Wrath of Cronos RPG V3A

[AnarchoNecros]

I used XWE to look at your mod. I think'd i can to change something to my favor (for me and my friends to play in different unstandart ways on extravaguant WADs). There's a lump called ToDo. I found there awesome things. And i'm really waiting for these to come. I can't wait!!!Anything about new version release date would be sweety... :0 (i meant feeling, that i'm having when i like to get/find/etc something)

[AnarchoNecros]

And i think, that in addition to all other classes (including two that you don't added already), a tamer (not a hunter;he's more like barbarian) - class that uses a mid and long-ranged weapons, and use his pets (only one at a time, plus they can't die and give only little support) (maybe: 1-whip (ALT-strong atack or grappling/throwing), 2-blade boomerang(ALT-just throw it on a wall/floor, then it's creates short-ranged energy rings (and you must pick it from where thrown/or press altfire again, so it will return)), 3-two blades (not swords) on chains(ALT-melee, stronger), 5-firestaff from MoC (ALT-fast ray instead of slow spread), 6-Scythe (SHOOT-creates long slash wave, ALT-melee atack, no mana), 4-the scroll of wilderness(fights at short range with green-light claws, ALT-slowly creates fast spheric green projectiles . ) would be cool.

[4thcharacter]

What is the actor name for the shop that randomly spawns in item spots?

[4thcharacter]

How do I kill the Oracle? The oracle cannot be kill and the same applies to it's specter. Even with the kill or MDK command.


EDIT: Did it. Removed the +Nodamage flag of the specter.

[tyketto]

I've finished another playthrough of Wrath of Cronos on my YouTube channel (clearly, I'm not a big fan of this mod...)

This time around, I played the Hexen singleplayer campaign as the Fighter. Take a look if you'd like: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... atOEPMFdke

[SyntherAugustus]

I've been enjoying the mod with Sunlust, but noticed a few things that may be op. Perhaps it's because I'm playing on HNTR, but my fully leveled golem and shadow creature alone were able to make short work of a dozen archviles at once and then a large monster mob near the end of the level (MAP24). After killing some of the final big mob, I fully unlocked the other two guys and all four were just wreaking havoc on 1000 enemies somehow without me lifting a finger. Do archviles have some kind of damage bug, or is it just because of the skill level I was playing there was some health thing going on?

Also I keep running into a shop guy that I have no gold to give him.

[Valherran]

I've been enjoying the mod with Sunlust, but noticed a few things that may be op. Perhaps it's because I'm playing on HNTR, but my fully leveled golem and shadow creature alone were able to make short work of a dozen archviles at once and then a large monster mob near the end of the level (MAP24). After killing some of the final big mob, I fully unlocked the other two guys and all four were just wreaking havoc on 1000 enemies somehow without me lifting a finger. Do archviles have some kind of damage bug, or is it just because of the skill level I was playing there was some health thing going on?

Also I keep running into a shop guy that I have no gold to give him.

If you are finding it to be way too easy, then you might need to crank up the difficulty. However, if you build your character right, you will eventually ROFL-Stomp everything regardless. The game was not designed for long term play, which was what I was hoping would be fixed because this MOD has serious potential.

[SyntherAugustus]

I think part of the problem is the damage from the monsters not scaling so much. While an archvile attack does 100 damage, my level 45 something necromancer has 450 total health. The healing urns seem to restore 100% health no matter the cap of the health.

[4thcharacter]

The game was not designed for long term play, which was what I was hoping would be fixed because this MOD has serious potential.

Definitely. I playimh this mod with the Community Chest series "attached" to each other and once you get to level 150+ the exp bar gets screwed up. And if you rack up too many wisdom, every map you can play can shoot your levels up by 5 or 10.

[quake3guy]

Problems with Viscerus compat patch! Every boss fight has the following errors:

P_StartScript: Unknown Script 912
P_StartScript: Unknown Script 913

I dumped the ACS to a text file and couldn't find 912 or 913 anywhere, but I looked at the Decorate for various monster attacks and it looks like they're trying to call it explicitly without having it defined, example:

Code: Select all

ACTOR SOVDiscipleGreenCloud : NewPoisonCloud
{
	Obituary "%o choked on the Disciple of Disease's wrath."
	States
	{
	Spawn:
		PSBG D 1
		PSBG D 1 A_Scream
		PSBG  DEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIII 2 A_Explode (4+2*(ACS_ExecuteWithResult(912,1,0,0)), 40, 1)
		PSBG  EEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIII 2 A_Explode (4+2*(ACS_ExecuteWithResult(912,1,0,0)), 40, 1)
		PSBG  EEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIII 2 A_Explode (4+2*(ACS_ExecuteWithResult(912,1,0,0)), 40, 1)
		PSBG  EEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIII 2 A_Explode (4+2*(ACS_ExecuteWithResult(912,1,0,0)), 40, 1)
		PSBG  EEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIII 2 A_Explode (4+2*(ACS_ExecuteWithResult(912,1,0,0)), 40, 1)
		PSBG  EEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIIIEEEFFFGGGHHHIII 2 A_Explode (4+2*(ACS_ExecuteWithResult(912,1,0,0)), 40, 1)
		Goto Death
	}
}

This particular one is extremely laggy, with just 2 of the green pods on the field my game goes down to less than 1 fps, and the console spams missing script errors.


One other issue is that Lava/Slime no longer damages the player in this latest version. Help!

[tchkb]

A year ago or two I was playing through Plutonia Experiment (made it through Go 2 It before getting bored) and Hell Revealed 2 (stopped playing after 9th level), both with Fighter on Titan difficulty. Two weeks ago I decided to derust this mod and played through entirety of Scythe on Berserker difficulty with a 100% melee-dedicated build. This time I had an absolute blast, probably because I already knew how to make the most of what I get as a Fighter and because Scythe's level design is more friendly for the class. That being said, I still have a lot of issues with both skill balancing and general design choices you made for this mod, and would've probably had even more had I played with other classes. I already have a few after some minor testing but I'll leave that for someday else and focus entirely on Fighter and general WoC.

First of, the experience system. The mod lacks any sort of level cap, both overall and in individual maps.
The former is a very straightforward problem: on larger WADs you can easily rack up about a hundred levels by the time you're done with it and max all skill slots you want, which invalidates the entire point of choosing what skills you want to have and making a character build around it. There's also the issue of gaining extra experience through higher Wisdom stat (Wisdom-focused builds gain much more skill points than those that skip investing in Wisdom) and Alchemy (related to Wisdom, but also makes flasks less valuable as combat tools than yet another mean of gaining experience, basically discouraging ever using them - at least it used to before Shopkeeper was introduced, see below).
The latter is normally not an issue, since you can't normally gain more than a few levels in a map, but I ran into it while playing Hell Revealed MAP09, where you basically keep constantly slaughtering a few hundred monsters, and once all your accumulated experience kicks in along with killing spree bonus, you suddenly gain over a dozen levels. This was probably caused by excessive number of Lost Souls spawned by Pain Elementals (was playing on Titan Difficulty), as I had a similar problem on MAP06 where I simply had to sit in an alcove partially revealed to provoke elementals to continuously spawn Lost Souls and farm a ton of experience that way. Either way, such ludicrous experience gains need to be cut in some way. I guess it would be sufficient to make PE-spawned Lost Souls and monsters resurrected by Arch-Viles give no experience on death. If this kind of problems persist, you could impose a limit of levels you can gain on a single map (about 5 or so).

Speaking of shopkeeper - it's absurdly broken. You can sell all items of highly-situational-if-not-nonexistent viability (which is pretty much all of them except Mystic Urns and Kraters of Might) you accumulate in a playthrough and buy a ton of Icons of Defender, hoarding them for the hardest levels so you can breeze through them. Not sure what to do with this. Removing Icons from buyable items list would certainly be a good step forward, but still wouldn't change the fact that item pool is littered with things whose sole purpose of existence is being sold for extra money to buy more Urns and Kraters. If you ask me, I would both remove shopkeeper and replace a lot of current items with more mundane yet still useful ones (like regular healing potions, flasks of various kind, etc). I would especially get rid of items whose effects can be replicated by skills (like Porkalator -> Mage's Polymorph), if not nowadays, then in the future, as some of the items like that guardian cube could actually make very good future learnable skills. Since it's an RPG mod, the depth of character customisation should come before large item pool.

Related to experience/level problem, scaling monsters' HP up with your level is a somewhat half-assed method of keeping them up with your increasing skills, especially that you're just making killing them take longer without increasing their direct threat to the player, though it's still not a bad method considering all possible difficulty progressions of custom levelsets. A possible alternative method would be making a few different variants of each monster and spawning the variation depending on player's level on map load. This could potentially allow players to start from any level of major levelsets they want without having to worry about being underleveled compared to the size and quality of monster hordes they have to exterminate, while still upgrading monsters along with your own gradually increasing power.

One thing I was very annoyed by in my previous playthroughs was the randomness of alchemy success. Couldn't you just remove this RNG aspect and make alchemy success binary, automatically successing if your Wisdom is above a certain level depending on combination and being impossible otherwise?

Most weapons 5-6 are awful, both by design and aesthetically. With all those offensive skills you're handing out to the classes, they bring a lot of redundancy to the table and make balancing the gameplay an even more difficult task.

One general thing about skills: you begin with them at level 1 and then increase that all the way to level 10. Isn't that a little too much? Can't this be like 5 or 6, offset by higher amount of experience points needed for each level up?

One last general thing that could be considered is allowing more minmaxing by removing static HP, Magic and Mana gain on level up and increasing amount of stat points gained on level up.

Now for individual skills of Fighter class:
a) Mighty Blow - why should I ever invest in this if I could just as well swing my magical weapon? From conceptual standpoint this could be a main weapon for dispatching or finishing mid-level monsters for builds that don't want to invest into aforementioned magic weapons. Basically should have a pretty long cooldown (decreasing with skill's level), but have damage worth at least four times the standard fist blow.
b) Stomp - seems too weak to be worth it; if it were designed more as an enemy stunning tool for supporting your melee I could consider it more. On the other hand, cooldown is hilariously short right now, so spamming it can rack up a lot of damage against hordes of enemies as long as they don't become too high-leveled.
c) Charge - again, should be more of a stunning tool plus very large speed boost to cover large distance in a short time. And again, cooldown is too short, allowing some absurd spam of it.
d) Hook Shot - conceptually a great tool for bringing elevated enemies down to your level, but Doom engine's limitations seem to hold it back a lot. Enemies tend to get stuck on wall corners, decorations, terrain and other monsters a lot. Could still be useful, but I'd make it a lower-level skill to make access to it easier and offset its situational reliability.
e) Death Blow - completely useless right now due to not affecting Cyberdemons and Masterminds. Even then it's too inconsistent to be a valuable weapon - you can simply slash one to death with Quietus - unless used on a very tanky build with lots of durability but not-so-big damage output. So either remove it altogether or rework it so that Cyberdemons and Masterminds will instantly drop dead if you hit them a few times with it (using a separate counting variable from hitpoints) and everything weaker will be simply oneshotted - for price of heavily increased cooldown and magic point consumption.
f) Critical Strike - slight free damage boost, nothing special.
g) Weapon Masteries - the main problem here is that there's not much incentive to actually invest in the first two instead of skipping straight to Sword Mastery to make Quietus as strong as possible. So either remove the first two altogether and replace them with something else, or rework them to unlock alternative high-power high-cooldown ranged attacks for those weapons and powering them up with increased skill level. Basically something to make Timon's Axe and Hammer of Retribution (especially the former - the latter can still be used for sniping) useful even after obtaining Quietus. Maybe even give those weapons different elemental damage types and introduce varying weaknesses for each Doom enemy.
h) War Cry - never bothered with this, so I don't know how useful it is. Has anyone else got any experience with it?
i) Berserk - activate Icon of Defender and watch everything drop in one hit. A double-edged sword otherwise, but still legit I guess.
j) Battle Shout - never bothered with this, but I imagine it's good.
k) Blood Rush - free recovery, what's not to like?
l) Concentration - the main problem with this is that Doom levels already provide ridiculously big mana (or rather ammo) reserves for you to abuse. Furthermore melee-focused Fighter will be mostly slashing his opposition away, which carries significantly lower mana consumption than the weapons' ranged attacks. I guess limiting mana gain from cubes and removing Combined Mana ones would cut down on this issue and make mana-conserving builds and strategies more worthwhile, along with this skill for Intelligence-based Fighters that make extended use of ranged attacks with their weapons.
m) Deflection - free damage reduction, what's not to like?

The above is mostly a collection of various unrelated ideas. A good way to think about it is that the player should be able to make at least two notably different viable builds for the class he chooses, some alternative middle-grounds and/or niche-but-definitely-viable options being a plus. For Fighter the two core builds could be martial-based Fighter (Strength + Wisdom) and weapon-based Fighter (Strength + Intelligence). But I'd be okay with any kind of fix for those general issues I outlined as long as the mod becomes balanced, with no dangling loose ends.

Well, that's a wall of criticisms and ideas. But I still like the work you did, playing Doom levelsets with Fighter gameplay is very fun. I'll be testing other classes and assorted stuff, as well as looking through scripts and decorate for things like damage formulas etc. I'd actually like to help expanding this mod, so if you need something, ask away.

[Funky Gnoll]

Mighty Blow is cheap to use and becomes horrifically powerful at higher levels--far more so than nearly any other weapon's single swing. Death Blow is mainly useful if you use the monster replacer, since some of those critters are nasty, but it's still pretty low priority if you use it at all. Concentration is a nice bonus to help keep the Fighter from having to resort to his fists or an unpowered weapon even in the most dire circumstances.

[4thcharacter]

6th weapons.. Yeah, the Hunter's alt-fire is weaker than it's standard fire despite the higher mana cost. Also, out of the 5 classes, Fighter is the least that I use frequently.

Is there a way to make the armor reduction not RNG-based when taking damage? And customization... It would be cool if there's one class that can choose the ability that they'll use before starting (Druid seems to be going to fill that role but from the looks of the text file he can only imitate a set of them)

[Exeor]

Is by the way Thetis active? It has been many months since his last post here. I hope that he take note about the issues or telling us about future updates, I cant play Heretic/Hexen without this mod right now, heh.

[peewee_RotA]

All this chatter made me absolutely have to play this mod again. Great work!

I enjoy the feature change since 1.7 of placing venders within the levels. The money mechanic is also a lot more noticeable. Before I kind of picked up money without realizing it. Now I kill monsters for it trying to save up for stuff.



I kind of wish there was a simplified version of this mod. The skills are awesome, but the skill tree is kind of hard to work with. Perhaps having a setting that auto assigns stats and skills would be an interesting approach. (I'm trying to set up the game for coop with my kids and the learning curve on skill trees is really abstract)