Skill: Favour of Gnak upgrade

[SkullFace]

This suggestion is intended to improve WM tentacle pets and bring back tentacle farms. Proposition is to make Favour of Gnak a 90 CP child ability of Binding of Gnak. In addition to pre-existing improvements granted by Favour, all Favoured tentacles are now longer subject to pet decay.

[Stretch]

I support this evolution of WM as a class that creates more permanent additions to the landscape. Would give the game more interactivity and player-based dynamic content.

I recommend it just as an addition to the existing skill (vs. requiring additional CP investment). With quick mutations already being a separate 60 CP skill, WMs are already having to specialize heavily.

[NearNihil]

Proposal: Knock it down to a 30CP child skill of Binding of Gnak (yes, less than the parent skill), but it only prevents decay if the Wyrm Master is on the same plane and within a 5 tile radius. Prevents multiple simultaneous lingering tentacle forests by the same WM, and anyone with a bit of resources (invisibility potion, Tracking skill or demon radar skill, possibly anti-invisibility measures) can fairly reliably find and remove the offender while damaging the forest. But it still allows what I think the core of the idea is: extended area denial for funsies.

[Repth]

How about same neighborhood instead of a distance?

[NearNihil]

Also works, so long as it's within a reasonable distance of the forest really.

[Repth]

The most widespread neighborhoods I can think of are voids (where they're actually called "void"), which would be all too fitting for the WM

[Stretch]

Recommend not requiring the WM to remain in the same neighborhood as like you said this can make them more easily trackable and is a nerf to the skill. Those with tracking can still track the WM of course.

I think that 9 classes (ES, NC, rev, elementalist, WM, IB, DH, seraph, overlord or Stygian DOs) don’t have much to fear from this regardless even if just wandering around blindly, unless they are without armor for some reason. Liches would respawn cheaply and move on or else pets out already and survive. Advocates are very strong and might similarly have few issues. Not sure about archons/EH and lol void walkers (if tentacles could even see them). And any character that knows to enter rooms right after the pet tick is safe.

So even if a WM puts a lot of effort into brewing pots and making tentacles this won’t is not going to change power dynamic much, so don’t see need for tying WM to tentacle location via coding.

A WM who built a tentacle farm is likely to choose of their own volition to remain nearby and continue to add to it since it took so much work to stand up in the first place. Would prefer to give them that choice (and no penalty if they spend an ap cycle searching comps the next neighborhood over).

Alternately could also give tentacles a minor buff if the WM stays close by, e.g. 2 points of soak (for auras).

Tentacle skills are currently a lot of cp without much oomph (aside from meme) so I agree 30 cp is better. Would recommend that 0 cp and just add to existing skill is best

[NearNihil]

The point of a limit, particularly a distance based one, is so that no one location can have functionally infinite pets, particularly when spawned by one player. We've seen what that can do in the right circumstances with the massive wall of lag in TRO's stronghold. As a result, there should be some manner of restriction to prevent factions becoming practically unraidable or hotspots becoming unusable. Given some prep (fonts, potions) and enough AP, you can poop out some 56 tentacles a day (sleeping outside, with the added overhead of casting Shadow Wrap twice + using a potion for that). A week is just shy of 400 of the things. I just know there are players dedicated enough to do that for extended periods of time (and with enough support to pull it off) and I'd like the servers to continue to not be on fire.

How about this, the non-decaying bit is baked in to both of the upgrade skills (so either one is enough to gain the effect), but the WM must be on the same plane, a max of 25 tentacles on any given tile - inside and outside counted separately - and a max of 50 tentacles per WM. (I was going to suggest something along the lines of "allied" tentacles so new ones could be summoned by enemies during a raid, but that's a bug-riddled experience waiting to happen)

[erikune]

Perhaps make it a new Tentacle variant, similar to how Bone Seekers are just Skeleton variants?

Keep it as a 90CP child skill, but it produces a special pet with all the standard Horrid Tentacle stats. Perhaps give it a unique delivery method, like being a Touch Attack and that killing the victim is what actually summons the tentacle. You could keep the limit on these "Eternal Tentacles" low, perhaps just 10 at Lv.30, while not impacting how many regular tentacles they could summon. I'd note that the "Eternal Tentacles" would still rejuvenate when they kill something and would still stick around after WM deaths, so they'd have the potential to stick around for long periods of time in infrequent areas.

[Stretch]

Near - I like it with the functional limit of 25 or so on one “room”. Would be enough to be entertaining, and a really tanky class is going to wind up killing 50 anyway. Although would like slightly higher so it’s a toss up at least whether it can take down an elementalist who waltzes in with full pets (we want to make them work for it if they are the active one).