ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I have not played casters much, but decided to give an archmage a try. Please bear with me if this is something that everyone knows and it's working as designed.

I noticed something about the 'Fireflash' spell. It's supposed to work like a standard fireball. You fire a projectile, it flies where you targeted it, and it's supposed to explode, burning everything in a radius. But this is not how it works. Only targets that have line of sight to the caster are affected.

Lets say that I hammer a hole in a room's wall, and toss a fireball in the center. Even if I can see everyone in the room (telepathy, track, etc...) only those that can see me are affected. Everyone else is unhurt, even if they were standing right next to where the Fireflash exploded, solidly within its radius of six.

Is this a bug, or am I missing something about the way the spell is supposed to work?

Is this all of the time, or else just in vaults? If it always happens. it sounds like a bug. If it's just in vaults then it's working as designed, as NPC's are locked until you have LoS to them.

lukep wrote:Is this all of the time, or else just in vaults? If it always happens. it sounds like a bug. If it's just in vaults then it's working as designed, as VAULT NPC's are locked until you have LoS to them.

Only vault npc's mind.

There are also certain open rooms that act like this, technically, they're 'pits' by other games terminology, and they're filled to the brim with monsters, all of one type. For instance, a round room with nothing but snakes on every tile, or ants on every tile. You can check this by mousing over the enemy, and it will have the 'in vault' status.

With that status, they are immobile, and invulnerable. Cannot move, cannot act. The status lifts once they can see you.

Does the monsters invulnerability extend to the players' summons, assuming you do not see the monsters in a vault room, but your summons are inside (and so see them) ?

Tried summoning stuff inside the Wyrm room but nothing happened until they saw me in person.

Hmm, that's odd too as i now remember everytime i had a big vault in one of the Prides, as soon as i opened it the game very noticably slowed down a lot.

If the AI inside does nothing due to their vaulted status until you're in line of sight, how come this heavy slowdown happens ?
Is there then a bug in which some of those AI even without LoS on you will still continuously turn on/off their many sustain/skills/etc.. ?

The Wyrm room is special, in that you only get the achievement when the Wyrms see the player. The code that grants the achievement, however, has nothing to do with the code that removes the "In Vault" status. Vaulted creatures should wake up if any character in the party can see them. They also wake up when you open the vault; "In Vault" is really only relevant to pits and vaults that don't have doors.

Ah that explains then the heavy slowdown, so i assume when they are active you don't need a los anymore for summons/attacks to have an effect ?

Yes. Becoming active removes that status. And this is also the slowdown, when they go from processing nothing to their normal AI routine.