a few new runes and infusions

[martinuzz]

Infusion: Relief
- increases the duration of x positive effects on you by y turns
- reduces the duration of z negative effects by y turns

Infusion: Reflex
- decreases chance to be critically hit by x% for y turns
- increases chance to score a critical hit by z% for y turns

Infusion: Swallow
- as it's name implies

Rune: Quicken
- increases spell travel speed by x% for y turns
- increases spell casting speed by z% for y turns

Rune: Telepathy
- grants telepathy:random (could be more than one type perhaps) in a radius of x for y turns

Rune: Empowered armor
- reduces your spellpower by x% for y turns
- adds the amount of spellpower reduced to your armor value for y turns
- raises armor hardiness by z% for y turns

[Frumple]

Relief: No, specifically because it's an exact replica of the shalore's Timeless talent, which is tremendously powerful. Certainly not as a general use infusion; maybe as one with charges or an artifact infusion.

Telepathy rune: No, specifically because there's a taint that does the exact same thing, so it would be stepping on toes. Runes have vision for detection abilities. A detmon effect might do, instead. Probably with charges, though, at least until/unless wands are phased out or changed.

Swallow infusions sounds weird, especially now that swallow itself has been taken out of general use (Swallows incredible useful, especially for non-wilder AM users). An attack infusion that does some resource steal, not just specifically EQ, might be interesting. Sounds like it'd make a better taint than infusion, though.

The other three sound interesting. Quicken might be another rune-with-a-charge, though.

[edge2054]

Relief could have charges as well. The fact that it's a copy of another ability makes it kinda meh. Also it has a lot of overlap with wild infusions.

How about a Rune of Purging for our undead friends? Removes X negative magical effects (and only magical effects) and boosts spell save for a few a turns?

Or to go with a chronomantic version, Rune of Body Reversion. Heals for X damage and removes X effects from your character (good or bad ).

[martinuzz]

Relief: No, specifically because it's an exact replica of the shalore's Timeless talent, which is tremendously powerful. Certainly not as a general use infusion; maybe as one with charges or an artifact infusion.

yea, it should have charges. As for being a replica, well. Almost all existing runes/infusions are copies of some talent, so that would not be odd.

Telepathy rune: No, specifically because there's a taint that does the exact same thing, so it would be stepping on toes. Runes have vision for detection abilities. A detmon effect might do, instead. Probably with charges, though, at least until/unless wands are phased out or changed.

Erm, what exactly would be the difference between telepathy for x turns and detmon?
At first, I wanted to make the rune telepathy:all, but then I thought it would be better as telepathy:random, as that would require the player to inscribe the right telepathy rune for the right environment. Also, there already is a hat (or was it light) ego that grants telepathy:all, I found it a few betas back.

Swallow infusions sounds weird, especially now that swallow itself has been taken out of general use (Swallows incredible useful, especially for non-wilder AM users). An attack infusion that does some resource steal, not just specifically EQ, might be interesting. Sounds like it'd make a better taint than infusion, though.

Main thing I had in mind here was making the boss swallow achievement a bit more accessible.
Second thought behind it was to make some infusion that does damage, as there are none I think.
What you suggest, some attack + rescource steal might be better than swallow.
Suggestion:
Infusion: Wildfire
- does x damage of a random type. No arcane, blight or temporal damage. restores x% health, y% stamina, and reduces equilibrium by z% of the damage done

The other three sound interesting. Quicken might be another rune-with-a-charge, though.

Perhaps it does, if it's buffs are decent

[Frumple]

yea, it should have charges. As for being a replica, well. Almost all existing runes/infusions are copies of some talent, so that would not be odd.

While most of the inscriptions are copies of other talents, none of them are copies of fourth tier racial talents. Very low charge or artifact infusion, if it is implemented at all. Timeless is an incredibly powerful talent that approaches game-break when combined with certain other talents. An alternate idea would be an infusion that simply suspends the effects of negative effects for a few turns.

Erm, what exactly would be the difference between telepathy for x turns and detmon?
At first, I wanted to make the rune telepathy:all, but then I thought it would be better as telepathy:random, as that would require the player to inscribe the right telepathy rune for the right environment. Also, there already is a hat (or was it light) ego that grants telepathy:all, I found it a few betas back.

Duration, especially when you're tracking something that teleported out of sight or is invisible. A one turn detection effect is considerably weaker than even a two or three turn one. Given that our other telepathy inscription is an artifact, perhaps a lesser telepathy taint that gives random, but never all tele, with the associated mind save reduction.

As for the hat, greater telepathy, yeah. It also comes in amulet form, though those are incredibly rare. Greater telepathy amulets are rarity 120 -- the next highest is 35. The hat ego is only rarity 50.

Main thing I had in mind here was making the boss swallow achievement a bit more accessible.
Second thought behind it was to make some infusion that does damage, as there are none I think.

There's two (Insidious poison, wild growth), but one of them is an artifact infusion.

Suggestion:
Infusion: Wildfire
- does x damage of a random type. No arcane, blight or temporal damage. restores x% health, y% stamina, and reduces equilibrium by z% of the damage done

Give it psi and hate, too. Blanket non-arcane resource steal. Also no light or darkness damage, as those come primarily from arcane classes. Might fit as an artifact, actually. Would probably need a different name, though. Wildfire is a archmage talent

[bricks]

Here are some runes I came up with a while back:

Stone Pillar: attempt to raise a stone pillar at target location; if the tile is occupied, it will instead deal physical damage and attempt to daze
Nightfall: smokebomb-style darkness and darkness damage in cone
Neutralization: temporarily suppress all positive and negative effects on target
Reversal: target's timed effects and cooldowns count upwards instead of downwards

I've tried to come up with interesting infusions, but I haven't had much luck. "Neutralization" could actually be an infusion, as it's kind of antimagic-flavored.

[Aquillion]

Please no more charged runes. They're not very ToME4-ish. And they conflict with the way runes work -- in general, after all, you want to treat runes as equipment and get the best stuff possible. Charged runes aren't commonly-found or easily-obtainable enough to make people 'reserve' a slot for them, and you can't unequip runes without losing them permanently, so using a charged rune means giving up what was probably a piece of optimal equipment for many builds. This means that many people are never going to touch a charged rune outside of maybe speed runes for the last fight (and I don't think that that's something to encourage.)

Charged runes should be done away with. The last thing we need are more.

[Frumple]

Thinking on it, what might make sense is to convert the charged runes into taints and give them some sort of appropriate penalty. They're charged because they're very powerful and honestly need some sort of limitation to them -- giving some nasty side effects might just be sufficient for it. It might allow us to phase out charges without the inscriptions using them becoming ridiculous.

Not sure what to do with any eventual charged infusions, though. They wouldn't really fit into the arcane taints, but there's no non-arcane counterpart, currently. Probably just have them have negative effects as a plain infusion, I suppose.

Another alternative is to just convert all the charged inscriptions into world artifacts.

[Aquillion]

A suggestion I made in another thread was to change the inscription system so the player has, say, 9 'slots' instead of 3, and each inscription uses up a different amount (with three, of course, being the default for the most commonly-used inscriptions today, like typical shield, regen, healing, wild, etc, so the core balance of the game doesn't change, though there could be weaker or stronger versions of some of them with different costs.) A category point would buy you 3 more slots.

Currently charged inscriptions could then use up many more (as many as, say, 8 or 9, or even more so you must spend a category point to be able to use them at all, while sacrificing most of your ability to use other inscriptions.)

Or the numbers could be higher. If it was 15 slots with 'typical' inscriptions using up 5, then that would fit nicely into adding talents that give you +1 slot per point... maybe that would even work with 9, not sure.

Maybe I should make a separate idea thread for this...