First, I really like the idea of these as an alternative to shields. For any spell caster you have to judge the tradeoff between improving your defense with a shield or improving your offense (mostly, depending on type) with an orb.
But the different types of orb to me seem really unbalanced. Going through the entire list according to wiki:
- attunement - might be useful in some situation but I somehow never use a staff
- energy - worsening your successrate for spell but get the mana back when you fail? looks terrible, never used that
- glass - looks useful
- guile - reduces willpower both for me and enemies, no thanks
- mayhem - sounds way to risky
- mesmerism - so powerful I’ve used it for the entire game, would take an artifact shield with several useful mods to replace it
- pyromania - could be useful
- stardust - better than an empty offhand, worse than anything else
- light - useful early on for the see invisible
So overall the tradeoff ones never seem worth it to me, most of the other effects are fairly minor, mesmerism is super powerful as a defensive tool.
I actually use stardust as my main orb usually. Incredibly potent burst damage, very useful for mages who’s strategy is “turn mana into damage, then run away”. Also pretty good for melee dudes who use god powers when the going gets tough, really helps with the running away. (Though for them there’s usually better options in the late game.)
attunement seems theoretically useful, but I haven’t had a character yet that made it work either. Mostly because I haven’t played many blaster casters recently.
energy is terrible, I agree.
Glass I never used. “Do more damage, sometimes, but only to enemies you’ve already damaged significantly” doesn’t have much pzaz.
Guile requires pumping a lot of skill into Evocations, which is a lot to ask on a hexer. I’m already training my Hexes to the moon. And stealth, and short-blades, and fighting… And you need methods to deal with the magic-immune enemies. I think it’s a cool idea, I just can’t make the item work.
Mayhem is pretty fun actually. Can definitely get you killed. But it’s also a very big power bump.
Mesmerism I haven’t much experience with.
Pyromanio, I need to get a fire mage going at some point to experiment with it. The fire enhancer will be significant if nothing else.
Overall, my main issue with the design of the orbs is that so many of them need a large evocations training investment to become worth it.
Energy and guile are straight-up harmful if you don’t have enough training, and glass and pyromania aren’t doing much at all outside of specific circumstances, unless you’ve trained a lot.
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Ya’ll aren’t giving guile enough credit. It doesn’t take mountains of evocations for it to come online and being able to put 90% of the game to sleep is pretty bonkers. I’ve ascended a few guile stabbers, they’re quite fun.
I agree with @petercordia on stardust. It’s absolutely phenomenal on a blaster caster or even a summoner. I just ascended the crawl cosplay challenge with a NaEE using stardust the whole game, and the stardust punches hard with about 15 evo.
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For stardust, according to wiki the damage per star is
4d<[Evocations*3 + 10] * (1 + .25*MP)/9>
So let’s use 4 MP for easier math. At 0 evocation that comes to 4d(20/9) or 4d2, tanked to usually 0 damage by any creature with at least 1* AC. At 10 evocation, it turns to 4d(80/9) or 4d9, looks interesting, maybe I will pump a few levels of evocation with my current DE conjurer.
Mayhem is triggered on first kill, so does nothing against single enemies. Against two enemies it is actively bad because it will strengthen the second one when you get the first. With 3 or more it could get useful mostly if the dangerous enemies are spell casters. I guess a spellcaster enemy with haste and might who can’t cast is still less dangerous. For ranged attackers like centaurs this is super dangerous but otherwise it looks good. Might try this at some point.
imo energy is great - if it makes you fail, you get the mana back
True but how often do you cast things that have a non trivial chance to fail? Say you get 5% extra fail chance, which seems to be around what I get when I looked at it. Going from 1% fail chance to 6% or even from 5% to 10% is terrible, even if get the mana back in the instances where I fail. For a spell going from 20% fail to 25% that may be worth while but I never cast spells with that high fail rates anyway.
Worth noting that sometimes you also get mana back when you succeed. Chance starts at 15% and goes up to 45%, scaling linearly with Evo skill (so a little over 1% per skill). So you get mana efficiency for the cost of some wasted turns (or more skill xp).
I haven’t tried it but wanted to point out your description left out the main benefit of the orb!