ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

A variation on wyrmics, as a multi-elemental debuff-centered class.
Rather than having 1 tree for each element, they'll rank up melee attacks, mental attacks, and elements separately.
Still a work in progress.

I started by reorganizing existing Wyrmic talents that I actually liked using and am making it more different from there.
I want to end up with a class that's

• More fun to me (and hopefully others) than vanilla Wyrmics
• A little more powerful than vanilla Wyrmics
• Still uses breath weapons and regeneration

Defenses:

• Scaled Skin makes you take less damage.
• Lashing Tail should reliably make enemies Off-Balance, making them do less damage.
• Fungus doubles the uptime of regen infusions and provides extra healing and regen.
• Drakeheart improves that constant healing.
• Lots of access to negative status effects.

0.4.0

• Utilities unlocked at level 1, but only contains 4 abilities
• Lightning does more damage
• Lightning re-daze chance reduced to be (on-average) as long-lasting as other elements.
• Lightning Aspect Static applies to all your Element damage, with a per-target cooldown.
• Cold aspect is a sustain of its own, separate from the scales.
• Sand aspect applies to all Draconic Combat abilities.
• Acid Aspect unchanged
• Fire Aspect gives you more action energy the lower your health is.
• Poison does more damage, is slightly less reliable, is its own sustain rather than part of lashing tail.
• Confounding Roar does no damage but lasts longer and scales faster
• Poison stacks
• Fire stacks, and just plain stuns.
• Racing wings should change color based on aspect.

0.3.1

• Dragon's Breath can no longer double-crit.
• Dragon's Breath has working CDR again.

0.3.0

• Hoarding Tree replaced almost entirely. Now has: Trapfinding and anti-stealth, Wear Gems, Confusion-inflicting Roar, Passive fear on large hits.
• Active Aspects moved to new unlockable@0 Skills Tree and not all available at level 1
• Aspects no longer change your Primary Aspect as they are passive, Prismatic Blood now lets you pick 1 aspect from all learnt aspects to provide your damage type (instant, long cooldown)
• Fire Aspect Passive Mk 3: Elemental Vortex drains life from enemies, like the old Devouring Flame
• Fixed Scaled Skin not actually granting Hardiness.
• Fixed description of static damage to specify current life.
• Sound for Elemental Crash
• Elemental Crash reports Damage correctly.
• Fixed bug that was slgihtly lowering Claw Sweep saves.
• New visual for Racing Wings
• Pristmatic Blood lua error should be fixed
• DoT damage types updated
• Breaths condensed into 1 talent.
• Breaths use the correct damage types
• Ranking up the Gem talent no longer deletes worn gems.
• Gem skill no longer thinks there is a tier 6
• You don't get random extra physical resistance.
• Improved descriptions on how aspects and resistances work.
• Prismatic Burst works with ranged damage as intended.
• Elemental resistances are now part of the passive aspect skill

0.2.0

• You change Primary Aspect only upon activating the appropriate Aspect Talent (all of which reduce cooldown with level), there's no selection talent.
• Combat Techniques is available by default, while weapon techniques become locked.
• Draconic Body/1 has the movement speed effect, which is core to the class, allowing more changes to be made to Aspects.
• Prismatic Burst unlocks at level 14 as intended and has a real equilibrium cost.
• Fire Aspect no longer thinks its a movement ability, instead it's a status cleanse and its passive has become Stamina recovery.
• Storm aspect now shocks people in a small cone.
• Breaths scale with STR or WIL
• Worn gems are visible and will not make you do Gem damage like a golem.
• Many descriptions improved.
• Hoarding 1 now cares about Artifacts rather than Masterpieces for less tedium, and scales better.
• Hoarding 3 uses proper scaling.
• Overwhelm now uses your primary damage type and attempts status with each hit - this does make it better for some Aspects than others.
• New visual for static.

0.1.5
-- Splendour is Strength now lets you equip gems
-- Lightning Speed effect moved to 1st talent in Draconic Body, replaced by knock-back w/o damage
-- Fire Aspect active is now status cleanse, passive is Stamina Gain on Roar
-- Combat techniques unlocked, Weapon trees locked.
-- Overwhelm works
-- Devour now does normal weapon damage, not nature
-- Claw Sweep description fixed
-- Normal scaling on Greed is Good


0.1.1
-- Actually can switch elements

I don't have time to play test it but certainly it does look interesting

Let's also add a link to the addon here https://te4.org/games/addons/tome/revamped-wyrmic

Here's my feedback:

- Lightning aspect might need some tweaks: It has a very strong active by lowering stun resistance, a strong buff to Elemental Crash but relatively weak damage passive effect (daze instead of Fire's stun or Sand's blind). It invites people to cheese by using the Lightning Aspect active to lower stun resistance, then switch back the primary aspect to something stronger like fire while still enjoying the Elemental Crash buff. And when paired with Elemental Vortex the daze is worthless. I suggest Lightning aspect's effect instead of daze, to be inflicting the hurricane status or shock for very few turns, or simply stun and make Fire Aspect's effect to be something else

- Venom aspect works a little bit strange: Taking Elemental Spit with Crippling poison as an example, there would be 75% chance that the poison won't stick and thus the Elemental Spit deals full damage in 1 turn, but there is 25% chance that the poison sticks and the damage is split over a few turns. I think the crippling poison should be added on top to the base damage if it sticks?

- Fire aspect's active effect and passive effect to Bellowing Roar does not seem to fit with the theme, also the active effect lends itself to cheese and something so generally useful like status cleanse is better made into a general talent. And that the passive effect to Bellowing Roar is in most cases quite useless as I don't really see Wyrmic will run low on stamina.

I am thinking the active effect could be adding extra fire damage to your attacks based on the number of detrimental effects you have, and the buff to Bellowing Roar could be adding the Devouring Flame within range, while its damage & life drain scales with your missing life.

- Dragon's Breath is too overpowered. One point in each aspect is all you need to spam the six different breaths which has a 100% chance to stick debuffs, here are some alternatives to make it more balanced:
1) (I have suggested it elsewhere) One single breath skill that allows you to can select the aspect of your breath, cooldown is reset as you score a mental crit with it (so you could still spam, with effectiveness increased at later game)
2) Spliting the scaling into two parts: Making the breaths' damage scale with the levels of your elemental aspects, and the Dracon's Breath talent controls the chance of debuff and range (or simply shuffling the variables around)
3) Using the breaths induces a status effect which increases the equilibrium cost of the breaths for a few turns and could stack

- I don't know what to make of the Hoarding Tree, I feel hoarding stuff runs against the basic design of ToME. I think a tree based on the themes of hunting / intimidating would fit more

While my post looks like complaining, actually I enjoy the revamp very much and I feel it is an improvement to the old wyrmic

And finally a bug that causes Prismatic Blood to fail:

Some other feedback

- Prismatic Burst does not work like what the description suggests. I would have thought it would apply to all subsequent attacks while the sustain is on, but it is deactivated when you make any attack. Worse yet it deactivates when you use any ranged attack upon your enemies, or when you deal melee retaliation

- The breaths do not have 100% chance to stick debuff as suggested in their description

- For Storm Aspect's passive buff to Elemental Crash, instead of dealing a certain % of damage based on the maximum life, it deals damage based on the remaining life

Glad you're having some fun with the class!

Lightning and Fire have been the problem aspects. They suffer from me having taken their signature abilities and made them generic, my personal dislike of Devouring Flames, and Daze being a weird status.

I'll change around Venom (and Fire) so you generally get a reasonable amount of up-front damage.

After using them more, I agree about the breaths. The equilibrium cost isn't huge enough to stop you from casting 6 breaths in a row, and it's actually not very fun. I'm thinking now a single breath talent, higher cost and damage, with some way to make the cooldown low but not to the point where you use Breath every turn.

I had a fear effect that I cut for having nowhere good to put it. And Hoarding can stand to lose at least 2 of its talents, maybe I can replace it with something ToME-ish.

Prismatic Burst is working as intended, but it might be better as real sustain or even a passive. At the very least I'll update the description.

Maximum % vs. Current % is a mistake of the description.

Further comment:

The aspects could have more differentiation. Currently they are very similar to each other in the sense that a Fire Wyrmic is basically a Sand Wyrmic that deals fire damage. An aspect consists of:

1. An active
2. A talent buff
3. Passive damage type

With 2 & 3 you cannot differentiate an aspect, because when you have Prismatic Blood the talent buffs apply regardless of what primary aspect you take, and that the passive damage types are inherently similar to each other.

Now for the actives, they are mostly utilities whose use is very circumstantial, and thus they invite people to abuse the aspects by using Sand Aspect just for burrow, or using Ice Aspect simply to cast Ice Wall. I think except for Acid and Venom the actives could be replaced by some capstone talents that are generally useful (like the Acid one) or bring great synergy (like the Venom one), while the utilities could be fit into another tree.

That is absolutely true.

In Vanilla
Every aspect had 3 actives and a breath (or rarely, 2 actives, 1 sustain, and a breath), plus a damage type that they inflicted and resisted.
The breaths are all together now, they each keep a damage type they inflict and resist.

• Sand Drakes bit people, Rearranged Terrain, Burrowed. The bite was part of your equilibrium management so it's in Draconic Combat now, and the terrain scrambling was kind of a bad power for them to have, even though it was often effective. Too random, too powerful at times. I'm happy with Sand.
• Cold Drakes clawed in a cone, had ice armor, and had ice walls. The armor is a core Wyrmic ability so it's in Draconic Body now, the claw isn't strongly ice-associated so it's in Draconic Combat now. They keep retaliation and ice wall. Pretty happy with Ice.
• Venom Drakes are a thing I just made up, since actual venom drakes are mostly Acid. They poison people, poison people some more, and make poisons worse. I'm happy with them.
• Fire Drakes knockback, Roar, and did AoE fire DoT w/ lifesteal. Originally I made the knockback part of Draconic Body, the Roar part of Combat, and Devouring Flames was merged into Elemental Vortex (without its special effect). Perhaps Fire could get its knockback back. Not happy with Fire yet.
• Acid Drakes had all their talents stolen. Acid Spray becomes the basic elemental attack, Corrosive Mist is the other inspiration for Elemental Vortex, and Dissolve becomes Overwhelm. If anything, Acid was the debuff element since it had Disarm, Blind, and Armor/defense reduction. I'm mostly happy with Acid's abiltiies.
• Lightning Drakes run fast, zap everyone around them, and throw out the extremely awkward stunning tornado. Running fast is now for everyone, Elemental Crash is the static field, and I've struggled with a proper active to give them. Lightning is a pain.

Part of the reason they're circumstantial utilities is so that the talents don't get overstuffed with value. I could split them up into a larger number of talents with some buffs (splitting the resistance across them), and I could make the passives only-1-at-a-time with more strength. Both would make different aspects more distinct, but I'm not sure it would be better. The class has a lot of talents already. I found myself using the aspects almost exclusively for their active, rather than to switch my damage/status, which I did after fights. Do we actually want Wyrmics to have different modes with significant differences between them? I see this as a small step away from original where they were all multihued all the time, but I don't want aspects to go as far as possessor's weapon trees.

If they have different themes...

• Sand is the weapon attacker. You burst through walls, rip off their armor, and hit them. Any other talents should enhance direct attacks.
• Cold is the defensive one. You want to get hit, you fend enemies off with walls. Any other talents should make them tough.
• Venom is the poison one. DoTs, more Dots, DoTs on your DoTs. Any other talents should reward them for extended fights.
• Acid is the debuff one. Weaken the enemy powers, slow them, take away their equipment. Any other talent should make enemies directly weaker.
• Lightning is...uh...lightning is Fast, and was the secondary Mindcaster element after Acid.
• Fire is the other one. ToM'E associates fire with injuring yourself for fun & profit, DoT, and speed.

Mostly unrelated: they have 12 core abilities and 6 aspects at the moment, but I think the important/really core abilities are:
Devour, Claw Sweep, Roar, Elemental Spray, Dragon's Breath, Racing Wings, Scaled Skin
The others could be replaced pretty completely.

Instead of saying the elements are not distinct enough, I should have probably said there were not enough build choices. If the argument is thus framed then we would see whether we should allow multihue or specialization is a moot point. The best thing would be to allow both.

I think what we need might be a locked specialization tree that grants you extra power based on the primary aspect you have chosen, for example:

T1: Active based on your primary aspect. I suggest splitting the existing aspect talents, keep the passive talent buffs there but move the actives here. By doing so we could avoid stuffing too much things into one single talent, and make balance easier
T2: Passives based on your primary aspect
T3/4 Could be wyrmic goodies like summon drakelings and transform into a dragon

This would open up a lot of build choices without too much changes to the original design. You can borrow some ideas about the active/passive from this thread viewtopic.php?f=39&t=41766&start=30

And as far as core talent go I think we could afford to remove some so we could have trees like these:

- Combat: Devour, Racing Wings, Claw Sweep, Overwhelm
- Mental: Elemental Spit, Scaled Skin, Roar (Combine with Elemental Crash), Breath
- Utilities: Moving the utilities actives here: Burrow, Ice Wall, Shock, Status Cleanse

I've uploaded a new version, 0.3.1, that's got various fixes listed above. The Predator and Skills trees are more tentative than the rest.

I quite like the idea of a tree that goes :
Primary Element Active
Primary Element Passive
Something
Turn into a dragon

And such a thing may well replace the Skills tree. But I think it will take me a while to work out the details. Meanwhile, there are real changes (improvements, I hope) and bugfixes elsewhere.

In the meantime, there's a choice between Skills/Prismatic/Weapon Tree. I think it'll usually be Prismatic 1st or 2nd, Skills 3rd, but other testers have mentioned going Dual Weapons - > Infusion -> Prismatic...

In Predator:
The first effect is boring but a little useful, weaker than Heightened Senses over all but with better anti-stealth on a target (if you see them once to use it?)
I like the gem talent. It's not a perfect fit here, but it's a fine talent and was there before.
Maybe the roar should lose it's damage, maybe it should get a better / scaling duration.
I could see changing the 4th talent for something that protects you against most but not all of a group, a challenge or target-selecting sort of thing.

I think other testers choosing Dual Weapons - > Infusion -> Prismatic is actually pretty normal. Dual Weapons is a reliable stun, a nuke, and great mobility rolled into one. Rather than Prismatic not attractive enough I tend to think Dual Weapons is too good, imagine you give it to Cursed or Mindslayer.

When this mod get to a more sophisticated state I think we could do without the weapon trees and simply think something better. An corrupted drake aspect tree immediately comes to mind

Speaking of the updated version:

- I feel the Skills tree could be unlocked as Burrow and Ice Wall are an important part of wyrmic, that should be made available no matter what build choice you have. But I guess that's ok because there is not too much locked trees to spend your category points on

- I have not play tested the new version yet, but looking into the Storm Aspect I wonder would it be too strong since you could reliably make enemies stay dazed once you could land the dazed status. Yes we have talents like stunning blow that has a shorter cooldown than the stun duration once get to a higher level, but in this case we have Electroshock. So I imagine even when faced a stun-resistant enemy you could Electroshock -> Elemental Crash / Overwhelm / Breath, once you land a daze then you cast Elemental Vortex to keep the daze

- Since the Actives are now decoupled with Passives for the Elemental Aspects, I wonder should we buff some of the passives (especially the Cold one). They are now only very restrictive passives that buff a certain skill, so I think we could go quite far in tweaking them, say when you are hit with x% of your life, your scale crystallize and form a special damage shield that hurls Ice Shard, just to give an example.

Some comments after a little testing:

- Since I am the one who suggested it, I am naturally biased to the change about decoupling the actives with the aspects. There is indeed much less need to switch aspect to exploit the actives now, but with this change the problem of some aspects having rather weak talent buff becomes apparent. For example Venom Aspect has no scaling to speak of.

- Venom drake's poison do not stack. If the poison is impossible to stack (I guess this has to do with how DoT works in the game?) I recommend if the same kind of poison sticks again the original poison will deal all remaining damage instantly (plus other fancy effect?). I believe this applies to Fire damage as well.

- Despite the total damage of poison aspect is 120%, the poison is often shrugged off and so many enemies resist poison. I think it is not unreasonable to compensate the risk by further increasing the damage, or dazing the enemies who shrugged off the poison. As for Storm Aspect there should be some compensation to the wildly fluctuating damage as well.

- Racing wings' color should change with aspect?

I think you're right when you say
At first, I was completely lost by the ice-shard shield suggestions, but I realize it's a perfectly valid variation on retaliation damage. Things that may have made sense as part of another skill could become something completely different on their own.

Poison can stack, and if it's not doing so that's simply a mistake on my part.

Burning usually doesn't stack, although I should be able to make it do so as well.

The lightning averages the same damage as the other types, but unreliability is a cost. I think it could do with a small bump in damage and/or a reduction of the fluctuation amount.

Burning should stack. Its had special code for merging additional burning effects into it forever.

_________________
My feedback meter decays into coding. Give me feedback and I make mods.

And there is a bug for Prismatic Blood

New version is available, changes are listed in the first post under 0.4.0

Bug with Prismatic Blood should be fixed.

The problem with Fire was that Flameshock and Burning both apply a fire DoT, and they don't inter-merge, as far as I can tell.

Things I know I'll be working on:
Apex Predator 1 and 4 are bland and don't really have any decision-making.
Draconic Body 3 is bland.
Fire Aspect is weird and possibly a trap.
Walls always look like ice cubes.
I think they need more advanced tree options. They technically have 4, but you will take at most 1 weapon style, and Prismatic is near-mandatory. I'd like for them to have an option that competes with Prismatic, where you only pick a single element and use it all game.
I have some interest in adding BlinkWyrm and Spire Dragon talents; as they're weird dragon types already in game that a wyrmic doesn't represent.
A drake/hatchling pet tree would be fun. I personally like classes that have some kind of pet.