ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Just saw Zonk's character report and disruption shield says something about a mana storm.

Beleba the heavy bone giant's disruption shield collapses and then explodes in a powerful manastorm!

So how about taking the damage and dividing it by 5 and applying that to a lasting map effect in a radius of 5. This way the player has a chance of escaping the effect instead of getting instakilled.

tiger_eye suggested in IRC that the storm always center on the actor with the shield (like an ice storm but without friendly fire) to prevent a player mage from popping off a big mana storm and then teleporting out.

I think that'd be good too

Yeah, all good ideas. Would lead to less unavoidable deaths, whilst also making it a bit more viable to use as an offensive skill without killing yourself. There have been a few other decent suggestions on how to change the skill, which absolutely *needs* changing.

That was an ugly death, but good thing it inspired this thread.

I haven't played with Disruption Shield much myself, but when looking at the info, I was sorta surprised at how it looked powerful if you had a lot of mana. And since NPCs seem to cheat with resources..

I do like edge's idea of turning into a map effect, although I think radius 5 is quite huge. Lower that to 4 or even 3, maybe.
Dividing by damage 5 sounds pretty alright, too.

Overall the damage would be the same. You'd just take it over 5 turns instead of 1 turn

I know, but it being spread over several turns makes a HUGE difference since as you say, there is time to flee, recover...do something about it basicaly.

As an alternative to dividing by 5, you could also divide by some non fixed value which basically acts as a cap on how much damage the storm can do per turn.
Let's say(random number) the Magic stat times 3 or 4?

So with 100 Mag, 2000 points of damage would be spread over 2000/300 or 2000/400 rounds.

(This isn't really necessary, 5 is a fine divisor, just thought I'd mention it)

Maybe the damage dealt should only take the last x turns of damage absorbed into account?

Or the shield reduces the damage by x every turn, unless there are a lot of people who use this ability for offense.

Alternative, as more of an escape mechanism:
Have the shield collapse and provide a static boost, duration depends on the damage absorbed.
Pick any combination of the ones below:

Offensive:
Damage aura (range 2, 50 dmg/turn for AbsorbedDmg/100 turns)
Debuff aura (chance to confuse and/or stun and or slow weaken, ...)
Buff aura (give you a 20% damage boost for AbsorbedDmg/100 turns)

Defensive:
Buff aura (movement speed and/or +temporary hp and/or +temporary resist and/or +invis and/or +saves and/or +stun/confusion immunity)

I personally like the idea of the shield giving you a movement speed bonus and a damage increase. This way you can try to run or finish the attack. I don't use this skill so these are just some ideas.

That's assuming the damage on the shield is meant to be a bonus for the person being shielded. I'm not sure it is. I think the explosion when the shield collapses hurting the person using the shield is meant to be just as, if not more, detrimental to the disruption shield user as it is to those around him. When it was coded I think it was coded for mages and given to a few other monsters for fun. But mostly the explosion was so you would consider manually turning it off before you blew yourself up (or at least that's my understanding).

Now that random uniques with huge resource pools are getting it though it's become a not so fun effect you should watch for on mobs. Because even if they kill themselves in the process getting blown up by a random uniques uber disruption shield has become an all to common story on the forums.

Yeah, I agree, Disruption Shield is meant to be a double-edged sword. The damage absorption aspect is really nice, but taking it too far can be rather... dangerous. Sometimes it's a useful dangerous; sometimes it's a big gamble.

So, I like edge2054's original idea: keep the talent as is, but spread the damage out over 5 turns or so and keep the effect centered on the source actor. Also, do it in a way that wild infusions or Timeless can't be used to avoid teh damage.

I would suggest capping or scaling the overall damage. That's the main problem right now -- NPCs can have really weird numbers, so it's very important that all talents scale in a way that places reasonable caps on what they can do. Choose some range that disruption shield can inflict, and have it scale towards the limit of the upper value with damage prevented.

Even with damage divided over five turns, I can see it getting ridiculous in some situations. This talent should never be going more damage than the typical player has HP. If it's meant to kill its user when it breaks, just have it set their HP to zero and be done with it; and either way, it definitely shouldn't be an instant death radius to everyone else.

Repeating my suggestion to make it deactivate at something like (0.5 * damage absorbed) mana instead of on the last hit that would bring it below 0. This would result in an enemy with 1000 mana, no regen, and a 1:1 damage conversion ratio deactivating it at 333 mana, dealing 666 damage. This has the added benefit of giving casters some mana remaining without needing to use a manasurge rune immediately, as well as giving the player options other than "dispel sustain talents" and "all out assault, preferably at range" to deal with it, as very fast mana regen would not be as much of an issue.

Then change it to only damage the person with the shield, and let it do capped damage over time.
In its current form (without capped damage) it is clearly dis-functional.

I dunno, though. This description is making it sound like it would become another version of Damage Smearing or Time Shield (or whatever it was called), delaying damage rather than really preventing it. Honestly, I think it might be better to rethink the talent from the ground up.

The current implementation doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, though I've never tried to use it. A shield that drains my primary resource and then explodes to hit me doesn't sound useful. Especially when I make heavy use of shields to avoid said gigantic attacks. The other defensive options seem vastly superior.

Would a global review of (player) talents be a good community endeavor? Adventurer parties and random bosses can be quite fun, but many talents don't scale with modified talent levels when they conceivably could, and others were never designed to go above 5/5 raw talent level. Adding diminishing returns on talent level and caps to various effects would be the main focus.