ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

It seems like there have been several bugs lately relating to monsters who, through class levels, have more than 5 points in a given talent. Is it intentional that this should be able to happen? When a talent has its "points" attribute set to 5, does that mean that "normal characters" should only be able to have 5 points in it, or that no one should be able to have more than 5 points in it?

I guess what I'm saying is, there's a lot of code that assumes that raw talent level never goes above 5 (or that talent level never goes above maybe 1.5*5). Is it a bug that these talents break? Or is it a bug that monsters are being generated with more than t.points raw levels of talent t?

It's a bug that the talents break. Through masteries and items and so on there are opportunities for the PC to hit rank 10 on some talents. If this breaks the talent then the talent needs fixing.

Breaking when the "talent level" is 10 is certainly a bug. But when "points" is defined as 5, and the talent breaks if the "raw talent level" is 6, is that a bug?

Isn't it best doubly-harden the code? It's a bug if an enemy is generated with raw talent level > 5, *and* it's a bug if a talent breaks should the raw talent level somehow get set to > 5.

For some more (based on normal monsters instead of farportal bosses, but whatever) see this thread from a while ago. I still support limiting skills to 5 raw levels, and moderating their power through mastery levels.

I think if a specific talent needs a limit, then put a limit on it. Several talents already do this, although there are probably a few that don't but need to. lukep has been especially good at locating those ones

Capping talents as suggested above would be a significant nerf to some high level NPCs, which I think is a bad thing. Once most characters get up to clvl 45-50, they seem nigh invincible, and the game needs to remain challenging for it to remain interesting (for me, anyway).

Randomly generated uniques is still a pretty new feature, so further balancing may be needed, but not by capping all talents, imho.

As an aside, I would really like it if the player could level up above clvl 50 in the infinite dungeon. I would envision the "points" for each talent could be increased by 1 every ten levels or so, so at clvl 60 you could invest 6 points in your talents, 7 at clvl 70, etc. If a more aggressive schedule were taken, this could be another means of hunting down "broken" talents--that is, if players survived long enough