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Umbrals - The Mechanics - WaifuApple - 05-28-2023
Hi, Appo here.
I'm one of the few people to play an Umbral in consistent capacity, and after months of doing so I've come to a bunch of observations, both mechanical and flavour-wise, that I'd like to share with the class. This post here will be focusing solely on the mechanics that come with playing an Umbral. What they're like in combat, and how I feel about it. I'll keep suggestions on exact fixes to a minimum, because I'm certainly no balance extrordinaire, and know that any changes that come (if any) will look a lot different, anyhow.
With that in mind, let's get into it.
Umbral Racials:
Fade Out: '10FP. 3M. Allow yourself to be covered in the shade of night, granting +15 Evade for 3 attacks, 5 rounds. (Expires after being attacked 3 times or when the duration ends.) During night hours, this skill does not cost any FP to use.'
The Mark: 'A facial mark that all Umbrals have. Whatever appearance it has, it seems to protect the Umbral from the powers of darkness, while making them weaker to holy light. They gain 25% Dark resistance, but 25% Light weakness (both reduced by your Scaled SAN, however; min 0%), and if they take any form of magic damage, they recover 3 FP. Furthermore, Umbrals have darkvision, greatly increasing the range they can see in dark conditions.'
Noctis Arcana: 'By tapping into the magic that marks them, Umbrals reduce the costs of all Spells they cast during night hours by 25%. However, this effect is reduced by your Scaled SAN (to a minimum of 0%).
Furthermore, your Dark ATK is increased by half of your character level (max: 15).'
Their first racial - the active Fade Out - is completely tailored towards evade builds. 3M, 15 Evade, expires after 5 turns or three attacks. Personally I think this is an incredibly boring racial skill, and it's not all that good, either. I'm not sure what the IC implications of being able to fade out on command are either, I've never really understood that. This aside, though, I feel like Fade Out could stand to do something more. You could have it give the player sneak for just as long and it'd still not be all that good, but it would give some niche uses and enable something like sneak attack in spellthief, at least. I'd much prefer it did something a little cooler, though, and a little more general, because I don't like that they have this active completely wasted if you're not an evade build. (Not that I think evade builds are going to use it either, they should probably have better options). It could take a hint from the mark and do something with magic damage, even. Reduce it, convert it to FP, what have you. Those are just vague ideas.
The Mark's fine, to me. Typical ele res and resist accompanied by the stipulations of SAN, as per the norm for Corrupted. Has a nice 3 FP recovery for taking magic damage, too. That's generally pretty handy anywhere! Can't complain about night vision, either, though it does make donation items feel kind of pointless to have, since torches remove that night vision and are worse. That's just a silly minor thing, though. Not an active complaint.
Noctis Arcana is last on our list, and it turns our evade centric build into a mage! A dark mage, too! Umbrals have 4 base RES! I don't know if that's to even it out, but suddenly I'm now compelled to build CEL and RES! You know what class has the passive for CEL and RES? Magic gunner? Where am I going with this? I don't know! It's not even relevant! Their STR, of all things (not a very dark mage stat I feel) is higher than their RES, with Umbrals running 5 STR. Not to mention they're only a good mage at night! They don't get anything but the dark ATK if the sun's out! 15 dark atk at level 30 and beyond is nice though, I'll give it that.
It feels like this sets up my biggest grievance with Umbrals as a race, though. It feels like a walking identity crisis between trying to be an evade build, a dark mage, and apparently there's also a little bit of STR build in there too. It feels like it's mid tier at pretty much everything it could set out to do. There are better mage races, better dark mage races, better evade races, and better STR races. You're probably picking like a quarter of it's racial stuff and the rest is completely irrelevant.
The weird "at night" stipulations are quirky but serve to turn off a whole half a passive at night. You could do anything here - make it work indoors (there's a system to tell something where not to rain/weather, and that can count for what 'indoors' is, to account for dark places / caves as a stipulation in it's lore. You could also just... add a reduced version of the same effect for if it's day. 10%? 15%? 5%? Something lower that at least says the passive is there. Heck, you could also tie this to fade out, and just have fade out have things count as night for the purpose of your umbral passives for 5 turns! Maybe less! That'd be niche but cool.
Racial Traits:
These are the optional Umbral traits. A bunch of races have these, but we're going to talk about the ones specific to Umbrals.
Tear of the Moon: 'You can call upon the moon's light to bless you in battle. Grants access to a special skill in battle called 'Tear of the Moon'. (For three rounds, negate the damage resistance and weakness modifications of 'The Mark', and gain +5FP regeneration. At night, duration is doubled.)'
I like this one! Not often you can just turn off your racial weakness at cost of your racial resistance. It's alright if you find yourself with a crippling light weakness that you need to patch up if you don't wanna DIE. +5FP regen is nothing to scoff at, either. There's the at night bonus, too. I think this is how at night things should be handled - they make existing things better, instead of being a requirement to turn them on in the first place. Also I guess we're moon people now. That's cool. The moon is darkness? Honestly, I want more moon things tied into Umbral, but that's a whole different thing.
Corrupted Ink: 'As you have been gifted (or cursed, depending on your perspective) with the divine tattoo of the Mark, you are more resistant to the draining effects of similar tattoos. The maximum HP reduction applied by your tattoo traits is halved.'
Hate this one! Now that Arcane Tattoos are more expensive stat cost wise, with some of them not really even that good (looking at you warding, there's no way I as an umbral am building fai for you. Can't even get lovely face so the charm one doesn't do any additional cool things either.) an Umbral most of the time isn't going to be running an Arcane Tattoo! Even if they were, it's 1% HP reduction to 0.5%, which is seriously nothing special. You probably only have one, so this isn't worth the trait point. If it were to uniquely make Umbral have an easier time affording the tattoo stat costs, that would be better. Reduce them by some amount so that Umbrals taking this trait get some more mileage out of it.
And that would conclude my rant about the mechanics of Umbral, really. It's a weird race that could stand to see some love mechanically, and to have some of it's skills and traits be more purposeful in more cases. If it's trying to do a bunch of things, at least let it's abilities all contribute more to that in some way. I do really like the idea of having fade out enable the on-night abilities, but that's just me.
Thanks for reading!
RE: Umbrals - The Mechanics - Autumn - 05-28-2023
Personally I just think that Corrupted Ink can be an alternative requirement for tattoo traits, where in if you have said trait, then you qualify for the rest of the arcane traits without needing to meet their more harsher stat costs. Most of the interactions with Umbrals are actually quite alright, with Noctis Arcana even leading into some huge spell cost reduction when paired with efficiency traits and/or other FP cost reducing effects such as chain cast, it is within the realm of possibility to get 100% spell cost reduction at night with Umbral and that's...decently scary to think about.
But that's about where the strengths of Umbral end, the +15 Dark ATK is nice but I think Fade Out needs a slight touching up as was brought up. It mostly falls flat due to being a 3m buff, giving it sneak again brings back an old slightly degenerative strategy involving sneak and wide reaching AoEs but its really not all that bad either, still, probably contentious to bring it back anyway.
I could see Umbral complimenting physical builds with access to more rogueish or backhanded passive like backstab damage, better flanking bonuses as well.
RE: Umbrals - The Mechanics - renowner - 05-30-2023
I think the +15 dark attack thing is pretty dang huge to be honest. The fade out buff only being for 3 attacks does make it kinda suck. If it cost only 2 momentum like southern wind, I think that'd be a good compromise. Or for it to just be reworked entirely.