ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I am kinda sad that skeletons lost their ability to use infusions. As discussed in another thread, this makes them a lot less viable to play. They used to be my favourite class, especially for playing Arcane Blades, but for other classes as well.
I really think that there should be some kind of replacement for their lost ability to heal, especially in the early- to midgame.

Here's some ideas. The rune ideas would be useful to other races as well, obviously:

1) move the re-assemble talent up in the talent tree. Proposed new order: sharp bones, re-assemble, bone armor, stats talent
Since the extra life at skill level 5 for the re-assemble talent is a one-time use only, I can't see any problems with it being available earlier to the player. It should heal some more HP than it does now, I think.
Moving the stats skill down to be the last skill feels okay to me. It was somewhat overpowered being the 1st talent, IMO.

2) alter the skeleton's stat gaining skill to give +2 STR, +2 DEX and +2 CON

2) New rune: Mana shield: x percent of damage taken is subtracted from your mana bar instead of health for y turns

3) New rune: Vitalis Arcanum: double your hitpoints for x turns. It doubles both your actual, and your max HP. So if your health was 280/300, your health after using the rune will be 560/600. When reverting back to normal however, the actual hitpoints will remain, as long as they're not above your natural max. So if you are at 560/600 when the rune wears out, you will revert to 300/300. Best used before battle, while fully healed.

4) New rune: Leech: drain x percent of the target's life over the course of y turns

5) New rune: Body of Air: raises defense and ranged defense by x for y turns

6) New rune: Body of Stone: raises armor and physical resistance by x for y turns

Most of your latter suggestions are just alternatives to shield runes. Wouldn't solve the base problem.

I agree on point 1. Swapping the stat talent and the healing talent would be easy. You could alter the resurrect ability to be the fifth level of the stat talent, so it's still on the highest tier. Reassemble would have to be severely improved though - preferably quadruple it's current value and scaling with Dex.

Ghouls could have a similar rejiggle with the stat talent moved to the top and given a healing talent at level one - maybe Brain Munch, causing minor damage to enemy and reducing their Willpower whilst restoring HP to the player. Enemy ghouls should get the same ability :)

A "ghoul" without life leech? Doesn't sound like a ghoul to me... I'd say definitely add a life leech talent to their tree...

Ghoul have Retch

Oh it works on self? I thought it would only heal other undead lol...

Would be a little use

Reassemble's been buffed but the cooldown is really long.

Bone armor still really sucks though

I think some of the rune ideas would make good taints. Vampiric Taint: For the next few turns you heal for X% of the damage you deal.

Another thought is maybe undead shouldn't be effected by Rune Saturation. Would make sense as they're animated by magic as it is.

Going to say this for the last time - Retch is the worst talent in the entire game.

Then it needs a boost

A big problem with all the undead talents is lack of stat-scaling. They quickly become severely underpowered (if they weren't pathetically weak to begin with). Ghoul talents should scale with Con and skelly talents should scale with Dex. The talents need to be very strong to justify the xp penalty.

I agree that it needs to scale. Almost everything needs to scale. But xp penalty now down to 40 just 5%above halflings.

Also, the exp penalty isn't about the skills - it's about the inherent resists.

I agree ghouls should be con, but, honestly, skellies could afford to be con too. It's about the fundamental makeup of your body, which sounds awfully con-like to me, and pretty much everybody invests at least somewhat in con. That way, it doesn't matter what kind of class someone wants to play, their racial talents will skill scale reasonably well in the end.

martinuzz wrote:As discussed in another thread, this makes them a lot less viable to play.

That's good because they were previously one of the best races.