ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hi, I have recently discovered TOME and play it a lot, one of the few things that I dislike that race choice is far, far less important then class choice. If this design philosophy, then I understand, if not, I want to propose a way to differ races more:

Racial bonuses\penalties to talent trees, not huge but meaningful, let's say ranging from -0.5 to +0.5.

For example:

Halflings may get penalties to two-handed weapons and two-handed maiming, but get bonuses to combat veteran and dirty fighting, then halfling\berserker and cornac\berserker will be more different then the are currently

Undeads may get penalties to sun paladins talents

Dwarfs may get penalties to most magical talents, but bonus to spell\stone and spell\earth

And so on

Hello, and welcome to the forums!

Your idea makes some sense, but also makes a lot of complexity, and would pigeon hole a lot of race/class combos even more than at present. I think the philosophy behind races not having too much impact is that any combo can work well, without everyone always going down the dwarf fight / elf mage / halfling rogue line. People still do that of course, but there is scope for interesting combos like Shaloren Barbarian working well. Mostly I think the idea is to give each race generic benefits rather than restrictions, so that they can combine in interesting and different ways.

I agree there should be more differentiation between the classes - perhaps by making their stat variances scale with level, or make them percentage effects rather than one-off effects.

I agree with what Grey said mostly because those dwarves mages are really durable, and I'm currently doing my first alchemist that is also a dwarf.


Sorry for going off topic here but: Dang! I didn't realize how good Alchemists were and how simple they are.

I agree with the OP..
Its boring to be able to do any combo.
And it also makes more sense for the game to work like the OP mentioned.
Makes the races actually matter aside from just being visually a bit different.

BasiC wrote:Its boring to be able to do any combo.

More options is boring o_0?

It just makes race a pointless option...
Why do you need to be able to play all classes on all races optimally or close to optimally? It doesnt add diversity cause its the same.

Maybe the races just need more features added to them to make them more diverse regardless of class..
But a dwarf archer is just so silly sounding...
There are combinations that should be discouraged IMO.

I'd go so far as to say that currently, nonsensical combinations are better than some of their thematic counterparts. I wouldn't really worry about pigeonholing race/class combos, because many races are pigeonholed anyway, except they're cast in the weirdest, most unintuitive roles.

• Yeeks make the worst Mindslayers bar none. Their health penalty has a relatively greater impact on their already low health pool, resulting in this combo having less than half the max health of, say, a Dwarf Mindslayer. On the other hand, they make pretty good Berserkers because of their speed bonus and the Berserker's natural health bonus negating the racial health deficiency.
• The big, tough Ghouls are bad at melee because of their global speed penalty, but decent at spellcasting because spells rely more on cooldowns, which are unaffected by global speed. And the health synergy works in the same way as Yeek Berserkers, just with race and class flipped.
• The mystical Shalore are better at melee than spellcasting because warrior-types have so many more timed effects to abuse with Timeless than spellcasters do, plus their global speed racial runs off of Dexterity and benefits melee more anyway.

So there are optimal choices already, but a lot of the time they don't really make thematic sense. If certain race/class combos were purposefully tailored to, then there would still be some race/class combos that are better than others but at least those combos would make sense.

Some of these suggestions just don't fit the games current lore.

Otherwise I'm with Grey. The stat penalties do this already but their effect is largely negated by the time the character hits its stride. Making them percentage based may be a good idea but it might also encourage too much min/maxing with the stat bonuses.

One idea would be to double the effect of the bonuses and penalties on stat maximums. Right now if you have a -2 penalty to dex your dex caps out at 58 instead of 60. If that was doubled then it would cap at 56. Again the margin isn't great but the bonuses would also be doubled, further encouraging players to pick races that fit their classes better.

A halflings strength would cap out at 54 for instance while their dex and cunning would cap out at 66 each.

Conversely if each point was instead 10% we'd be looking at a strength cap of 42 for the halfling and a dex/cunning cap of 78. While if each was 5% it would be 51 and 69 (which is fairly reasonable really).

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The above I typed before don posted so I wanted to mention that he brings up a really good point, especially with life ratings. Because we have racial life ratings and class modifiers to life ratings the 'squishy' races tend to pair the worst with the 'squishy' classes. I don't know what can or should be done about that. But I felt it worth echoing.

I'd honestly be fine with race having no bearing on attributes. It only matter for stats for the first few levels (unless you pick an intensely gimped combo), and life rating sometimes feels too important.

Here comes a TOME noob's take:

While I think the original proposition is not entirely undesirable (and races could probably use something to make them more important), I would modify it a bit. To me, it makes more sense that races should be about what you ARE, and classes about what you can DO. What I mean by this is that to me, it's really weird and counter intuitive that classes have stat modifiers and have any incidence on health. In the same fashion, I think it'd be really weird for races to impose talent caps or mastery modifiers (although racial talent trees can be an exception to this). These could be achieved by a few measures that would make more sense, though:

1) Make racial stat modifiers more important, possibly scaling with levels, a % or something along those lines. Also, remove stat/health/speed modifiers from classes.
2) Make talents have clear stat associated to them, and make prerequisite stats more important (higher). Or course, the exact prerequisite should be case specific, and I am in no place to give any advice on this matter.
3) As an incentive to further accentuate this, maybe experience modifiers could not be dependant on the race alone, but be a consequence of race/class combos, either by some kind of algorhythm (like spreading races and classes on some graph with three or more) poles, those being physical power/deftness/mind & magic, either by only giving each races two more statistics (or more if needed): favored classes (-X% exp requierements) and unfavored classes (+X% exp requirements). Maybe races could still have a base % on exp requirements, that would be made better or worse by class choice.

That way, with 1 and 2, some race/class combos would be discouraged. For exemple, a dwarf with a dexterity penalty, could still be an archer, but that deterity penalty would prevent him from obtaining the higher levels for talents of that class, and would also force the character to delay certain talent aquisitions. Add an exp penalty to this, and it's pretty clear dwarves should not usually be archers.

What do you think?

For me problem isn't that classes are same with any race, obviously some combos are stronger then others, my problem that I don't like the fact, that I don't change stats\class points spending strategy based on the race past character level 3-5.

Also, I don't want to ban some combos by making them obviously weak\unplayable I want to see a situation, when to get good result from Race A\Class A combo you need use pretty different strategy to Race B\Class A combo.

That way, with 1 and 2, some race/class combos would be discouraged. For exemple, a dwarf with a dexterity penalty, could still be an archer, but that deterity penalty would prevent him from obtaining the higher levels for talents of that class, and would also force the character to delay certain talent aquisitions. Add an exp penalty to this, and it's pretty clear dwarves should not usually be archers.

Big no! No brainers is bad for any game, situation - don't ever play race X\Class X is boring.
What I want is that Dwarven archer to be different to Shaloren archer, not that one is unplayable\challenge mode

Perhaps To make each race/class combo more unique there could a racial tree for each class (not sub class) so a elf fighter would get some elfin fighter tree or something like that. The problem with this is the large amount of new trees that need to be made up. I suppose each meta class does'nt need a unique racial tree but some may be fine. for example there are extra trees for shaloren mages and corrupters, extra trees for dwarf warriors and wilders. This isn't ideal but it will encourage new class combos and it keeps all class/race combos viable. If ideas can be mustered for this I am fine coding all of it if necessary. if this were to happen I would make some partial trees (each racing only getting 1 or 2 trees) then the rest would be filled out later. If making up all the trees is so hard just making one talent for each would work. most racial trees have a "meh" talent that often is skipped over. replacing that depending on class would be viable. or just let the racial talents have 5 talents instead of 4

216 new talents would be awesome.

You should totally code this Goblinz

One simple approach to make races more important and more thematic would be one or two special bonuses. I don't think they could be too big or they would make the race choices too predictable, but it would be enough to overcome some of the reasons for picking the opposite race (Dwarf mage, Yeek berserker, etc). For example:

Higher: +30% critical damage
Cornac: +2 generic points
Halfling: +50% resistance to disease and poison
Shalore: +10% casting speed
Thalore: +5% critical chance
Dwarf: +10% physical resist

I have been suggesting scaling stat bonuses(and maybe generics for Cornacs?)for a while myself....

Don't forget about resistances, too - could give nature res to thalore, arcane to shalore, physical to dwarf(but 10% like benli suggests high).