ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Played around a bit with the traps a bit and thought I'd give some early first impressions.

The traps are pretty good overall, they help with surviving early life as a rogue. I don't care for the fact that the starting trap in the tree is a 2 rng AoE. Without other control skills that come at later levels that means getting caught in your own blast radius too much. Maybe switch it and bear trap?

I like how the tree goes two ways. Still too single target focused though; nothing really adequate for crowd control IMHO which is what the rogue desperately needs. The AoE DMG is nice but AoE effects (web, smoke, grease etc) would be more useful. This is worsened by the traps being one shots. If they weren't they could still be better used for crowd control as they are. If I can ever get a trapper off the ground I'll try the Prides and see how it fares.

Maybe split the trap types into one group for damage and one for effects/control?

The thing that really rubs me the wrong way about rogues in general right now though is,

Stealth.

Every time I use stealth I feel like I'm putting a pillow case on my head in the hope that if I can't see anyone they can't see me. It also seems to be about that effective.

Why is it ArchMunchikins get Sense right of the bat, (along with a small atomic arsenal and the ability to teleport) and rogues don't even have a class skill for dark vision? Sure mages are (theoretically) glass cannons and thus need to know where the monsters are, but rogues are glass scalpels. I can buy track but first I have to open Field Control, which either means level ten, or a Bree-Man. EDIT: (Sorry not sure what I was thinking about with the bree-man there, can get it by level 4, but still that's only one race.) Even then it's still a general skill, when some kind of dark sight should be part of the Stealth tree as a class skill. You'll notice there's a distinct lack of successful night-blind cat-burglars in the world.

Maybe there's a solution I'm missing but bumping into monsters and walls in the dark is not my idea of stealthy. If there is please let me know.

Oh yeah, kind of related infravision should see walls they're much cooler than ambient air and show up quite clearly on thermal imaging. (which I assume it's heat based, but they show up with as well with low-light, sonar basically anything but something like tremorsense that feels vibration.)

Overall I still think this game has one of the better interpretations of rogues, just still need a little tweaking. Can't wait to figure out how to unlock Tempest's and Anti-Magic.

I like the idea of rogues being able to choose between direct damage and more crowd control type traps. The class should be quite versatile, look how high its cunning score is! The description of trap mastery hints at other traps being learned in-game, and maybe that is where the traps can be added.

I agree that infravision should give a bit more detail than it does currently. What if infravision did not set tiles to seen/remembers and instead indicated if it did or did not block movement. You wouldn't be able to tell if it was a wall or a door, or if there is a trap in the next tile, but you are not quite as blind as you currently are. I can experiment with this if others are interested.

In game would be fun. I like the hunt the secret master element in games personally, Arcanum did that well.

For Infravision what about if the player had to pause for X number of ticks, standing still to let their eyes adjust before it kicks in. It also wouldn't work if the player had a light source equipped. This would add some tactical aspect to lighting, especially the dungeons with their switches between light and dark. Maybe with a nice FBO shader to show the vision type.

Well Heightened Senses isn't meant to be infra vision is it?

Maybe it should detect walls in a small radius (talent level maybe).

edge2054 wrote:Well Heightened Senses isn't meant to be infra vision is it?

Maybe it should detect walls in a small radius (talent level maybe).

yessssss! maybe even talent level times 1.5-2. but perhaps enemy type should not be specifically conveyed? like, you can 'sense' that there is something around the corner, but you don't know what it is...nonspecific telepathy has been discussed for vanilla in recent months, this could be a perfect application for such an idea....

edge2054 wrote:Well Heightened Senses isn't meant to be infra vision is it?

I meant actual Infravision, not Heightened Senses. Specifically I was thinking of the Phial of Undead, it conveys Infravision. I'm sure other things do too.

teachu2die wrote:perhaps enemy type should not be specifically conveyed? like, you can 'sense' that there is something around the corner, but you don't know what it is...nonspecific telepathy has been discussed for vanilla in recent months, this could be a perfect application for such an idea....

That would be an interesting way to represent peaking around corners with mirrors, listening at doors and all those other rogue-y habits in an abstract way. Little "?"s running around in the dark lol. If that's too much for a passive it could be a sustained maybe.

For crowd control, how about a Caltrops trap? The talent could spread traps in every space in a cone, or maybe in a radius around you (I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but expect you can disarm your own traps or bypass them safely, so you could still leave the area), or even in a radius around a nearby target. traps deal small damage and slow and/or confuse. The area can increase with either talent level or cunning.

Or maybe a pitfall trap - once it gets set off, everything in a radius gets pinned as the false ground falls out from under them, and they drop into a pit. (and maybe dazed? or even stunned?) Or instead of pinned, maybe it just takes three two or three turns to climb up the edge of the pit. Perhaps at higher levels, you could put spikes in the bottom of the pit for more damage, maybe a chance to bleed while in the pit, maybe further slowing, maybe even a chance to instantly kill targets. Not really sure about the flavor on this...it would take much more than one turn to dig a pit that size...

Another thing that could be interesting would be an ability to pick up traps that you have disarmed (but not your own) as items, to be placed at a later time. The ability could come at level 4 or 5 of some trapmaking talent (there is a general trapmaking talent, right? not just one for each trap? again, haven't tried it yet - ideas just popped into my head), so people who can't use the traps don't end up with them.

I recently watched the new teaser from Diablo 3, where a new class was revealed. I didn't really liked it, but there's a spot where the character throws some bear traps and I was like "damn, I really want to do stuff like that in ToME".

I think the trapper should rely on trapping for keeping the mobs away from himself and throwables, something like bombs and such. It would be cool to have skills to make mobs fight eachother, imagine you throw a "bottle of hormones" to the toughest mob, and all the surrounding mobs start attacking it for X rounds.

Dunno, I remember playing as a trapper in T2 and it was utterly boring. Don't get me wrong, it was fun to lure a mob into a trap, but it wasn't effective and you knew that it was just slower than wielding a huge sword and slice and dice without mercy. So a trapper should work like it does in Dragon Age and Diablo 2, like really being another (and effective) kind of fighting enemies.

I might be a bit off the discussion, but it just came to my mind.

raithe wrote:The thing that really rubs me the wrong way about rogues in general right now though is,

Stealth.

Every time I use stealth I feel like I'm putting a pillow case on my head in the hope that if I can't see anyone they can't see me. It also seems to be about that effective.

Why is it ArchMunchikins get Sense right of the bat, (along with a small atomic arsenal and the ability to teleport) and rogues don't even have a class skill for dark vision? Sure mages are (theoretically) glass cannons and thus need to know where the monsters are, but rogues are glass scalpels. I can buy track but first I have to open Field Control, which either means level ten, or a Bree-Man. EDIT: (Sorry not sure what I was thinking about with the bree-man there, can get it by level 4, but still that's only one race.) Even then it's still a general skill, when some kind of dark sight should be part of the Stealth tree as a class skill. You'll notice there's a distinct lack of successful night-blind cat-burglars in the world.

Maybe there's a solution I'm missing but bumping into monsters and walls in the dark is not my idea of stealthy. If there is please let me know.

Oh yeah, kind of related infravision should see walls they're much cooler than ambient air and show up quite clearly on thermal imaging. (which I assume it's heat based, but they show up with as well with low-light, sonar basically anything but something like tremorsense that feels vibration.)

Stealth blindness is easily solved... Vision is needed!

On first impression I didn't like the traps to much. I kept blowing myself up with explosive trap.

Then I rolled a Nandor.

Grace of the Eldar + Trap Laying has been win so far. I'll update once I get a bit further, gotta go do the Halloween thing with the kids.

raithe wrote:

edge2054 wrote:Well Heightened Senses isn't meant to be infra vision is it?

I meant actual Infravision, not Heightened Senses. Specifically I was thinking of the Phial of Undead, it conveys Infravision. I'm sure other things do too.

They both work the same currently. Maybe they should be split into two separate abilities.

Anyway Yufra, I think radius 4 is good on that code you did up and it's made playing my stealth rogue a lot less stressful in AS.

Now we just need to convince Darkgod

Care of Yufra.

The more I think about it, the minimum radius of 1 should be removed. You get this with 1 talent point in heightened senses, and the only reason I added it was because the undead start in a dark dungeon.