Make siding with the assassin lord better

[Planetus]

I love the idea of a chest-rich dungeon level and a fixed tier5 dagger at the end! That sounds great! I'd still like to see a rogue-style shop, though.

Maybe, before you go east, you have access to the Assassin Lord's fortress, which manifests as a small rogue-focused town, meaning no shops with heavy armor or non-dagger weapons, but probably also a jewelry shop and maybe both a rune and an infusion shop. I'd like to see something more thematically rogue-loot about it, like higher probability of artifacts, or maybe a randart store (not choose-your-item, just random randarts). Unfortunately, that's all I can see to qualify as a rogue-loot store. I don't think it's the only option, just the only one I can think of right now. Anyway, when you get back from the east and go in there, you find it's been over run by horrors, and the Assassin Lord has been turned into one, creating the dungeon cttw suggested.

I know I've been suggesting a lot about stores in this thread, but I think the thematic options of this game are rather limited, and a new town (basically just stores) sounds more interesting to me than a random artifact on the spot or the like.

[SageAcrin]

Getting access to a kind of Black Market of fairly high end daggers/light armors/etc. stores seems reasonable.

It's not a huge reward, though, so there's a question of if it's worth the coding trouble. It's certainly thematic enough.

[Emaster]

Actually would be really cool to have some kind of rogue alliance so players could have another option to side with. Right now the only in-game decision is going Anti Magic or not.

Lorewise also sounds cool. Is strange in Maj'Eyal the non gifted people haven't formed an alliance to protect against the power of arcane forces or nature forces from zigur.

Siding with the Assassin lord could give access to a new town area with shops, quests and access to talents.

In this town could be added an artifact shop similar to the one we have already, making it less painful siding with the assassin lord. Or some kind of black-market where you could buy only artifacts.

[BoomFrog]

Oh, more horrors? Yawn.

Picture this: two assassins approach you one night and tell you the assassin lord is calling in his favor, you are going on the grandest heist ever, robbing the vaults of iron throne. If you refuse you fight an assassins ambush, but who would refuse such an opportunity?

The vault is a two level dungeon the first zone is relatively normal with a generous timer, populated by dwarven guards, archers, earthwardens, and stone golems. Lots of pin, stun, confuse, earthwall, and high armor and resists. Anything to slow you down.

Second level is similar but a much shorter timer and the whole zone is no teleport. There are golden chests everywhere but do you really have time to deal with them? If the timer runs out the level is flooded by acid. You start suffocating and taking an acid dot every turn and your healing modifier is 0. (to prevent some acid proof undead superthief from looting everything, better make it 50% resistance penetrating too just in case.)

Inside the second level is a sealed vault with epic loot. No custom orders, no store just a shot at glory. That's an appropriate and thematic reward. The only way to win is careful use of avoiding fights. Stealth, invisibility, trap detection, and tracking/vision will all be invaluable.

Dwarves who refuse are given a +0.2 mastery in the dwarf racial tree for their loyalty.

[aristalis]

Cute. Have the damage start at a low baseline and then ramp up as time goes on, so it can't be cheesed by million% movespeed rampagers with infusions

[HousePet]

These suggestions are leaning heavily towards the Rogue and Shadowblade classes.
Prodigies and the rest of ToME in general likes to make choices a grey area.

[BoomFrog]

That's a good point, but the timed dungeon I described could be completed by any class that is capable of progressing quickly with little rest. Avoiding enemies is one option but I'm sure a summoner with movement infusions or a berzerker with good stamina regen could both make it through.

It just seemed like a nice opportunity for a new type of challenge. It's actually not new, there are a lot of timed events. Most (or all) allow for slowness though. But of course this mission is optional. Maybe a warning at the 40 turns mark that you should probably activate your rod about now.

[SageAcrin]

These suggestions are leaning heavily towards the Rogue and Shadowblade classes.
Prodigies and the rest of ToME in general likes to make choices a grey area.

No they don't. I mean, yes, ToME goes for giving out non-specific-to-class rewards, but the leans are definitely not something it avoids. For Prodigies, it varies strongly by the choice.

Legacy of the Naloren has a strong lean towards two-hander wielders. Mental Tyranny is terrible for those that don't build Mindpower. Superpower requires building both Strength and Willpower-a fairly narrow subset. The assembled Telos staff only appeals to mages. Arcane Might, only for physical fighters who also build Magic. Wildtouched Speed is only useful for Wilders and those with massive investments in Harmony or Antimagic, Tricky Defenses and Spell Feedback only for the AM, and Blighted Summoning only for Summoning types that build magic.

All of these are about as narrow of a niche, and Tricks provides more for those outside of its niche than many of those(in the form of the Scoundrel category...and making Invisibility Runes better, I suppose.) than those skills do. (Tricks also already provides for more good niche classes than that, also, as an Archmage is a perfectly valid user of the skill. I'm not sure about Anorithil, but I think they'd work too.)

A system of literally dozens of skills-where you can only take two-should go both for niche and good all-around skills, to provide people with choices while also staving off decision paralysis.

As to dungeon design...don't see why you can't have one side be generalized and the other niche. There's dungeon splits like the Flooded Cave/Temple right now that appeal fairly similarly-the Pearl is usually more useful, but siding with Slasul gets you a niche setup.

Edit: Wait, I...hadn't read that newest suggested dungeon description. That is leaning way too heavily towards one playstyle, yes...

Besides, if Supermini wants to code one, I am happy with what Supermini wants to code for concept. Being willing to code something counts for a lot.

[Planetus]

I wouldn't say that all of those are as narrow a niche as the rogue/shadowblade niche we're currently talking about, but some of them are, and many of them are still niches. The proposed niche for this is pretty slender, so widening it a little would be ok, but it's still defensible.

As for the suggested dwarven vault dungeon, I like the idea. I'd also suggest that neither timer starts until a guard notices you, survives a single hit, and/or moves to a specific alarm tile. This fits the rogues-breaking-in theme and stealth-oriented rogues could sneak through the whole place and, for the second level, loot everything carefully, a wonderful reward for their stealth-skill. Likewise, invisibility-focused mages could do some good work here. Also, depending on how it's done, quick-moving powerful one-hit killers could do well as well. If the loot isn't specified toward particular types (daggers, heavy armor, etc.) this opens this up to a number of builds as quite beneficial.

If combined with the black market town with rogue-specific dagger and light armor shops, and maybe specialized rune and infusion shops (invisibility, teleport, phase door runes, movement infusions, whatever else is favored by rogues), but a generalized jewelry store or two, and maybe generalized light boot, glove, cap, belt, and cloak stores, this makes it a nice mix of rogue-specific niche benefits and overall benefits.

[supermini]

I'm not too keen on doing a stealth type dungeon in a non-stealth type of game. Yes, we have stealth in ToME, but the way it works is more like a blind that lasts one round, every round and gives you shadowstrike crits. It is the complete opposite of the whole avoiding combat thing that stealth games do - it is more about sneak attacks and backstabbing. I'm also not keen on timed dungeons, because I don't see the need to reward fast killing classes over more defensive ones. If someone else wants to code that, I'm cool with it.

As for another set of shops, I dunno...I'd like the option of siding with the assassin lord to be thematically different from siding with a merchant. You'd get a shop either way, and symmetric outcomes are boring.

However, I like the idea of breaking into a dwarven vault. So here's an idea.

When you come back from east, you are faced with an assassin ambush. You get a choice between breaking into a dwarven vault and fighting them (dwarves get 0.1 bonus to racial if they refuse). You are to retrieve from it an artifact(McGuffin) for the assassin lord, and everything else that you find is yours.

If you agree, you get a mini-dungeon where you have to fight dwarven guards (I'm thinking a mix of stone wardens, alchemists and berserkers). There should be some chests scattered around the dungeon which ties into SageAcrin's idea of getting a bunch of chests as a compensation for losing the merchant.

After this, you can trigger the second part while walking on the world map. A bloodied rogue finds you and tells you that something horrible has happened at the assassin hideout, that the whole place is flooded and full of unspeakable monstrosities. If you choose to investigate you get a flooded version of the unknown tunnels with aquatic horrors - with a horror boss at the end (assassin lord, transformed by the evil artifact). He has a chance (75%, as is standard) to drop a t5 dagger. I'll also add some lore about the artifact, but I don't know what it will be yet.

Two mini dungeons, a bunch of chests, an artifact at the end and a chance to take that prodigy sounds to me like a good enough compensation for losing the merchant.

Comments and ideas are welcome. I started working on the flooded dungeon already, it's going ok but it's a learning process for me.

[HousePet]

Playstyle niche's aren't what I'm worried about. Its classes ending up having cookie cutter builds.
I wouldn't want it to turn into a situation where playing as a Rogue meant you would always side with the assassin lord.
That would be worse than the current situation, where nobody but a Rogue or Shadowdancer sides with the assassin lord.