What Even Is The Point Of The OP Overworld Patrols?

[Zizzo]

The "point" of worldmap patrols, such as it is, is pretty much to teach you that the very first addon you need to install is Opt-in Adventurers Parties. Oh, sure, I don't doubt the local experts can handle them just fine, but for us mere mortals, they're basically obnoxious walking death traps that suck the fun out of the game, as you discovered.

[Whiskiz]

"Honestly max invis gear might be why you’re having trouble. That’s a lot of stuff to give up for a shitty category that is made good by one and a half talents (shadow strike and shadow dance)."

"You appear to be over-relying on stealth, at the expense of survivability in other situations. Maybe not, but it appears that way, and one of the weaknesses you've created is susceptibility to patrols."

I'm sorry i guess i should have been clearer - i'm not focusing-on/maxing stealth gear - i just said i was building for stealth (through stats/skills/gear) but not focusing on it in gear: i have a couple pieces that also happen to have stealth on it, while focusing Cunning (which affects damage as much as stealth) and while i do have maxed stealth and 4/5 shadow dance, i'm almost max level and all my skills are almost maxed - so i'm only maybe missing a few 5th tier skills in place of stealth which is minimal damage/effectiveness increase due to diminishing returns as a skills level gets higher.

"Whiskiz... it is clear that you've either not mastered the mechanics of the game effectively, or for some reason you don't want to and instead want to argue against design as being "wrong" in some sense."

We can't have a debate about the subject? Especially when whether patrols should be in the game or not is subject to personal opinion and why someone has that opinion? This is a forum after all. I'm taking the feedback, but i have questions or feel as if some things are tedious and/or maybe things that aren't intended or that it doesn't solve my problems and why. And oddly enough all those fair points i raise have been completely ignored, instead people have just responded to correct me and how to just "deal with it" of which there was only really one solution and even that isn't guranteed if you end up getting cornered like i did.

"The overworld patrols are notorious in this game for forcing a steep learning curve, but they are eminently manageable."

In most situations yes, they are nothing more than a tedious, repetitive game of single pieces checkers on the overworld, but i both argued that there really is no point then to them being there and in some certain situations like getting cornered, they are not manageable at all. There is not a thing you can do on the overworld and you have to hope you spawn close enough to the exit to get out.

Otherwise you are facing a bunch of rares/elites, 50% higher level, that summons extra enemies and there is nowhere to hide or run/get a reprieve, needing to kill them all in one big fight which is maybe specifically hard for squishy, melee, resource intensive Rogue.

"I'd totally be fine with removing patrols, since they're either A) Super deadly, B) Trivially Avoidable or C) Loot pinatas, none of which are really a good thing."

Exactly. One of my points that nobody has seemed to even acknowledge let alone have a reply to, oddly enough.

"Either your gear and infusions are really sub par or your battle strategies need adjustment."

"You should be decked out in t4 to t5 artifacts and randarts at this point. Infusions should be wild-physical, movement, then your choice of heals and shielding or heroism"

I have 5 infusions (Cornac just for this) they all scale on my main stat and they are: 1 shield, 1 hero, 2 regenerate and 1 move speed. As mentioned my gear/damage is 250% crit dmg, 98% crit chance and just crit the backup guardian in Kor Pul for 2.6k damage (i could go into further detail but may not mean much) have green and a blue level saves ( 40 - 60) and usually couple-shot bosses and destroy single targets, even a couple of targets, etc, but fighting a patrol is much different from the rest of the game - again maybe especially for a squishy resource intensive melee.

Little room, little reprieve for CD's, no escape, 50% higher levels and all rares/elites and spawns more enemies.

As for my strategies you can only get so far in that aspect with the afore mentioned squishy resource intensive melee, when you can't run and hide and need to kill all that in one go in a little 2x4 arena. Even probably for melee in general and maybe most classes as alot more people seem to have problems with them also, seemingly more than just new or newb players not playing properly (fighting them side of it, not avoiding)

"Like others have said, use the trees for blocking the line of sight, burn down the ones closest to you quickly. Reposition, remove negative statuses & heal, regain cooling down abilities, repeat."

Trees are touch and go for LoS especially when they are as sparse and sporadic as they are in patrol fights and the rest applies to any combat ever - those are the basic concepts but again it's almost impossible in the patrol fights special circumstances, listed above.

"Which specific orc types or skills are causing you the biggest problems?"

It's no specific enemy or problem, again it's a mix of nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nowhere to regenerate, enemy level increased by 50%, guaranteed elites/rares, summons even more enemies, and you have to deal with all that in one long, grueling, go.

Can't run and hide and regen etc, during it. I'm not even talking about a full reset, like i need to rely on a full reset after killing an enemy every time. I'm talking even a few turns break for your CD's, but you get no break at all because you get surrounded by the orc patrols, little cover/LoS in the afore mentioned sparse trees and you can't escape or go anywhere in paticular at all.


I will definitely try pop move speed in a zone before the world map though, cheers for the tip - but i wonder if especially when getting cornered, if you are able to get back to a zone you came out of to do that while being herded by the patrol.

No-one above though, as mentioned, has even acknowledged my points on why patrols are even in the game. Considering the fact they are:

-Tedious (easy to avoid in *most situations* so are there to just consume time)
-Meaningless (nothing to do with quests, any other mechanics, just randomly tacked on to the overworld)
-OP (to balance gear/XP scum risk/reward, which is fair enough, but "farportals" fit that niche and aren't trying to ambush you into it, 200 times a playthrough)
-Can insta-gib you when cornered (As mentioned in my original post. repeatedly in one go, as also mentioned)
-Needless, because of all the above. The fact they are tedious, meaningless, OP, can isnta gib you and there are already farportals for high risk/reward

But it's ok because you can get around them in most situations, lets not discuss potentially bad design decisions because you can avoid them most of the time, amirite.

[tabs]

You can farm patrols for gear and tinker ingredients.

[Coldbringer]

How long have you been playing Tome? When I first started, patrols wrecked me. I hadn't played many classes, I didn't know what enemies skills were doing (besides making me die), didn't know I could look on their character sheet to see what skills they had and what immunities they had, and I didn't know how to optimize my own characters.

Now that I'm more experienced, I take great pleasure in smashing them and avenging previous characters deaths. I do still occasionally die, mostly to the extra powerful EoR patrols, or at low levels vs Zigur patrols. But most of the time I crush them & relish the extra challenge they provide. And the orc patrols are trivial on normal and NM. Once you get better, it is so satisfying paying them back, I'm not even kidding. One of the rare single player games that has me trash talking the computer

Like a lot of RPG games, melees have a harder time than ranged classes. It's high risk, high reward getting up close and personal with every big mean ugly monster. And it requires even more careful strategic decision making. When to reposition, when to retreat, when to push forward, what order of skills to use. Compared to being a ranged class where you cast high damage AOE and single target skills and wipe out the hordes before they even get close to you.

As much fun as the stealth classes are, as you noticed they are very vulnerable. Glass cannons, if you will. Might pay to take a break from them and play some other class types, gain more experience and knowledge then come back to it. With some nice items to vault.

I would be open to some changes to patrols, to make it more fun and interesting. Maybe a chance to evade them like in Adom, a dexterity or cunning check. Darkgod hinted a while back he was looking at redesigning the whole East experience.

[Quidix]

Although there are indeed ways to cope with patrols, I agree with the underlying sentiment that patrols don't add anything meaningful to the game. Personally I'd prefer them completely removed, but they should at least be greatly reduced in numbers.

[goremode]

1000+hours and i still afraid of patrols..

Usual i can find there no less than 7 strong enemies, with high res and powers, with hard cc-chain, with good synergy (like magic hunter+summoner+necro+archer+random enemy with burning curse or something: hard cc, over9000 summons aka fleshshield and over9000 dmg ofc. plus u can be twoshoted from archer) and without any chance to kite them cos u are playing in very small room (kiting for winning, not for runing away)
Usual atleast 5 rares. Unique and ranboss 4/10 times.

But i like this patrols mechanics: u can easy avoid this. U can escape (as PM it's with 100% chance), and u can fight them to test yourself, if u want.

PS Insane difficulty

[Parcae2]

Anybody who thinks that patrols can easily be avoided has never turned a corner directly into a loading screen. I installed Opt-Out after that happened twice on one character.

I miss the Tome 2 approach to the world map. Back then, each individual tile was a level of its own, and you could go back and forth between the world map and the level map at will. The world map was simply a way of saving time by summing up the turns it would have taken to walk across the level map into a single turn, and it reminded you of that by making all timed effects dissipate faster and all damage over time orders of magnitude deadlier. One of my fondest memories of that game was walking directly into the ocean and drowning, because I didn't realize how much more damage over time the suffocation was inflicting than on the level map. I respawned, went back to the coastline and "shrank down" to the level map to approach the area more cautiously, whereupon I was promptly eaten by a kraken.

[Zizzo]

I know this wasn't directed at me, but I feel this side of the debate needs more representation:

How long have you been playing Tome?

[checks notes] About 5½ years, according to te4.org. Since before the 1.0.0 release, at least. (Ye gods, I feel old all of a sudden…)

And the orc patrols are trivial on normal and NM.

*blink* …no. No, they are not.

I'm by no means an expert at this game but I have little to no problem clearing orc patrols in NM.

And I'm by no means a carnivore, but I only eat meat. Trust me, if you "have little to no problem clearing orc patrols in NM", you're pretty much by definition an expert.

Now that I'm more experienced, I take great pleasure in smashing them and avenging previous characters deaths.

(shrug) You do you, I guess. Myself, I derive my satisfaction from preemptively defanging them, so that they can't ambush me and wreck my game.

Counterplay : pop a movement infusion before entering world map

See, this should have been your first clue: the fact that you're having to resort to a pretty skeevy exploit like this just to avoid those patrols ought to be telling you that they're a problem. Remember, time is advancing significantly faster on the worldmap, as evidenced by the calendar log messages; that movement infusion really shouldn't be lasting even a single step on the worldmap. [T2, as Parcae2 notes, gets this right by dramatically accelerating food consumption and effect duration countdown while moving on the worldmap. Oh, and also by making worldmap ambushes reliably avoidable.]

pop RoR after getting ambushed and stay out of sight until you're yanked out

…wait, what? Tiny zone, with multiple bogies and sparse cover, and you're just casually suggesting staying hidden for forty turns straight as though it were no big? Are we sure we're talking about the same thing here?

pop movement infusion after getting ambushed and race to the exit.

Yes, that's what I've had to resort to when trapped by patrols; with movement infusions nerfed, though, they generally won't get you to the exit anymore. And of course, a single misstep, accidentally bumping into a hostile instead of stepping around it, will kick you out of fast mode and drop you into even worse trouble than you started in. [Also of course, this leaves your movement infusion on cooldown, so you can't use it to escape the second patrol that was piled up behind the first. (Also also of course, having to run away with your proverbial tail between your legs like this pretty much puts paid to the notion that worldmap patrols are in any meaningful sense "trivial" or "manageable".)]

You don't even have the excuse of being debuffed and not being able to exit once you're in the east because you got relentless pursuit from Aeryn.

Relentless Pursuit? The one with the ridiculously long cooldown? The one that won't even remove a detrimental effect if its duration is long enough? I hope you're not depending on that one. And the point, of course, is that you're being spammed with multiple debuffs by multiple hostiles over multiple turns, more than enough to leave you with all your detrimental effect removal on cooldown and still getting pummeled.

Like others have said, use the trees for blocking the line of sight,

*facepalm* We have mentioned the multiple hostiles approaching from multiple angles, yes? With the not particularly impressive tree cover, it's frequently impossible to stay out of line of sight of everything at once.

burn down the ones closest to you quickly.

Oh, is that all? The point, again, is that those "ones closest to you" are usually what kills you by ganging up on you. [In fact, y'know what the usual strategy for a situation like this is? The one pretty much any roguelike survival guide worth its salt will recommend? Teleport out, come back in on a safer angle of approach, and lure the baddies out one at a time — exactly the strategy that the ambush neatly sabotages by making its zone small enough to fit entirely inside your teleportation rune's enforced minimum teleport radius.]

remove negative statuses & heal, regain cooling down abilities,

Again, when are you finding time to rest between the constant onslaught of bogies from all directions?

I would be open to some changes to patrols, to make it more fun and interesting. Maybe a chance to evade them like in Adom, a dexterity or cunning check.

I don't mean to harp on this, but "reliably avoidable" really is the only change that would make patrols "fun and interesting". Worldmap patrols are about the right level of threat for the sort of challenge that you have to actively seek out (in the spirit of That Room™, for instance). For something that can blindside you around a corner? Something that you have to go to exceptional effort to avoid, with the ever-present sword-of-Damocles threat that a single misstep will get you killed? No.

[szekrenyer]

Avoid this. Fun.

[Coldbringer]

If you can't beat patrols, how are you going beat the prides, high peak, and the final bosses? All of which are much harder.

Play on normal-adventure with the stronger Race/Class combos, vault items, farm all the zones. Experiment with builds and equipment, gain experience. Ask the experts on the forums or in game chat for advice, check out their guides.

If you want to upload some videos of your fights vs patrols, show your build and gear then we could give better feedback.

[Coldbringer]

szekrenyer I think you can pop back into that zone, the patrols will move or reset when you come back out. IIRC

[Parcae2]

Coldbringer, please try not to be so condescending. I play on Madness. Patrols scare me way more than the prides.

[Micbran]

Coldbringer, please try not to be so condescending. I play on Madness. Patrols scare me way more than the prides.

this

i dont think you realize how crazy inflated patrols get on higher difficulties, even on insane which isn't a meme difficulty like madness is.

[Kruzifixxion]

Coldbringer, please try not to be so condescending. I play on Madness. Patrols scare me way more than the prides.

spotted the problem

you're playing a mode that only one person has beat in the entire history of the game and isn't meant to be beaten, patrols can be killed in a few turns on normal-insane (the difficulties that tome is actually balanced around) and the player doesn't have to use cheat addons that let you avoid fighting patrols completely

[Coldbringer]

I said normal and NM. Insane is a whole 'nother ball game. And madness will induce a similar mental state to it's name.

I stand by what I said. No condescension intended. If you are reasonably well geared, have a good build, and use smart tactics (what this game is all about), you should be crushing the orc patrols on sub-insane difficulty levels.