ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

What does "mastery" do? I find amulets of mastery (+X to some talent category). I also see that some talent categories have a mastery score of 1.00 or 1.30 or whatever. What do these numbers mean? (Or are they vestigial from the ToME 2.x days when they determined how many real-points you got by investing a level-up-point in a given skill?)

In concrete terms, if I already know a talent category (and perhaps some talents therein), and I wear an amulet of mastery +X to that category, what does it do? Likewise, if I do not know a talent category and I wear an amulet of mastery for that category, what does that do?

mastery is a multiplier that is basically you can take the effect of the talent and multiply it by the multiplier to get the end result.

normally mastery is 1 or 1.3 to start out with, there are some cases where mastery is 0.9 though

For example, if you have 4 points in a talent and a mastery of 1.3, the game will treat it as if you had 5.2 points in that talent.

So... if a talent has a specific effect at level 5, and I have 4 points in it, and I have mastery 1.30 in that category, does that mean I get the specific effect for only 4 points? 4 x 1.30 = 5.20 after all.

Conversely, if I have 0.90 mastery in a category, and I put 5 points in a talent, will I fail to get the specific level 5 ability (if there is one)?

Yes, that's correct. 4 points in sense as an archmage (with a divination mastery of 1.3) will let you detect traps. The 5th point does nothing. With 0.9 in divination mastery it would be impossible to learn detect traps.

Personally I think the mastery system should be removed (ie, everyone should have a mastery of either 0 or 1 for every talent tree). It's overcomplicated for people who don't understand the system, and you get weirdness like with the sense spell above.

actually the 5th point does do something in most cases, like with sense it will increase the radius.

and the only one that I can think of that there is a 0.9 mastery on is survival, which has no special things happening at lvl 5.

Such weirdness can be easily fixed to not account for it.
It was just a nice bonus.

But i have some future plans for the mastery system it'll stay for now

darkgod wrote:Such weirdness can be easily fixed to not account for it.

Okay, then it should be fine.

Do you have any plans to make it so most talents are available to most classes (like how it was in ToME 2 iirc) and regulate what talents different classes are good at via mastery? Like, make it so manathrust and such are available to warriors and rogues, but they'll only have 0.5 or so master so it wouldn't be nearly as effective as it is for an archmage.

Vanguard wrote:Do you have any plans to make it so most talents are available to most classes (like how it was in ToME 2 iirc) and regulate what talents different classes are good at via mastery? Like, make it so manathrust and such are available to warriors and rogues, but they'll only have 0.5 or so master so it wouldn't be nearly as effective as it is for an archmage.

I'm generally in favor of something like that. It would be nice if classes differed more in what they're good at, not at what they can ever possibly do. It doesn't make a lot of sense that a mage can't learn to swing a sword or that a warrior can't get access to even a low level utility spell.

A talent system where every class can access every talent at different degrees of mastery (maybe with "favored" talents taken at the start) would make for some awesome flexibility, and you wouldn't have to design tons of hybrid classes.