ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Merging the various weapon talents into one was a good idea, but now we have virtually no differentiation between swords, maces, and axes. Not that the talents really made them different, but they did push you (in a bad way) towards considering one over another for a given character. Ideally, what we'll have is weapon preference determined by class mechanics, talent choices, and play style without a player simply having to invest in a weapon type and then feeling forced to stick to it for the rest of the game.

Currently there's a very slight difference between most of the melee weapon types. These differences are just in power, armor penetration, and crit chance. Magnifying those differences is not a good way to differentiate the weapons, as you would have to make some drastic changes just to get to the point where the weapons feel different. What I propose is that each weapon type gets a small talent tree. All melee characters have all these talent trees naturally, but cannot spend talent points or category points in them. Rather, points in these trees come from equipping various melee weapons. For example, wielding a mace would add points to talents in the mace talent tree for as long as the mace is wielded. As for which abilities get points and how many, that depends on the design of the mace. (See this post). A cudgel (weakest mace design) only adds a single point to the first mace ability, while a flanged mace (strongest mace design) might add two points to all three mace abilities. These talent trees thus differentiate not only weapon types, but weapon designs within each type.

Here are some possible talent trees. The exact numbers aren't vital at this point. Heck, the exact effect isn't vital. These will almost certainly have to change somewhat for various reasons (overpowered, underpowered, boring, impossible to code, etc.) before being implemented. All trees have three talents: a sustain for the first, a timed buff for the second, and a potentially multi-target attack for the third. All abilities take no resources, but they do have cooldowns and take a turn to activate.


Swords

Defensive posture (sustained): While sustained, prevents you from performing regular attacks, but still allows talent use. Slows movement speed by some percent to prevent cheesy shoot-and-scoot type tactics. Every melee talent that you land on a given target causes you to gain an X% chance to parry the next melee attack made by that target. X can scale up to 100. Ideal for confronting that melee boss one-on-one.
Pinpoint accuracy (activated): All attacks and targeted talents made in the next X turns are automatic hits
Lunge (activated): Performs an attack with a range of two, potentially hitting two lined-up targets. Damage is X% of regular weapon damage. X can scale up to 100.

Maces

Stunning blows (sustained): While sustained, improves duration of all stuns landed. Prevents you from performing regular attacks, but still allows talent use. Ideal for character builds that include multiple stuns.
Concussion (activated): All attacks made in the next X turns slow the target by Y% for Z turns. Not cumulative.
Overwhelm (activate): Melee range. Causes you to smash your opponent backwards, doing X% increased damage. You move forward to fill square previously occupied by opponent, and they move back one square. If the target cannot move backwards, you don't move, either. If an NPC prevented the movement, then the damage from the attack is split between the target and the obstacle. If a wall or other immobile object prevented the movement, then the attack does 50% more damage. Lots of interesting tactical potential here.

Axes

Shearing blows (sustained): While sustained, increases critical hit damage by X%. Prevents you from performing regular attacks, but still allows talent use. Ideal for character builds that include some degree of control over crits.
Butchery: All attacks made in the next X turns ignore Y% of the target's armor. Y can scale up to 100.
Cleave: Melee range. Hits the target and one other NPC with a normal attack. The additional NPC must be adjacent to both you and the target.

I've attempted to give each of the weapons a sort of 'feel' with these trees. Swordsmen have the finest control over the ebb and flow of a fight. Mace-wielders are all about battering their foes senseless. Axe-wielders simply butcher things.

As I said at the beginning of this post, we'd like a player's choice of weapon to be determined by class mechanics, talent choices, and play style. I think that the options opened up with this system would accomplish that.

Fun idea: snip Weapon Mastery down to five points and make up for the damage nerf by including the character's Weapon Mastery talent level in the formulas for all these weapon-specific abilities.

*thumbs up*
skills in general sound pretty solid to me.

another possible way to incorporate this type of idea would be that you gain points in these skills the more you use the weapon type, maybe measured by damage dealt. might feel more 'natural', more progressive.

Sounds grindy to me teach, the leveling up the more you use it thing (unless you only got talent points for boss kills since bosses are impossible to grind).

When this first came up in IRC it got mentioned to have these talents scale off one of the combat talents, can't remember if it was the hit or damage one. Anyway I still like that idea just for the sake of simplicity. Dividing every type of weapon into further subtypes and subsets with different talent values and what not sounds like a lot of work and as DG said about adding spears to the game, a lot more clutter on the drop tables.

yeahh, thats a good point about the grindiness. its just that it would be nice to have the implementation of this force the player to make a choice of some sort, developing axe skills at the loss of sword skills, for instance.
scaling from talents sounds like it would be pretty good, though.

I like the idea of Weapon Combat being reduced to 5 levels and the weapon talents being based on that.

However I think 3 abilities per weapon is too complex. 1 or 2 activated abilities is enough. The sustains are all especially poor in my opinion, and are hard to balance properly without being attached to a specific resource. Activated abilities make far more sense.

I'd suggest Cleave cause heavy bleeding too, to make it more useful.

I actually feel like the sustains differentiate the weapons better than the activated do. I mean, cleave vs. lunge is just a question of hitting 2 guys next to each other or two guys in a line. Defensive posture vs. shearing blows is a much bigger difference and does a good job of capturing the difference in style between the weapons in real life, while still remaining turn based. Maybe some tweaking for balance is needed, but adding another low power activated ability to the arsenal doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Not that I'm a veteran RL player or anything; This is just my unqualified opinion.

Random alternate thought - have these weapon skills actually directly associated with the weapons - a sort of non-ego ego. You'd make a random check (based on metal type, say) that would distribute skills to the various weapon-specific skills. It wouldn't change the weapon price, and it would only kick in for people with an already-unlocked stamina bar (or possibly only for people with an appropriate level in the appropriate weapon skill). You'd have themes among the powers of the various weapon types. Axe might be raw damage and being surrounded. Maces would be various forms of debilitating effects - chances at dazing, confusing, and so forth. Swords would be defense and riposte. Daggers would be crits(extra crit chance and extra crit damage), and additional effects against stunned/dazed/etc monsters. The idea here is that you'd build your character somewhat around the weapon type you intended to use. People who were intending to go with axes would build themselves more to do interesting things with critting. People who were defensive fighters would gravitate towards swords - and so on. If you got a particularly good weapon that wasn't of your type, it might still be worth using, but the sorts of skills you'd be likely to get out of it wouldn't fit your character as well as the skills you'd get out of your chosen type. Even for people without a specifically tuned build, it makes the process of choosing weapons a bit more interesting - this one does a bit more damage, but that one has a pile of useful skills, and so forth.

Similar objections as the ones that applied to the old system.

1. More item clutter useless for almost everyone. If everything else is equal the game must generate 3 times as many weapons if a character if going to get as good a weapon as currently. The other 2/3 of weapons is just useless clutter even for melee characters. Non-melee characters are going to drown in a sea of useless melee weapon clutter.

2. Very difficult to balance. Both the talents and the artifacts must be very well-balanced. Otherwise everyone will choose the same specialization as before when everyone picked swords due to Ringil. Lots of work for those designing the game.

The gain is small compared to these disadvantages.

I agree on melee clutter. I also don't like the idea of these things being in any way hidden.

I quite like how at the moment you can switch between any of the 3 weapon types at will. I don't mind some more differentiation between them, but it would be terrible people had to choose a type early on and stick with it.

I don't see why it would mean you need to pick something and stick with it. if you are built for crits and find an awesome sword, you could still easily use it and still be strong. it would be adding something, not taking away, so melee classes wouldn't be weaker than otherwise if they couldn't find that sweet axe. Similarly we wouldn't need 3 times as many weapons.

As to Mithril's 2'nd point. I feel like that is saying we should take out alchemists because they aren't as strong as archmages. Make everything the same so nothing is better than anything else doesn't really seem to fit the spirit of roguelikes as I understand them so far. I think the problem with swords and Ringil, was that Ringil was just like every other (one-handed) weapon, only better. If alchemists were just like archmages, except worse, than people might not play them either.

I currently don't even pay attention to axe/sword/mace, and I feel like it should affect my decisions at least a little bit.

I'm very much anti-clutter. Hate it. Maybe I wasn't clear in my other post about different weapon designs, but they mostly exist as flavor to justify a wider range of potential physical power on weapons of a given material. So instead of maces having an average physical power between say 5 and 20-- a huge range-- I'm just proposing names for maces within that range to make it feel more sensible. I do NOT want to generate five times as many maces as before, I just want to give flavorful names to maces that got more or less lucky on generation.

This proposal is all about differentiating weapon types, but I couldn't resist applying similar ideas to the designs within each type. Admittedly, this would mean that the weapon names are no longer simply flavor to justify their relative physical powers, but we're still not talking about increasing clutter in any way. Maces that don't get lucky on generation we call cudgels and give them only one talent point. Maces that get very lucky on generation we call flanged maces and they get more talent points.

I'm also against having to pick a weapon type and stick with it. This system imposes no restrictions, requires no commitment of talent points. You never choose a specialization. It's just giving different weapon types fun bonus abilities. Depending on how you build your character, some types may just be more attractive than others now. I firmly believe in being able to swap between weapon types at any point in the game when you find something new and shiny.

Why not instead have different weapons classes having more noticeable different effects without creating yet another talent system? Like, for example, swords may cause bleeding, maces stun, and axes sunder armor? This way the weapons get more different without the problems mentioned above with a new talent system. These problems will apply with a new talents system unless the new talents are so weak as to be pointless or if the talents are so easily attained if you switch weapons that this becomes practically the same as the weapons just causing such effects always without a talent system.

I'd like to avoid simply granting passive on-hit bonuses to weapons. It's dull and doesn't do much to change the way we play. It doesn't really open up any new interesting possibilities. There will be balance issues to work out, as you said, but I'm confident we can do it.

I'm not sure we need to change the way we play. What's wrong with the way we play? Having some static on-hit effect *would* make the choice between types a bit more interesting, though.

yeah, i kind of like the idea of having simple passive bonuses - adding a bunch more activatable talents might just add more clutter in the skill department (as it stands i rarely use more than 3 different activatable melee skills in a normal battle). maybe trim it to one passive and one activatable per weapon type?
i don't really like the talents being attached to the weapons themselves. there's no need to place even more significance on the material level of a weapon. scaling off of existing talents is better.