ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hey,

I recently started playing ToME and it's awesome stuff, one of the best games I've played. Thanks for this great game :)

I thought I'd write some feedback in hopes it's helpful, and I'd like to see the game get even better. I'm not sure if this is the right subforum though. But here goes:

General stuff:

1. Random bosses, eww. Ok, this is well known and somewhat fixed in b39 I hear, but still. Getting oneshot by an archer boss isn't fun.

2. Shops. Again, seems to be a topic often talked about. Anyway, they're annoying, as it's best play to avoid shopping as far as possible due to the shop scaling. And new players don't get any info on when the shops restock.

3. Stun and confusion immunities, and the status conditions. Those two immunities are way, way too necessary, and having to gear up for them is not fun. This is especially annoying in the early game, as you'll always want to be aiming for 100%, and early game stuff has less of this than the later ones. So most of the cool loot end up being trash if it has no immunities. Then later on the loot distribution is a bit wonky anyway, and artifacts offering huge immunities fall from every corner. Imo the status conditions are way too dangerous, and the fact that immunities don't scale leads to boring early game gearing. I mean, it's fine if they're as dangerous as they are, as long as the solution isn't stacking immunities on every character (except maybe dwarves, the only race who may care about saving throws).

4. Saving throws seem useless. They're not reliable against stuff that matters, and not worth building for against the rest. I could be wrong though.

5. Tedious early game. Mostly everything up to and often including Daikara gets tedious after seeing it tens of times. It's practically required to complete most of the dungeons, because immunity gear. Also, the new bosses that spawn after returning from Far East don't seem to spawn if the earlier bosses havent' been killed. Not sure about this. Anyway, the game is too predictable. If random bosses weren't so horrible they might help somewhat, and random dungeons in general. Also some encouragement / prohibition against doing everything early. Don't really know about this though, as the early game is fun for the first x times :)

6. Traps, awful, I hear they'll be looked at and that's good. No traps - addon is necessary atm.

7. Runes/infusions. They don't feel balanced. Teleportation rune is way too good get out of jail free card (except when it kills you). And the difference between getting a good shield rune or two is huge. On the other hand, why would I ever want to use heat beam or poison spit? Imo teleportation rune could use either a small delay, or a huge cooldown (enough that boss can track you down and the rune is still on cooldown). Then anti-magic would get more play too.

8. Two-handers are good for berserkers and mindslayer's mental grip, not much more.

9. The quests can be annoying. Track down the hermit every game, remember to visit arena or lose 2 free generics.. also, certain two quests basically require the player not be a melee character.

10. Animals in west map. They're not a threat to any character, don't give anything useful, but cause unnecessary loading.

11. Glove stats would be nice to see without an addon, at least when playing a brawler.

12. Escort quests. Missing on Arcane Eye, Providence or such is really annoying when it's caused by an AoE. The escortees just love AoE damage and seek out every cloud. Not to mention every enemy too, but that's probably fine. Anyway, Daikara escorts are sad, between stone throwers, lightning and the occassional wretch acid cloud.

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There's more, but that's from top of my head.

Corruptor
More specifically, I love the corruptor class, but I want to complain about it too:

13. Most of the dot talents are useless. Bone-stuff also. And hexes other than Pacification, curses other than Vulnerability. The way I see it, there's more or less one optimal talent build, as follows: 14. One of the reasons all dots are useless is that corruptor doesn't have time to watch his enemies rot. Corruptor has *no* escape skills (bar the occassional Dark Portal, and Fearscape but that doesn't let the dots run their course). Corruptor has *no* survivability skills (Bone Shield doesn't count, it's horrible). I mean, not every class can or should be as good at everything as archmage (none should, imo), but still. Corruptor at the moment needs to kill everything before they can harm him, cause that's all he has. Catalepsy kind of counts though, but it's still slower than what Blood offers.

15. Why would I want to use Darkfire? It does crappy damage, and at higher ranks it harms myself in almost all cases. Burning myself a bit is fine and thematic if there's a payoff, but really, most of the time it's a wasted turn. I also did the mistake of unlocking Bone on my latest character and regret it. Bone spear is kinds of useful when everything else is on cooldown. Corruptor has 4 good direct damage spells that scale with crit, blight damage buff from Blood Fury and otherwise, and Vimsense. The others don't, they're bad spells with often bad base damages too.

16. Nothing much to use generics on, combined with dire need for additional rune/infusion slots (caused by lack of shield/escape outside of those). b39 seems to give Torment - category, but at the moment that seems bad too (the Vim buff would actually be worth the points, heal prevent is one point, Overkill is bad, useless and redundant, Blood Vengeance may or may not be useful. I really hope these will change..).

17. Flame of Urh'Rok and/or Fearscape are good and cool skills, but only usable after lvl 35 or so due to high Vim sustain cost. Corruptor is always sustaining 80 Vim worth of skills already, and Fearscape really needs the immunity from being a demon. So that's 240 Vim worth of sustain. At 35 with Bloodcasting it's possible to take advantage of Fearscape (or even without, as a temporary escape). The level requirements should really reflect this, if nothing else. Better yet would be access to these skills earlier (which the new generic tree seems to grant, kind of), as a build option.

18. Willpower doesn't give Corruptors anything useful. They have no Vim problems with 0 points in Willpower, and besides the bonus from Willpower isn't much good against bosses anyway. Cunning is the point dump, along with some strength. Finding a good massive armor and being able to use it effectively is actually cool for a caster. Anyway, the description could be changed as it's misleading.

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Heh, there's a wall of text. I hope it's any good. In any case, despite the above, the game is good. Many of those aren't too bad, and may even be intentional. Still, the game could always be better. I'd especially like to see less dead skills on many classes.

Wraithform is an alright escape spell, particularly if you're a skeleton or use a movement infusion.

PureQuestion wrote:Wraithform is an alright escape spell, particularly if you're a skeleton or use a movement infusion.

It has cast time, and by itself doesn't take you anywhere. It can be nice at times, but most of the time I'd rather use the turn I'd spend casting Wraithform to teleport away, or just use conventional movement infusion. Corruptors don't feel very durable lategame (early at least they can focus constitution more than most other classes), so hanging around *preparing for escape* isn't a good idea.

Edit: though sometimes it might be possible to buy time via Fearscaping a weak enemy, heal, wait for cooldowns, cast Wraithform and stuff, kill the enemy and run. Assuming there's a nice target that isn't dangerous and will survive long enough.

1. Wholeheartedly agreed
2. Wholeheartedly agreed
3. Wholeheartedly agreed
4. Saves can be useful depending on the class and race combo, and your gear
5. Wholeheartedly agreed
6. Wholeheartedly agreed
7. Teleportation is not too good, imo. If it has a chance of killing you, it's never too good no matter how good it is when it doesn't kill you. At best it's a desperate last resort unless you've already cleared out the map. I prefer movement infusions or controlled phase door. Agreed about attack runes and insidious poison though.
8. Wholeheartedly agreed (this is an ego problem; two sets of egos are generally going to be better than one and that tends to overpower any other factors at the moment)
9. Wholeheartedly agreed
10. Wholeheartedly agreed
11. Brawlers do see glove stats without the addon.
12. Wholeheartedly agreed
13. Dark Portal + Catalepsy is good for dealing a ton of burst damage in an AoE against things that are non-disease immune. Really, take a look at max Dark Portal damage. It's amazing.
14. Dark Portal is also an escape spell. It's a controlled phase door, which is about as good as you can ask for. Also Wraithform makes movement infusions slightly more reliable as an escape. Besides, it's not like most melee classes get escape spells either. Really I would just say every other spellcasting class is heavily spoiled and overpowered, and Corruptors are actually in a good state of balance.
15. Agreed except, and I keep parroting myself, DARK PORTAL. I mean it doesn't scale with crit but it does so much damage.
16. I can't comment until I see the numbers on these talents.
17. Meh
18. Wholeheartedly agreed

Basically you make a ton of great points which have mostly been brought up before, but it's nice to have all the major issues compiled into one location.

Derp, that's just stupid of me. I didn't realise could be used without a creature in the target area. Ok, that actually is a good escape tool :P

I did know Dark Portal does excellent damage though. But yes, I also didn't realise that could be combined with Catalepsy. I feel like a fool now. Newbie at least.

There are few places where teleportation isn't reliable enough, at least assuming a wand of teleportation just in case (or just a wand of teleportation). Armoury is one, some of the prides possibly. Most places simply don't have normal enemies that would be very dangerous.

Anyway, I didn't mean to say Corruptor was underpowered (how could it be, when there's stuff like Doomed and maybe Reavers..). It just tends to feel like it's lacking options that don't involve blasting everything. But yes, this is after playing Paradox Mage and while drooling at options Archmages have.

On the new tree, yes, it's way too early to say much about it. But I do think Overkill won't be good, regardless of numbers, if what I'm looking at will be at b39. Reavers may find some use for it, though I doubt it, Corruptors certainly don't need more AoE. Especially as it's often single enemies that need to die fast or be otherwise controlled, AoE is more of a convenience thing. Overkill actually seems inconvenient, as you need to be wary not to kill monsters near you while it's on. The others are about numbers yes.

Oh, about dubious talents, is there any reason why the healing part of Leech doesn't scale?

Edit: By that, I meant that Leech doesn't scale with anything except talent levels. The amount of healing that's good at the early game doesn't cut it later, and imo the skill should scale with spellpower, maximum health, constitution or something like that.

Keemossi wrote: Oh, about dubious talents, is there any reason why the healing part of Leech doesn't scale?

It does scale...

Lots to comment on here. Just re corruptors though:

13. Most of the dot talents are useless. Bone-stuff also. And hexes other than Pacification, curses other than Vulnerability. The way I see it, there's more or less one optimal talent build, as follows:

Code:
Everything Blood. Dark Ritual. Drain. Soul Rot. Vimsense. Pacification Hex, Curse of Vulnerability, both mostly because not much else to get. All of those 5/5. Then some one-point wonders and stuff for later game.


14. One of the reasons all dots are useless is that corruptor doesn't have time to watch his enemies rot. Corruptor has *no* escape skills (bar the occassional Dark Portal, and Fearscape but that doesn't let the dots run their course). Corruptor has *no* survivability skills (Bone Shield doesn't count, it's horrible). I mean, not every class can or should be as good at everything as archmage (none should, imo), but still. Corruptor at the moment needs to kill everything before they can harm him, cause that's all he has. Catalepsy kind of counts though, but it's still slower than what Blood offers.

15. Why would I want to use Darkfire? It does crappy damage, and at higher ranks it harms myself in almost all cases. Burning myself a bit is fine and thematic if there's a payoff, but really, most of the time it's a wasted turn. I also did the mistake of unlocking Bone on my latest character and regret it. Bone spear is kinds of useful when everything else is on cooldown. Corruptor has 4 good direct damage spells that scale with crit, blight damage buff from Blood Fury and otherwise, and Vimsense. The others don't, they're bad spells with often bad base damages too.

I disagree on talents. Some other talents:

• Virulent Disease is great and with a cooldown of three, it can debilitate melee NPCs at high levels.
  Epidemic at high level is great for crowd control.
  Corrupted Negation is incredibly powerful at high levels. Particularly when combined with Teleport, as you whittle down many boss talents. And if they are talents that require feeding or regeneration, you can usually render them impotent with a few blasts.
  You obviously haven't cast Domination Hex on a necromancer or summoner, and watch it summon a ton of FRIENDLY npcs that all start blasting the enemy NPCS. A greatly undervalued talent.
  Curses - again, Curse of Death + teleport, and Curse of Weakness are very helpful against bosses.

I never use the Fearscape talent tree, as I find points better spent elsewhere, but I'm probably in the minority here. I've won twice without it though (unfortunately not registered on server). Rather, I always spend extra point on blood. For blood spray it gives range 11, and 85% disease catching, and greater damage. It wipes out whole rooms very easily. It also of course improves the other blood talents, which are the strongest.

You are right in that survivability is the hardest part. So I increase strength and bulk up on armour and resists. The loss is Blackrobe (ouch!).

Using the Blood tree I pretty much oneshot the orc welcoming parties on my last character, so I didn't really feel like I'd need to lower their stats at any point of the game (Alas, npc's can get good use out of Bone Shield, as they only contend against a single character :) . The bosses that are so dangerous I'd like to debuff (and not just nuke more) them also tend to have so high stats I doubt a static value debuff is good, compared to a percentage one.

I'm not quite clear with mechanics at this, but as far as I can see: debuffing str against melee bosses is bad as it won't really cut their physical power even 10%. Debuffing dex is useless, as you'll never have so high defense it would matter. And debuffing Con is just worst. It seems I'm on a roll of being wrong though, so.. am I wrong about this? :P

I had really bad experiences with Corrupted Negation on the same character. With 70+ spellpower, the spell didn't even reliably disable Bone Shields from orc corruptors. Then I later died to a random boss that Fearscaped me and I resisted every attempt to dispel. The same goes for Domination Hex because there's always a good chance of it failing, and then it's just a wasted turn. Damage is damage every turn.

Curse of Weakness is really good, yes. I originally considered Curse of Death, but Weakness adds way more damage as it multiplies all the other spells.

The main draw in Fearscape talent tree for me is the haste bonus from Flames of Uhr'rok. Even if I sometimes run out of spells to cast, it's yet another multiplier on the damage/turn I can output, and even better as Blood Boil puts slow on enemies.

Yeah, I actually really like that corruptors can play as armoured casters. I considered also using shield, but the onehanded staff part + Lifedrinker is way too good, especially as I didn't find any good shields. To be honest I haven't had too hard time staying alive as corruptor, all of my deaths on the most recent corruptor except against random bosses were avoidable (like, if I hadn't pressed 5 to wait while the area wasn't safe, or running around killing stuff and not noticing my health was like 1/3 of max. I was on a spree). What I'm kind of missing is some kind of buffer durability(yes, shields) against those oneshot bosses and other surprises. Shield runes are so chance-based.

Eh, another huge post, I can't seem to stop. Anyway, I guess I undervalue some talents because of my playstyle too. Big numbers are so nice :P

The stat reduction on diseases is basically meaningless for Corruptors, and while Reavers might get a tiny benefit, it hardly "debilitates" anything. Virulent Disease's damage is pretty bad, it can't crit, it can't refund its Vim cost on a kill, and its low cooldown would be nice if it didn't overwrite itself when applying the same disease. To make matters even worse, if you've got a much more potent disease going from say, Blood Spray or Dark Portal (which Corruptors almost always do unless they've just cast Catalepsy), VD can overwrite that disease too, in effect dealing negative damage. It's too bad disease effects don't stack like poison or burning.

Basically the only thing going for it compared to other spells is spellshock.

The low cumulative cost of vd though can be a life saver. It can overwrite, yes, but if it doesn't, the damage can be massive per turn. I always seek damage increase items with this class, as their best strategy, as you say, is quick death.

In b39, epidemic won't be able to be resisted by any NPC at all

-25 dexterity against an archer? Yes thanks.

Maybe VD could be smarter and only apply a disease the target doesn't have and maybe a special fourth disease that stacks once the other three diseases are applied.

edge2054 wrote:Maybe VD could be smarter and only apply a disease the target doesn't have and maybe a special fourth disease that stacks once the other three diseases are applied.

Something like that could be nice. Afaik Reavers could use the buff anyway. The possible fourth disease should be something that's useful against bosses, since it's not very likely anything else will live long enough.

I don't think -25 dex against archers is really that good, compared to actually killing them. Especially as it's only 1/3 chance of getting the right disease. Also, low Vim cost isn't *that* important, as at least from my experience Vim isn't very limited resource. Especially with Bloodcasting.

jenx wrote:-25 dexterity against an archer? Yes thanks.

Against a level 50 orc archer that's like a 15% reduction in base damage (so it won't affect ego damage) and even then that's only when you get Decrepitude as opposed to Rotting. The damage isn't "massive" either: Manathrust does more damage, does it all at once instead of spread out over 6 turns, and does it in a beam. Plus it doesn't check disease immunity, it can crit, etc etc.

Virulent Disease would be a nice filler spell if diseases stacked better, such as in the way that edge suggested, but otherwise your turn is better spent doing something else. Heck, most of the time even doing nothing is better than casting VD.

Damage-over-time is always going to be hard to balance in a game where most NPCs die in a handful of regular hits. It's especially bad for Reavers, as they typically have to spend a full turn putting a disease on a single target. Personally, I mostly ignore the disease-based talents for Reavers until I hit 20+, since they only really shine on bosses (and then I can just stuff a few extra point in and pull them out afterwards). Once you pass mid-game, the damage requirement leaps enormously (which is probably why I've gotten stuck there a few times).