Cursed Ruminations (Aka Brainstorming)

[Ritz]

Bump-centric is the worst idea for any class, how is it supposed to be fun? I am all for more/better actives.

It is most definitely not the worst idea. I feel the need to express my opinion at this point, because one of my other favourite classes, Archers, have already been reworked into the more "active" style. The old one could just get a bunch of passives and sustains, disable confirm on ranged hit and spam its way with Steady Shots, Flares and auto-attacks to victory due to the awesomeness of debuffs and poisons. Skeleton Archer was one of my favourite combinations and worked beautifully on Insane. With only so very few buttons to push, the appeal comes from the simplest source - when playing an auto-attack or purely bump class, you don't have to analyze or think as much, or constantly rotate your abilities (god, how I hate Archmages for that). All you do is focus on mowing down the enemies, collecting loot and seeing the little number in the top left corner steadily grow. This is good. This gives pleasure. This should stay.

Now, I never managed to win a game with Cursed, and I feel the class could actually use some actives for better survival (maybe with a gimmick of not reducing the Rampage duration?), but that doesn't mean that its current iteration doesn't work - it bloody does, it just doesn't appeal to everyone. Those who like actives, the vast majority of game classes are already made for you. At least leave me the ones that rely on a metric ton of sustains, passives and procs, so that I can turn my brain off after a long day of mind-numbing work and get my daily doze of dopamine. That's the addicting nature of grind. That's the drug that pushed forward Diablo and other action RPGs. ToME won't lose anything by making a strong, Insane- and Madness-relevant bump class for this primal, bestial feeling of joy that comes with huge numbers and loot collection.

Edit: You know what, this is wrong. I'll rephrase what I said - having less active abilities does not result in a simpler style that makes you think less. Your focus just shifts to a different kind of work - utilizing the environment, choosing the best target to take out first, paying more attention to items and current status effects that you laid down. I will argue that this is more satisfactory than finding a perfect rotation out of thousand possible active skills, and involves a different effort from players, thus giving the game more variety. "Less is more" is a thing for a reason.

[Micbran]

Overall, it seems like people prefer having Cursed have more actives, so I'll update the OP accordingly with your ideas.

And I'd like to work with you HousePet, except not right now. I'm a little saddled with other responsibilities until summer.

[Dopaminka]

I agree with Ritz, archer was my first winning class and I liked it's "simplicity". Not all classes need Mindslayer levels of complexity and tons of actives.
What Cursed could use is a buff to it's generic/survivability trees but definitely not centering it even more around Rampage

I'm a bit worried by this trend of changing classic classes to fit several power players ideas of what a perfect class should be, especially when you use terms like "overwhelming majority prefers" to force the change. What overwhelming majority? Did you make a community poll that reached anyone who doesn't check te4.org forums regularly? Just this week there were tons of people who only heard about 1.5 beta because the global chat was talking about it as they don't read te4 forums all that often.

[dadito]

Make gloom scale with the higher of phys power or mindpower, so it's also useful late game against mobs with high save values (if this gets done, I would probably take out the extra mindpower to apply effects that's on it right now)

I really like the idea of skills having extra effects when at high hate, as it is right now the actives range from being awful at low hate to being mediocre at high hate values.

Even at high hate their damage multipliers/extra effects are much worse than physical classes that don't have to deal with awful resource management

[Micbran]

I agree with Ritz, archer was my first winning class and I liked it's "simplicity". Not all classes need Mindslayer levels of complexity and tons of actives.
What Cursed could use is a buff to it's generic/survivability trees but definitely not centering it even more around Rampage

I'm a bit worried by this trend of changing classic classes to fit several power players ideas of what a perfect class should be, especially when you use terms like "overwhelming majority prefers" to force the change. What overwhelming majority? Did you make a community poll that reached anyone who doesn't check te4.org forums regularly? Just this week there were tons of people who only heard about 1.5 beta because the global chat was talking about it as they don't read te4 forums all that often.

If you have issues with a proposed rework feel free to expound on exactly what you do and don't want to see. There are no changes being forced here, I am no devoloper and even those that have popped up in this thread that are so not have the final say on class reworks or anything.

[anonymous000]

More or better actives does not necessarily mean turning Cursed into Archmage. As things stand currently I think Cursed is having the "less" without the "but more" part that Ritz cherish about the old Archer, even old Archer requires more management than the current Cursed do. Simple and simplistic are two different concepts.

A good benchmark for Cursed would be Berserker. Berserker, as a starter class, is simple enough without being boring. I am not sure about whether Cursed as a locked class should be made simpler than Berserker.

For the tweak itself, I love Razakai's idea as it keeps the class simple while giving it a unique flavor that Cursed currently lacks

Edit: I don't think the point made about class reworks as "changing classic classes to fit several power players ideas" well-made. As a person who normally plays in Normal difficulty, I can only see Rogue and Archer are being made way more interesting than before.

[Razakai]

Yeah it'd be best to keep Cursed as relatively simple vs other classes. My proposal was intended so that you could have the choice of primarily bumping to keep your Rampage maxed out and therefore getting large +damage/atk speed bonuses, vs using lots of talents to get less passive boosts but more active stuff. Maybe have some locked trees that can push the class into a sustain/passive heavy path. Advanced Gloom/super-Rampage perhaps? Either way, let's make sure that Cursed doesn't turn into something overly complex - no advanced resource management or combo systems.

[voltteccer]

Don't have a lot of time right now, here's quick and dirty, will get detailed later tonight hopefully.

It's a bit of a mistake to describe Cursed as bump-centric. They prefer to open a fight with several actives in a row, and to use Harass Prey on cooldown whenever possible. If you aren't using Reckless Charge very frequently you probably just don't realize how good it is. It's more accurate to say that Slash and Frenzy are terrible talents, and that Cursed actives inexplicably all have low damage.

I like the idea of a class that just grows strong the more it hates And when that hate drops it's just a normal guy that's left. It'd probably need a redo on Hate management though to make it more controlable but then again, the current management isn't exactly liked anyway.

Right now, Cursed are "normal guys" at 100 hate (100% healmod, decent-but-not-great damage on talents) and become crippled hobos when hate drops. You have to maintain very high hate just to avoid suffering penalties.

Instead of 50-100 healmod, they should vary from 75-150 or something similar. Or else get some sort of major compensation buff from high hate. Can you imagine if Solipsists had 100% global speed at 100% psi, and got slower for every % of psi they lost, and also got a damage penalty on all active talents? That's pretty much how Cursed Form works currently, and it is incredibly dumb.

What's wrong with hate, exactly?

Any resource that passively drains is problematic because it means in order to protect yourself from ambushes you have to constantly maintain it using active abilities/items. Additionally any resource that is difficult to recover encourages players to do really lame crap like leave harmless enemies alive as resource-fridges. Hate has both of these issues. It's not a big deal on Doomed because they have a good supply of hate from Feed. Cursed don't need much hate to function, but since your healmod gets trashed you have no choice but to maintain your hate. We come back to the fact that MERELY HAVING THE HATE RESOURCE IS A DISADVANTAGE, and there is currently no accompanying benefit or bonus to make up for it.

They use both strength and willpower and by extension, both physical power and mindpower are important stats.

Mindpower is only important if you are investing heavily in Gloom or Fears. Dominate is also mindpower-based, but unless you are playing on Normal, you won't have enough mindpower to actually stick this on dangerous enemies. Like dadito said, either this stuff should scale with phys power, or Cursed should get some source of increased mindpower.

To prevent using Rampage as an escape tool you'd have to gut the move speed bonus included or make it somehow only work when moving towards an enemy.

There's literally nothing wrong with using Rampage as an escape tool.

I like the idea of passive Rampage a lot because it makes hate good instead of bad. Also current Rampage is pretty unfun and weird TBH, I don't like getting hit for half my health, getting a big buff, and then needing to waste that buff to heal myself.

[Mordy]

Right now, Cursed are "normal guys" at 100 hate (100% healmod, decent-but-not-great damage on talents) and become crippled hobos when hate drops. You have to maintain very high hate just to avoid suffering penalties.

Instead of 50-100 healmod, they should vary from 75-150 or something similar. Or else get some sort of major compensation buff from high hate. Can you imagine if Solipsists had 100% global speed at 100% psi, and got slower for every % of psi they lost, and also got a damage penalty on all active talents? That's pretty much how Cursed Form works currently, and it is incredibly dumb.

Yeah I was implying that. Make them get buffs for hate and nothing really special at 0 instead of the current debuffs when hate lowers which is a big part of the pain of using it.

There's literally nothing wrong with using Rampage as an escape tool.

Well someone said it was a problem so I put a suggestion on how to change that but indeed I don't have a strong opinion on that part.

[Razakai]

So a vague idea for how passive Rampage might work:

Rampage - now an unlocked tree and passive. The first talent grants you movespeed and attack speed, based on your current Hate. The movespeed would take into account Surge being merged into this. At 50 Hatred it'd be approximately equal to old one, at 100 significantly moreso but not quite double, make it a sorta bell curve - so that you can hover around 50ish Hatred with actives if needed, or go to 100 if you want the passive style.
If having insane movespeed all the time is too good, you can tie it into having enemies in LoS so the numbers are weaker if you can't see stuff.
The other Rampage talents would be relatively similar, at least thematically - and instead of extending duration, would instead give more hate (e.g. Brutality gives hate on crit, Tenacity gives hate from taking a big hit). I'd probably replace Slam with a non-offensive talent, maybe have it also give stuff like the other sustains - cleave/deflect chance?
A locked tree could give 'active' things to your Rampage like Slam. So for people that want buttons to go with Rampage, you can invest in this tree for special talents that interact with it.

[Davion Fuxa]

We should probably talk a bit more about Cleave, Surge, and Repel here. There are some nice ideas here - such as making certain weapon combinations better when using the corresponding talent - but because they are mutually exclusive you won't invest in more then one. I'm not sure if darkgod has unlocked the Tome:Orc discussion thread, but a while back I had thought up a scheme regarding making use of different weapon setups to change how your weapons work.

For Cursed in this regard, an idea for them might be to move all three talents to their own Talent Category and 'make' them build off each other. Start with Cleave which will let you sometimes get second attacks off, but take out the buff to Two Handed weapons; follow it with Repel that let's you deflect atacks, but remove the bonus to shields; put in Surge and depending on what Rampage does we can make it do something else, no benefit to Dual Wielding. Finally, make a new capstone talent that will deal with different weapon combinations, and give buffs depending on what combination of weapons you are using.

[Razakai]

A sustain/passive focused tree along those lines might be a good idea. I think some of those talents might be a bit weak, but the core concept of a tree of nothing but self-buffing/melee-centric sustains would fit well for Cursed. Then you have Gloom, weapon-sustain tree and Rampage offering powerful passive sustains. Slaughter/Endless Hunt/Strife can then be the active trees (if we actually need 3 active trees, potentially you could merge it down into 2 now).

e - a brief 5 min sketch of a potential new-Cursed:

Code: Select all

Gloom: OK but does this need a way to apply the effects better so it's less difficult to apply vs insane bosses etc?

Slaughter
Slash - Deal high weapon damage and grants hate. While above threshold, torments targes
Frenzy - Large number of attacks vs adjacent enemies, can hit targets multiple times. Gain additional attacks based on threshold.
Reckless Charge - Charge+push targets aside. Gains hate per target hit, at threshold costs hate and dazes.
Blindside - Teleport to target, attack, gain resistall for a few turns. Above threshold, grants perfect evasion for a turn.

Endless Hunt
Dominate - Pins target, reduces resistances, armor, defence. passively grants stalk effect.
Beckon - Pull target towards you and stalk them. Stalk also numbs target.
Preternatural Senses - Passive tracking, see invis/stealth. Interact with stalk somehow?
Harass Prey - Multi-hit attack that places talents on CD, increased benefit per stalk stack.

Strife
Cleave - Attacks chain to nearby targets and can bleed+reduce healing. Passive crit bonus.
e: actually bleed doesn't fit, let's ripoff my Bastion addon and have it give a brief atk speed boost if you have no valid cleave target so it's still good vs single target
Repel - Gives chance to parry melee attacks and deflect ranged attacks.
Surge - ???
? - Special attack based on weapon type? Bonus to sustain based on weapon type?

Rampage
Passively grants +atk/movespeed based on hate
Grants physdam/physpen based on hate, crits grant hate
Gives mini-shield and saves based on hate, damage taken grants hate
Gives lifesteal based on hate, kills grant hate

---Locked

Advanced Gloom Tree (primarily passive playstyle with 1 or 2 actives)

Advanced Rampage Tree (primarily active playstyle, special attacks that interact with Rampage like an adv. Slaughter tree)

Predator: ?
Fears: Buff/rework. Maybe this overlaps a bit with Advanced Gloom's concept?

---Generics

Cursed Form - make this tree better esp Unnatural Body

Cursed Aura - This should probably always be unlocked as Ruined Earth/Cursed Sentry are so good. Alternatively move those 2 into the other generic tree and have this instead
do more curse stuff. Also rework how some curses work.

? - Probably needs 1 more generic tree. If we move RE/CS, maybe theme this around cursing the earth around you, passive defensive debuffs and control.

[Davion Fuxa]

I don't see it as a problem that it might be weak - we can always add to it or buff it as needed.

As a note, going the other way (entirely new category, meaning empty talent spots), we could fill up empty talent spots with talents that help shore up areas the Cursed is weak in. Someone said landing Dominate was difficult - so a talent to improve that and other Mindpower based effects in some way for example (maybe increasing Mindpower based off a % of Physical Power?).

[Razakai]

Yeah I think either a) the key Cursed debuffs need to become irresistible as it's no fun losing a big portion of damage/effects due to random saves or b) give em something that lets them land all types of effects via increased MP rather than just Gloom. Maybe in the now-empty Surge spot? Rename it and have it be the mental sustain (so we have the offensive cleave, defensive repel, and utility 'surge').

[Mordy]

Make a sustain/passive that improves mindpower based on physical power when the user isn't using mindstars? It'd allow non mindstar Cursed to apply gloom correctly without making the psiblade builds apply it too easily. Make it scale on Hate too