Update to Combat Techniques

[Fortescue]

Rush
Unchanged

Powerful Grip
Sustain. You grip your weapon tightly and attack with sweeping, massive blows that are nearly impossible to avoid. Gain (8x Skill) Accuracy and (30, 35, 39, 42, 45)% resistance to Disarm. All attacks cost 3 more Stamina.

Justification: Precise Strikes is just weird, a Strength requirement skill that scales with Dex? and slows your attacks? We can do better, and now that Acid Wave Disarms getting Disarm Resist is a bit more appealing, and it makes sense to give access to it to all Warriors. Giving Accuracy on this sustain is a great way to let new players focus on Strength and have a Class point method of reliably improving their hit chance during the early game.

Honed Instincts
Instant, Active. Increases your Accuracy by (rank x 10) for the next (2+ rank / 2) turns. As well, you have no penalty to attacking targets you cannot see (while you are Blinded, in complete darkness, or your target is Invisible or Stealthed) for the duration. Cooldown 20 (-1 x rank, min 15)

Justification: I don't like long cooldowns, on demand critical chance is more interesting than accuracy, and the wording being changed will help new players to understand which situations penalize their ability to hit.

Flowing Strikes
Passive. After attacking you gain 4% global speed, stacking up to (raw rank, max 5) times. This bonus speed fades by 1 stack each turn you do not attack.

Justification: Blinding Speed is not a good design pattern. It is archtypical of the kind of "buff button" ability that is great for auto-cast, which is one step away from being a straight up passive anyway. This version encourages you to stay in the fight rather than being given another escape button, and as a bonus it lasts as long as you're fighting instead of only 5 turns out of 55. I hate long cooldowns.

[stinkstink]

Justification: Precise Strikes is just weird, a Strength requirement skill that scales with Dex?

Combat Techniques talents currently use the greater of your Strength and Dexterity for their requirements.

[Fortescue]

Justification: Precise Strikes is just weird, a Strength requirement skill that scales with Dex?

Combat Techniques talents currently use the greater of your Strength and Dexterity for their requirements.

Ah, well that explains that! Thank you. I've brought that point up multiple times in IRC and nobody pointed this out to me

[Davion Fuxa]

Precise Strikes seems fine to me as it currently is - though perhaps it could also scale with Strength since it is in a category that scales with either Dexterity or Strength. It thematically fits that you might be more attuned to placing your blows well that your strikes that you wouldn't attack as freely as a result. I also think it's fine being a sustain since on Meta-Class Rogues you can have Momentum draining your stamina and countering the attack speed penalty and higher Accuracy means higher stun chance on Dirty Fighting or Dual Strike; plus using subsequent attack talents turn after turn on Dual Wielding Meta-Class Rogues will quickly deplete stamina very fast as well, which a more 'brutish' type of character might do (and I don't mean just Marauders).

Blinding Speed also sort of seems perfectly fine in its current form in relation to other classes as well. Much like with Precise Strikes, it also does well with Meta-Class Rogues because it synergizes well with their hit and run tactics by giving them that quick burst before they might flee back into the shadows. On a class like Berserker it also works well with Unstoppable also - specifically letting you do more under the effect since you likely won't be using Unstoppable again after the effects end soon anyway.

The only talent that is really bland to me and not really noteworthy or that valuable is Perfect Strike. In many ways the Blind-fight feature is the only notable ability on that talent, but it is often considered a '1 point wonder' for taking out that one really annoying Blind enemy - plus if Precise Strikes is made to scale with Strength you should get a sizable Accuracy boost to compensate on Warriors; or we could go farther and perhaps give Precise Strikes Blind-Fight at Talent Level 4 or 5. An Anti-Disarm Talent seems like a good replacement for Perfect Strike in any case - though maybe for your Powerful Grip idea we might lose the Accuracy Boost and just make it a straight up Passive or a Sustain, since it is likely you would never want it off anyways.

[Fortescue]

Shibari doesn't like Precise Strikes as it exists, or Blinding Speed. Perfect Strikes is mostly unchanged besides giving a little less Accuracy and having a shorter cooldown (yay), along with being renamed.

[Davion Fuxa]

If Shibari doesn't like the talents, that's fine; but that's not a reason to change the talents. If he had a reason to change them due to potentially negative effects on gameplay (like Unstoppable for example being considered a little too predominate a talent) then I would be all for change being brought in. None of these talents though seem to work in an overpowered or really underpowered in way however, and all of them are mostly designed around the theme of 'HEAVY tactical use'.

Combat Techniques is one of the better designed categories - outside of Perfect Strike perhaps. It is a multiple class category that caters well to all the different classes it supports without leaning too heavily towards any specific one. At the same time it doesn't have any really overshadowing talents with lots of bells and whistles attached to it that really steps on the properties of any other class talents - Passive Global Speed Buff talents exist in the Spell/Temporal Category, which is something I consider to be a Mage-like feature that shouldn't be replicated in non-Mage classes.

The strategies that also come out of the talents in Combat Techniques, while simple, are there; and in many ways the advantages and disadvantages of the talents are fairly unique to this category. Outside Aim, I don't think any talent reduces Attack Speed as a drawback; Multiple Talents however drain Stamina, some of which exist on the classes that would take Combat Techniques and probably would synergize much less well. I also don't think there is any other talent like Blinding Speed that will affect Global Speed for a small duration.

[Fortescue]

Well I am not going to wiki dive for you, but currently Skirmisher has a global slow (Pace Yourself), and Berserker has a timed global boost (Unrelenting Fury), however I think Shibari probably does not want skills to inflict slow on players, especially new players, and Combat Techniques is a very newbie facing and extremely common category. I know I'm going to completely redesign / remove Pace Yourself when I get around to Skirmisher work.

I'm not really interested in arguing with you about if the changes are needed or not. That isn't the point, and I'm pretty sure whether I proposed it or not, Precise Strikes was going to be changed at some point in the near future. The other 2 changes are quality of life improvements without really changing the purpose of the talents. For example, ToME has enough escape skills, so reconfiguring Blinding Speed towards being an in combat only buff is an improvement.

[Davion Fuxa]

I think inflicting a bit of Slowness is fine, as long as the advantages are there to compensate for that specific drawback. Precise Strikes is also probably the only example of a talent where the advantages can drastically outweigh the reduced speed penalty due to how powerful the offensive benefits associated with it are. I don't think there is any problem either with a Newbie taking a talent that causes 'slowness' as well as long as the benefit is well defined and it will have meaningful use to them in whatever scenario they might have access to the talent - since this is a multi-class category talent that also scales with both Strength or Dexterity.

As for Blinding Speed, it's important to note that it isn't just an escape talent. I've used that talent in the Barracks of Grushnak Pride, against Ambushes on the Worldmap, or for a quick burst in speed to chase after and hammer Elandar in the Final Fight. Moving and tactical positioning is a part of all that, so it is as much of a useful feature in combat as increased combat speed is. Even the argument that 'ToME has enough escape talents' is fairly weak if just looking at using the talent for escaping; ToME is pretty good about making it so that eventually you will likely run out of escape options, eventually.

As for arguing about changes, I'm not even arguing about the changes specifically to talents here - I'm arguing about Developers taking too much of an approach to changing things unnecessarily without considering what might be lost due to their changes or whether changes can be made elsewhere to achieve their goals. Change is good and some of it is needed, but due vigilance needs to be taken on what might get lost in the process and where change is appropriate. It seems not enough attention is being given to what might be 'indirectly lost' as a result of a change. Whether it might just be more appropriate to address an issue through other means (such as Housepet's suggestion about changing to Offhand weapon to counter Disarm) or whether the talents can keep to their initial working and simply have the added features associated with them currently should be consideration for approach.

As a note on suggestions here btw:

Powerful Grip for example DOES change the purpose of the Precise Strikes talent - it losing it's 'ignore or take' nature because Disarm immunity is so valuable at the moment that players will be handicapped by not taking the talent; does meaning that they would need to take the talent. I also consider the slower attack speed for more damage to be another defining purpose of the talent as well - you hit slower but gain offensive advantages as a result of hitting slower. If there is an issue with Newbies potentially needing to be catered to, then this can be done by making it so that if they use the talent they will get notable advantages from it regardless of how they may come to obtain it (such as a Halfling Rogue taking it or a Dwarven Berserker).

Giving Honed Instincts a really quick cooldown as opposed to the Perfect Strike it replaces also turns DOES change the purpose of the talent - it would lose its tactical nature for one that is repeated use; which as a note would be a break from pretty well all the other talents being so 'heavily tactically inclined'. Specifically with the suggested scaling you would get 7 our of 15 turns of being able to Blind Fight and have increased critical chance at talent level 5/5. Unlike Rush, talents like Perfect Strike and Blinding Speed aren't instant use abilities that act over multiple turns, so there is a reason for that long cooldown they have not getting changed by increased talent levels.

[Fortescue]

I actually removed the crit from Honed Instincts already, Shibari didn't like that. I also capped the duration at 5 turns (2 + skill / 2), so now it is 5 turns out of 15. It isn't much different now, just a little less accuracy in exchange for a faster CD really. Also 15 is not a "really quick" cooldown @_@

[Orangeflame]

15 is a quick cooldown. Flurry is cooldown 12, which is not much less than what you're proposing.
I could use that multiple times in most boss fights, whereas the ~40 cooldown of Perfect Strike is really only once per fight, and only more than that in the final fight or if I'm in an extended fight of little to no danger (ex. a large dreadfell room, and I'm standing just outside the doorway). The long cooldown makes it ideal to save until you are up against a foe that you need the blind-fight against (ex. dread), but if it's cooldown 15, it encourages using it less sparingly.

Also, a sustain is the wrong way to deal with the current disarm problem. I think most of the issue will go away once the Acid Wave runes are fixed and respect saves/immunities, but other suggestions (read: Housepet's) are preferable than a talent. Plus, there's nothing wrong with Precise Strikes.

[Atarlost]

Precise Strikes would not be at all interesting if it didn't make the trade it does. Right now it's an important strategic choice that shapes your stat distribution at enough of a cost to not be a no brainer. It turns dex into crit rate enough to ignore cunning while still being good at crits or gives you another accuracy source on low dex builds, or even dex into damage by using overflow accuracy on swords to boost crit multiplier. These all change what sorts of stat distributions a class can support while the attack speed penalty makes it an actual choice rather than a must have.

[edge2054]

I'd like to see the cooldown dropped on it and have it be an instant action to use so it can be toggled easier.

But I kinda feel that way about most sustains so...