ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I'm not the first to make a ghoul post but here we go anyway.
Ghoul is supposed to be a tanky but slow race. Their tankiness is more geared toward physical enemies than mages, which makes sense.
I'm not gonna make up new talents but rather propose changes I think would benefit them on the already existing ones.

Ghoul : stat part is fine but the one shot prevention bothers me. If you get 2-turned because of your global speed it is useless, if you get flurried it is useless etc... furthermore ghoul has tons of hp so it's harder for it to triggers.
Proposition : everytime you take damage you ignore x% (based on max life/con) of this damage as it strikes unneeded and nerveless flesh.

Ghoulish leap : no changes, the buff was excellent and the numbers are good

Retch : retch is fine but scales way too good so you have no reason not to max it, from 8 to 18 turns for 20cd? From 6% to 30% chance to remove a phys effect? Wow.
Reduce the duration so it goes 6 to 12, remove the damage and the heal. Now every turn spent in your vomit gives a growing chance of gaining a buff/debuff (undead/living). Buff is regen and phys clear (mini providence) debuff is stat reducing disease (stackable to a point).
This makes retch more random but the growing chance if you stand in it will ensure you benefit from it after a few turn. Retch is worse for the first few turns then becomes better as it ensures debuff removal and debuffed enemies, the fact that you gain a buff that last a few turns means you still benefit from retch after it's over so the lower duration isn't all that bad

Gnaw : give ghoul from level 1, and let the ghouls stick around forever (with limit of x per floor). Rest stay as is, could even still give ghoul at 5 only.

Thoughts?

Ps : obligatory "ghouls don't need to breathe"

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You can go here for a compilation of everything I wrote, plus some other important stuff!

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replacing retch heal with unreliable regen wouldn't be fun. If I wanted to make huge changes to ghoul and completely remove any of it's remaining viability I'd make the one-shot preventing talent much stronger, but introduce rot-like mechanism where upon receiving a very high single-instance damage you lose some of your flesh/HP pool until you kill/feed on enough trash mobs to gain it back

consumables are a sin and you know it

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A little bit of a starters guide written by yours truly here.

Nerfing an ability on the weakest race because the scaling is "too good" doesn't make much sense. If scaling is the problem, increase the minimum values.

Spoiler: https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4/commit/504398d2a8bd06c0385670d0dde35587f14c7f67

These changes were suggested in light of the git changes.

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A little bit of a starters guide written by yours truly here.

Only retch is a huge change, I want to buff the fourth and give you basically unpiercable all res on the first in place of a talent that never does anything after the early game because your hp pool is too huge.



I thought I'd do something different while I was at it but I'd be fine with what you're saying.
That said I don't think my proposition is a nerf, in my mind retch would become worse in the first turns but then thanks to the growing chance of buff/debufff you'd get more out of it, rewarding you for staying in the area (and punishing enemies). Or you were talking about the disparition of phys removal?

Retch is more of an after thought, the one I really want to see change are the first and fourth because they've been bothering me for a while

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Do you like guides ? I write guides.

You can go here for a compilation of everything I wrote, plus some other important stuff!

Includes general guides (inscriptions, zone, prodigies), and class guides (Demo, Anorithil, Bulwark, Zerker, Sblade)

after 5 points into the first ghoul racial, you can inscribe ONE infusion on yourself, not an extra slot, just one of your inscriptions can be an infusion.

alternatively, one infusion at 3 and two infusions at 5.

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A little bit of a starters guide written by yours truly here.

By pure chance I did a bunch of Ghoul changes the other day: https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... quests/478

First thing to keep in mind is improving the runes is being considered a large Ghoul buff, which is why my changes are not in the massive overhaul category, Gnaw aside.

Ghoul: I strongly disagree that this isn't useful. It will trigger very rarely and be incredibly good when it does, the same style of effect as Cauterize. I agree that it is out of theme and has antisynergy with the high HP pool, though. Completely changing this effect seems like a good idea. Could do something like your proposal, or maybe gain a % of life as die_at, or whatever.

Retch: I came to the same conclusion about Retch you did as soon as I looked at it, heh. I'm happy with the existing functionality though, and even with the scaling nerfed (fixed to 10 radius) it comes out to 200-400 total life+damage early game.

Gnaw: Similar thinking here as well. I love the idea of focusing on the ghoul summon part of this, and I spent a pretty good amount of time tuning the new ghoul stats to keep them from being useless. Its pretty fun to wind up with 3+ ghouls from 1 Gnaw cast, and Gnaw is a solid melee talent now. If we went with a permaghoul model the ghoul stats would have to be adjusted until they're pretty underwhelming which is kinda boring. Pet stats are hard to get right though so this might still need adjustment.

While I'm here, a couple other racial proposals:

Halfling: Change Militant Mind to add +5..40% of their Cunning as all powers (Mind, Phys, Spell, Steam, ...). Really nice for hybrids.

Yeek: Allow Dominant Mind to work on all ranks but only last 2 turns if the rank is above elite, add an extra effect to Quickened that gives you a full turn of energy anytime damage puts you below or is taken while below 30%. Probably 18..10 CD or so on the effect. Should reliably make your turn start when you get low in most situations. Awkward interaction with die_at, though.

For the dominant mind change, would higher rank enemies revert back to the enemy faction after it wears off rather than dying? Otherwise that would be an instant kill against any enemy with low enough mindsave

Yes :p

Okay, that sounds pretty fun then
Edit: Although I think it might be more interesting if they also reverted back to enemy faction if you damaged them so that it wouldn't just be used to get 2 free turns of attacks (especially with yeeks global speed)

Technically Yeeks 'Obliterate' the Mind of the enemy the use Dominant Will on. Kind of hard thematically for them to bounce back to the enemy faction.

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Yeah, the whole idea is to turn them into a brainless husk before instant death. At the very least they would turn back with major setbacks.

Ghoul actually isn't that bad right now on some classes. Remember that any changes will also affect enemies which could be annoying. Just give them 100% stun resistance and call it good. Literally reason to nerf Retch since it's not even comparable to really good racials like Nature's Pride and Timeless.

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