ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

here

I'm not particularly happy with the current alignment system, so it's hopefully going to change in the future*. There's also an additional talent tree I might add. But the current version is ostensibly finished and it seems appropriate to release it today.

Basically this replaces Anorithil's resource micromanagement with a completely different form of resource micromanagement, and changes some talents to emphasize building for both light and dark damage.
Since it doesn't use positive/negative energy anymore it arguably shouldn't be in the Celestial category, but, eh.
As usual, don't expect this to be S tier unless I've overlooked some massive exploitable bug. It's intended to keep Anorithil a not-ultra-strong class, hence there are both buffs and nerfs.

I had a little too much fun with the sound design. And yes, I'm aware that this is post is the worst advertisement ever for the addon.

*edit on aug 31 2017: actually the current alignment system has grown on me and i'm probably not going to make it more complicated

I'll try this soon since anorithil is already the best mage in the game not needing to deal with negative energy probably makes them even better

_________________

Aaaand I already had to upload 2 new versions because of serious bugs. (Did you know that the game is really inconsistent with how critical multipliers should be expressed?)

This seemed interesting, so I decided to take it for a whirl. Haven't made it out of the first zone yet, so all of this is based on first impressions.

-The alignment bar looks very strange for a [more or less] resource bar, to the point that it took me a while to notice the Sun/Moon oscillation. It also doesn't have a little helpful description if you hover over it, like all other resource bars do.
-I don't really see why Celestial/Light now starts locked, but its not like Anorithils have many categories, so its not a big deal past level 10.
-Removing Glyphs is perfectly fine, since its a terrible tree about making traps and it got replaced by the newly viable Sun tree, but it still leaves Anorithils with only one locked class tree. Still not a big deal.
-The way that Blue Hour interacts with talents that shift your alignment could be made clearer, since it had me thinking some kind of bug was going on at first.

Jumpgate II doesn't seem to have it's cooldown lowered at all. It's at 18 with Jumpgate I is at 4.

That's how the unmodded Anorithil jumpgate works already.

My EoR Normal/Adventure winner

Really love the addon. The alignment system is a really unique idea and implemented well. Just a few thoughts:

• Threshold - This is likely a bit too good. With little effort you can get a skill rotation which will switch alignment every turn giving all those tasty benefits each time. I rarely used Intercalation because I was procing the benefits so often anyway.
• Solar Focus - I wish I was clever enough to find a way to abuse this terribly. It's pretty good against bosses (I was doing about 500 each turn against the Final Boss near the end) but meh against most else.
• Blue Hour - The benefits are pretty high, though I never considered them when changing my alignment.
• Sear/Numb - Really nice. Star Song and Corona keep these up at full power constantly.
• Selenelion - Seems nice enough. Never got the gear to get >100% critrate though.
• Heavy Armor - No downside to wearing it as a caster? Nice.
• Shadow Simulacrum - No idea if you can change this to work on bosses, but it'd be nice.
• New trees - have you thought about adding some of the Celestial trees that enemies get in EoR, like Cosmic or Sol?

Definite suggestion, though I'm not really sure how to implement it... it'd actually be something pretty great for possessors, too, though. Have some sort of new color or icon shading or something for when your alignment isn't compatible with a talent. So if I were playing without icons and sun aligned, moonlight ray would be... teal or somethin', I'unno, instead of green. Align staff could also oscillate colors while sustained between... something or another. Yellow and purple, maybe, even though the base sustained indicator color is already yellow.

Trying it out, heh. EoR run, too. Took me 'till after the initial corridor, yeti, and most of the first floor of the emporium to finally notice an easy tell for what alignment I currently am. Checking saves when I'm not sure is more handy than any other way I can figure out, unless there's some sort of graphical tell if you're not playing in ASCII with everything turned way down. Keep forgetting it's moon that has the high saves, though, ha. I see 'em lower and my thought immediately goes to class cannon and moon's alldam+, when that isn't what's happening.

E: Though, that said, maybe you could abuse solar focus if you were running an adventurer and crossed it with some of those time stop type paradox talents? Maybe wyrmic or summat if it just needs line of sight instead of line of fire, use ice wall to give you more turns to build it up without risking damage doing it. Might manage something similar with some of the chronomancy artifacts, dunno.

The small Sun/Moon resource bar displays your current alignment.

Ah. Bug, then. In ASCII/Classic/Dark, the bar isn't displaying at all :V

1.0.4 released. Changes:
I literally forgot the Classic UI still existed, oops. Guess I'll have to fix that in the next version.
I wanted to partially grey out talents that can't be used with your current alignment. Unfortunately, messing with that area of the UI in addons is very difficult to do cleanly, as far as I can tell.

Re: fatigue doing nothing, yeah, I'm kinda unhappy with how that steers you into massive armour even more than usual. On the other hand, blackrobelol

Re: adding any sort of DLC exclusive content, absolutely never happening in any of my addons ever.

The Shadow Simulacrum thing was really something I meant to do at the start, but I hit the deadline before I got around to it. The new version has bad HP but you can heal it by hitting it, so hopefully that provides enough incentive to stay in the fight.

1.0.3 changed Solar Focus to break if the beam can't be projected to the target for some reason, which prevents bizarre behaviour with translucent walls like Ice Wall (the particle effect would go through the wall but the beam wouldn't). It does still have synergy with effects like Time Prison, but you can't Time Prison-lock a monster since you can't keep beating Continuum Destabilization forever, so I don't consider it abusive.

... okay, this is silly tiny, and I'm half sure it would have undesirable balance effects on top of it from what I (mis)remember of how the stuff works, but if it's not major to pull off could it be possible to make sure solar flare's combat log output happens at the very end of a turn's report?

Would make it more likely you can see if you're hitting something outside light/sight range without having to open the message log or something. Which would be nice if you're using it early in a fight to probe the area around to see if something you can't see is in the darkness. There's probably other places to see it as well, but it's pretty noticeable in the dominion port in the EoR campaign, which is basically an even wider maze that comes early enough you're not entirely unlikely to have pretty weak light/etc. radius.

Flare's really nice to have a better idea if you want to hold on to starfall or whatever for a turn or two (even better, if it multihits, you know the enemies are fairly close to each other), but it's mildly annoying when the log output gets shoved off the top where you can't immediately see if Something was hit.

E: Idle thought: Have mana clash do... something. Possibly mana drain damage in general. I could see causing alignment randomization (over a few turns for clash, perhaps), or locking it for a turn or three, possibly with percentile chance based on (some fraction?) of the amount of damage possible. Alternatively, have clash/mana drain have a chance to cause your shift bonii to misfire. Blue hour could zero out or invert to some degree (reduced saves, -% allw/e, etc.) and/or equinox do damage instead of heal. Stuff like that.

Keeps feeling kinda' weird that the clash does basically nothing, near as I can tell. Having to care about that would be nice, to the extent enemies taking a previously un-steel toed boot to your crotch is nice.

E2: Hrm. Not sure how much it's a concern, but it looks like there's an incompatibility with the EoR DLC -- psyshots' psionic fog tree also has an effect/damage type called sear, and it seems to be causing some weirdness with the sunlight tree's version.

Error it throws up is:

E3: Also, um. Are dream projections supposed to not have access to solar focus? Actually kinda' weird, just noticed the buyable tinker trees are missing their point investments, too. Dunno if that's normal and I just never noticed it or what. Jumpgate's zeroed out, too.

E4: Okay, this is more base game issue than anything to do with the addon, and more visual quality of life than anything overtly mechanical, but if you're tweaking things for improvement... ASCII mode would probably love some solution to this:
Otherwise known as what happens when you set all four circles to autocast adjacent. You, ah. Have trouble seeing what's inside of them, once they start overlapping. That not happening would be amazing.

Got this error while in one of those vaults with the spinny laser traps.

Lua Error: /hooks/revamped-anorithil/load.lua:32: attempt to call method 'knowTalent' (a nil value)
At [C]:-1 knowTalent
At /hooks/revamped-anorithil/load.lua:32
At [string "return function(l, self, data) local ok=false..."]:1 triggerHook
At /data/damage_types.lua:472 defaultProjector
At /data/damage_types.lua:858 projector
At /data/damage_types.lua:1210 projector
At /engine/interface/ActorProject.lua:219 project
At /data/general/traps/complex.lua:139 act
At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:129 tickLevel
At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:64 tick
At /engine/GameTurnBased.lua:51 tick
At /mod/class/Game.lua:1386

god I'm a dumbass

1.1.0 released

This is the first time I've ever had to break save compatibility in one of my addons

No, no, easy one to miss. I'm not entirely sure anyone's ever used that particular talent before

Only reason I ran into it is because a randboss... orc, I think, was hitting me with it.