ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Let's face it, using the same talents from level 1 can sometimes be boring despite their usefulness, or worse, they stop being useful. I don't know about everyone else, but many times I have thought, "This ability was great up to level 15 or 20, but now I have no reason to use it anymore because of X." Or, "I wish Y didn't counter every talent/inscription I have off of cooldown, its not like these lower tier talents can help me, time to pray and bump attack/run."

What if players, through certain requirements, could change some of these lower level talents to increase their appeal even at later levels?

Example:
Lets say an adventurer finds a rare storm wyrm tooth. The adventurer, hearing the _____ legend in a tavern, wants to use its legendary power to imbue one of his skills with the speed and ferocity of a storm wyrm! Using an ancient forbidden technique taught to him in the lowest dungeon of the deepest pit, the adventurer subjugates the essence within the tooth into his knowledge of <insert talent>. In a cascade of energy concluding with the brazen crack of thunder, the adventurer's chosen talent is now energized with this magical/spiritual/whatever energy stolen from the essence of the wyrm tooth. Due to using this forbidden knowledge, the adventurer cannot change the talent again and the tooth is consumed in the process.

The name of the adventurer's talent would change to confirm the success of the ritual. In this case the icon changes from a more generic representation to an icon that has lightning effects drawn on it, and the name sounds something cheesy but cool like "Fist of Thunder". Now if a mage-like character does the same imbue to an acid fog or fireball talent, the result could be a damage type change to lightning or possibly some other small effect along with the renaming of the talent. Let's say an alchemist or summoner type used this to one of their golem/spell/summon talents. The golem or spells could gain one or more traits from a number of possibilities, and the summoner could make his ritch flamespitter become a sweet lightning spitter instead.

Ideally the player characters could, through a rare item drop from a dangerous enemy (or perhaps a joke imbue from a weaker monster) and spending resources like extra talent points or gold, imbue a limited range of skills in different but visceral ways, adding replay value and opening up more options for players who love their lower tier talents.

Thoughts?

I'm not sure at all of any examples of one talent surpassing another in such a direct way that one talent becomes useless [in regards to what is accessible to any single class]. Care to have an example?

Fair enough.

I'll preface this by saying that this is 100% my opinion, and do not mean to offend anybody on purpose or by mistake. If you disagree with me, go ahead and point it out, I want to hear what people other than myself think about this.

Take the talent Dirty Fighting. It's a low damage hit combined with a stun. Extremely useful, especially for Rogues.

But, Rogues can also points into Dual Strike for a high damage talent that stuns and Dual Tech. tree has 3 more damage talents. The Dirty Fighting tree has Backstab which is meh, Switch Place which is situational, and Cripple...which can be entirely replaced by a poison. Depending on the player, these are nearly worthless or one point wonders. Really they don't need any talent points in the tree at all, they can use Traps for more crowd control, get a switch place replacement like disengage (or a teleport rune or a movement infusion), backstab replaced with one point in shadowstrike, and cripple by the crippling poison.

So where does that leave Dirty Fighting later in the game when you have to dish out as much damage as possible? The talent might help you, but only if Dual Strike is down. If you do put points into the skill, it will give 1-2 turns more stun duration with the same investment in Dual Strike but deal 1/4 to 1/2 the damage.

So my take on the talent is that it is very useful, and I actually love it and use it a lot before level 15, but later on is overshadowed by the greater appeal of doing more damage or using other utility skills.

Another skill that is useful early game would be Bone Spear for a Reaver. It does ranged physical damage in a line to every monster, wow, sounds incredibly powerful for a level 1 melee character. But we also have Drain, which deals blight damage from range and gives extra vim; and don't forget Virulent Disease which deals blight damage over time from range *and* makes the target weaker. Despite this, the spell by itself is not bad, the range combined with the damage potential, cost, and cooldown make a great ability.

So why do I think Bone Spear is useless later?
If you have your enemies bottlenecked, what matters more, hitting every monster in a line, or being able to duel the one in your face while your heal/shield is on cooldown? Questionable utility from the spear even when used in the most efficient setting.
But the spear has a huge range! Yes it certainly does, but Drain and Virulent disease scale in damage and range with investment, whereas only damage scales with Bone Spear.
One argument is that you can spam the skill because it has low vim cost and low cooldown. Virulent Disease has a lower vim cost and cooldown, and Drain doesn't have a vim cost.
Let's say an archer kites you and for whatever reason Virulent Disease and Drain don't have the range for it, what then? I don't know why you wouldn't invest 2+ talent points into either of those two skills but...look at the talent right below Bone Spear, its Bone Grab. Assuming you left drain and virulent disease at 1-2 talent points, then Bone Grab has a higher range than them. Also, Bone Grab brings the target into melee range *and* pins them for 4 turns even with one talent point.

If Bone Spear's pros and cons are laid out like this, even a new player can tell that the talent does not offer much utility, and if you're worried about area of effect damage, there are plenty of those kinds of abilities in the Reaver's arsenal. Furthermore its boring, just a line nuke by design. And why would you want to use a nuke that deals physical damage when you have two awesome physical damage talents available at level one like Rend and Corrupted Strength?


Obviously not every class has this issue of a skill that later offers so little utility or damage that it feels like you wasted those talent points later, but the main reason that I posted this topic was to refresh abilities that are one-dimensional and offer something new, even if statistically the change is cosmetic (like a lightning spitter dealing the same or less damage than its flame counterpart, but deals lightning damage instead of fire).

Talents that just aren't as interactive as others fall into this category. Particularly any offensive single target talent that deals damage but has no flavor/utility can put people into that zombie mode where you stop caring about efficiency, try to brute force every encounter, and don't care about dying. Bone Spear would be much more impressive if you could invest in it for the line damage, and then later imbue it to give the talent a little extra something (like leaving behind bone caltrops that can cause bleed), I think people would have more interest in the game and reduce that chance to fall into zombie mode.

Its not just about making the skill more powerful or have a cool extra compared to the original. Being able to mildly change how a talent works within the game itself offers a lot of power to the player's creative process. Additionally, by allowing the player the choice of which skill to alter and in which way (i.e. More than rare one item to imbue a skill with), they feel more freedom in manipulating their character, which is important to players who like classes with a more limited number of categories. How crazy would it be if an Archer could imbue their ranged skill into a melee counterpart or vice versa? Just something to think about.

If talents are too weak they need fixing obviously

Now for your idea, it's perpendicular to the issue, both can be done.
I like the idea, but it needs to be done well, care to pump out some examples ?
(when I started T4 I hesitated for a long time between 5 points talents and single point talents with "addons"; I went to the first because it was far too hard to come up with enough interresting options for each and every talent)

Interesting, well, the way that I see it, my idea could be used in two simple ways.

(Aside: To simplify my idea as much as possible, think of the imbued skill as a capstone ability, basically something that gives you a benefit for investing heavily into some skill, which lowers your versatility, when you could have divided your points to gain a higher power level through diversity instead. This doesn't mean that diverse builds would be any weaker, it means that focused ones, only in particular skills that aren't considered overpowered, would gain strength besides the original per level scaling. The talents intended for this functionality would *not* be the kind already in the game that seem to require high investment, although they could be altered to fit that design philosophy. This capstone idea can be seen in more modern games like the Pathfinder tabletop, Skyrim, etc. To note, capstones do not have to be relegated to end-game, in fact Dungeons and Dragons 4.0 uses this type of design with class choices being offered at significant levels like level 10 or level 20 to decide which branch to take for future progression. Dnd 4.0 still, however, allows the jack-of-all-trades multiclass type, but this was nerfed because of power gamer abuse in 3.0 and 3.5.)

1. Let's say for the "weak" or "boring" skill in mind, that it offers an extra final talent level. This could be done either by changing the current talent to scale into a 4/4 format and then the fifth point would be the capstone, or keep the current scaling and offer a sixth level as a capstone. If the idea was relegated to the character level-up screen, then the cost would be a talent point or a category point, this would be a balance decision. If this way was used, my opinion is that a talent point would suffice. These capstones could be unlocked by finding a specific piece of lore, rare drop or quest that would enable the final point to be invested.

2. Let's say the "weak" or "boring" skill has no extra talent levels and none of the scaling was changed from the current talent system. Then the way to change the talent into its more potent capstone form would involve one of the following: a quest, a rare drop, etc. After obtaining said reward, the player would be given a choice whether or not to capstone ability A or capstone ability B. The binary nature would force the player to make a meaningful decision; though it could just as easily be from a list of choices or that particular quest/drop only affects a single talent.

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I'll just mention my motivation for this idea are not for skills that are overall considered underpowered (those just need some balance tweaking), I'm talking about skills that are effective and don't warrant a balance change, but because of the nature of player/enemy scaling in diversity and power level, these skills become obsolete and are essentially sunk costs for the player to make. One of my examples was the talent Dirty Fighting, it can have quite a long stun duration and allows for combo stuns when used with Dual Strike and thus has a high power level particularly early game. However, later in the game when more enemies can resist stuns, have stun immunity, use a wild infusion, or a number of other counters like teleporting, skills like Dirty Fighting become obsolete due mainly to the fact that its one feature that warrants its use becomes marginalized to the degree that the player gets punished for using it.

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So let's take that example Dirty Fighting for a possible capstone benefit. As of now I believe it can stun for up to 9-10 turns at a 5/5 investment and deals somewhere around 70-80% damage. In my mind the main issue with using Dirty Fighting 5/5 opposed to Dual Strike 5/5 is that the latter is far more damage efficient. Instead of some raw damage increase which sounds boring and doesn't give much incentive for use (because I could just Dual Strike and use Flurry and not care about a small damage buff to Dirty Fighting), something that gives more utility would be preferred in my opinion. For instance, if Dirty Fighting had its capstone variant, it could still perform the basic low damage stunning function, but also increase some other damage related statistic like +Critical Damage%. This would also incentivize the rogue who got the capstone for DF to place points into Backstab for the increased critical strike chance, and end up with a more focused build as a result.

An example of a boring ability that could use some capstone excitement would be Arcane Combat. An Arcane Blade can put points into and obviously increase his damage output, but if he procs the skill too much, he'll run out of mana, this is clearly done on purpose to limit the bump attack power of a Arcane Blade and should be kept that way. A capstone should not make the weakness of an ability eliminated and therefore that interaction eliminated, but rather something slightly more oblique that incentivizes players in trying to use it, but still having to deal with the inherent weaknesses built into that skill. So instead of directly increasing the damage of an Arcane Combat proc or increasing an Arcane Blade's mana/mana regen, something along the lines of converting 50% of the Arcane Combat proc damage into the Arcane damage type makes more sense.

It could be overpowered because one of the Blade's weaknesses is overcoming the high resists of late game foes, but at the same time if a player does invest heavily into this skill, they get punished [which players should always get punished for focusing too much]. The problem with this is that now that same player will completely avoid investing more than 1 point into this skill because of his prior experience. In fact I recently played an Arcane Blade with 1 point in the skill and used Gloves instead of regular weapons; because I could attack more often, I could proc the skill more often, and my damage output did not suffer from this build decision. Should a unconventional approach like wielding gloves on a weapon user be the answer to "fix" a skill like this, or should a method like a capstone be used to add both incentive and flavor?

I could offer more examples of what a capstone can accomplish for the player and game design itself, but I believe the basics are in this post, such as increased use of "focus" builds, an increased number of build types (assuming each 1st tier talent had a capstone) while still allowing players who diversify a lot early game, and adding an extra layer of depth for players who can successfully plan out their talents to use capstone abilities within a more diverse build.

The cons for this kind of system are if capstones are considered overpowered then suddenly every player *has* to use them, which limits build diversity and smothers player creativity. The balance of an ability would have to take into consideration this capstone and vice versa. In the #1 method to implement capstones, the problem would be far more obvious and more difficult to balance [like if someone gets a capstone by level ten and has the equivalent power level of a level 14 character]. Of course when I mean this early rush for a capstone, I am assuming that the levelling up process would not change for this; it could just as easily change the requirements to stop the player from rushing for an overpowered capstone instead of learning to player better through diverse skill investment. In method #2, the player who initially suffers his heavy investment and has to survive through good gameplay, will later be rewarded for his choice if he manages to make it; also a player can stumble across this capstone reward and right then and there decide to heavily invest. The early capstone rush could just as easily be a problem in method #2 if a player finds gets the quest reward/rare drop early in the game from luck. Depending on how the quest/drop would occur, the capstone could then be balanced for the middle or later part of the game, not affect early game decisions, and allow players to diversify early with no penalty.

So my opinion would be to use option 2 for a capstone system.I suggest this for a number of reasons: one because in the drop type it fits within the roguelike play style of finding loot to increase your power, two because a quest/drop system would keep this extra complexity out of the talent system, or three because it fits within the rpg play style of quests rewarding the player who does every side objective and goes above and beyond the typical job. Also, in my opinion you would have to balance capstones around the mid to end portions of the game to avoid early imbalance as well as to keep complexity down for new players; because I have a feeling new players would be overwhelmed even more than now if capstones were in the beginning or part of the talent system.

As for the feasibility in programming this, I'd say keep the original talents the same, don't change how they work in the talent system at all, don't bother adding a complexity wrinkle like capstones directly into the talent system. Instead try for method #2, with the quest reward/drop being an item, when used, swaps out the 5/5 ability with the new improved version. Obviously you'd want the capstone replacing that ability to have the same hotkey as well.

I know this is a really long post, but I felt like I had to explain my logic behind the idea and also behind the design philosophy that goes along with implementing such an idea. To suggest such a drastic change without any justification would just be asinine. I put time and effort into this because I personally think that it is a decent idea that could improve how players perceive the game as well as add another layer of depth.

Feel free to add input, criticism or praise, any ideas, questions etc.

With the ability to remove skill points i'm not sure if it's a terrible thing that there are talents that are more useful in the early game and less so in the late game. Just make sure the points in that talent are always the last points distributed, so you can remove them later. (i.e. remove at levelup, distribute the perm. points and then put them back in)

I disagree with you about dirty fighting, btw. I usually prefer that over dual strike simply for the way longer stun duration except on enemies with some kind of retaliation shield effect. Also quite often a second stun on an annoying add OR the ability to permanent stun the primary target by alternating both stuns comes in handy.

IMO a good example for an awesome early game skill vs awful late game is shadow combat, because it scales so terrible. In the early game it is often your most potent or even only non-physical damage modifier while in the late game it mostly pales in comparison to what your equipment adds.

I love the Dirty Fighting skill too Fela for that exact reason. Every time I play Rogue I get both to have two stuns on demand or for a combo.

But compare DF with Dual Strike assuming only one skill can be chosen. This is how I compare two similar skills, see how one skill would stack up to another and not the combination of the two. I don't mean two similar skills that deal different damage types, I mean two similar skills that fill the same role, in this case physical damage and a stun.
Both have an equal chance to stun, have decent to long stun duration aka start at 5 end at 10 w/DF or start at 3 end at 8 w/DS
The main difference: DF deals far less damage, namely DS starts at 111% per hit and DF at 45%.
The two skills have the same cooldown of 12 rounds, but DS takes a bit more stamina.
If we assume each aspect of a skill has a gold equivalent, it looks like DS is worth more even if it only hits once, and it scales better.

So to you Shadow Combat is an example of a skill that scales at a low rate. Completely agree, it starts at 6+ damage at level one but the poor scaling encourages point placement in other skills, leading to a 1 point wonder for many levels. One way to make it more interesting and slightly increase its power level with a capstone could be something like adding a 5% chance to enter stealth per hit while using Shadow Combat. This wouldn't be a gamebreaker because of the low chance of success and the fact that a player could just get hide in plain sight if they really needed combat stealth; but it adds a small amount of utility to the skill. When it procs and saves the player's life, it would be greatly appreciated for its value in the same way when a critical strike kills a monster 1 turn before the player would normally die; and scorned for when it doesn't proc. This would tell the player not to rely on the stealth proc chance for a survival strategy and instead use it as part of their offensive strategy by combining it with their passive Shadow Strike and active Hide in Plain Sight from the stealth tree; like 'shadow combat proc, use crit attack b/c of shadow strike, immediately use HiPS and crit again.' Basically it would be a 5% chance to combo two shadow strikes in a row, indirectly increasing damage output; and offense is the point of Shadow Combat anyway so this kinda makes sense!

About DF:
I think you're missing the main difference. DS has one stun attempt, DF has two (assuming dual wield). The difference in statistics is huge, especially with individual fail chances in the 10% area. And against bosses i REALLY want them stunned reliably .

About Shadow Strike:
Actually I had considered giving it a status effect at higher skill levels, or with a probability scaling with skill levels. The problem with that is flurry, which would either mean automatic success (if the chance is non-negligible) or make it useless, because it never triggers. The same would account for your stealth idea. If it was really implemented in a useful way, flurry would break it as it would mean you basically get another hide in plain sight cooldown with it.


P.S. I just noted you did address the difference, i just can't make myself agree about the 'even if it only'

I did not know that the offhand counted with DF, thank you Fela.

But yeah, ideally a Rogue player would get a point in DF and put several into DS to maximize efficiency.

Flurry tends to break a lot of things, just look at the complaints for Subject Z, honestly I am just trying to come up with ideas off the top of my head, there's no way I can see every unintended consequence. But that's why I listen to other people like you guys!