT nerf was way too far. Its specialization is just more insult to injury. Here, let's spend 7 precious specialization points so you can have a weaken version of QT attempting to play catch up, while all other build get to use those 7 points to further power up.
