ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Cunning/Poisons class is too weak. For example 'Venomus Strike' hit is weaker than normal (critic or sneak) hit. What is more, poison damages per 1 turn are sybolic (about 50 nature dam). I am 50 lvl skeleton rogue and every normal hit I have done several hundred dam. I spent a lot of class points and 2 category points for this but now I am not sure that it was good choice.

PizzaPL

I beg to differ. I think all talents in cunning/poisons are still very powerful. Poison damage is most useful early and mid game, 'cause in late game rogues can often kill enemies in one or two turns anyway. For strong enemies they don't kill in one or two turns, however, poisons are still awesome. I recommend that late game rogues use two poisons that have status effects (such as Numbing and Crippling, or Insidious if enemies heal themselves).

Poisons: doing 50 damage per turn per poison for 10 turns is nothing to scoff at! "Deadly Poison" can stack with itself to do more damage per turn. Other poisons have status effects (as well as do damage). If an enemy is afflicted by three poisons, then that's ~150 damage for 10 turns, and when it dies these poisons can have a chance to pass to nearby enemies. This is incredible, not underpowered, and the other talents in the tree only make it better.

Venomous Strike: Nature damage! This addresses non-trapping rogues' biggest shortcoming: doing non-physical damage. This can also be a normal critical or shadowstrike critical, so I don't understand your criticism. With one poison, this talent can potentially do x2 damage compared to a normal hit, and with two poisons it can do x3. This also has low cooldown (5 turns) and a low cost (7 stamina). In other words: awesome!

Empower Poisons: Fuses very well with other poison talents. The only shortcoming I see with it is that some players may forget to--or choose not to--use it. Example: an enemy just gained two poisons, which do 50 damage per turn each. Using empower poisons the next turn can make those poisons to a combined 700 damage per turn for 5 turns! Furthermore, this affects all poisoned enemies, not just one enemy.

Toxic Death: I love passive crowd control . I think it would be great to display a log message when a poison is passed from one dying enemy to a neighboring enemy. It would give players a "warm fuzzy" feeling to know that their cool, high level talent is working .

Anyway, I think cunning/poisons is one of the most versatile trees available. It is useful for hit-and-run tactics, single enemies, mobs, bosses, healing enemies, 100% physical damage resistance enemies, etc. If you invest heavily in other combat talents as a rogue, then you may find you don't need to use every talent in this tree. On the other hand, this tree is powerful enough that it can serve as ones primary combat talents (in my humble opinion).

Yes, generaly I agree with you. But 50 dam is a sum of 2 poisons. Normaly 1 poison add 18 - 27 nature dam. This should be improved.
Second, Venomus Strike - 2 poisons - gives 316% = about 500 nature dam. It is very small because Dual Techniques do about few thousands dam! The category and class points a cost is too big.

PizzaPL

P.S.
It should works with any weapon (bow,sling etc)

Ah, yes, I guess I misunderstood what you were originally saying. 20-25 damage per turn per poison is more normal. I think the amount of damage done by poisons is perfect during the early and mid game. Players typically max the poison talent at clvl 16, and they typically max cunning (more or less) at clvl 30. Poison damage doesn't increase much after this point in the game. This is when the effects of poisons and the other cunning/poison talents become more useful.

knypek wrote:It is very small because Dual Techniques do about few thousands dam!

Yes, well, I don't think any talent tree should be compared with something that can do thousands of damage to a single target .

By the way, are there any poisons that you haven't found useful? I played through quickly with a poisonous rogue (with the help of a tiny bit of cheating to cheat death ), and I found that I was never inclined to use Stoning poison. I used all the other poisons, though. Can you think of any other poisonous effect that would be useful for high level rogues, PizzaPL?

*edited* to avoid propagating confusion.

tiger_eye wrote: Players typically max the poison talent at clvl 16, and they typically max cunning (more or less) at clvl 30. Poison damage doesn't increase much after this point in the game. This is when the effects of poisons and the other cunning/poison talents become more useful.

But what later? Maybe we should learn new and more deadly poison recepture in the last part of game, like a paralysis (part of body, limb or vital organ) or epilepsy attack


PizzaPL

You do get that it's stronger than the strongest brand available on a weapon right? That's part of it's charm - it's a 'free' branding that still damages even if you run away, miss, or attack another enemy.

Also, with the fact that it's nature damage and there's not many things that intrinsically resist nature specifically [to my knowledge] it's going to be doing decent and reliable damage to almost everything.

Vampires have good nature res.

But anyway, yeah, the point is it's a passive effect, which gives an always-on extra boost. Extremely worth the points. More important than the damage though is the status effects.

I've seen venomous strikes late game crit for like 2.5k on a boss with 50% nature resist (so 5k, off one of two strikes... 10k potential on a single attack!!). It's a weapon attack. I don't know what's giving you the idea it's not. You attack (with both weapons) and any damage that happens is converted to nature damage. It also hits really really really hard if the opponent has a couple poisons on it (which isn't to hard to get if you open with flurry and follow up with vs). It works just like Swallow really but with the damage based on how many poisons are on the target.

Crippling and Numbing Poison are the two best imo. Deadly is nice early game but you're right the damage doesn't keep up late game. So what. You have other poisons and they don't all need to be viable the whole game.

Anyway, Crippling (I think that's the one) prevents talent usage. Attack and Shoot are talents. This is basically a 30% chance the enemy can't do anything on it's turn. Numbing (again I may have them reversed) reduces all damage that target does by 30%.

Empower poisons was the only skill I didn't max in the tree. I don't think it's a bad skill (after all it takes no time to use) I just had other places I thought my points could be used better.

Anyway... I disagree and I've played a poison rogue up to level 50 or so.

*edit* I also never used stoning poison, things didn't live long enough. I also want to point out the versatility of the tree. All poisons are instant cast so you can swap them out mid-fight without losing an action. When fighting a boss this poison swapping (and the rod of spydric poison + poison traps) was key to stacking poisons for venomous strikes.

Thanks for chiming in, edge2054, you're absolutely correct. I must have been delirious when I looked at the poison tree code during my second post.

Anyway, I still contend that the poison tree is awesome. If anything, I'd say it's overpowered, but it's fun the way it is, so I'd also say keep it the way it is...

...except for maybe the stoning poison. Too long of a wait. Has anybody else not used this poison while playing the game? Perhaps it should have a shorter duration.

New poison status effect ideas:
(1) reduce sight (including infravision) by 1 for each turn afflicted by the poison (but only implement this if AI is changed to take into account vision range for talent usage).
(2) slow enemy by an additional 5% each turn with a maximum of 50% slow (which would be attained after 10 turns of being poisoned).
(3) Poison Medley: a combination of all other poisons, but with weaker potency of each poison, of course (maybe allow this to be merge-able, too... or maybe not).

I agree that if anything it's a bit overpowered. Especially Venomous Strikes. But considering the time it takes to get that damage going maybe it's alright the way it is (at least 2 turns and then only if you get some good poison applications out of your flurry).

What if Stoning Poison was rolled in with your slow poison idea tiger_eye? So it was a gradual slow that built up to the stoned effect (each time the poison type ticked it could reduce speed by X%, once speed was reduced below 0 the target would be turned to stone).