ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

High damage classes like arcane blade are OK, but even middle-damage classes like reaver are frustrating, not speaking about low damage classes. Fight become exercise in patience: If player have enough patience to spend hour or more endlessly clicking hit/heal while boss do exactly the same player won. If player have not enough patience, boss can live with it...My reaver managed to kill minotaur barely, after don't know how many clicks, and only because minotaur can't teleport, but Subject Z is a waste of time - he has not enough damage to kill me, I have not enough damage to kill him in one hit, and if below 60-70%hp he PD away and heal...

Suggestions ?

- Increase cooldown of NPC only infusions
- Decrease effect of NPC heals
- Add some heal breaking rune / status(something like summoning destability)
- make infusions take more turns to use
- add charges to infusions which regens slower than cooldown(like 3x times slower)

you can also join some of above:
- rune which gives status durning which Actor uses heal its cooldown will rise or heal effect will be halved.
- with each charge used infusion takes longer to use.

Can I do it for the player too ?

darkgod wrote:Can I do it for the player too ?

Please do! I think runes and infusions are rather overpowered right now, especially in the early game. I can stand around with a troll pounding on my level one characters and survive indefinitely by doing nothing other than using the starting regeneration infusion. If nothing else, increase the cooldowns. Healing infusions in particular cool down too quickly. We don't want them to completely overshadow the few defensive abilities each class gets.

It sounds like the original poster's problem with the minotaur was the Phase Door, not the healing. And that's due to the layout of the Maze, and wouldn't be a problem anywhere else.

Here's a Rune idea stolen from a chronomancy talent I coded last night.

Rune of Entropy
- Places X of the targets runes or infusions on cooldown for Y turns.

An Infusion Idea

Infusion of Insidious Poison
- Deals X poison damage over Y turns. Also reduces all healing on the target by 50% (this would be better if Regen was a heal).

and a wand that removes status effects

Wand of Magic Dispersal
- Removes X magical effects from the target, good or bad.

Another idea, specifically for Reavers.

Epidemic could halve healing rates or prevent regen while active.

I'm on the end boss right now. I've been fighting him for over 30 minutes and I haven't seen his health drop to less than 60%. "Frustrating" is an understatement - I'm not sure it is even possible to kill him with the assortment of runes that he has.

greycat wrote:It sounds like the original poster's problem with the minotaur was the Phase Door, not the healing. And that's due to the layout of the Maze, and wouldn't be a problem anywhere else.

No it's other way around. Minotaur my reaver could handle, but barely. The game breaker was Subject Z. And yes revaer have curse to prevent regen, but I didn't started curses tree yet, and it probably wouldn't prevent infusion heal.
Heal infusion have way too short cooldown. Player isn't supposed to kill leader of the first orc ambush, but with 2 regen and 2 heals I was able to do it.
IMHO best solution would be make charges for heal infusion and "smear" regen infusion - make it 4 times longer with the same amount of heal points
Just making heal infusion heal less would remove some fun. I think charges is the best solution for heal infusion

I have fixed the healing infusion cooldown.
We'll see if regen needs a nerf too, let's do one at a time

Player healing is fine, it's the boss healing that is killing the game. If a player thinks that a 450 point healing infusion with an 8 turn cooldown is too much, he doesn't have to strap it on (but there are bosses that can still kill you even with that level of healing, especially if you aren't prepared in other ways like stun resist), but when a boss monster shows up with 500+ points of healing and a 750 point regen to boot, that's a game breaker right there.

I'll try reducing the effect of stats on the runes/infusions for NPCs, should do the trick.
Also additing ways to reduce/suppress healing do make for a neat mechanism too

I have always been against enemies using healing. Healing enemies (save more one monster that is designed to heal others but not itself) make the game less fun for me because I feel it just artificially lengthens the game and create an imbalance between high damage classes and low damage classes. I would rather enemies have shields rune or just give them more health.

Shield *IS* a heal, it function the same: it delays the point of death