ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

'ello there, my name is FM, and today, I'm here to talk about how all the sludge, garbage and magical byproducts from your way of life is effecting the world, by bringing it back on you. Enter, the CODE [temporary placeholder].

The class functions as a filter that the pollution and poisons dumped into the world travels - the more Resource you have [aka the pollution in the world], the weaker you are. The less Resource you have, the stronger you are. This class also has a new and [currently] unique resource, called Bile [also, a temporary placeholder]. And, here is how it works:

Resource

Name
Bile
Function
A resource for class CODE
Parameter
A percentage based function
A direct relation on players max Life
The higher the percentage, the less Max Life the player has
The higher the resource, the greater the effect the talents will have
Talent use reduces the amount of the resource [which then gives player more Max Life]
Effect
Reduce player Max Life by 25% of resource amount

Yes, the more of the Resource you have, the less Max Life you have. The less Resource you have, the more Max Life you have. And, yes, you also innately regenerate Resource over time, so overtime you are becoming 'weaker'. However, to offset this, your talents will also be more powerful [similar to how Paradox works with Chronomancy classes].

Using talents [except perhaps very rare few] all reduce the amount of Resource you have [that then increases the Max Life cap], and then of course will make the next talent you use weaker. The variable effect of the Effect of talents based on Resource is low, but you will feel it when comparing 15% Resource to 100% Resource.

Now, on to the abilities of the class itself. A general theme I am working on, is that of forcibly shoving negative effects [debuffs] onto your enemies, while using mostly natural damage types: Nature, Fire, Light, Darkness, but mostly Nature. The negative effects are mostly Poison, Blind, Daze, Pin, Slow and Insidious Poison. They will also be a long range class [due to most talents planned being ranged, and having low HP], and not having any preferred weapon [no 2handed/weapon+shield/staff/bow/sling mastery trees]. This grants them flexibility to use any weapon they find, but as there will be no support for it, attacking will be very weak. This will instead make the class rely on their talents, which will keep the player active and engaged.

I haven't yet decided on what stats the talents will work with, but I believe Con and Cun along with a bit of Will will be the final three that will reflect onto the class. You may notice, that these stats are not really a scaling point for weapons either - this is intended.

Here is a sneak peak at some of the ideas that may come in with the finished class.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl= ... hKEE#gid=1

I like the idea of a health/power trade-off, however, I wouldn't want to continually spam skills to keep it at the level I want, as is the case with positive energy.

How about a skill that lets you slow down or even turn off regeneration of the resource if desired? That would solve that issue.

Also I would suggest calling the class the Tortured and the resource Pain. These would be afflicted cursed with eternal pain and suffering, but have used to wield their pain as a weapon and inflict it on others. That would fit pretty well with your description there.

I like the tortured idea, that use pain or suffering to inflict damage on others, and can transfer pain/conditions from itself to foes.

Skill name ideas:
* Feel my pain - inflict your suffering on others
* Agony - unleash a stream of agony, knock back and stunning foes around you and dealing damage
* Martyr - negative effects on you (health degeneration, stun, ...) are also inflicted on creatures around you in a radius of 8. For each creature affected this way the duration of your negative effect is reduced by 20%.
* Eternal pain - confuse target and deal damage
* Suffering - any damage inflicted on you is also inflicted on the source.
* harden the pain - increase suffering regeneration for a certain time (=more suffering).

You will have to take into account long battles. If the resource accumulates quickly, then the player will have very low HP / very high penalty. If it does not regenerate quickly, then the player will not be able to do, for example, limmir's quest. In longer fights, damage will suffer more if you can use more skill than your resource regenerates. This means that the player will need something to manage his energy, some skill that can be used out of combat, perhaps even a fast recharging skill with no or little combat usefulness.

Thinking along this line, here is an example skill. It should probably be a sustained ability that does not consume a turn, and triggers when the player act:
* Endure suffering: (sustained, no energy, no recharge, -10...100% suffering regeneration) You have trained your body to resist the effects of suffering, effectively slowing it down. At level 3 you can choose the percentage of pain you want to endure each turn.

Here is another idea: Instead of reducing max HP, why don't you give the tortured health degeneration when he is above 50% hp?
If current hp > 50% then set temporary effect health regeneration = -x.
x= (current hp - max hp/2)/5
Each time the players uses energy this function gets called to update the regeneration cause by tortured body. This would mean that the degeneration becomes less when you have more HP.
Depending on the amount of suffering you have, you could change the threshold. (50% hp at 100 torture, 80% hp at 20 torture, or whatever).

It would also mean that you can heal beyond 50% hp, but you would suffering heavy degeneration immediately reducing the effect of the healing.

Based on these ideas, I propose a skilltree something like this:

pain/suffering (general)
* tortured body (start at 1/5) You automatically regenerate 1 pain each turn, up to a maximum of 50 pain. You suffer constant health degeneration while you have pain/suffering until you have lost 1% hp for each point of pain/suffering. Example: you have 11 pain/suffering, then you will have health degeneration until you have lost 11% of your max HP. Additional levels in this talent will decrease the rate of health loss, but you will still loose up to 1% health for each point of pain. optionally you could start higher (say 2% for each point of pain) and lower it to 1% at 5/5. More talent levels could also increase the rate you gain suffering.
* Endure suffering: (sustained, no energy, no recharge, -10...100% suffering regeneration) You have trained your body to resist the effects of suffering, effectively slowing it down. At level 3 you can choose the percentage of pain you want to endure each turn.
* harden the pain - increase suffering regeneration for a certain time (=more suffering). +x instant pain
* pain release - loose all pain, and stop all regeneration for x turns.
* Martyr - negative effects on you (stun, pain, ...) are also inflicted on creatures around you in a radius of 8. For each creature affected this way the duration of your negative effect is reduced by 20%.

With talents like this, you could use endure suffering to manage your pain regeneration. Right before combat you could use harden the pain + regeneration. Your health would go down, but all creatures around you will be suffering pain (=-health regeneration). Then you can really use your pain as a weapon. The higher you can get your HP, the heavier the health degeneration will be (since the formula uses 1/5 of current HP-desired hp).

In addition to all this, there could be skills/items that affect your max suffering/pain. An item that gives your +10 suffering will potentially increase your pain (I think suffering should cause pain, suffering the name of the resource, pain the name of the effect?).

If you have high suffering (70 suffering for example, for a minimum of 30% hp), then you can potentially have high pain IF you can heal yourself. Therefor, this would combine well with a skill that heals you when you move! While traveling it keeps your HP up. You can kite monsters while your pain combined with martyr kills them. You might have to make a choice between moving (and healing!) or attacking and leaving you low on HP. This might be an interesting trade-off. This would mean that warriors are really easy to kite and kill. The most obvious solution would be to have martyr give you a movement speed penalty. This penalty could be offset with equipment, giving the player an interesting gear option.

I prefer the nature theme for the class, but that's probably just 'cause I'm kind of a hippie. The ideas I had should fit with either theme, though:

For a powerful attack, you could have a talent that deals damage equal to the difference between your current and max health. You could potentially have it heal the character as well, so the talent gets weaker each time you use it, unless you're taking a lot of damage.

I really like the idea of being able to inflict your debuffs on others, although I first thought of it happening with an activated talent, rather than the Gloom-like effect that marvalis suggested. That could work too, but it seems like a less reliable version of gloom. Anyway, inspired by the combination of that and the pollution/torture theme, how about a required passive ability (maybe included as part of Tortured Body, if it goes that route) that inflicts a random (from a set list) debuff on you every 3-5 turns whenever you can see enemies. Then you could have reliable ammo for your debuff-transference ability.

As a variant of that last idea, you could have the ability give you a constant debuff called Pollution Sickness (or something Torture themed), with a duration of 7 turns at 1/5, and 3 turns at 5/5. It does nothing on its own, but when it ends, it inflicts a random negative status with no chance to save. Any time you remove the Pollution Sickness, it immediately returns if there is an enemy in line of sight (when you are "stressed", or "distracted"). This way, the effects inflicted by the Sickness can be quite nasty, since you usually pass them on before they affect you. The class can have multiple abilities that transfer or remove/reset the Pollution Sickness, so if you want to build your character around debuffing, you can the Sickness duration down to 3 turns, and still not be affected by it most of the time. Or, you could have an ability that transfers all of your debuffs at once, so reducing your Sickness duration to 3 turns would let you build up a larger stack of debuffs to throw.

Pollution Sickness could cause Poison, Burning, Bleeding, Disease, Blindness, Slow, Confusion, or Daze. They all fit the theme, and they're only nasty to the player if you don't pass them on to someone else first.

Talents based on Sickness could include:
Swallow Bile (or Swallow Pain) - Remove/recharge Sickness to add to Resource. (should help with protracted battles)
Exude Sickness - Remove/recharge Sickness to inflict Sickness (full timer) on all within x spaces.
Steal Health - Give all Debuffs to target, drain some life if they have a higher % than you.
Displace Illness - Remove all debuffs, and give them to random targets within x spaces.
Delay Symptoms - Convert every debuff to another instance of Sickness (full timer).
Blood-borne Illness - Chance to inflict Sickness when struck in melee. (maybe splashing to adjacent tiles at 5/5)
Incubate - Increase the timer on your Sickness by 3 turns to increase the effect. (either nastier effects, or multiple)
Virulent Sickness - Remove/recharge your Sickness to put three Sicknesses on your target.
Vomit - Remove/recharge Sickness to deal acid/blight/nature damage in a cone
Dry Heaves - Remove/recharge Sickness

Balancing cooldowns and number of talents could be tough. There should be enough, with short enough cooldowns, that your aren't constantly getting screwed by your own Sicknesses. On the other hand, they should still be a constant, imminent threat whenever you're in combat. Maybe the need for movement and healing will be enough to balance that out. Range for abilities should be pretty long, or there should be some good movement talents, so you don't get sick from spotting an enemy that's out of range.

These are not concrete numbers, but I was thinking of about 0.2 regen/turn of Resource innately, giving you five turns before you get a full point back. Also a sustain ability [the ONLY sustain] that puts the regen of Resource to 0, but when you use Resource and inflict status, you regen x Resource [the sustain, of course, would be kinda expensive, like 10% of resource, equating to a good amount of -Max Life.]. The reason why only one or an extremely few amount of sustains is that it plays too much with too many things. If you have a sustain, and you sustain it, you just voluntarily lowered your max life and increased your max resource - if you shut it off, the inverse happens. This can start to cause some problems when you have a sustain forcibly shut off. Also - I will want to include a lot of passives [that will directly effect you in some negative way, but like everything else, also has a good pay off.]

Another tree I had in mind was an Active / [Supporting] Passive / Active / [Supporting] Passive - maybe something like itastelikelove Pollution Sickness idea. That idea could be a very good sub-mechanic of the class and really help make it unique. When I read that, I had a flood of ideas that made me grin. Thanks itastelikelove.

Also, I would really like it to be based with nature - that was the whole theme idea of the class to begin with, and we already have corrupted and tortured style classes [Reaver, Corrupter, Cursed]. Something new and different is surely better.

Keep in mind though, just tacking on a status effect to something that deals damage isn't exactly good either. Sure, you need damage to kill things, but manipulating the field and making it easier [via status effects and not damage] is also fun. Fun, uniqueness and simplicity, these are the core things that all classes should have, this included.

Along with that, the resource cannot be too complicated. If it's too complicated, then it takes too long to decide what to do. That's why I went with a direct 25% reduction. It's an easy number to do math by, it doesn't change and it's big enough to feel, but not large enough to really hamper.

Thank you for all the ideas! I'll keep working and post up some new stuff soon.

itastelikelove wrote:I really like the idea of being able to inflict your debuffs on others, although I first thought of it happening with an activated talent, rather than the Gloom-like effect that marvalis suggested. That could work too, but it seems like a less reliable version of gloom.

Let me try to explain the mechanic behind it. Martyr seems like an offensive skill, but it is really a defensive skill. Unlike gloom, you actually transfer your condition! In my example, it was a 20% reduction, but this could just be 100% or whatever value. The idea was that if you get stunned, and are close enough to your target, then the skeleton warrior that stuns you is stunned himself!

In addition I assumed that people want to heal before a battle anyway (if you are at 50% health, you might as well use that regeneration infusion now before getting nuked). While this is a protective action, there is synergy when you inflict your pain on others, lower their health as well as yours, and balancing things out (stuff dies more quickly while you get low on HP).

Final Master wrote:Reduce player Max Life by 25% of resource amount

Final Master, how did you like the idea of lowering current HP instead of max hp? Keep in mind that HP is the most important thing to stay alive in tome.
I think it would be visually more interesting for the player if max life would represent how much hp the player would have without hp reduction.Instead of lowering max life, we could put a cap on the current HP of the player (for example, player cannot have more than 600/1000 hp). That way the player would see how much life he has lost. This would then be somewhat counterintuitive because players might try to heal when they have 600/1000 hp and it would not work, wile the player does not understand why this is. This is why I prefer the idea of life degeneration. When the player heals, he will notice that his health goes down rapidly (and he will see a temporary effect in his status window explaining what is going on) and eventually his health will settle at 600/1000. After a few heals the player will figure out that his health is reduced because of the class he is playing.

Final Master wrote:I was thinking of about 0.2 regen/turn

How much would skills cost?
0.2 regen x 5 turns = 1 unit. If a skills costs 10 units, then you need 50 turns of regen.
With a regen of 0.2, any talent or item (I assumed there will be items, like the ones that regenerate stamina/health) would have a very high % modifier. For example, boots that add 0.3 regen would mean a 150% increase in resource regeneration.
That means that we have to think about the cost of skills and about the regeneration on items.

Final Master wrote:Also, I would really like it to be based with nature

I got carried away with the idea of a cursed class, but you can chance it all to nature themed and keep some of the mechanics.

Pollution sickness
* Pure of hearth (start at 1/5) You are pure of hearth and cannot stand all the pollution around you. Automatically regenerate 0.2 pollution sickness each turn, up to a maximum of 200 pollution sickness. You suffer constant health degeneration while you have pollution sickness until you have lost 0.25% hp for each point of pollution sickness. More talent levels could also increase the rate you gain pollution sickness, and give more power to your purify skills.
* Pollution shield: (sustained, no energy, no recharge, -10...100% suffering regeneration) You have trained your body to resist the effects of pollution, effectively slowing it down. At level 3 you can lower your gain of pollution sickness at will.
* Dirty secrets - Look around for hidden pollution, increasing your pollution sickness. The effect lasts for 5...10 turns after using this talent. (+regeneration)
* Purify - loose all pollution sickness, and stop all pollution sickness regeneration for x turns.
* Martyr - negative effects on you (stun, pain, ...) are also inflicted on creatures around you in a radius of 8. For each creature affected this way the duration and power of your negative effect is reduced by 20%.

Nature themed or not, it still basically is a cursed class to begin with, since these people will be cursed with suffering the ills of nature even in your original version.

My idea mostly came form your not being sure of a resource, class name and the ones I came up with (Pain and Tortured) suggest further ideas.

What you do with it is up to you though.

I had, for a long time, wondered the same about Vim. Does the Corrupter expend some vital life essence as he casts his spells, later on regaining it through the use of his nefarious magics? What if a corrupted character progressively becomes more decrepit, as his Vim decreases from the maximum?

It might signify the caster's transformation from fully live and whole to a state of undeath, thus granting undead-like resistances but harming healing abilities as it depletes. Or it might signify an onset of putrescence, causing diseases and sundry other foul effects to spring up spontaneously upon the user's body (in a gory parody perhaps of the Paradox anomaly).
edit: Oh man oh man oh man suggesting this for a necromancer class at the first opportunity.

Well... This got a "neat" or two on the IRC channel, but I can't see anyone suggesting it as an innovation necessary for the Corrupter classes.

Serious suggestions for FM's actual class idea are incoming, it's just a lot to read!