ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

It seems fairly useless to me, for several reasons.

First, the 100 (!!) equilibrium cost is just way, way, way too much. It forces my failure rate to 14%; while that may get better later on, it's absurdly out of place when you get it. What's the use of speeding up my summons a bit when I'm rapidly going to fail a summon and waste my entire turn? Wasting a whole turn hurts a lot more than the very small benefit this talent offers at lower talent levels.

Second, summoners don't generally have a huge amount of stuff to do with their turns anyway. Reducing the time spent summoning doesn't help with this.

But the main problem is that speeding up your summons doesn't help you if you waste a turn failing a summon. It's just too risky for way too little reward, especially since when you inevitably botch a summon, you're still left with that obscene 100 equilibrium and now you're summoning slowly and unreliably.

Why not make it a cheap, non-sustained activated talent that dramatically increases the speed of all your summons, but which ends as soon as you do something other than summon? So you could activate it to summon a bunch of stuff at once, without the horrible trade-off it offers now.

Or am I missing something about it? Does it get better later on?

Having just played a summoner that reached decently into the Far East, I really feel the ability is completely worthless -- even in the late game, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. If this skill is to be useful, it needs to be scaled back considerably (it's potency is insane at max level, but a single fail makes the ability pretty worthless) and then made passive. Rename it to Nature's Friend or something. The idea isn't bad, but the implementation isn't very helpful at all.

As a summoner, I find myself mashing the . key a lot when my summons aren't dying quickly. Summoners don't have a lot to do with their turns to begin with. Frantic Summoning didn't seem worth the TALENT POINTS, much less the cost.

Tasseographer wrote:As a summoner, I find myself mashing the . key a lot when my summons aren't dying quickly. Summoners don't have a lot to do with their turns to begin with. Frantic Summoning didn't seem worth the TALENT POINTS, much less the cost.

This is exactly why I turned to fiddling around with Summon Control, which did quite well for me for a long time. Of course, anyone watching the ideas forum should know how that ended up ...

If the intention is to give a short boost to summoning speed, then just rework the skill to reflect this:

For 1... 2 ...3 turns your summoning takes only 60%...50%...40%... energy. While frantic summoning is active you cannot fail because of your high equilibrium.

To further balance the talent, in addition to the short duration, give the skill a long cooldown and no cost (or a very low cost).

Changed to: