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- Skills and effects affecting constructs?
Is there a way to find out exactly which skills, perks, effects, etc. affect my constructs? I'm levelling up my seasonal tech adept and some mechanics are even less clear than those of the traditional trio of classes.
For example: do psalm doctrines affect my constructs? If I add +50% heat damage on my weapon, will it only affect my weapon or will the constructs benefit as well? Do my range tree skills also improve the ranged skills of my constructs? Same for the critical hits tree?
There is a lot of ambiguity in the way the game describes many skills and effects and having now a class that splits its performance between the character and minions only adds to the confusion.
As a quick quality of life improvement, perhaps you could add a small cogwheel or a coloured frame to all the skill points and effects that affect my constructs. Same for the tooltips and item descriptions. So that it is immediately clear which ones boost only me and which work for my whole private army of mechanical murderers.
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I did not really play the tech adept before the season started, so I have no idea about its state back then. Good to hear there have been improvements.
Also, I'm not as motivated as to inspect the game files to find out the detailed mechanics, so I appreciate @BOROGOVE insight from his research. For all us less inclined to dig through the data files, knowing that they already contain the 'minion' flags for all kinds of skills and effects (beyond the obvious construct trees), I would imagine it should be all the more straightforward to have them reflected a bit better in the game itself (e.g. via small tweaks to the UI, like the mentioned tiny cogwheel or something like that).
I'm not suggesting the TA is broken, it actually plays ok. But it's far from the psyker (my main) levels of effectiveness, TTK and the overall easiness of its playstyle, and I think a big part of this is due to the interaction between the TA and the constructs being so underwhelming. Since they are so disconnected from the TA's build and items effects, no amount of construct offensive modules and skills will match a 2 x 200% damage doctrine with full crit / debuff / dot / dmg build.
I know that the constructs benefit indirectly from the debuffs and dots you place on the target - but then so do all the other classes and all their (psalm-doctrined) abilities.
Obviously, that is not to suggest that a TA should be able to run around with 16 or 20 vivisectors all with a 200% buff. But there could easily be for example a high-tier Mindlink attribute that goes along the lines of 'Your constructs share your passive skills and character effects with 50% reduced effectiveness' and spread the effect among all the active constructs - so the more you have up, the more the individual buff will be diluted to balance out the overwhelming numbers in case of the psiloi.
Anyway, not to ramble on too much - thanks both for your input on this!
As to perks If it's not written that it affects construct's it does not. Same goes for skill trees. Only Construct skill trees affect them. Other that that you can affect your constructs by decreasing cooldowns or applying statuses on enemies that increase construct damage (vulnerabilities, burn,slow,stun etc).
Season of Inferno also added gear specifically targeting buffing constructs. Prefixes are marked in blue (word Constructs or specific type of construct is in blue)
As to psalm doctrines only two affect construct directly +50 Construct HP / +50% Construct DMG
To be honest before Season of Inferno it was much worse to make anything worthwhile using constructs. Right now with the new prefixes you actually can make something out of it.
As far as the design choice in how constructs interact, again I agree, but we've definitely had that discussion with the devs. The reality is that ship sailed a while ago, and the decision is baked pretty deeply into the game. That said, I think you may be overstating the penalty TA's get. One thing to consider is that 40K Inquisitor heavily weights gear choices over skilltree choices. Perks are strong (and TA has a variety of powerful unique ones), but passives are generally not. TA gear, moreso after the recent 2.3 patch, has a lot of options for construct-focused builds. Additionally, consider the prospect of allowing all passives and skills to benefit the TA *and* constructs: you now have a class that double-dips heavily in most stats. Finally, remember that TA's have a whole extra interface over crusaders and assassins (pyskers have their own) in addition to a slew of unique item types (construct equipment) and several skill trees. As far as "customization", a lot of that is over on that side.
I'm not really trying to convince you that the status quo was the right choice. I'm mostly just trying to offer another perspective to help you avoid feeling like the TA is fundamentally broken. Don't get me wrong: the Tech Adept is, overall, generally weaker than its counterparts and in need of buffs. But there's a lot of room to play around, customize, and regain balance even without rebuilding the class mechanics from the ground up.
One last note: while I agree that the interface could really use some clarity and consistency, most of what I was mentioning isn't really guessing. The game data files are not encrypted (they are packaged, but easily extracted), and the skill mechanics are available to inspect. For many item enchants, there's literally a "MinionEnchant" flag that forces it to apply to constructs instead of the player. That doesn't help the *player* much at all, but it does give us some ground truth as to how things work.
However, the fact that we have to rely on rule of thumb to figure out game mechanics is not a good sign - there should definitely be a bit more clarity here. (I generally think the game would greatly benefit from a dev sitting down for a few days to properly document all the effects, using clear and precise language - the tooltips are too often very ambiguous and confusing)
While I don't want to derail my original post too much, I don't think making constructs ignore your skill choices (apart from the explicitly construct-focused trees) is a good design choice.
- First, it means the tech adepts are lesser siblings to the psykers, crusaders and assassins. because these effects (non-construct trees, doctrines, item perks) ignore a major part of their game play, while the other three classes benefit fully (all their abilities are boosted by the doctrines, for example, as opposed to only 1-2 for the tech adept)
- Second, it seriously hampers our ability to experiment with tech adept builds. There is very little variety as it is and such design choices just make it even more limited. You could have a whole range of builds balancing the power between you, your minions, making them better at melee, ranged, debuffs, crits - whichever path you like. Now all this is missing.
In any case, although we suspect things to be working the way @BOROGOVE described, it would be good to have a clear visual indication in the game - instead of just guessing and trying to figure it all out as we go.
A good rule of thumb is "if it doesn't say it affects constructs, it doesn't affect constructs".
Psalm doctrines generally do not affect constructs. The +50% heat damage doctrine does not affect constructs. The ranged and critical skill trees do not affect constructs. (Also, constructs cannot crit.)
Debuffs on enemies do generally affect constructs, for instance vulnerability stacks and slow/stun/shock/etc. I say "generally" because a few passive skills that are written as "enemies do less damage" are actually implemented as buffs to the player (and not to constructs).
I'm not suggesting that this is the right or wrong way to implement skills (okay, maybe I'm suggesting that writing descriptions which reflect the player-buff/enemy-debuff behavior correctly is the right way), but it's a lot more cut and dry than I think you're assuming it is.
Hope that helps!
Set this current order state as My default.