ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Thanks for the feedback, glad you enjoy it!

As for the Dark Adept tree, it's much more powerful at high levels than I had realized it was going to be. I had intended for it to interact with item stealth power as well, but unless I go through and drastically reduce the base power of most of the talents I don't think that will be necessary. This tree is likely to see some more tweaking, though.

I do have some tentative plans. Now that I'm fairly confident unhealing is not game-breaking I'd like to make an advanced unhealing tree with more unhealing and less darkness damage. I'd also like to replace Aether and Nightfall with a new category, one that blends Arcane and Darkness damage but is melee-focused.

damn...

I just corrected the +stealth power issue of the Dark Adept tree by my own, reverse engineering your code and the stealth calculation method of the Stealth tree and now you are telling me its WAD:)

Its true that the tree and the overall class is very powerfull, but its why its so funny. Well, that and the new mechanics you have included in the class.

cheers.

v1.4.2

Now available on the Steam Workshop.

Slightly reduced the all resist granted by Dark Adept.

Changed the last talent for the Arcane Weapon tree from Animate Staff to Empower Staff:
Flood your staff with Arcane power. While active all weapon strikes will deal [scales w/ spellpower, higher than damage from their other damage procs] Arcane damage. Your foe will be Humbled by the display of power, reducing all damage dealt by 30% for 5 turns.
Critical strikes will release a burst of Arcane energy in a radius of 5 around you, dealing [75% of direct damage, can crit] damage to all enemies in the area. The energy is released in a brilliant flash which has a chance to blind enemies for 5 turns.
Both the direct and burst damage will weaken your enemies, reducing Arcane resistance by 30% for 5 turns.

I really liked the idea of Animate Staff, but it was just not that great in practice. This should be more appealing, as it gives you another source of proc damage, debuffs enemies, dishes out AoE damage and blindness, and reduces Arcane resistance. Maybe a bit of a one-point-wonder as only the damage scales with talent level, but Animate Staff was a huge point sink to be even a bit useful and this class has plenty of good talents to invest in already.

Using this for a while, though I like Dark Priest a lot I have two main complaints.

1. Righteous Instrument's Mana buff is quite high to the point of almost being broken in the beginning for a first talent, I've not had any worries about the resource in any game played with it.

2. This is sort of a side-effect to the neat idea behind abilities that run off of healmod or stealth power along with having Shadowblade talents. There don't seem to be enough Spellpower scaling talents that don't require an unlock to counterbalance the availability of all the good Spellpower raising talents at your disposal. Arcane, Aegis, and Aether are mostly it, unless you want to spend a second cat point on Nightfall (and without minions this option isn't the best in the world). Shadow Cunning alone should necessitate access to a more viable Spellpower-centered build, because you're most likely going to be raising the relevant stat for it a lot.

Glad you enjoy it, and I appreciate the feedback.

1. You're right, the mana granted by Righteous Instrument is excessive. My intention was to allow the Dark Priest to have a large mana pool, without needing to invest in Willpower. They have several sustains that are available to them, and the cost of some (Premonition, in particular) would necessitate spending points in Willpower if you wanted to be able to use it as soon as it is unlocked. As the Dark Priest is a caster/melee hybrid, Strength, Dex, and even Con are all much more useful to the player than Willpower, so I wanted them to be able to spend points a little more freely.
That being said, I do believe I went a bit overboard, especially in combination with the regeneration that they have available to them.
Interesting side effect of this is that Disruption Shield, which is normally extremely powerful, is practically useless to the Dark Priest, because their mana almost never drops low enough to use it.

As it is now, the bonus Mana scales based on the Dark Priest's Cunning stat. Currently it uses a talent scale, which are front weighted, so one solution may be to make it scale directly to Cunning, at the same rate as the normal mana increase scales to Willpower. Another possible solution, aside from a straight-up nerf, would be to add a materiel level coefficient based on your equipped staff. This would curb the early game impact while still allowing the player to build to quite a large mana pool later in the game.

2. You're right on this one, too. Compared to other Spellpower classes, the Dark Priest does not have a lot of options on how to use that power. I particularly feel that a the class should have a darkness based damage dealing tree of its own, rather than Nightfall. I was stalling on a way to make a unique tree, rather than just copying old standards and changing the damage type, and couldn't come up with anything that I was satisfied with. Nightfall was a huge compromise, and it probably never should have been locked.

I haven't really been active lately, as you may have noticed from the delayed reply. I have some plans for a rework on Dark Priest, but I don't know when/if I will get a chance to work on it. I want to remove Stealth and give them their own tree which works toward the same goal, but uses Invisibility instead. As planned it would play off of the lit/unlit quality of terrain, with the Dark Priest being able to (both passively and actively) un-light tiles to generate 'Shadow' charges. They would then gain certain benefits, such as increased crit chance/modifier and an Invisibility sustain, which would increase in power as you increase your Shadow charges. The Dark Adept tree would be reworked to be based on Shadow charges rather than Stealth Power, and would apply benefits when the Dark Priest is Invisible and standing on an unlit tile. Talents which currently require a Health sacrifice (Repent and Ritual Sacrifice) would be reworked to consume Shadow charges instead. I hadn't planned it, but a tree that consumes Shadow charges to cast powerful darkness damage spells would fit in quite well and create a balance between storing Shadow charges for defense and expending them for damage.

This is all very tentative, however, and as I said, I'm not sure when I will be able to work on it.

Tweaking Righteous Instrument and at least unlocking Nightfall would be a pretty quick update, though.
Let me know your thoughts on Righteous Instrument and I'll see if I can hammer out a quick patch this weekend.

Dark Priest v2.0.0 is up.

Hopefully the issue of having way more mana/regen than you know what do with has been addressed. I've also clarified all of the talents that benefit from Spellpower (there were a lot that just didn't have this in their description), and added a whole new, Darkness damage spell tree.

This was a fairly broad overhaul. I retuned a majority of their talents, totally reworked Fervor, re-scaled Righteous Instrument (you now gain the same amount of Mana from Cunning as you do from Willpower), REMOVED Stealth and Nightfall, added TWO NEW trees, REWORKED the Dark Adept tree, and granted locked access to more vanilla talents (Enhancement, Meta and Combat Techniques) and unlocked access to Combat Training.

I'll get a proper change log up tomorrow. For now, a couple of highlights:

Spell/Unlight is a new tree that plays with the Lit quality of tiles, allowing you to un-light them and generate a new pseudo-resource, Shadow Charges. You can become Unseen while standing on an unlit tile (granting semi-permanent Invisibility). The Dark Adept tree is now tied to this tree, rather than Stealth, with many of its bonuses being scaled to your number of stored Shadow Charges. Both Unlight and Dark Adept have activated talents that consume Shadow Charges.

Spell/Dark is a fairly straightforward Darkness-based caster tree, including a beam, a ranged AoE, and a bolt which can remove beneficial effects from its target, as well as a passive that improves the functionality of all of these talents.

The overall power of the Dark Priest has been scaled back, and, while still strong, they are (hopefully) a little more balanced now.

I'll be surprised if I didn't miss any bugs, and reports are always greatly appreciated! Also, I'd love to hear what people think of the new mechanics.

Enjoy!

I won a game with the v1.43 dark priest, trying out the new one at the moment. Just got up to level 10.

Aura of Unlight issue: it appears to have bugged out and is constantly activating Unseen at just two shadow charges, which puts me at -2 charges and instantly deactivates Unseen on the next move I take. I kind of wish Unseen was an activable skill rather than an automatic one - it's only in rare cases that the utility of invisibility overcomes the speed penalty + mana drain + damage penalty for the most part. The stamina regen hasn't really come in useful - stamina is rarely an issue. In fact if it wasn't for wanting to try out all the other skills that require shadow charges I'd probably just have it off. I guess it could combo well off disruption shield, though.

Completely random idea- what if dark priests' staff talents worked with tridents too? I think it fits thematically if contextualized as a pitchfork (tridents are basically staffs with a fork on the end anyway), and it might help distinguish this class from other melee-casters.

Oops, that was my bad. The costs and penalties of being/becoming Unseen were tweaked a lot, and I forgot to change the pre-activation check when I increased the cost for the last time before upload. All fixed, now.

It sounds like I have it tuned just about where I want it if the costs are greater than the benefits at early levels. Generating Shadow Charges should be the biggest reason to sustain the Aura, but the Invisibility can definitely be useful, too. I'd be reluctant to tweak anything too much just yet, until I have time to give it a proper play test myself, and hear some more feed back. I found that Invisibility, even at very low powers, is absurdly useful. The majority of enemies will just ignore you entirely, even if you are blasting them with magic and beating them over the head with your staff. It may take a little longer to kill them this way, but that's sort of moot when they just sit there and let you.

The damage penalty decreases with further investment, and the spells in the Dark tree can ignore 50% of the damage penalty with 5/5 Malign Darkness. Dark Apprentice grants a sizeable boost to Physical and Spell Power, if you store up Shadow Charges, which should help with the damage penalty, too. Also, it's a damage penalty, so it doesn't affect Unhealing
The speed penalties can be completely overcome with talents available to the Dark Priest (Umbral Swiftness and Shadow Feed).
Shadow Feed also boosts mana regen, as does Dark Thoughts.

Combine this with the spells that Shadow Charges facilitate, the bonuses you can get from storing Shadow Charges, and I think it's in a pretty good spot. Also, it might be worth noting that Shadow Charges persist indefinitely until consumed, even when Aura of Unlight is turned off. I kind of anticipated that low level Dark Priests, or those who choose not to invest heavily in the tree (the Dark Adept tree can gain all of the same benefits even with just one point in Aura), would have to toggle it on and off as they deemed necessary. Turning it off will remove Unseen, and therefore the associated costs and penalties, but you will keep your Charges.

I did reduce the cool down (20->15) and change it to instant usage speed with this update, though, to better facilitate toggling.


That's a thought. Though, when I think of pitchforks, I think of the angry mobs that would be trying (and utterly failing) to stop the Dark Priest, rather than the Priests themselves.

Wicked Fervor appears to be slowly raising my crit multiplier indefinitely whenever I do anything. Crit multiplier currently at 1025% and rising.

Thanks again for the report!

That's really odd, though, I can't see why that would happen at a glance. So far as I can tell, the value should be getting removed completely before it is reset if W.F. is active, so it shouldn't be stacking up.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to investigate in depth at the moment, but I will try to get that fixed later today.

Ah-ha, found it! You'd be amazed how many times you can read over the same piece of code looking for typos and still not spot them. There was a missing underscore in the check that removes the old temp value before setting the new one. It's fixed now, but I have no way to fix it for your character, unfortunately :/

On some tile sets (Scintillating Caves, for example), there's no visual indicator of lit or unlit at all. On other tile sets, there is, but even when there is the tiles that are directly adjacent to my character appear lit, even if they aren't. The only way I can tell in these situations is via mouseover.

I don't think this is really your fault (lit and unlit tiles have always behaved this way), but your add on is the only reason it matters. It make effectively using "Unseen" a bit of a chore. Is there some setting I need to change? Or would it be possible to make a more obvious and consistent graphical indicator of which tiles are lit and which aren't?

This is something I noticed as well, and it is definitely unfortunate. I found myself having to mouse over tiles on occasion to check their Lit status, and it can be kind of a chore. Addressing this would be beyond my current skill level, and I can't think of an elegant solution that would be within my power. I could potentially add a map effect of some sort, though I'm pretty shaky on those, and I would only be able to do it for tiles that were unlit by your Aura, not tiles that are already unlit, and I'm not sure I would be able to have the effect cleared by things that would re-light the tiles (e.g. Sun Infusions).

I did not realize that some tile sets that have no visual indication whatsoever (although I did anticipate there might be problems in places with the 'star-field' back ground). If the graphics are just swapping between a 'lit' and 'unlit' tile graphic, and some tile sets are just lacking the alternates, that could potentially be solved by creating some shaded versions of the tiles and overloading them into the set.

I'll see what I can do, but I can't promise that this is something I will be able to find a solution for quickly, or at all :/

Apparently I should have given Wicked Fervor a lot more thorough testing after I reworked it. While I was working on it, I thought I had mistakenly used whole numbers instead of decimals for the crit mod value and that that was the cause of the absurd crit mod value my test characters had. So I divided the value by 100 and called it good. Evidently, it was the stacking problem that I had missed which was actually at fault; I should have been using whole numbers after all. This is now fixed.

I apologize for all the updates in such a short time period.

I started a melee-focused run today and noticed a few things that needed fixing/tweaking.

I slightly increased the lower value for the accuracy granted by Sinister Power. I nerfed the accuracy it granted after I gave Dark Priest unlocked access to Combat Training, but I think I over did it a bit. Even with a point in both Sinister Power and Combat Accuracy, I was still missing more often than not at very low levels.

While I was tweaking that I happened to notice that Unhealing Strike was not actually getting the increased damage benefit based on healing factor that it should have from having 5/5 Sinister Power, and that the description had a mistake causing it to show the incorrect value for the damage of the weapon attack.

I also decided that some of the weapon attacks should have lower cool downs. I reduced them for Unhealing Strike, Arcane Repulsion and Humble. Blink Strike and Umbral Swiftness remain unchanged, for the time being.