ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

if you are confused and low on health, what is the 'right' way out?
if you are pinned and all abilities are on CD, what is the 'right' way out?

if there is no 'right' way out, why this is called 'roguelike' game? this has to be an adventure, with life limit set to about 20

A lot of times the "right" way out is having done something differently a few turns ago. That "if you are pinned and all abilities are on CD" situation, for example, that's a thing where you should have, three or four turns ago, recognized that this fight was a long one and activated an escape to rest until your status cures are available again.

This is not a thing that is exclusive to TOME. If you're playing Nethack, and a cockatrice hisses at you, and you don't have a lizard corpse, the "right" thing to do is to have run away from the cockatrice before it could hiss.

phantomglider wrote:A lot of times the "right" way out is having done something differently a few turns ago.

How would you deal with a monster that can pin you? Do not approach it at all? what if you are playing melee character?
engage a monster - get pinned for 8 turns at full HP - get escapes on CD at once - wait 8 turns without being able to do anything - restart the game ...
isn't this familiar to you?

quite a few monsters can confuse, and quite a few can deal a lot of damage, so, sooner or later, you are stuck with 50HP, confused and unable to do anything. there are no healing potions in game, so the end is inevitable

There are infusions and runes that can cure pinning, there are torques for this also, and a few talents. (Infusion work when you are pinned and are instant). There is also an infusion that restores health.
I'm seriously wondering if you played the game.

The "right" way out of most bad situations is to not get in that situation in the 1st place. Or having a method of getting out of the situation. It's the same for all roguelikes.

quite a few monsters can confuse, and quite a few can deal a lot of damage, so, sooner or later, you are stuck with 50HP, confused and unable to do anything. there are no healing potions in game, so the end is inevitable

Tome is an unfair game... because you don't know how to play it?

Pigslayer wrote:The "right" way out of most bad situations is to not get in that situation in the 1st place. Or having a method of getting out of the situation. It's the same for all roguelikes.

Amen.

Most "bad situations" are ones that oneself has plunged into while being careless, overconfident,
unthinking and rushing ahead... But at times, bad situations happen nevertheless and one
should try to have an answer ready, possibly more than one.

Well, it was not that bad before oozemancer mobs... There is a physical wild for stun, and even if confused, you can just try to activate teleport, until you are get lucky. Monsters (except oozemancers) are usually not strong enough to kill you in just 2-3 turns.

ToME is a game of constant healing and management of cooldowns.

You can think of it as short term resource management, rather than long term. There is never going to be any "I can just blow all of my Medkits/my Wand of Healing" here. There is "I can use my various infusions to heal" instead. In that sense, assessing and understanding your opponents and their talents is far more important than usual for a Roguelike.

There is no safety net, except Adventure mode lives, in the case of a bad situation that you fail to understand at all, whereas many Roguelikes allow you to blow resources and get past it. This allows people to bash their head into something and eventually clear due to sheer RNG luck-not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a different way to deal with things. ToME, especially given how long it is, requires consistency and skill, like any Roguelike, but cuts out a lot of the impact of fortune. (I personally like that.)

As to those situations... If your escapes become on cooldown from Stun, use a Physical Wild Infusion, like you would use any other form of status heal in any Roguelike-Wild Infusions heal various classes of status, and each status tells you what class it is with their tooltip. You just can't spam it, ever. Mental Wilds can catch Confusion. Wilds are Instant, and can never be set on Cooldown by status, nor will Confusion ever stop them from functioning(or any other Instant).

There's also various ways to mitigate status, to prevent it from happening. Saves are pretty good mitigation of status-they don't prevent it all the time, but they're very good at preventing a nasty chainlock-and status resistances give you a flat rate chance to block that status. Both of them can be raised enough to be perfect protection against status(though it takes a very, very large amount for saves, and if you want perfect blocking of status, you want a resist).

If you're at 50 HP, chances are that you got in over your head, as others have said-if you do this a lot, Healing Infusions can be better than Regeneration, because they work more reactively(giving you a big amount of healing, instead of allowing you to heal up attrition damage constantly).

Many people have beaten this game without dying-it requires a ton of skill, I believe tiger_eye checked and found that on average, there's a 0.25%~ win ratio on Roguelike. But it can be done. It's just nasty.

I know a lot of folks have given similar advice - the "right way out" is to be prepared enough not to enter those situations - but they are correct. There is no roguelike that can be won without several (tens, dozens?) of failures first. One needs to know what is dangerous (and how and why) before knowing how to counteract it.

Adventure mode in ToME is important. There is a reason why it's the default. This game is long (from my experience, 15-20 hours for a win), and the RNG is king. Mostly it is fair, but occasionally, out of desire to supply us with interesting and new content, it can decide that we need to be fearscaped by an oozemancer skeleton master archer. Or that autoexplore should introduce us to an invisible dredgling with flurry and GWF. Or the level 38 patchwork troll guarding Bill felt lonely. Or finding 5 uniques and Filo waiting for us in a pit surrounding the staircase in Dreadfell would be fun. Inescapable situations do happen, but very rarely.

I have three wins in ToME, with (i think) one death between them (not counting the way triumphant). It is very possible to build characters to handle every issue you've brought up. It just needs knowledge and planning, which is the case with every other roguelike I've ever played. I've probably spent as much time with DCSS as I have with ToME - they're very different games, but the principle is the same - knowledge builds characters. Same with any of the *hacks or *bands. Learn how they work, and you have a pretty good chance at ascending/winning/whatever.

I would say stop transmuting those stun/pin immunity items - they are there for a reason

90% ToME4 is about builds. Other roguelikes give you items which you can use in emergency. In ToME, you have to prepare well ahead: there is no equivalent of potions or wands. Charms have similar role, but most of them are too weak to bother.

Saves are nice to have, but don't help THAT much. Stun, confusion resistance (immunity actually) is much more reliable. Unflinching Resolve (Conditioning) and Providence Celestial/Light) are great skills.

Low saves are not usefull yes, high saves, trust me, work real great!
On one of my winners I stacked saves as high as I could and I nearly never needed to use providence or or such things

b0rsuk wrote:Saves are nice to have, but don't help THAT much. Stun, confusion resistance (immunity actually) is much more reliable. Unflinching Resolve (Conditioning) and Providence Celestial/Light) are great skills.

My save-stacking nightmare roguelike winner was nearly immune to status effects. The only effects that consistently managed to get through were from the OP wyrms (level 111). And spell feedback. Several endgame bosses couldn't land a single effect on me.

I used to die all the time from master archers like the original poster before I figured out how important those stats are. Usually you go for status resistance or saves not a bit of both. I find the lack of needing to save up emergency buttons refreshing vs other roguelikes

user0123 wrote:quite a few monsters can confuse, and quite a few can deal a lot of damage, so, sooner or later, you are stuck with 50HP, confused and unable to do anything. there are no healing potions in game, so the end is inevitable

You are right, there are no healing potions in the game...

Yet one of the advices for roguelike games is "don't use your healing potions as an escape hatch," meaning that if something is bashing you down badly, drinking a healing potion will only delay it for a few turns. Unless, of course, that thing is also almost dead and a few more turns is all you need to kill it.

All roguelike games (okay, maybe not Omega...) involve resource management of some sort, say, the problem with food. It just takes a different form in tome.