Miscellaneous Questions

[friedegger]

I've been getting back into playing Demon recently and I had a few mechanics questions:

1. Does cunning impact your chance to use debuffs like Expose?

2. All those new abilities like Mighty Spells have the following wording which I personally find hard to parse:

"The lesser of 75% of your strength and 100% of your magic is added to magic to determine magical damage and healing"

From the name, I would think that this adds a bit of your strength to your magic OR uses 75% of your strength score instead of your magic, but the wording suggests otherwise. If you have a strength of 20 and a magic of 14, then if will take your magic score (as 75% of 20 is higher than 15). So it seems "mighty spells" only uses your strength score if you have a lower or equal strength than magic. So it's of no benefit to a high strength character, which is not what the name "mighty spells" would indicate. So what's going on there? How do these abilities actually work?

3. What happens if you have multiple powers like this, like both Cunning Spells and Mighty Spells?

4. When a downside of linking is that the demon gets more powerful... is there any way of knowing *how* much more powerful? I've had very promising runs end a few times now by relatively killable opponents suddenly becoming ultra-deadly (most recently, that shouty giant).

5. With countdowns like Cold, do aura abilities and reactive abilities decrement the count?

[Ferret]

Hey, welcome to the forum. Here're the answers to your questions:

1. Yes. Cunning impacts the chance of any status effect working that lists a % chance (even if that chance is 100%) of success. It is opposed in this by the target's Vitality, which reduces the chance.

2. Ugh, I really need to find a new wording for those. Here's a few examples using Mighty Spells:
If I have 20 Strength and 20 Magic, my effective Magic for damage and healing is 35 (75% of 20 Strength is +15, which is less than 100% of 20 Magic which is +20)
If I have 30 Strength and 10 Magic, my effective Magic for damage and healing is 20 (75% of 30 Strength is roughly +23, but 100% of 10 Magic is +10, which is the lesser.)
If I have 10 Strength and 30 Magic, my effective Magic for damage and healing is roughly 37. (75% of 10 Strength is roughly +7, which is less than 100% of Magic which is +30.)
If I have 39 Strength and 1 Magic, my effective Magic for damage and healing is 2. (75% of 39 Strength is roughly +30, but 100% of 1 Magic is +1, which is the lesser.)
If I have 1 Strength and 39 Magic, my effective Magic for damage and healing is roughly 40. (75% of 1 Strength is roughly +1, which is less than 100% of Magic which is +39.)

In essence, they use one stat to boost some of the effects of another, but they don't allow that stat to completely replace the stat being boosted: you have to have some of both to get the full effect, and it works best when they are both relatively close in value.

3. If you have multiple of these abilities, they stack. For example, using Cunning and Mighty Spells, if you had 20 Strength, 20 Magic, and 20 Cunning, your effective Magic for damage and healing would be 50. (+15 for the lesser of 75% of Strength and 100% of Magic, +15 for the lesser of 75% of Cunning and 100% of Magic.)

4. "More powerful" and "enrage" effectively means "becomes Heroic", which gives 200% damage dealt, 50% damage taken, 50% chance to be affected by status effects, and 50% reduced SP costs and cooldowns. This should be consistent for all cases of "more powerful" and "enrage".

5. Auras do not affect those cooldowns, but reactive abilities do.