ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Concept
A few days ago I had considered a class called the Cursespewer for the Corrupter Metaclass that Darkgod is planning to put together. I pictured a warrior clad in heavy armor, wading into battle with a wicked looking two-handed weapon, weakening his foes with hexes and curses as he closed.

That idea has evolved a bit. Now I'm imagining that same warrior, his body covered in puss filled sores, his face teeming with maggots, oily black liquid dripping from his forked tongue. A body not riddled by disease but one that lives in a symbiotic relationship with every plague normal men fear. A man so corrupted he hardly looks like a man at all.

He still has his hexes and curses. He still has a wicked looking two-handed weapon. But now he spreads death and disease by his mere presence. His enemies don't merely fear him, they fear what he brings with him. This is the...

Pestilent Defiler

Alright so flowery text aside, this is what I've come up with so far.

Talent Trees

Corruptions (generic)
- Carrier (passive): You no longer suffer damage from being diseased and even begin to develop a symbiotic relationship with the diseases you carry. You gain 10% disease damage absorption per talent point and spread any diseases infecting you on a successful melee attack. At rank 5 you double the duration of all diseases personally affecting you. (In other words when you get diseased it lasts twice as long as it normally would).
- ??
- Vampiric Blood (passive): You no longer heal through natural means (e.g. resting) but gain 20% of all damage you inflict as health per talent point invested.
- Forked Tongue (passive): Casting speed increase.

Curses (class)
Overview: Bigger and Badder hexes. Range of 10 instead of 5 and still go aoe at three talent points. Definitely should cost Vim.
- Curse of Pacification: Pacifies the target for X turns (Basically a stun but read on...). Any damage caused will break the effect (okay a one round stun). (So basically pacification should last longer then a stun generally would since this deals no damage. It's a crowd control spell primarily or a buy yourself some time spell). At level three it effects a radius of 3.
- ??
- ??
- ??

Hexes (generic)
Overview: I'm picturing Hexes as very short range spells like 5 tiles. Short enough range that you're practically in melee but not quite. I'm also looking at this as a possible generic corrupter meta-class tree with heavy synergies for the other talent trees but some general use for everyone. Maybe do all of these as 0 Vim effects since they're basically minor curses.
- Energy Doll (active; 0 Vim): You pull Vim from the Hexed target at the rate of X per turn over the next X turns. At level three it effects a radius of 3.
- Restless Slumber (active; 0 Vim): Hexed target will rise from the grave if it's killed within the next X turns. It's undead form will serve you for only X turns before crumbling to dust. At level three it effects a radius of 3. Does not effect undead.
- Thinned Blood (active; 0 Vim): You thin the hexed targets blood causing it to bleed more when it's injured for the next X turns. Any physical damage it suffers it takes X% of again the following turn At level three it effects a radius of 3. Does not effect undead.
- Brittle Bones (active; 0 Vim): The hexed targets bones become brittle, causing it to suffer X% more damage from physical attacks (double effect on undead) during the next X turns. At level three it effects a radius of 3.

Plague (class)
- Virulent Disease (active): Infects the target with a disease (save applies). More talent points invested increases the disease damage per round and the duration of the effect.
- ??
- Swarm of Rats (active): You conjure a swarm of plague carrying rats in a radius of 4. The rats ravenously attack everything in the area of effect except the caster, inflicting 1 damage per attack (ignoring armor) and spreading the disease they carry (save applies). Additional talent points increase the number of times the swarm attack each target per round (and thus the more times everything in the area of effect must resist the disease) and the strength of the disease the rats carry (higher disease damage).
- Epidemic (active): Infects the target with a highly contagious disease. Every time the target suffers physical damage it spreads (save applies) the Epidemic to adjacent tiles along with any other diseases infecting it. Talent points increase disease duration and damage.

I have some more stuff I want to add to this but my wife wants to watch a movie. I'll get back to it when I can. In the meantime I'd love to hear feedback and any additional talent ideas people have.

vampiric blood seems too powerful

as for curses and hexes, maybe have them go from radius 1 at lvl 3 to radius 3 and lvl 5 instead of the huge jump.
as for your curse of pacification that would be called a daze in t4 terms (yes there is stuff like that in game now)

as far as carrier goes... it probably would be better to make that a 20% resistance to disease (so at lvl 5 you are immune, but at lvl 4 you are not) then make it so that you have a 5*(talent lvl)% chance to pass a disease on. (chance increases if wearing a poisonous weapon or inflicting blight damage)

I had also the idea of being a diseases carrier and spreading them, more with an active talent though, something like:
Blood Spray: you spray your own corrupted blood in a frontal cone, doing xx blight damage and spreading any diseases you carry.
Although I quite like Epidemic too, but it seems too melee focused, we also need corrupted casters.

I agree with shoob that vampiric blood is too powerful (or too weak), I love the idea but I can hardly see how to balance it.
Stun that breaks on damage is indeed a daze and already exists.

As for hexes & curses I saw them more a two different categories, with curses affecting the target stats/resistances/... debuffing it and hexes applying special effects (like a berserker hex that increases damage but makes it mad and attack anything in sight).

I added a few corruptions talents for beta9 for new monsters in Rak'Shor:
* Soul Rot: a simple blight bolt
* Blood Grasp: a bolt of blood, doing blight damage and healing the caster for X% of it
* Blightzone: lasting blight damage zone
* Curse of Vulnerability: reduces all resistances of the target by X% (this does not go below 0 it just helps to fight highly resistant/immune things)
* Bone Shield: Sustained talent, X bone appear around the caster, when any damage is take one of the bone fully absorbs the damage (however high it may be) and then disappears.

Other ideas I had:
* Curse of Attraction: make the target look like a foe to all other creatures
* Death Hex: prevents life regen & increases chance of being critically hit (must be careful thi scould be too powerful against bosses)
* Domination Hex: target becomes your puppet for a few turns
* Wraithform: sustain, gain etheralness allowing to pass through walls, increase armour or defense
* Blood Sacrifice: sacrifice your own blood (HP) to increase your Vim (should probably only be useable when "in combat")
* Darkfire: beam of darkness/fire damage
* Armageddon: fire aura, randomly throws slow moving molten boulders that do physical/fire damage on impact
* Dark Suprise: melee hit taht deals darkness damage, if it connects the target is blinded and an other melee strike follows that deals blight damage
* Blighted Weapon: sustain, simple +blight damage on melee weapon
* Blood Tap: temporary melee boost at the cost of HP
* Quench Life: instant death unless a save is made, obviously needs consideration
* Raise skeleton/wight/bone giant
* Drain: drain HP from your target to replenish your Vim (coul merge with Soul Rot ?)


PS: I'd prefer if all hexes were called "Foo Hex"/"Hex of Foo" and all curses "Curse of Foo"/"Foo Curse"

Memories of Melkor

Disease empathy (passive) - Your body's diseases recognize and are aware of their brethren on other creatures, giving a limited form of telepathy. Level 1 detects molds, Level 2 also detects jellies and gelatinous cubes, Level 3 also detects ghouls, Level 4 detects skeletonkind and Level 5 detects vampires as well.

Wasp wings (activated) - You extrude ugly oversized insect wings from your sides that allow you to fly temporarily, increasing your speed but reducing all to-hit, magic and melee (after all, you were not born with them).

Balrog skin (activated) - Your flesh hardens into a revolting leathery mass which increases your armor temporarily and greatly increases fire resistance at the cost of increased cold susceptibility.

Morgoth's Revenge (activated) - Causes a field of blight around you for X turns, which affects each monster in LOS; healing all of them in disease empathy (also maybe orcs, trolls and dragons?) and damaging all others.

Disease empathy sounds rather useless to a player :/
As for flying I have not decided if I want it in or not

Morgoth's Revenge sounds fun, except when you realize that about two third of the late game monsters are orcs, trolls or dragons

Yeah, I wasn't sure how you wanted to organize everything DG or what specific talent ideas you had so I just started playing with a few ideas in my head.

as far as carrier goes... it probably would be better to make that a 20% resistance to disease (so at lvl 5 you are immune, but at lvl 4 you are not) then make it so that you have a 5*(talent lvl)% chance to pass a disease on. (chance increases if wearing a poisonous weapon or inflicting blight damage)

Here's my reasoning on this because I had a similar thought before I went with what I wrote. I knew I was going to write up a way for diseases to spread from enemy to enemy and that that would be very dangerous for non-undead characters. My thoughts on it auto-spreading was that mobs get a save check and if it takes a melee attack you might miss. So it already has to chance based variables to work off. Also the disease absorption was meant to tie in with vampiric blood as another means of healing.

Anyway, yes Carrier could be tweaked. I just fear that every character built around disease spreading will end up undead though if it is because spending 0 talent points for disease immunity is a lot more efficient then spending 5.

I like the rest of your points though Shoob.

Vampiric Blood numbers can be cut in half and still be useful if each corrupter class has some means of self-healing. Necromancers could get a life drain. Blight mages could still have Carrier and a self-inflicted disease to use (assuming the absorption effect remains on carrier) as well as Blight Bolt.

Curses and Hexes can be divided up differently and renamed. Two of those spells started off as blood and bone talent ideas and got moved when I thought of making hexes more of a little bit of everything tree.

Anyway here's the rest of what I have for Corrupter classes that I didn't manage to get down last night. This isn't Pestilent Defiler stuff, actually it's all blood and bone talent ideas. The names probably need work. The word bone is used 800000 times.

*Bone Tell: Some sort of divination. Caster tosses the bones of small animals on the ground and reads the future. (This goes back to historical necromancy and may not end up fitting the rest of the class).

*Bone-Puppet: Similar to Domination Hex. Think a combination charm and fire golem (tome 2) spell. You steal control of the targets skeletal structure and puppet it around but it takes total concentration.

*Bone Shatter: AoE Physical damage. Auto-crits targets inflicted with Brittle Bones Hex (there's one of the synergies I was aiming for)

*Bone Graft (passive): You graft bones to your flesh gaining armor and hit points.

*Grasping Arms of the Dead (or Bone Grasp if that's to long): AoE pin. Deals light physical damage each turn.

*Wall of Bones: Summons an immovable wall of bones in target tile. (The 'wall' is actually a creature, with hit points dependent on it's level and the talent points invested. The Wall can grab opponents who come to close, pinning them and inflicting light damage. If possible it should prioritize attacking targets that are not already pinned)

*Bone Prison: Sure I stole this from Diablo 2, it's still a good spell. Works much like Wall of Bones above but the 'wall creatures' can't attack. Summons eight such wall creatures around target creature.

*Master of Bones: Synergy with Hex of Restless Slumber. Makes the skeletons created by the aforementioned spell permanent up to 1 skeleton per level. (If you don't use that hexes spell effect someplace this name can be used for something else).

*Blood Boil: Pretty self-explanatory. Wouldn't effect undead. Could be made AoE or single target, whatever the blood tree is lacking.

*Stroke: This is fully detailed under the probability control stuff for Chronomancers. I hate reusing ideas but this really fits here.

*Bloody Betrayal: Basically animates the targets blood causing damage every round and possible status effects (stun, confusion, blindness, could be done randomly). Extra damage on targets effected by the Hex of Thinned Blood (another synergy idea).

That was everything semi-specific.

A more generic idea would be for a undying corruptions tree for necromancers with stuff like one of my favorites I stole from an old angband variant.

*Undead Form: Who didn't love this ability? Talent points could effect how many death points you get and/or how fast you lose them.

p.s. I like the Blood Spray idea too and agree that epidemic could be to melee focused. What if epidemic stayed though and instead of Blood Spray it was like Pus Burt or something along those lines, basically you cast it on a diseased target and the target takes some damage for each disease infecting it and spreads all diseases to nearby tiles?

(This one sounds like a lot of fun to play!)

About stealing spells: yeah do not hesitate

About blood spray, I like your idea, currently blood spray is a frontal cone of blight with a chance to infect the target with a random disease, it could also stay as such

How about this then for the Plague tree (assuming Rat Swarm fits here, I'm not sure it does. A whole tree could be built off swarms.)

- Virulent Disease (active): Infects the target with a disease (save applies). More talent points invested increases the disease damage per round and the duration of the effect.
- Cyst Burst (active): Deals X blight (is that the disease damage type?) damage per disease affecting the target and spreads all the targets diseases to adjacent creatures (radius increases with talent points).
- Swarm of Rats (active): You conjure a swarm of plague carrying rats in a radius of 4. The rats ravenously attack everything in the area of effect except the caster, inflicting 1 damage per attack (ignoring armor) and spreading the disease they carry (save applies). Additional talent points increase the number of times the swarm attack each target per round (and thus the more times everything in the area of effect must resist the disease) and the strength of the disease the rats carry (higher disease damage).
- Epidemic (active): Infects the target with a highly contagious disease. Every time the target suffers physical damage it spreads (save applies) the Epidemic to adjacent tiles along with any other diseases infecting it. Talent points increase disease duration and damage.


That gives the plague tree three different diseases (Swarm, Virulent, and Epidemic) and two separate ways to spread them (note that the rats inflict physical damage and can spread Epidemic ). Plus... you can always cast Epidemic on yourself and turn it into a damage shield

Disease empathy sounds rather useless to a player :/

I thought it might be useful in Tol Falas, though admittedly not much afterward.

Morgoth's Revenge sounds fun, except when you realize that about two third of the late game monsters are orcs, trolls or dragons

That's one of the reasons I put those in parentheses. Although orcs, trolls and dragons are Morgoth's corruptions they are still alive, so they might not get the aid from Morgoth's Revenge and take damage instead (perhaps half damage?).

Taxorgian wrote:Memories of Melkor

Disease empathy (passive)
Wasp wings (activated)
Balrog skin (activated)
Morgoth's Revenge (activated)

Disease Empathy gives me some ideas. Possibly a whole trees worth.

Molds, Slimes, and Jellies
Disease Empathy - Gives Telepathy for molds, slimes, and jellies in a range of X. Also lets the player charm molds, slimes, and jellies for X turns.
Fungal Sprout - Summons X molds, slimes, and jellies around the caster in a radius of 5. Figure this doesn't need a duration since most of these mobs will be immobile anyhow and end up getting left behind. But a duration does insure actor clean up.
????? - Haven't come up with a good name for this one but the idea I have is that the player could pull hit points from friendly molds including the one he's wearing. Would be melee/personal range.
Symbiosis - Another stolen idea. Lets you 'wear' friendly molds, slimes, or jellies. Would be a similar mechanic to the golem mount ability. Worn molds, slimes, and jellies can attack adjacent foes but otherwise the player has no control over them (so no Q symbiosis cheese). Talent points increase the chance that the mold takes damage instead of the player when attacked. AoE damage should effect both equally.


*On a separate note, and DG may already be planning for things to work this way, but would it be possible/desirable for abilities that drain Vim to actually be a vampiric effect that lowers whatever the targets relevant resource pool is? In other words if you pull Vim from a stamina using actor they lose stamina equal to the Vim you take. If you pull Vim from a mana using actor they lose mana equal to the Vim you take. I'm not sure if creatures use resource pools but if they do it's an interesting thought. Obviously some resource pools couldn't be drained like this (equilibrium and paradox) but all of these classes except two (summoner and paradox mage) also have stamina as far as I know.*

edge2054 wrote: ????? - Haven't come up with a good name for this one but the idea I have is that the player could pull hit points from friendly molds including the one he's wearing. Would be melee/personal range.

Hmm...just to somewhat fit the theme---Commensalism/Mutualism?

Might as well have a class of some sort based around the Parasitism, Commensalism, Mutualism tri-fecta. I mean, there's already that Slime Mold potions and its doings...

Hum let's thing about what classes we can have:
- Blight Mages: a corruption based caster, using blight & blood spells
- Reaver: a melee combatant, diseasing it's targets, spreading the fun around, enhancing it's melee strikes with blight, acid and darkness
- Necromancer: a kind of Summoner but that might have more permanet pets and ways to control them, might be able to survie it's own death in progressively more degenerated forms
- Demonologist: invokes demons (kinda ike a summoner) but takesa more active part in the fighting, going head to head with a big two handed sword, imbued by demon powers

Reaver sounds like it might be interesting as a duel-wield class that doesn't use daggers. Double swords, axes, or maces might be fun. In other words, a strength based duel-wielder.

What trees where you considering for generic purposes DG? Corruptions I'm assuming would be one. Some sort of generic Vim tree would probably be another.

What are you looking for as a primary stat for spellcasting? Magic I'm assuming. So the demonologist and reaver might need a way to artificially inflate SP.

Another thought on the Reaver and SP, maybe this class could have a Blood Rage type talent that boosts SP with each attack that hits. Would fit the duel-wield concept well.

Maybe Demonologists could sacrifice demons for Vim, SP, or stat boosts.

Reaver sounds fun as a dual wielder yes!

Magic is the casting stat yes (Wilders dont use it because they dont do "real" magic)

demonologist: yes that's my genefic idea

As for the generic tree, what about:
Blighted Rituals:
* Blood Sacrifice: drains your own health to replenish your Vim, only usable when in sight of a foe
* Drain: drains the health of a target to replenish your Vim, as a short range bolt
* Absorb Life: Sustain, slowly drain vim but each time you deal damage increases Vim (by morethan you loose)
* Life Tap: Use Vim to gain a temporary boost to all damage (think like +X% all damage for Y turns)