ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Thanks for the input all! New version is up.

-Fixed Solar Burst not always triggering from Whirlwind Strike.
-Revised scaling on pretty much all the "scales with stats" talents to take more advantage of diminishing returns functions and stuff. Also adjusted target values in some cases. In entirely unrelated news, I Can Carry The World was hilarious on a Phoenix Knight.
-Changed immunity talents to scale with secondary stats. I'm not quite pulling the immunities back yet, but at least you'll need 100 in the secondary stats to actually get the maxed immunities, so you have to level into them and get some boosts. Cap bonuses remain 6%/raw talent level, so maxing the talents will make 100% immunity possible if supplemented by sufficient gear.
-Mana Bolt now simply reduces arcane resources in addition to damage, rather than actually causing additional Manaburn damage. Also nerfed bonus damage percentage for other Mana Flare talents slightly.
-Drink Deep (activated) now also heals you for a percentage of any damage done by your Erosion effects.
-Fixed the issue with not needing to learn Eldritch Body to affect weapon stats. Armour Training correctly changes to Magic required for me. That was an existing character? I think the check there is when the first Eldritch Body talent level is learned, so if the character already had that it probably didn't get the new check.
-Started Mage Knights with a level of Eldritch Body since it's kinda necessary for them to equip basic gear.
-Eldritch Body will now show shield and gloves offensive stats.
-Erosion now replaces duration if new duration higher, adds +1 (rather than one-fourth the lower) if lower.
-When using a Shield, failing to trigger Eldritch Combat gives chance to Block, rather than Block being one of the triggerable talents.
-Tectonic Patience now only lowers detrimental effects and cooldowns by 1, and doesn't restore resources until raw talent level 2, maintain beneficial effects until level 3, lower detrimental effects until level 4, or lower cooldowns until level 5.
-Astral Blitz should no longer be able to self-target.
-Astral Jaunt won't add dead targets to the potential target list.

Aww, no more getting Aether Permeation at 30 and becoming unkillable on a Mana Knight...

Remember that issue of changing stat modifiers (STR, DEX to MAG) on non-mageknight classes?
Apparently that applies to prodigy stat requirements too...

Huh. That is a thing that exists. Hrm. I might have to lower Mana Knight Arcane resist in general. Which would make a certain amount of sense, since Arcane is supposed to be less commonly resisted I believe.



That's happening on the latest version?

...Actually, that's an especially weird one since the code to change talent requirements should only be running on learning the first Eldritch Body talent. I'll look into it further.

Had this error pop up very early in an EoR run:

Uploaded another update.

-Riptide talents cooldowns and resource costs increased some.
-Flow correctly set to not block "other" effects (and thereby occasionally allow Eldritch Combat to trigger multiple times per round).
-Phoenix Blood no longer grants passive die_at, now grants Healing Modifier.
-Phoenix Soul no longer grants Healing Modifier, and also now grants a Heroism effect rather than a life boost.
-Drink Deep active effect changed. Now grants a pool of "drinks" which, like flow, get automatically spent, but drinks are spent each turn to restore health or lower detrimental effects or cooldowns rather than spent reactively.
-As With The Tides now swaps between granting and restoring drinks and flow rather than previous effects. Active function now lowers cooldown of both Drink Deep and Go With The Flow based on the other's points.
-Erosion no longer affects paradox, because that gets weird.
-Fixed that "gen_ec_boost" glitch.
-Astral Jaunt no longer allows multi-teleporting self.

Earth Burst's tooltip tells me that the ground effect will last 40-60 turns.... but it lasts about six. 60 turns of 50% per turn of various debuffs is pretty crazy strong, so I don't think the actual duration should be changed to match the tooltip, but one or the other should change as they mismatch right now.

Edit: While I'm talking about Earth Burst, the ground effect is kind of obnoxious.... I can't see anything through it at all most of the time. Maybe make it less slimy? Just a thought.

_________________
Let slip the toast of war.

Looks like I had the numbers in the wrong order. That'll be fixed in the next updated. Will also change the terrain effect. Thanks!

I've updated a new version. This one is pretty extensive; enough so that between it and the other changes made so far I've edited the OP to account for new details. I'm trying to get the balance tuned in at least a bit better (not ready to say it's quite right yet, but should be closer). Quite a few raw numbers have been toned down, resource costs bumped up some, and I'm assigning "target" values a bit more precisely rather than by my gut. Some highlights:

-Eldritch Combat now provides an attack speed boost for unarmed attacks and daggers (the latter based on Dexterity), to make Storm Knights make a bit more sense and finish making unarmed combat a viable fighting style for them.

-Eldritch Body now provides a degree of "one-shot protection" because going from full health to 0 without being able to do anything annoys me.

-Eldritch Surge now converts Stamina to Mana/Psi rather than just boosting it, and now that does apply to EC triggers. So if you're making regular attacks, your casting resource can be potentially significantly extended, but if you're using a lot of active talents you might not have the stamina to fuel your magic.

-Focused Strike is now a more rush-like talent, and has a boost to the attack itself rather than a short-duration general boost. Doing this allowed me to remove Combat Techniques from mage knights entirely; they don't really need to have access to Blinding Speed, and if they want a Perfect Strike-like effect they can spend the cat point for Weapon Supremacy and pick up Instant Draw. Whirlwind Strike and Rapid Strike are also more cohesive about what sort of effects they provide (defensive and recovery, respectively).

-The second class talent tree is now four distinct sustains each with their own costs, now cost stamina and mana/psi rather than just stamina, and the costs scale with both talent level and the relevant stat just like the benefits do. All supplemental activated effects have been removed (though some have replaced or in some cases been added to functions of other talents). Many of the numbers, especially defensive ones, have been nerfed in this area, and they're now always on a deliberate trajectory rather than weird things like Phoenix Soul's auto-cure being based on your current regen or Steelskin's flat DR being based on armor+hardiness+phys resist. Since the third talent is now a sustain as well, in most cases the effects have been spread out, so these talents generally won't provide nearly as many benefits each. Overall, I'm hoping this should result in a substantial reduction to these classes' passive power levels.

-The immunity talents now also impose a minor weakness to a more-or-less thematically appropriate energy type. Also figured out a workaround for the whole Mana Knight + Aether Permeation = Invincible issue (if you get Aether Permeation, the Arcane resist becomes only a quarter as strong, but the other three quarters become Arcane affinity).

Been playing a Shalore Storm Knight to test this out. I'm quite liking them overall, although that doesn't mean there isn't room from improvement.

Thoughts/Feedback:

-Mage Knights seem pretty strong overall, although I'm only playing on Normal. Good ranged magic abilities to streamline the early game which then provide good proc damage for their above-average melee. They seem slightly lacking in survivability in general, but this can change a lot from one branch to the next.
-That said, they're certainly under pretty heavy resource constraints. All their unique spells are quite costly and their many sustains add up into a vastly reduced max resource pool. This is especially bad for Storm Knights, who also want Tempest, Feather Wind, Hurricane and Thunderstorm[In decreasing order of relevance].
-Talking about their sustains, Mage Knights are basically immune to sustain deactivating, despite being so reliant on them. In some ways, they're actually LESS vulnerable to sustain deactivation then a class with no sustains at all, because enemies will still use moves like Corrupted Negation or Entropy on them. All of their sustains both have cooldowns of ZERO while being instant to activate. There's a good reason there are basically no talents like this in the main game. I'd suggest either giving most of them a cooldown[Eldritch Combat could probably get away with being a straight-up toggle] or making them no longer instant to activate[Again, Eldritch Combat could probably stay instant].
-The Storm Invocations tree[And probably the corresponding magic damage trees for the other Mage Kngihts] don't take +lightning damage% items into account when displaying the damage. This makes them look weaker then they are compared to the basic Archmage-style spells, which DO include those damage boosts. EDIT: Apparently this only applies to the first two talents[Beam and Wave]. The last two display damage numbers properly.
-Storm Bolt, meanwhile, just seems to behave weirdly in general. It has a projectile speed, despite being a beam and I swear I once saw a snake dodge out of the way of it just like it would a projectile. I've seen it chain through walls, but not deal damage to the creature on the other side of the wall. I've also seen it hit twice, which the description says it shouldn't.
-I find it pretty weird that Wind Stride can be triggered by Eldritch Combat, especially since the talent doesn't explicitly tell you it can be, like most other Mage Knight talents do.
-Wind Stride and Whirlwind Dervish have an interesting synergy, although not one that seems useful for much. It mostly seems good for getting a bunch of procs off while dealing very little physical weapon damage.
-Zephyr Dance says that it deals 1% weapon damage, which seems uselessly small. It deals much more damage then that[80-120% weapon damage, by my estimate]
-Rapid Strike says it gives you a defensive effect with magnitude 145 for 109 turns at level 1. In reality, it gave me a 73 magnitude shield for a mere three turns.
-Rapid Strike's various effects strike me as somewhat strange. A damage shield, for instance, is straight-up worse then gaining additional health or a negative life threshold because it doesn't get as many damage reducing effects applied to it[IIRC, damage to damage shields applies before it gets reduced by elemental resistances].
-Eldritch Body's new secondary effect seems needlessly convoluted. If the intention is to protect you from one-hit kills, couldn't you just give it a resilience effect like Ghoul/Sacrifice/Suncloak?

-EDIT: Whirlind Dervish affects enemy patrols on the world map. It does no damage, but I'm still fairly sure this isn't intended.

-DOUBLEEDIT: Lightning Ride's damage at talent level 5 is really high. Like, it's Storm Knight's most damaging talent. And it can be activated without teleporting yourself through Eldritch Combat. The weird thing is not that it does good damage[Although it does very good damage], but that it turns from being a nigh-useless Eldritch Combat proc to being the absolute best Eldritch Combat proc with talent levels.

Thanks for the feedback!


I'll keep an eye on this. Trying to tone down some of the sheer defensive numbers was one of the goals for this last update, but it's not impossible I went too far in the other direction. Storm knights (and mind knight) though have the weakest defenses of the bunch by design, and will have to compensate a lot more with mobility.


Back when I was originally working on them, resource limits were supposed to be one of their major weaknesses, and another goal of this last update was to get back to that. And likewise, it's entirely possible I went too far with it, so I shall keep an eye on that as well.


This is intentional. The powers are designed as sustains mainly so they can be toggled. The point about enemies potentially wasting turns on sustain breakers is a good one, though. It's not something that concerns me enough to make the sustains more costly to reactivate, but if I can find some way around that I'll implement it (the AI functionality is rather beyond me at the moment, though I do have some intention to look into it a bit more when 1.6 comes out, since an AI overhaul appears to be one of its main features).


Errors on my part. Will fix!


This is probably my "copy-paste and fiddle" approach to lua rearing its ugly head. I'll look into it.


Probably forgot to specify it in the description. But since the Free Movement effect it provides doesn't break on non-movement like many movement speed boosts, it is something you can trigger and use as you need it.


Yeah I'm not 100% certain Whirlwind Dervish doesn't have some sort of broken combo possible, but I'll fix it if it becomes apparent.


Both mistakes in my formatting the descriptions. Will fix.


Huh, interesting. That was outside of my system knowledge. I do have a sort of vague intent that the different effects of the different Weapons Master talents may vary some in power (in particular I tried to give the single weapon option a bit of an edge over the others in general, since it has nothing going for it in the base mechanics), but not one that I've really put much effort into. At some point I'll probably do some competitive balancing with those, in particular try to make them synergistic with the fighting style and maybe make it so each fighting style is kinda strongest for one of the talents and weakest for another or something.


The intention is more to protect against one-turn kills. Be it a single overpowering instance of damage, an overwhelming Flurry or Assault, stepping around a corner only to find out there's three mages in the next room, etc. It's much closer to Cauterize in purpose, although strictly and substantially inferior.


Nope, will fix.


Yeah it's kinda their equivalent to Phoenix Burn, since storm knights are supposed to have the second-best offense. That said, the damage coming online late is probably a little weird. Maybe I'll shift it to damage->blind->stun rather than blind->stun->damage. ...Come to think of it daze may be saner than stun for this one too.

Thanks again for the feedback, I'll keep it in mind when next updating!

Actually, the above was written before I took a look at Eldritch Surge. I didn't know that it converted Stamina into Mana or that it would be activated by Eldritch Combat if you trigger it while you don't have enough mana for your spells. Its probably fine, all in all.

Found a bug with Flow.

Classes are quite fun; a lot of times I'm in the mood to play a bumpy class, and this whole meta-class is very bump-centric. Thanks for the wide variety of new classes in that regard. Mana Knight rares are the bane of Mage Knights. Sea Knight might be too strong with all of the status cleansing and resource/life regeneration, but tweaks to talent costs and cooldowns seem to have reined that in a bit. First impression was that all of the classes were somewhat over-powered, but you've tuned things up quite a bit and they seem to be somewhere in the wide spectrum of the standard classes now, which is about as close to 'balanced' as you can really call anything.

Great add on

That should be fixed in the latest upload. Other notes:

-General bugfixes.
-Lightning Ride now does Damage->Blind->Daze rather than Blind->Stun->Damage.
-Whirlwind Dervish shouldn't trigger on the world map anymore.
-Eroding water attacks now deal triple damage against lower-rank opponents, but deal their full damage instantly rather than as a DoT. This serves two purposes. First, it lets sea knights clear out trash enemies more quickly, although they're still at an effective -40% energy damage compared to other mage knights, on top of splitting the damage between two types (though they retain the benefits of lower costs and cooldowns). Second, and more importantly, it keeps sea knight rares and randbosses from being completely stupid.
-Rejiggered Flow and Drinks some more. Now they settle towards a certain baseline rather than 0, proper tide will prevent diminishing or speed recovery, and chance to gain from erosion is much lower. May need to fiddle with these numbers though, have to playtest a bit still.
-Individual Gemstone Shields no longer sustained. Base Gemstone Shield is always random. Individual ones can be triggered to get specific shield starting at raw talent level 3, but doing so foregoes the no_energy benefit. Eldritch Combat checks the individual shields rather than the main shield (they can be triggered by EC before TL 3, as long as the gems themselves are known).
-Cleansing Waters and Pure Waters are now instant use at level 3, Flowing Waters at level 5. Cleansing Waters and Pure Waters no longer give a portion of a turn if the target already has the lingering benefit. Rather, all Healing Waters talents now give bonus flow if the instant function isn't useful to the target, and bonus drinks if the target already has the lasting function.
-Lowered the duration of Gemstone Shield and the Foundations of Aegis shield.
-Rescaled some of the talents in the various third class trees, mainly those that used a spell damage calculation but didn't actually do damage. Should cause them to be somewhat more Spellpower-dependent and generally weaker at the early levels.



Thanks!

I've gotten to level 43ish on my Storm Knight and have only died once[And that death doesn't really count, as explained below]. For me, even on Normal, that's pretty impressive, especially considering that I did Dark Crypt.

General Thoughts:

-My damage is pretty high, but not unreasonably so[Especially considering that I took Eldritch Might/Windblade]. Storm Burst/Storm Blast/Lightning Ride all look pretty indistinguishable since they cover similar areas of effect and have similar animations. I think that maybe the radius of Burst talents should scale a bit less with levels, but that's a minor thing.
-My mobility, on the other hand, is completely ridiculous. Storm Knight takes hit and run to a whole new level. I took on the vault full of overpowered dragons at the level I arrived there and won, with only one death[And I DID have the Blood of Life by that point]. Said death could easily have been avoided if I'd gotten Track instead of Heightened Senses and used Wanderer's Rest or a Psychoportation Torque. Storm Knight can Wind Stride in, drop a Zephyr Dance, melee until their shields break and then run away using Storm Charge or Lightning Ride. Against enemies without copious regeneration on a largeish level, this basically guarantees victory. Especially since Storm Knights have a good DoT in Hurricane/Storm Blast.
-The general Mage Knight resource situation reminds me somewhat of a Shadowblade's: You deal lots and lots of damage until your stamina runs out and then you're dead meat. It gets alleviated a lot once you have the leisure to max Willpower, but ending fights quickly is still essential. I quite like that kind of resource game, although the role of Eldritch Surge could stand to be clarified a bit.
-Mage Knights have a LOT of talent point sinks, to the point where I still haven't put any points in Mobility or unlocked any talent trees besides Storm. One disadvantage of Mage Knight talents not being one point wonders[Although Wind Stride comes pretty close] is that the vanilla talent trees Mage Knights have become less attractive in comparaison because of how well the talents in their unique talent trees scale. I'm not really against this, but I feel that including so many different valnilla categories in the class doesn't actually change how it plays at all.
-Eldritch Body does weird things to the Dex and Str requirements on Prodigies and warrior talent categories. Sometimes they'd require Mag and sometimes they'd require Dex/Str. I suspect[But have not proved] that in a game session where you've learned at least one point of Eldritch Body, all talent Dex/Str requirements flip into Mag ones. Otherwise, they revert back into what they were.
-Mage Knights feel quite strong. However, I have yet to face the final bosses. The final fight will be more of a damage marathon then a damage race and I suspect the cramped confines and long duration of it will make it very difficult for a Storm Knight. I'll have to see if I can force myself to slog through the Prides+High Peak to test this out.

I got bored of playing my Storm Knight after going through Gorbat Pride[Hardly unusual] and started up a Cornac Earth Knight.

Earth Knight Thoughts:

-Geez their resource costs are super high, especially since they're encouraged to wear heavy armour.
-Gemstone Shield is overpowered. You can get a shield stronger then a thousand hit points by level ten that lasts ten turns using Crystal Shield. Sapphire Shield is even worse and gives Gemstone Shield near 100% uptime, assuming that the shield lasts most of its duration. I understand that Earth Knights are supposed to be robust, but giving them nearly Aegis-tier shields isn't the best way to go about it. FAKEEDIT: Looking at the Gemstone Shield changes above, that doesn't really change the core problem: Its numbers are just too high. If the gem shields have different cooldowns, then it actively makes things worse, since you don't even have a two-turn window of vulnerability in between Gemstone Shields.
-Alter Terrain is a terrible, terrible ability. First off, it's incredibly overpowered. It's a better Stone Wall, which is an incredibly overpowered talent. It lasts longer, is more flexible, has a lower cooldown and affects a larger area. Second of all, it's incredibly boring. It doesn't give Earth Knight any new capabilities, but rather triples down on the ones it already has. Earth Knight already has digging[Pulverizing Augur/Earth Bolt] and wall creation[Stone Wall/Earth Blast] in spades, so a talent that can do both isn't really interesting. It should be removed in favour of a completely new ability. My vote goes for something that creates non-blocking terrain of some kind[Stone spikes, mud, boulder field].
-Verdant Blood falls into the same category as Gemstone Shield and for more or less the same reasons.
-Tectonic Patience is a rather questionable, if thematic, ability. The first thing that came to mind was using it to get 100% uptime on Alter Terrain by using it while entombed in rock. However, the stipulation that there be an enemy in sight neuters that[Unless you can entomb a harmless enemy in with you or blind yourself intentionally]. Note however that you can totally do that with Ice Wall, since that lets you see enemies on the other side of it. Since Mage Knight talents are availible on Adventurers, you could make the cheesiest build possible and kill enemies using only Ice Wall + Tectonic Patience + maybe Raze for quicker damage. I'm not really sure how you could eliminate that kind of scummy behaviour while keeping the talent relevant to people playing fair while keeping the talent as is. My suggestion would be to make it stronger, but less spammable, probably while removing any interaction with cooldowns.

I actually[Briefly] started up an Adventurer to test how Eldritch Knight talents interacted with it.

Adventurer Findings:

-Somehow, I started with 5/5 in Psychic Combat[The capstone talent for one of the Mind Knight Trees] and Impassive Mountain, despite never unlocking those talent categories. Mousing over those talents in the skill screen brought up a lua error.
-Eldritch Combat decided which element to use based on which damage categories I had unlocked. Curious, I unlocked the straight-damage categories for all the Mage Knights and bopped some trolls. I got the passive damage for ALL of them combined, which was quite impressive at level 1.