ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Cursed is by far the class with the fewest options that I've played with. They have 8 talent trees total and begin with 5 unlocked, which is the fewest of any class. Moreover, they only have 4 class trees, so there is very little variety in builds. Rather than developing another tree for them, I offer these simple suggestions:

I recommend changing "cursed/dark-figure" to a class tree for cursed (I don't know about doomed--never played as one), and keep the tree locked at birth. I also recommend giving them the "cursed/traveler" generic tree, and have it locked at birth.

As an aside, I also wonder if "Suppression" from the tree "cursed/dark-figure" is working as advertised. I have doubts that it is.

On the note of adding to Cursed, give them 2H-Maiming, Combat Techniques and Combat Veteran from the Techniques tree. Would give a few more interesting options for the class.

Grey wrote:On the note of adding to Cursed, give them 2H-Maiming, Combat Techniques and Combat Veteran from the Techniques tree. Would give a few more interesting options for the class.

One problem with that, though, is that Cursed currently don't use stamina. They use hate. Giving a class just a few stamina-based skills has not yet been done in ToME, and probably for a good reason. Cursed already invest in Wil, so they would have ample stamina with which to use a few stamina-based talents, which completely defeats the purpose of resource management.

There are a few passive techniques that could possibly be put together in a hodgepodge combat tree: Dual Weapon Training, Riposte, Dual Weapon Defense, Mortal Terror, and Bloodrage. Remember, they are cursed; they have no preference for weapon combat style--except for axes!--so it wouldn't seem terribly inconsistent to me to give them access to a shield talent and dual weapon talents (which I would love to use!) in the same cursed combat tree.

Of course, if somebody were a bit more creative, they could develop another tree for the cursed (but I have no idea what it would entail)...

As I see it, the cursed class is akin to a class styled after Gollum or Jack Nicholson's character from The Shining: Someone who, through misfortune or fate has gone completely off his or her deep end and grabbed the deadliest weapon of opportunity they had in their possession and started swinging. These people aren't exactly combat veterans, so yeah, the stamina-based combat trees are kinda against their lore. Maybe a tree or two dedicated to improving skills in other trees, the way that the gloom talents after gloom enhance the gloom talent? Or maybe something that is tied to your size category, so that you can eventually dual wield two-handed axes if you up your size category to huge?

tiger_eye wrote:One problem with that, though, is that Cursed currently don't use stamina. They use hate. Giving a class just a few stamina-based skills has not yet been done in ToME, and probably for a good reason.

So change them into a full hybrid class by giving them:

2 Hand Weapons (locked)
2 Hand Maiming
Shield Offence (locked)
Combat Techniques
Combat Veteran
Field Control (locked)
Dirty Fighting

This still wouldn't be too many categories for a class, and would make them much less weak at 0 hate (vs. 0.1 or 0.5 Hate). Don't know how it would end up for balance and it now has redundant skills, but redundancy isn't so bad.