giltheb wrote:
Well all speed things are nice but they are useless for most of the class because they mainly only affect moves and bump atacks, and they hardly give an edge in the first turn of a fight.
For exemple what is the point of global speed for a solipsist but screwing its spell rotation?
Great question - and the answer is, the point is very significant indeed. The vast majority of npcs you encounter use dumb ai to choose talents. If you look at the code, you'll see that if they lose a lot of hp (percentage wise), they will always choose to flee or heal, if they can. So with greater speed, you will almost always get two turns before their first turn. Do as much damage as you can in those two turns, and on their turn, they usually won't attack you. then you get turn 3 and presto, dead npc mostly.
this works also on nightmare and insane, and is key to victory. I wrote a new ai addon to change this, but for an older version of tome

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This is also why any attack that does damage but takes no turn is so powerful. One of the greatest under-utilised attacks imho is lightning/fire/ice runes, because they take no turn. so you get THREE hits before they act if you are faster than opponent

This is also why things like circles (anorithils), moss (oozemancers) and other instant damaging talents are so fabulous.
By the way, this logic also helps you decide between a talent that does 400 hp damage in one turn versus one that does 2000 hp over 10 turns. do the 400 first, to maximise your chance that the dumb ai will then choose retreat or heal over attack.
and beware the cornerned npc !! if a master skeleton archer has 1 hitpoint and no healing rune available, it will still shoot you!
cheers, jenx