ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

In my understanding of Cursed, they should be weak at low Hate, and strong at high Hate. Over the past few characters (a few around level 20, one past level 30), I've found that they are indeed weak at 0 Hate, though not cripplingly so, but they never seem to get as strong other melee classes, even at 10 Hate. The main problems I found are a reliance on (and lack of) accuracy, few tactical options, and weaker damage talents in general.

Accuracy: Cursed are hit hard for accuracy, with only Combat Accuracy and Rampage boosting it, and Life Leech and Torment not needing it. Nearly all of the other melee (and melee hybrid) classes have it better. Fighters, Rogues and Shadowblades have access to Precise Strikes and Perfect Strike, Berserkers and Wyrmics have Berserker, Arcane Blades, Wyrmics, Mindslayers, Reavers and Sun Paladins have spells as backup, Brawlers have...grapple? (not too sure, I haven't played them much). With the investment of a Category point, 4 or more class points, Cursed can increase their accuracy by 30-70% (at 10 Hate) at a cost of 2.5-7.5 Hate for 4-9 turns, with a cooldown of 100-150 (all depending on class point investment). Note that a percentage increase is only useful if accuracy starts high, so a 50% boost would bring it from (for example) 40 to 60, still not high enough for many bosses.

Tactical Options: Cursed have the following skills to help control the flow of a fight: Gloom (debuffs), Blindside (repositioning), Reckless Charge (damage and repositioning), Bait (repositioning), Slash (dazes, useless if you have Life Leech), and Cleave (hits a second target, for average of 50% damage at level 5, 10 Hate). They have one (strong) debuff talent, and no knockbacks, stuns, pins, or escape talents, and weak multiple enemy damaging skills.

Weak damage Talents: The Cursed's main damage talents are Ruined Cut, as well as Frenzy, and Slash (which can be boosted by Dominate, and Rampage). Ruined Cut is good against bosses, doing up to 300 poison damage (100 willpower, talent level 5) over (12-18) turns, but it takes too long to be useful in fights in corridors, or against single enemies that are spread out. Slash scales linearly with talent level, so it could reach quite high damages, especially with an axe and dagger both boosting it (278% damage at talent level 7, 10 Hate) but it deals normal damage at 0.1 Hate, and only deals damage, with no added effects. Frenzy deals similar damage to Flurry, but hits targets randomly. Dominate boosts damage against a single target by 20-50% and Rampage can triple (or so) your damage output for a few turns with a long cooldown.

OK, so now that I have given a background, here's some changes to talents, the rationale behind them (in italics), and a new tree to help fill the gaps.

Slash: Keep the Hate cost, but increase damage at 0 Hate from 100% to (100 + 5 * talent)%, and stun for (2 + talent * 0.5, rounded down) turns. This will make it do more damage than a normal attack if used at 0.1 Hate, as well as giving a stun to the class.
Reckless Charge: increase range from 4 to (4 + talent * 0.5, rounded down). Mobility skills should increase in mobility with levels, also Cursed need more range.
Dominate: Decrease enemy armour by (5 * talent). Cursed have no APR, this will help, without changing too much
Blindside: Increase range from 6 to 8, give either (or both) increased chance to crit, or stun on hit. Cursed need more range to deal with archers etc... and blindside implies surprise, thus the stun/crit.
Smash: make it a special type of Daze that prevents targeting by Cleave and Life Leech. Daze is useless if they are damaged right away.


Cursed/Dark Soul unlocked by default, Willpower for requirements, flavour text in italics.
Focused Rage: sustained, 30 cooldown, -(0.04, 0.035, 0.03, 0.025, 0.02) Hate per turn
+(2 * talent + [2 + 0.5 * talent] * Hate) accuracy, +(talent + [1 + 0.25 * talent] * Hate) defence. Deactivates when Rampage is activated.
Maintain a cold rage focused on your enemies, increasing your accuracy by XX at 0 hate to XX at 10+ hate and your defence by XX at 0 Hate to XX at 10+ Hate. Rampaging will deactivate this talent.
Dark Escape: 0.5 Hate, 30 cooldown, (8 + 2 * talent) range
Teleport randomly within range, and gives invisibility (5 + 2 * talent power) for (talent) turns.
Gather the shadows around yourself and slip away, reappearing up to XX squares away. The darkness clings to your form, granting invisibility (XX power) for XX turns.
Damned Strike: 0.5 Hate, 20 cooldown,
Attack for ([80-120] to [140-200], based on Hate)% darkness damage, +1000 APR, and +100% dark resist penetration.
Call upon the forces that have brought you down, slashing through your target's armour and resistances for XX% (at 0 Hate) to XX% (at 10+ Hate) darkness damage
Lifeblood: passive
Gain +(20, 30, 40, 50, 60)% healing mod while you have unnatural body healing remaining.
The untainted blood of your victims lifts your curse, for a time, allowing more efficient healing (+ XX% healing modifier)

So, what do you think about my analysis, modifications to existing talents, and new tree? Am I focusing on the right issues? Making them too powerful? Removing flavour? Do you have any other ideas that would fit?

Just a few comments...

I agree that accuracy and APR can be shortcomings of cursed, so adding some way to improve these (or decrease the enemy defense or armor) could be good.

I just looked at some of your cursed characters, lukep. You didn't boost gloom?! It's a passive debuff--can't get much better than that!

Regarding "Blindside", I don't think it should stun the enemy. Blindside is already an incredible talent: you can jump through walls! That said, I've never invested more than one point into Blindside, because I care much more about the mobility than I do the damage. So, perhaps the range of Blindside could scale something like floor(5 + 0.6*tl).

Benli's always been pretty adamant in the past about the class not getting a single target stun so I'm surprised they got the one honestly.

I don't like the second and fourth talents in your proposed tree. Not that there's anything wrong with them they just don't fit the theme of the class. Blindside and Reckless Charge already do an adequate job as close in talents and a talent that's based purely on escape simply doesn't fit the class. Lifeblood also doesn't feel right.

As to the accuracy issue another way to go about improving accuracy is to reduce enemy defense. Some sort of fear effect could be added to one of their weaker abilities or possibly added to one of the gloom talents or even a generic talent that reduced the defenses of enemies that can see the Cursed (some sort of Frightful Presence power).

I don't agree with most of your conclusions. Cursed used to be a late-game powerhouse before the 50% healing and lifeleech aura nerfs, and it still scales very well. A 5/5 Slash dishes out incredible damage once you set up things... anyway here's my 2 cents:

First of all: Since the revamp on max hate, the hate limitations are just dragging the class down. Getting +1 hate cursed items do nothing except give you a hate cushion since hate bonuses are capped at 10. to: return (min + ((max - min) * self.hate / 10))

Secondly: This class has WAY too many generic points trees. There's so much needed stuff in there that you'll never have enough points to pump racials or combat techniques, let alone pick up anything from escorts. Either Cursed form or Fateful aura should become a class tree to alleviate this problem.

Talents:
Blindside - Extremely reliable utility spell. Too reliable at 1 point actually... It should have reduced cooldown with extra talents otherwise it will always be a 1 point wonder: 24/20/16/12/8 or something.
Stalk - The extra crit for a single attack is a bit weak at the point in the game you can use this... and it doesn't really fit in with the class theme.
Idea : Stalk - Passive. Blindside will do 20/30/40/50/60% bonus damage to your prey and will decrease it's defense by 60 for 2/3/4/5/6 turns. (Single target accuracy and no strange rule to set up Stalk->Blindside)

Strife -
Ruined Cut - Solid early game damage, however I feel it lags behind later on.
Bait - Really well designed utility.
Smash - Life leech aura breaks the daze, so it's almost useless.
Assail - It can be strangely useful when Blindside is on cooldown. The hate cost is too steep though.

Rampage -
Rampage - The hate loss doesn't seem to be working so it needs to be looked into.
Instincts - The evasion needs to be a bit higher to be noticeable.

Cursed form -
Seethe - Too long cooldown to be useful.
Enrage - I don't like this talent at all. A 1 turn use for a bit of temporary hp is just a bad healing infusion in my book.
Idea:
1 - Unnatural Body - As is
2 - Enrage - 1 turn. Activated. 50 turn cd. Temporarily increases your hate and maximum hate by 2/3/4/5/6 for 20 turns.
3 - Relentless - As is
4 - Cold hatred - Passive. Improves all your hate multipliers up to maximum hate by 10/15/20/25/30%. (If a talent would do 0-100 based on hate, it would do 30-100 at 5 points. This is easily done by adding this talent to the hate multiplier formula.)

Fateful aura - This is apparently being changed a lot lately so I'll wait and see.

Maybe make the Fateful Aura tree a part of the class as something that improves as the afflicted gets bigger (like sneak attack in D&D) where you don't need to spend points in it?

Also, agree with Dervis on Seethe. Would be nicer (at least for Cursed) if Seethe instead gave a flat 5 or a flat 10 hate with a cooldown of 600 - (100 * raw talent level).

Doomed is really fun because the Hate mechanic has variable throughput - you can run really high and dominate a field, at the cost of worse defenses and greater risk of burning out, or you can play it slow and methodically, keeping your defenses way up. Cursed has, in my limited experience (played a lot of Cursed but never made it much further than level 17), none of this dynamic. Sure, you can deal damage without Hate, since you are playing a melee class, but all of your offensive skills seem to both scale with and require Hate. You can't even attempt to get better positioning without losing Hate.

The solution in my mind would be to allow Cursed to build up Hate in combat, perhaps at the cost of reduced damage? Just brainstorming, but perhaps there could be an activated or a sustain that build up an effect on a single target that gives hate regeneration on hit, at the cost of reduced damage. It would force you to focus your attacks on one target to get the effect up to a reasonable level, and you couldn't keep it on all the time if you actually wanted to do serious damage.

Another health recovery option would also be great. The effects of Unnatural Body range from totally broken (400+ health regeneration after killing a room full of weak enemies?) to, well, totally broken (no way of recovering health during fights outside of gimped infusions). It becomes more manageable when you find good shielding runes. Edit: Forgot about Life Leech. It would be nice if it was a little lower in the tree.

Side note: Hate loss needs to be frozen between arena rounds. Right now the long waits before boss fights (which help most classes) make everything that much harder. I don't think any other resource has this issue. Doomed don't have it too bad, because of Feed. Cursed continue to get the shaft.

tiger_eye wrote:Just a few comments...
I just looked at some of your cursed characters, lukep. You didn't boost gloom?! It's a passive debuff--can't get much better than that!

My three most recent Cursed don't show up in the Vault, because I edited Fateful Aura to work on armour, and not on Alchemist gems. They boosted Gloom/Weakness, and it was worth it.

Dervis wrote:I don't agree with most of your conclusions. Cursed used to be a late-game powerhouse before the 50% healing and lifeleech aura nerfs, and it still scales very well. A 5/5 Slash dishes out incredible damage once you set up things... anyway here's my 2 cents:

This can get very powerful, but the lack of generic points for Weapons Mastery counteracts the +50% bonus from Dominate, and Rampage has a very long cooldown (which you can't just wait out without losing Hate), which limits its use.

Dervis wrote:First of all: Since the revamp on max hate, the hate limitations are just dragging the class down. Getting +1 hate cursed items do nothing except give you a hate cushion since hate bonuses are capped at 10.
Code:

Code: Select all

local function getHateMultiplier(self, min, max)
   return (min + ((max - min) * math.min(self.hate, 10) / 10))
end

to: return (min + ((max - min) * self.hate / 10))

That would have made my characters a lot tougher, and a bit more powerful. My highest level Cursed was running around with 12-14 Hate most of the time, and fighting with 15-17, so I would get an extra 4-12 resist all, in addition to the extra damage. (Thank you resource leech)

Dervis wrote:Cursed form -
Seethe - Too long cooldown to be useful.
Enrage - I don't like this talent at all. A 1 turn use for a bit of temporary hp is just a bad healing infusion in my book.
Idea:
1 - Unnatural Body - As is
2 - Enrage - 1 turn. Activated. 50 turn cd. Temporarily increases your hate and maximum hate by 2/3/4/5/6 for 20 turns.
3 - Relentless - As is
4 - Cold hatred - Passive. Improves all your hate multipliers up to maximum hate by 10/15/20/25/30%. (If a talent would do 0-100 based on hate, it would do 30-100 at 5 points. This is easily done by adding this talent to the hate multiplier formula.)

I like it.

edge2054 wrote:As to the accuracy issue another way to go about improving accuracy is to reduce enemy defense. Some sort of fear effect could be added to one of their weaker abilities or possibly added to one of the gloom talents or even a generic talent that reduced the defenses of enemies that can see the Cursed (some sort of Frightful Presence power).

I like the idea of reducing defence better than increasing Accuracy. The simplest thing to do would be to roll it into Gloom Weakness or Dominate, but it could be a separate skill as well.

edge2054 wrote:I don't like the second and fourth talents in your proposed tree. Not that there's anything wrong with them they just don't fit the theme of the class. Blindside and Reckless Charge already do an adequate job as close in talents and a talent that's based purely on escape simply doesn't fit the class. Lifeblood also doesn't feel right.

I agree with you on Lifeblood, I mostly just needed a fourth talent for the tree, and had the idea bouncing around. With that in mind, here's revisions.

Stalk: Adds Phase Door effect if used in targeted enemy's LoS after level 3.

Dark Soul 2: Rash Attraction: 0.2 Hate, 30 cooldown, (5, 6, 7, 8, 9) cone range, (10, 11, 12, 13, 14) duration
Draws enemies towards you (like Call of the mouth), and reduces their defence by (5 + 7 * talent) for the duration
Call to your foes with your hatred, drawing them slowly towards you and forcing them to disregard their own protection for XX turns, reducing defence by XX.
Dark Soul 4: Blood Strike: 0.5 Hate, 30 cooldown,
Attacks for ([60-100] to [100-140], based on Hate)% damage, healing you for (10, 20, 30, 40, 50)% of the damage dealt. Places a radius 1 map effect at the target's feet, healing for (10, 8.9, 7.8, 6.7, 5.6)% of the damage over 5 turns. (total healing = total damage, if it is all used)
Strike the heart of your enemy for XX% (at 0 Hate) to XX% (at 10+ Hate) damage, spilling its blood on the ground in a radius of 1, and stealing XX% for yourself.

Still not 100% satisfied with it, but it's as good as I could come up with on the spot.

Another way to do Rash Attraction would be to bias the AI's decision and force it to close in.

Blood Strike could convert all damage to bleed damage over six turns (with bonuses of course, say 1.3 - 3.0 depending on talent level and hate multiplier) and turn that damage into healing for the cursed plus some hate gain. Would make for a good healing + hate gain effect on high hit point targets (bosses especially) and virtually useless on normal monsters (but the former is really what the class needs right?)

I'll work on some more balancing on this. I've played a lot more Doomed classes than Cursed so the balance is probably about 10 versions old. Its been a long time since I've made it to the East (mostly death by version upgrade..that one just doesn't show up in the player profile).

I think I agree with Dervis on most points so I might start there as those are simple changes. I'll also look at accuracy and APR.
* Changing the hate bonus to scale past 10 would restore some of their late game glory and make cursed items with hate bonuses even more of a good strategy. If its overpowering it can be taken out.
* Blindside should scale cooldown and/or range.
* I'm OK with the stalk idea of adding a kind of dominate to blindside. At some point I thought about doing a victim mechanic which is similar. Select a single "victim" with a special attack and gain bonuses against them until they die or you target someone else. That sounds pretty similar to dominate. It almost makes me want to rework all three talents in some way.
* Seethe. The long cooldown is to prevent turning hate into an plentiful resource that requires constant "resting". Unfortunately it doesn't help enough in long boss battles. My current thinking is to seethe on a nearby target. As long as it is within range you gain hate at a fast enough rate to use some of your talents or keep hate high. Good for boss battles.
* Enrage has always been worthless. I like Cold Hatred so I'll probably add it. Plus its really easy to code.
* Smash is already changed from daze to stun. Yeah I really didn't want a stun when I designed Cursed. At v6 or so that was how every melee class won every battle. It's still pretty powerful but smash is a bit nerfed and expensive so I think its ok.
* For Attack/APR I could work that into the Endless Hunt talents. I'm also considering completely replacing the Axe restriction and focusing on cursed weapons. Either requiring cursed weapons or improving the talents (hate multiplier?) when using cursed weapons. I could add some attack and apr bonuses for wielding a cursed weapon as well.

Secondly: This class has WAY too many generic points trees. There's so much needed stuff in there that you'll never have enough points to pump racials or combat techniques, let alone pick up anything from escorts. Either Cursed form or Fateful aura should become a class tree to alleviate this problem.

Agreed but Doomed has the exact opposite problem. Its hard to have a melee and mage share the same generic talent trees. There are other ways to make this balance better. Other sources of attack for example. Fateful Aura could becom a class skill as it is pretty optional for doomed.


For reference, this is a summary of the Cursed Touch changes:

For early game balance (especially Cursed characters):
- Cursed Touch starts with about 30% chance to curse an item. Extra points in Cursed Touch increase the chance up to 90%. Invest in this to make cursed items easier to find if you want to invest in curses.
- Cursed can wield both axes or cursed items with their Strife and Slaughter talents
For late game balance:
- Too many passives, replaced Grim Craft with an activated talent: Cursed Sentry. Animate a cursed weapon from your inventory and toss it to a spot. It will fight for you for a while before crumbling to dust.
For simplicity:
- cursed items get 1 bad effect and either 1 Dark Gift effect or 1 Vengeful Blessing effect
- curses are either minor or major; The chance of major curses improves with points invested.
More interesting effects:
- like egos: curses, gifts and blessings have names. They are displayed in the item description. For example: "curse of clumbsiness, blessing of whispers"
- like egos: effects can change multiple item properties
- power of effects scale with item quality and level of dark gift or vengeful blessing (scales from about 50% to 100% power)

benli wrote:I'm also considering completely replacing the Axe restriction and focusing on cursed weapons. Either requiring cursed weapons or improving the talents (hate multiplier?) when using cursed weapons. I could add some attack and apr bonuses for wielding a cursed weapon as well.

Please, please, oh gods alive, please. Axes are frankly crap compared to swords or maces -- axes need some sort of general boost, period (the crit advantage doesn't make up for the lack of damage, at all.) -- and being able to use almost anything else (perhaps not staves, ha) would be a tremendous boon to cursed players.

Other than that, all I can see is that I'll be a little sad that we won't be able to get penalty-less cursed items anymore, but I think I could deal.

I'm not sure about cursed sentry (another RL I've played that has a similar mechanic, I never, ever, end up actually using the ability), but would be willing to give it a try. As an alternative, but similar concept, perhaps a summon whose strength (and possibly unique abilities) is based on the power and/or amount of cursed items you're currently wearing, but doesn't have an item cost? A curse manifestation type effect. It would fit the theme while having less fiddly bits (menus popping up, keeping weapons in the inventory/around, etc, etc.).

benli wrote:- Too many passives, replaced Grim Craft with an activated talent: Cursed Sentry. Animate a cursed weapon from your inventory and toss it to a spot. It will fight for you for a while before crumbling to dust.

I like the rest, but this seems out of place with the rest of the game. It would make carrying around otherwise useless items necessary, and be one of the (very) few consumable things in the game. (the others are Speed and Invisibility Runes, wands, and gems for Alchemists and Mindslayers). One way to do it differently would be to disarm you while it is active, then return your weapon, as I don't like it crumbling to dust.

lukep wrote:

benli wrote: - Too many passives, replaced Grim Craft with an activated talent: Cursed Sentry. Animate a cursed weapon from your inventory and toss it to a spot. It will fight for you for a while before crumbling to dust.

I like the rest, but this seems out of place with the rest of the game. It would make carrying around otherwise useless items necessary, and be one of the (very) few consumable things in the game. (the others are Speed and Invisibility Runes, wands, and gems for Alchemists and Mindslayers). One way to do it differently would be to disarm you while it is active, then return your weapon, as I don't like it crumbling to dust.

Meh. Unless transmo chest is getting changed in b32 to auto-transmogrify items this isn't as bad as you say it is - just keep one weapon among the millions you're going to find anyway in your inventory, and replace it with the next one you find. I don't think Cursed Sentry is intended to be a power that's always going to be in use.

I agree with lukep, though. Just in terms of fun -- I dislike the idea of a talent that permanently consumes objects (without giving me something permanent in return.) When I invest points in a cool power, I like to be able to throw it around and have fun with it! I don't want it to feel like a failure every time I use it because it's eating up permanent resources.

Why not just let them keep the weapon? It could make a 'shadow copy' of the weapon or something. It wouldn't unbalance very much, I think, and it'd just be more fun to use, all else aside.

When something consumes permanent resources, it feels like I'm failing every time I use it. That's unfun; and using your talents should be fun.

My main concern with it is having to deal with the inventory screen every time I use it.

I agree in theory that inventory managment, losing items, etc sounds annoying. In practice I think it works much better than it sounds.

1) A small gold/fortress energy cost is a pretty small price to pay. It initially had a hate cost, but I liked the item destruction better to limit its use.
2) There really aren't too many weapons lying around.
3) It has a longish cooldown so you typically use it once in a battle.
4) Most battles don't need that much help; mostly bosses, adventurers etc.

My main concern with it is having to deal with the inventory screen every time I use it.

I don't think this is too much of a problem since it isn't used very frequently. I think the worst thing about it is managing a set of weapons to use. Though its not much different than collecting other stuff.

Anyway, people can try it out and and see if they like it.