Basically, 1.05 removes the majority of highly ab-usable things (tentacle range, spider/crystal farming, mucus through walls, etc), but I figure that it'd be desirable to make a clean sweep of all of them. Here's a rundown of all the really game-breaking things that I can think of that are left. Most are obvious bugs, some are just tedious yet broken ala swift hands, all of them are horrifically abusable. These are the type of things that completely sidestep difficulty, and are in general just bad for the game. Feel free to bring up any that I've missed, as I'm sure there's all sorts of other shenanigans particularly with the classes I don't play much.
General Game-Breaking Exploits
1) Persistent effect stair cheesing. The old change where enemies heal up and whatnot fixed most of it, but there is still quite a bit of stair abuse possible. Mostly it's persistent effects such as Gravity well, Maelstrom, Earthquake, Traps, etc. These don't disappear when you go up stairs and rest, so you can just keep going down and throwing one, go up, repeat. You can just layer an absurd amount of stuff like that, which is pretty abusive.
Solution: Already fixed by Hachem_Muche with a patch found here http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=38467, all that needs to be done is integrating it into vanilla.
2) Horrible AI pathing that's ab-usable, described in the AI discussion thread.
Solution: Have I mentioned that Hachem_Muche is badass? Because he also already made a fix found here http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/npc-ta ... provements that I've been playtesting for a while, and it certainly mitigates or solves the issue. Again, just needs to be integrated into vanilla.
Class Specific Game-Breaking Exploits
1) Paradox mage temporal clone has infinite range/goes through walls, similar to how tentacle was.
Recommendation: Same as with all similar things, just make it obey range/LOS.
2) Gravity trap damages/sucks people in through 1-thick walls (via being placed ON the wall). This is insanely broken, if anyone disputes that I can post vids/scrnshots to demonstrate.
Recommendation: Either make it so that all traps can't be placed inside walls, or just make gravity trap not do anything if it is in a wall.
3) Ambuscade is probably the single most abusive class specific talent remaining. Particularly with the horrible AI pathing as it stands (please implement Hackem's fix!), you are literally in no danger at any point 99% of the game. You just dig tunnels (which nothing can ever path to you from, as mentioned) and clear the entire level and all vaults without being in any risk. Teleport was disallowed from Ambuscade because it was so abusable, yet that wasn't the real issue. As it stands now Ambuscade is exactly as imbalanced as it was with teleport, just in a slightly more tedius/tactical fashion.
Recommendation: The vault issue is of much less importance than the general problem, because they're such a small part of the game. Still, I recommend making Shadowstep respect vault walls. More importantly, a simple and clean solution is to disallow Shadowstep (and probably probability travel) for Ambuscades. The ability would still be plenty usable, and that would remove almost all of the abuse potential.
4) Wraithform once you get a belt of unlife/corpslight/are-already-undead is on a similar tier of imbalance. It allows you to rest in perfect safety on the huge majority of levels, and allows you to pop out and snipe anything with pretty much 0 risk. Nor would just lowering the damage as SageAcrin recommended work as all that would do would be to make it take 1 or 2 spells more to snipe things and be perfectly safe (also, domination hexing one of a group of mobs doesn't even depend on your dmg).
Recommendation: There are a couple possible solutions that I could see working: Stitions solution, that being in a wall when it ends does damage (as you are presumably being crushed, and not needing to breath wouldn't really help you). That way, it can still be used for positioning/escape, without being ultra-abusive.
On the other hand, you could maintain it's defensive/cowardly properties while removing the imbalance by disallowing spell casting while you have wraithform up. That way you couldn't pop out/back during one cast of it (and do anything), although you could still try to abuse it but would have to use a turn to cast it and go hiding again. Overall though, I think Stitions solution is the most elegant, and most likely to solve the issues once and for all.
Miscelaneous Exploits That Are Problems, But Not of the Game-Breaking Tier
1) Drowning Uniques for XP/Items (mentioned by loimprevisto).
Recommendation: Make drowning people angry with you, at least if you've shoved them there? That wouldn't require any overall mechanics change, and would still allow you to be a risky psychopath and fight townsfolk if you so choose.
2) Infinite Trees (and probably yeek summons too), which I just remembered. If you summon Trees as a Thalore with only 1 square in LOS via some digging, then it only summons 1 tree and doesn't take the cooldown.
Recommendation: Seems straitforward to fix whatever trigger happens when they summon and the cooldown starts to go off if any summons occur, not both.
3) Aether Beam goes through 1-thick walls (mentioned by Doctornull). Pretty sure nothing offensive is supposed to go through walls. Much less of an issue than, say, Gravity Trap however, as GT also stunlocks them next to the wall so there is never any risk of retaliation.
Recommendation: See all wall/LOS based bugs
