Makes for a fantastic assassin, however I do have a couple things to say:
- The summoning theme, which is apparently central to the perk's flavor, is not great? Not mechanically, but thematically. It's just increasingly bigger snakes with the same name up to Summon III. They don't really get any sort of... Nothing new to them? It's like the same creature with a bit of a buff each level up. With the reduced amount of Sorcerer spells taking Summon spells vs taking spells with poisons attached feels like a no brainer.
- The poisons on rest are all spider weapon poisons at least up to level 6. It's a bit odd on two counts: Getting spider product out of snakes, and also being a sorcerer. If instead of spider weapon poisons, they were ingestible poisons it'd also work better with the perk's "Poison Empower" mechanic.
Basically the Perk has 3 (Summon Theme, Poisons on rest and Poison Empower) aspects to it which are very cool but in practice don't really work together at all.
The poison on spells aspect however is very strong: I tested it on Karpie's fighter by tagging him with a Dark Reaver Powder, which is on Ghoul Touch, and if he hadn't drank an antidote almost on reflex his PC might've died on the spot. DC 18 2d6 + 2d6 CON damage is no joke.
Your average non-fort class with 14 Con needs to roll a 14 to pass the save if they're level 8 (Assuming no extra saves bonuses), and once they've failed the save they're going to lose 7 points of CON on average, which makes passing the next roll even harder. There's very little chance for counterplay too, since if you're rolling that low on a fort save there's very little chance you passed the spell's DC for Paralysis (DC22 or so on a GSF Necro sorc). If they fail the next roll, they're going to lose on average another 7 con. That's their entire CON score.
Opening the thread cus it seems like a really nasty result out of a single spell from what seems like an inocuous perk.
Great fun tho.
I feel like this has potential to be EFUA/M era necromancer though, Aberrant in v4, Shadow Conjurer in v5. In that someone so dedicated to SNAKES would be borderline KOS from jump once discovered.
So I don't mind it being pretty nasty in terms of violence considering the cultural attachments, cult vibes, etc. +poison loot is also one of the most common salvation items in EFU.
Some things should be scary, dangerous, and woeful.
Beware the BASH MU KOR.
Ay Yiat.
Giant anacondas. Flying serpents. Serpents so massive that the summoner could only bring a fraction of them into reality via portals in the ground (like the dune worms, but sneks).
This theme needs a lot of love and has the potential to be one of the most frightening themes we've ever seen.
It just needs a bit of a revamp on the escalation of 'serpent'.