ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Only my opinion, so make of it what you will. I play on insane rl
unless I launch a desperate attempt to finally unlock doomed elf.

Class balance: Going into every class would be an exercice in lunacy but I feel that currently melee classes are genreally pretty weak
because the price you pay for (possibly) extra damage is way too high - general best strategy atm seems to be killing things without touching
them as best as you can because if you touch them you might get hit by a massive melee burst and you are bathing in status effects so why risk it.

Necro: Nice, feels much more like a necromancer now. So many choices. Minions are actually good. Eat your heart out, summoner.

Lich: Cool and worth a prod point.

Blood of Unlife/improved Rak'Shor's Cunning: Nice, it's much better now,
might be worth using.

W I D E mage: I only dabbled a little bit with it but it seems fun. Prooobably worth the prod point but not sure on that one.

Master of Disaster: I wish this was named Endless Calamity but otherwise I think this might be viable as well. Nice.
Improved Aether Permeation: Nice, I always like to see UP prods getting the love they need

Fallen: I love the concept but this one needs some love imho. I actually felt weaker after taking this. It also tries to do a lot of things at once.
The requirements are too steep and it doesn't give any immediate extra oomph like the other class/races evos do.

Annihilator: Feels less clunky thanks to a lot of bug fixes, I like the new visual for electric web, sadly some new bugs were introduced but
I have faith in the great dg.

Talents Trees on enemies: This is a bit of a mixed bag. It was already toned down a bit so not everyone and their dead dog has very high accuracy.
I thought this is nice because it means that defense is still viable without making ethereal form as overbearing as it was in 1.6.
I like it in general because it means a wider variety of enemy skills. However I think 2 skills right now are just a bit overtuned and you can run into
those "4th" row skills very early to boot. The outliers for me are:

Mirror Image: Everything with this becomes quite literally 2-4 times as deadly. I think the only way to tell you are hitting a copy is that it takes 1 damage.
they are super tank, seemingly don't expire (bug?) and believe it or not it can actually be very very hard to tell what the hell is happening in the fight.
A very good reason to pack some form of silence, if you can...

Fearscape: If you get hit by this and don't happen to have the exact right tools on hand (which are not easy to come by, especially not early) or you are lucky and the caster is super weak, you simply die. period.
There is no real counter play unless you are one of the few blessed classes that can break sustains naturally (or have ur'hok) or you have already evaded the inscription tax bureau with dissipation
and even then you're not guaranteed to get out. This isn't the good kind of difficulty if you ask me.

Those 2 are the only real problems I have with this patch.

Hopes for the future: Always love to see more prods becoming viable (Roll with it... SOMEDAY, SOMEHOW). I like the class and race evos put if the prod price tag stays, it also needs to be on the power level of a prod.
This is mostly true right now I feel but not for Fallen. One possible danger I see with this system however is that if you burn out all your creative juice on evos there might not be enough left for whole new classes/races.
I hope alch gets reworked. I hope weapon classes get re-evaluated a bit or combat/monsters change in some way to make them struggle a bit less.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank dg and crew for the work they put into this. I have so many hours in this game that I needed to put opaque duct tape on the hour count on stream out of shame, but that's a good thing really

I think Fearscape still doesn't correctly have increasing vim cost per turn, so NPCs, with their inherent regen, can sustain it forever. PC Demo can too, and probably other classes could with a bit of work/gearing.

In general strong talents that are balanced for the PC by quickly burning through resources may not translate well to NPCs because NPCs are designed in such a way that resources aren't a meaningful limitation to them and they will never run out.

I haven't tried Fallen but I agree with the rest of your assessment. 1.7 mostly added cool/fun stuff. Beamlord works well and is a nice way to scale the tribeam play style into the later game for players who like it. As you say there are a few things that could be improved. In particular, I think the earlier appearance of T3/4 skills has made the early game harder, and I think the early game is the worst place to increase difficulty because as you say the player doesn't yet have many options to respond.

Even if it increased properly(which I don't think it does, but maybe, it's hard to tell), enemies with 500-600vim and 5vim regen would still keep Fearscape up for stupid amounts of time if you're not manaburning them. It's definitely somewhat dumb currently as enemies do A LOT of damage via fearscape, while also healing for a lot. I almost got killed by a random rare in spellblaze(granted this is a rough place but it wasn't even the grand corruptor) because their fearscape was hitting for 120 and healing them for as much, at lvl 22 or whatever. This is a lot of healing and damage every turn, at virtually no cost for enemies(and to an extent even players once you have decent vim tools/are high enough levels). But yeah it doesn't help that apparently it doesn't scale. The scaling should probably scale based on the talent level too. So lvl 1 is +1vim per turn, lvl 14 is +14vim per turn(or maybe +0.5 per talent lvl or whatever). This way when NPCs use their way too high lvl fearscape, they can actually deplete themselves.

Mirror Image is weird in that I haven't felt it's done anything really, other than being a nuisance after the fight. I had to spend ~80turns bumping one of them once to destroy it, due to it having evasion or whatever it was that made it actually negate hits. Even besides that freak one, it takes generally 10-20turns of bumping them to destroy them after the fight, which is dumb. They should simply disapear upon the caster's death like anni turrets, since they literally can't do anything at that point anyway. There's also basically no reason to even try destroying them midfight, which I guess is fine but feels a bit weird, other summon types you can generally decide if you want to fight, run or ignore, but mirror images you can realistically only run or ignore. Even turtles tend to be easier to kill.

Even after the nerfs to summons, I feel Necro AIs still summon somewhat too much stuff. It's not THAT bad generally but I've been playing pretty strong classes so far so not sure how it'll go once I play something weaker but even then it's still kinda annoying bumping for a dozen of turns to clear out the ghouls. This is combined with necro burst being fairly high if NPCs actually use their skills properly(granted that doesn't happen too often but still). Rigor Mortis is especially messy if you get enough debuffs before it hits(which lategame can be a single turn of several monsters attacking you). Corpselight can get pretty nasty too but you can run out of range of this one, although the aoe is massive if it's built up. Also one thing that's annoying is Boneyard/Desolate Wastes covering other ground effects so you can't see them. Might be my settings though but it's pretty annoying. Overall necros are definitely a lot scarier than they used to be, but some feels somewhat unfair to fight, and the first room of Rakshor's Pride is super deadly now.

I've gone lich, and am really enjoying it - especially the tile design when you first turn; adds a definite sense of wow factor to it.

My only complaint is that all the 'lich' flavoured items, including the arch-lich set, are near useless for lich's. Hopefully these items will get a review in the future.

I'm really looking forward to the next patch to balance enemy talents. I'm losing characters right and left to crazy damage spikes and it's becoming frustrating. I play on Insane/RL pretty much all the time and I'm used to dying a lot, but right now it's unusually bad.

Well I just found out why my character is permastuck in fearscape.

Using Infestation too so I keep feeding the enemy endless vim. Guess I'm waiting for the next patch...