This was one of the starting places... but really, what is amulet of teleportation giving you? Free TPs worth 250 a shot? 1 Free item slot? What are you giving up for this? More life (survivability) or more skill use (damage output). These are the favor items that are useable.

Aside from compensating for slow ass Rook, it's a marginal economic advantage. It allows you to TP about early game when you shouldn't be blowing TPs in favor of buying gear... but that quickly runs out when your enemy has 5 slots of the mainstay items and a good favor item and everyone can afford to be carrying TP scrolls for ganks/saves. At this point the enemy hands you your ass everytime you meet him because you are outgeared.

If you want to go the route, get Coin Purse, at least that allows you to gear up faster and buy cit upgrades.

So... from there, we have the line of thinking... well, what is good about normal TPs though? TPing in for ganks/saves! If we combine the above advantages with just a few improvements to the gank/save usage, we have an item that compliments the 2on1s in the typical 3on3 matches. We can go it one further and give it a dodge bonus for DGs with accessible dodge skills. (DA and Sedna now... dark light theme of gank vs save).

We end up with an item that gives you an advantage when performing ganks/saves that nobody else can do quite as fast.... but you pay for it. less life / damage output. Amulet of TP will not let you hold a lane against a DG geared for this, equally.

Er, both the Amulet and scrolls use a shared cooldown, as of one of the first patches.  Unless you changed that in this mod.

They each still get their own timer?  I hadn't realized that.  I recall buying a scroll once while waiting for the amulet cooldown, and it was the same cooldown time as the amulet, but I guess that's not the case if you have a scroll in inventory already.

All of the arguments made so far by everyone are good, and since I a trying to 'unsuck' a few of the item options in the trinket shop, there should be more mid game options for using amulet of TP. eg: Carry around wand X + Flag Lock and Sigil

Is there any reason that every demigod except Oculus gets a little improvement?  I'm not meaning his awesome skills that really don't need a buff. I mean the dodgy ones like Sacrifice (meh...), Lightning Blast (does this even work?) and ball lightning (would be nice if it had a use other than tower fodder before having 5 points in it when it suddenly becomes EPIC!!!).

I'm not sure why you think that was intended, and it would be incredibly difficult to balance when combined with their death explosion ability (as they could be summoned across gaps to quick-kill towers).  However, from the code, it's obvious that they did want the lightning to advance / attack move toward the selected position, which they do not do because the wrong method was used.  That's why they're retarded and just sit there when there are no targets within a very short range.

The Uberfix 1.03 RC already has this fixed, and they work significantly better when you can just quick-summon them with an attack move target, and forget about them (unless through some miracle they actually win and survive).

Balance-wise, this change would greatly benefit from a longer targeting range (35-40 from uh, like 20 or whatever it is now) so they can be commanded to advance from a decent distance.  They also need a bit more speed, and either some DPS or HP (or a little of both), because they have none of either right now.

Also agree that Sacrifice and Lightning Blast need big boosts.  LB's proc should hit a lot more often, maybe for a little less damage, so it actually adds some consistent DPS to your minions and the grunts around you.

Yes, but there's actual code in that ability for moving / autoattacking the ball lightning, and it simply doesn't work properly.  It's a huge stretch to say they were meant to teleport just because they have a reticule, when the reticule is currently used (if the code worked) for expediting their attack runs, which does make sense because of their limited lifetime and disposability vs normal minions.

They just need an actual attack move command, a longer command range, and more speed.  With ~7 base speed they could easily move to engage anything within a reasonable range, without the huge and obvious balance problems that come with teleporting 1600 AE damage plus their weapon damage anywhere instantly at level 15.   If you really don't think they live long enough, extend their lifetimes to 30s from 20.  Occulus does not need another long-range mega-damage nuke ability, he already has too many of those.

Control isn't the problem with the long-range summoning, it's the fact that they can be made to do insane damage with the explosive death ability.  Remove or re-appropriate that, and then I can see the point-summoning being potentially balanced.

Also, making them non-controllable necessitates removing minion bonuses from them, and remember how terrible they were before they got minion bonuses.

Comparing them to Rook's towers is also silly, because they share absolutely nothing in common with them, while they are actually almost identical to normal general summons - they can move, be manually commanded, receive minion bonuses and aura buffs, and summon in the same groupings as all other general summons.  Nevermind that Rook's towers can't be summoned 20-25 units away.  It's a melee-range ability.

You should use the fixed attack move before you make a judgment about how useless it is.  Considering their limitations with respect to other minions, and how they need to be constantly re-summoned, I found the attack move to be an extremely convenient thing, especially when combined with a long ability range.  Summon them toward a tower or a creep wave, and go on about your business.  By the time you would need to micro them, they're either dead or expired.

Even if you're using the special summon select key, it still saves at least 2 clicks and a decent amount of time.  It also means they're advancing the instant you summon them, and you don't have to change your current selection.

You're still dancing around the core issue, which is that they'd be completely overpowered (making Occulus insanely overpowered given all his other abilities) if they could be distance-summoned with explosive end.  They're plenty useful when they're made fast enough and damaging enough and you don't ever have to micro them.

Lots of games have lots of broken things.  Occulus was a free addon for a game that had already been out for months that wasn't selling well or receiving much hype, made by a developer who was already focusing 100% of its attention on another game.  Several of his abilities do not work correctly, due to lack of testing / support, but it's always obvious from the code and the description what they were meant to do.

I can assure you, from a programming perspective, that it would be incredibly trivial to have made the ball lightning behave like Rook's towers - a lot easier than getting them to attack move upon summon.  Yet they otherwise behave like normal minions, not Rook towers, and nowhere in the code or the description is it ever implied that they should teleport in at range, and in fact there's a whole lot of evidence to support the contrary (including the attack speed aura they're supposed to have, but don't - if they were meant to be suicidal long-range bombs, that is not something that would have ever made it into their design).

The same is true of DA's supposed invisibility abilities - impossible to balance, and the game doesn't support invisibility well at all.  It didn't work well in FA, and in Demigod they still haven't changed the 'feature' of the moho engine that allows units to pursue their targets even when they don't have viz on them, thus invalidating cloak/invis - if you don't believe me, go look at the 30+ page thread in the FA mod support forums and look at all the insane things we're STILL trying to do to get cloaking to work right.

It's especially nice once you have explosive end, some serious mana regen, and a celerity flag + cooldown item.  You can basically use them as two-click fire-and-forget mobile bombs that will almost assuredly explode on something, especially if you have some minion speed items as well.

Ver 6 Favor Item things to try that are fun (let me be your tour guide)

1) Diamond Pendant + Staff of renewal on a lane pair of DGs.
2) Furious Blade DA / Besital Wrath UB with furious blade
3) Brilliant Bauble DG paired with Rook for health side lane.
4) Yeti / Shambler builds using Staff of the warmage
5) Pure Open QoT (think of yourself as mobile artillery support) with cape of mana (close when you use this)
6) Any ranged DG with goggles
7) Shield support QoT with wings of the seraphim or cape of mana
8) 1v1 Crucible + Coin Purse with Reg / QoT / DA vs a real demigod

hey - quick thought in case you don't already have something like this in your code:  check my enhanced ui mod's mod_info.lua file.  At miri's suggestion, I added a few lines of code so that you couldn't have the original ui mods active if you were using my version.  As you are using a customized version of the enhanced AI, you could make it so that no one could have the current enhanced AI loaded if your mod is loaded.  Just a thought in case you don't already have that in place.