I'm working on a couple of Frankenstein classes. I'm tweaking damage, cooldown, and animation speed, and regrouping skills sort of thematically, and also messing with some passives. Basically anything that doesn't require 3D modeling.

I keep wanting to release a version, but I keep adding and changing things. For example, I didn't realize until today that animation speed is a good mechanism for balancing some skills. So imagine you can shoot Berserker's Rupture with a bow, but it takes a second or two to fire the shot - things like that.

The vanilla base classes are all spammy all the time, and I'm sort of modding that out, but the balance is probably off at the moment. I have a potion nerf in particular that I'm continuing to use with this.

Both of my new classes have STR-VIT and DEX-FOC cross-scaling passives. VIT is sort of a weak stat in vanilla as it is, so that one scales from 10 to 50% by skill level, while DEX-FOC is 10 to 30%.

------------
Pirate - Pistol-and-melee dual-wield class. Passives and skills mostly depend on RH Pistol and LH melee. Skullmug briefly grants 1/1.5/2% health regen/sec after any kill, for 1-5 seconds renewable, depending on the passive level. The rest is a sort of Outlander/Engineer hybrid. Blast Cannon makes an appearance, with less range and more damage, and a bit of a cooldown. Implosion makes an appearance from the Embermage class, too. Long Range Mastery has been scrapped. Instead, the two weapons scale off of each other, and the Pirate gets an attack damage bonus paired with a smaller attack speed penalty, along with some skills that scale off of weapon damage. Between Skullmug and the bonus stats, the odd demands of mid-ranged melee/pistol fighting might be manageable. What I don't want is a lose-lose situation where you can never equip enough gear to stay in the game. But with the extra stats, a few scalings might have to be tuned down later on.
-----------
Ascetic - Kind of slow, goofy, and hard-mode. I'm not sure how it's going. I'm just trying to give polearms and bows some attention, where in vanilla Shotgun and dual-pistol got all of the love. This class has a weird double-edged passive, which restores or reduces health/mana in a linear way toward 60% or so (I keep tweaking it). This class also has large penalties to potions and fame, around -70% at the moment. Also has penalized gold drops, but gains gains bonuses depending on missing health% at higher ranks. This class begins with -20% attack and cast speed, but +20% total damage, and earns back 1% AS/CS per skill rank in the passive.

This class scales uniquely well with raw health, +potion effectiveness gear, and HP/time gear. And they can proc Stormclaw with bow attacks. At low levels, the Clovenhoof set is a godsend, and Blade Pact is priceless early on for surviving as a melee against champions. The pacing can be a bit sluggish, though. Waiting out the recovery to get more hits in slows down melee play a bit too much, but I don't want to make the healing passive too strong to the point of cheating death too easily.
------------

Anyway, if I release it as is, there could very well be removed skills in a day or two, which AFAIK would permanently destroy skill points.

I went ahead and uploaded a late Beta version. I might be close to satisfied, or burnt out, or both, at this point. Let me know if you find anything fun or inspiring:

http://www.runicgamesfansite.com/vbdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=649

I'm not totally sure. I know that there are ways to mess with the interface, but I don't know if the number and types of gear slots are set in stone. It's possible to make class-restricted gear for inventory slot that already exists, so a lot of this might be doable, but way beyond the relatively minor cut, paste, and tweak that I already do. You might be able to add extra "ring" and "necklace" slots and make "circuits" slot into them with Robot as the class restriction. You can probably have skills bound to them, too.

I don't know the best way to do everything you're trying to do, though. Probably make all slots "necklaces" and "accessories", make those necklaces and accessories robot-only, and so on. Whether you want these to drop randomly at all, or if you just want to add them to vendor inventories, is another issue. I have doubts as to whether you could equip a weapon or an armor in the same slot indiscriminately, though - existing gear might be forced to go in one or the other. That's why you might just want to do robot stuff from scratch. You might be able to wear more than one armor, but you might have to have some weird passive that makes armor 40% less effective or whatever.

It is possible to start with every skill unlocked, and it is possible to set up whatever level prerequisites you want for raising those skill levels.

Brainstorming is a lot easier than implementation. If you wanted to work this stuff out, you'd be looking at a weekend or three of Googling and messing around just to modify and rework a few existing skills here and there just to get used to how it fits together. I still hit walls and get stuck on things that seem basic just because it's a somewhat rigid and finicky system to work with.
Also, I don't know much about animation. I don't know how hard it would be to swap models, or if you could inherit the animations and basic skeleton. You would probably have to make gear invisible to make old armor not show up on your tin can floating in the air, but I really have no experience with that.

I updated the mod to include another healing skill for Ascetic. It's a somewhat dangerous active skill, but something powerful was necessary to help sustain through long fights and shorten recovery gaps between smaller fights.

Hi, mothwentbad

We're a group of Torchlight modders, holding up at: torchmodders[dot]com (I can't post links yet) We're a friendly bunch who are collaborating on mods and helping each other out on projects.

Feel free to join us. =)

-Wolven

Thanks, I didn't see this community for some reason. Some of the others seem a little more dead, not that T2 is especially active anywhere. It would be nice to get a balance pass or maybe some tips for where to find decent portrait replacements. I think my classes might scale too well, but I might move on to other things soon. Was was learning Actionscript before GOG released T2.