ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Looking through it now, quick comments (2013-04-02 02:47 version):

- All of the decks have a level_range of 1-10. Should be changed to be in line with other item types? (1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50)
- An "elemental" deck" of Exorcism" probably overrides one of the effects (like inquisitor's weapons of crippling). Probably best to have it restricted to prefix only or suffix only.
- "of Legerdemain" decks look weird. If I'm reading right, they will either do nothing extra, or else add one tile traveled per round, and nothing in between. EDIT: oops, missed the later travel speed calculation.
- "Fortunate" decks have a wielder effect, which is practically unique for the quiver slot. (may be intended)
- holy (swords/coins/cups/pentacles) damage type: why not allow it to project onto empty terrain? It might not matter for Light damage (IIRC) but if it was Darkness it would matter for that one Prodigy.
- For "Hit Me" I'll have to look in to it, but I think "fake" is more appropriate than "true" for no_energy. (allows fail from confusion, placed on cooldown from stun, not 10x as attractive to AI, etc...)
-- It is definitely better to use "fake" (or whatever it is) for Steal Luck. It's standard on technique attack talents.
- For "Bluff" (etc) I believe there is a flag like no_npc_use, if you don't want the AI using it. (see the time travel spells)
- for "fortuitous" tactical = { FORTUNE = 1 } does not work. You need to modify tactical AI with a new entry for "fortune"
- Charmed Life should work, but there might be a reason other stat-adding talents (like the skeleton racial) are made the way they are.
- How much damage does "Throw the bones" do? (it's not in description)
- How does "caution" differ from the T4 stealth talent?
- Sticky Fingers + healing/multiplying enemies = infinite gold? (may be fine)
- Spontaneous combustion: are you sure you are estimating damage correctly? the comment says 500 at max, I'm getting ~900 damage in a rough estimate. (I'm also off for steal heart)

OK, it's pretty late, so I've probably missed some things, misinterpreted some things from not playing them yet, and given bad advice on others, but I hope it's helpful nonetheless.

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Some of my tools for helping make talents:

(incomplete)

I can answer a couple of these as they are from a design standpoint rather than code.

The "Of Fortune" cards that give a +Luck bonus is intended. There are few enough luck items and they're helpful for the class. I want decks to feel a little different than other quivers.

I'll need to check my notes on it, but Caution is supposed to be weaker than T4 stealth for the most part but capable of stacking with it. Also it should be dependent upon your Fortune level.

Throw the Bones...I'm not certain but I know that every level you add 1d8 extra damage, up to a max of 8d8, or 8-64 damage. I know there is some scaling there but I'm not 100% sure how that works.

The sticky fingers thing is something that hadn't occurred to me but does not bother me overmuch; there's not a whole lot of use for gold in this game anyway, and so woo, you can buy more artifacts from the Merchant. You're a thief. You cheat. A Wyrdthief cheats reality. I'm not all that surprised.

Thanks though Lukep. The feedback is helpful!

Yeah, special thanks to everybody for reports. Working on them all now; I'll have new version tomorrow, I figure.

Special thanks to lukep. Code diving reveals things playtesting wouldn't.

Agree re: +stat decks. This is placeholder behavior.

holy_ex: I'll probably figure this out now that I know to look for it, but have you got examples of projection onto tile versus projection onto actors? If you think it should project onto tiles, and that doesn't break anything, I'll do it.

Thanks for heads-up on fake energy use, didn't realize this existed (as a Cursed player, that's the first place I looked for my templates, and sadly I don't tend to look in two places, and Cursed energy use is a little broken.)

I'll see if I can make AI use Fortune tags-- else, there's probably little point in allowing NPCs use of any of these talents.

Caution: right now, in case you're curious, does check; if it fails, moves on to stealth 4 check. Basically just a bonus, makes wyrdthieves potential stealth nightmares. Could change.

Sticky Fingers: Hmm. There already is infinite gold via infinite spawns (like in the Ruined Dungeon), but it's not good, and I'd rather not contribute to it. I'll see what I can do.

And I'll deal with/investigate the rest, they're great comments.

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Proud father of and add-ons; proud mother of add-on

cant do anything about farming adventurer parties and adventurer parties generate farportals in my book....heh.

make sticky fingers only steal from humanoids?

"Whoa! This poison ivy has gold! Lets kill it!!!!"

fated b3 up.

Changes + fixes:

classic UI (playerdisplay.lua) now uses a hook to be friendly (desophos is doing it the same way so you can equip your glutton with a deck )
should no longer cause error on particle removal when no particle exists
players now start with a deck
dealer talents now make explicit the need for a deck
errors on dance of destiny, fortuitous activation fixed
base decks now have appropriate level ranges
elemental deck ego is now a suffix (" of the elements")
talents now use no_energy = "fake" where appropriate
no_npc_use now added to dealer, gambler talents (which NPCs will never be able to use intelligently)
added fortune flag to AI (overloaded tactical AI, created a hook; not ideal but maybe next version)-- needs testing, it's one of those things that I'm praying works
charmed life now raises stats with a friendlier function (i was just feeling petulant when i first wrote it)
throw the bones info box now states average damage
steal heart no longer throws errors on actor death, correctly reassigns faction at end of duration
sol exorcismus now maintains the ability to regenerate cards between sessions
grand larceny stat requirements changed to be in line with similar trees
full list of games added to dealers choice (wanted to do this line by line by talent level, but that didn't work out so hot)
sticky fingers will no longer generate gold from summons, multiplying mobs, or mobs that grant no xp; will no longer double dip when using melee talents like steal armor with steal life
steal life will now auto-quit when out of fortune

Comments:
Looked into the damages; what I saw was very close agreement between info box and actual damages. Sometimes, there were small differences, when I can't think of any explanation (wolves can't have any arcane resistance, right?) but the differences were small. It's possible you were critting-- because of nature of the class, I tried to build crit checks into just about everything.

edit: forgot to mention, player also starts with higher fortune

_________________
Proud father of and add-ons; proud mother of add-on

_________________
Proud father of and add-ons; proud mother of add-on

Will be giving it a longer try after work. It looks really cool though and very thematic. I have to tell you, when I started reading the description of the talents under the card generic tree and dice generic tree (cant remember names) it just put a smile on my face. Why SHOULDNT there be a sly trickster who learned some arcane talents to twist things even more in his favor in maj'eyal?

Maybe I used it wrong but the Bluff ability seems to explode the trap on both the enemy and me (which hurts).

In general the passives on the class while not using any of the actives seem far too strong (compared to the gain of actually using the actives more often).
One reason is that the effects scale linearly with level so not only the first talent point in gives you a good (to very good) effect but all following as well. Defense, crits, saves in abundance (especially if you add a category point).

hit me dosent seem to be behaving properly. It says it scales with the value of the card you pull but it dosent, every card i throw does 9 damage whether I pull a 2, a jack, an ace, or whatever.

I started to play with this mod and I didn't check there was already an update. So i'm not going to report the lua errors because probably you already got them.

Lvl 16 shalore so far. I choose shalore for the extra speed (class uses dex), extra crits, and Timeless/Fortune Certainty combo.

So far, honestly, I haven't really used the Fortune talents.... I just used steal luck to max my fortune for the passives from Fortune/Felicity which right now is really OP.

I have 258 fortune (Begginer's luck artifact gives 4, and charmed life another 25 luck) so I get from Fortune/Felicity:

10 defense points (fortuitous lvl1)
21 accuracy (good graces lvl1)
45 all saves + 45 health (not working) + 13 regen (charmed life lvl5, maxed this for the extra luck)
62% critical chance and 40% extra crit damage (turn the tables lvl 4), at next lvl I will get 77% chance to critical hit.

This tree really needs to be nerfed... spending a category point on this tree only makes the numbers even bigger, can't wait to get alchemist luck potion and lucky day talent. Numbers will be huge!

So with these bonus, I don't even need to use any fortune talents, specially because I have stamina based talents and "in case" I decided to ran out of fortune I could just spam Turn the tables because it has 5 cooldown reduction and talent is used for 5 turns and is an instant spell so no penalties for having a bad fortune.

So, my ideas for the class:

A) Remove Technique/dual weapons and Technique/Dual technique and maybe Cunning/Dirty fighting and Cunning Lethality and create new similars talents using fortune as a resource.

B) Change Fortune/Certainty, all talents except last one are 1 point wonders right now because putting points on these only decreases the cooldown. As a rogue normally is all or nothing you don't want to make fights last long because you don't have enough HP.

Denied could evade up to x attacks for the duration, Vetoed evade up to x saves check, and guaranteed could do x critical hits, all of them for a Y number of turns, also, remove the instant usage, and make them instant at lvl 3 or 4.

C) Add some talents that improves when you're on misfortune. Right now this class is all about keeping your fortune as high as possible, could be interesting for the class to have a more "risky" way to play with a low fortune. Maybe for another class like a gambler?

D) Haven't tested, but stealing gold with talents could be exploited. There are summoning monsters, healing monsters, you can hit yourself (not sure if this gives gold, but it gives fortune), remove your weapons to deal little damage to obtain even more gold. and you always can steal Fortress shadow luck/gold.

There's a curse that decreases the gold obtained. Maybe you can check the code to see if it is possible to make it increase it via this way or put a cap per map, level of the player.

E) Increase the "Turn the Tables" cooldown. Or remove it, fortuitous already has a way to reduce the penalty of misfortune.

Also, this talent can be used to obtain fortune. Just use it when you're low on fortune, use talents that consumes fortune and when the effect wears off you'll have more fortune than when you used the talent.


Really interesting class so far! Thanks for the mod!

I agree, fortutious is pretty powerful in and off itself, I have 218 fortune, 8 from beginners luck and 10 from prox's foot.

Im getting something like 30 defense from it at level 9 which is huge at this level, nothing can touch me.

All I use fortune for is the defense talents like Denied and Vetoed which are really good, 5/5 them gives them low cooldown and decent duration.

But then using steal fortune, I have everything I spent back.