ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

For those who don't follow the SVN, charms will occupy the player's tool slot, and can be activated for use of certain talents. The types of charms are wands (arcane), totems (natural), and torques (mental). All items that can be activated for talents, excusing artifacts, will share the same "charm" cooldown. Hopefully I got the details right.

The new charms system looks like a good way to supplement a player's talents without providing too many free talents, like the Celestial/Light tree. Plus, they don't require special stat investment, talent points, or category points, and they all share cooldowns, which can prevent certain abuses. I also like the idea of being handed a trinket like a wand or totem as a way of thanks, instead of instantly learning how to perform certain talents. Finally - and perhaps most importantly - players will be less likely to feel like they got screwed by the RNG if the escort mission rewards aren't so preposterously good.

A few miscellaneous issues that would come out of this change: First, the stat point rewards. I can take or leave these. They are fairly minor, especially by the end of the game. I almost never take the stat point rewards unless the talents offered are completely useless. Second, the Wild Gift/Fungus category (which if I understand correctly has replaced the Wild Gift/Slime tree as an escort reward). I think anyone who takes Antimagic should just get the locked category for free. Antimagic already soaks up a lot of generic points, and having to first unlock Antimagic and then hope you find the right type of escort mission just seems like too many hoops to jump through. Sending an escort to Zigur could be rewarded with an Antimagic-themed totem.

Good idea. Seems much more fitting.

Will you have to swap out though for digger to dig, reseting cooldowns?

jenx wrote:Will you have to swap out though for digger to dig, reseting cooldowns?

Yes.

If it was my call, diggers (and the few places that need them) would be removed. They sort of feel like a quick fix for the problems with level generation, which I think could be fixed with a spacefill procedure. Granted, that would knock out (at least) two very good artifacts, though I could see the Tooth reworked as a special kind of charm (with a critter summon activate?), and the Dwarven pickaxe could be made into an exotic weapon (or it could be left as one of the few diggers in the game).

Not to be too harsh, but...it seems like a moderately large overall nerf that lowers the interesting options of the game, especially the parts that allow for unusual and atypical builds.

If there's some specific issue with a specific skillset or offered skill, that's one thing, and I can see saying the escort system may need a retool, perhaps. But as it stands, that idea would mostly reduce Escorts from "fairly major risk/reward sub-quests that unevenly and interestingly reward different classes in different ways, all of which are important to try to get to some degree, and often are quite hard to successfully get to live" to "oops, I lost that guy. Oh well, guess I won't get a single option from him, just will have to settle for one of the eight later ones. No big deal, I can't make decent use of them all simultaneously.".

It both weakens PCs and, more importantly, is a really boring way to. To boot, escorts are currently one of the few major ways to distinguish runs in the earlygame, and to force mid-game build changes, as you can get substantially different options from one run to the next(unless you specifically savescum escorts, but that's boring and vaguely cheaty. You can do that for a lot of things.).

There is nothing wrong with an overall nerf, especially with the huge overall buff we're getting with capped randbosses. In fact, without randbosses to murder us with 63 levels of weapon mastery anymore, I dare say an overall nerf is warranted.

A charms reward system has the potential to be just as varied as escort talent rewards, considering nobody's said anything about what kinds of charms could be rewarded. Besides, escort rewards aren't really that interesting anyway. Most of them don't really even offer a choice because of how blindingly good some of the rewards are. Hmm, Bathe in Light or Providence? Channel Staff or Imbue Item? Gee I wonder.

And escorts are currently not "all important to try to get to some degree". Repeat Sun Paladins can go rub their faces in poison ivy traps for all I care, same with Seers and Loremasters. A charms system also has the potential to be important sometimes, and not others. "Ooh, this guy gives a psychoportation torque! Yes I already have a wand of detection, and a totem of cure poisons, but I really do need to be able to teleport." The fact that they share cooldowns is of no importance, in this case. Multiple charms can still be welcome.

I'm not saying one system is strictly better than the other, especially since we have yet to see an escort charm system, but I don't think your arguments that charms would be strictly worse than talents hold any water. However, I'm not sure this overhaul is worth the time to implement, either. There are much simpler solutions to fixing escort quests.

The thing is, though, Randbosses appear in what, Infinite Dungeon (which has no escorts anyway), High Peak, and Farportal dungeons? I don't buy the argument that the fact that I won't get one shot on floor 8 of the High Peak by an arch-mage necromancer forge giant as often means players should be weakened overall.

donkatsu wrote:Said things in favor of charms from escorts.

This was a really well thought out post. I wasn't convinced of this idea but after reading this I am now.

+1

I'm not saying the game should be made harder or easier overall. That's for DG to decide. I'm just saying that without randbosses one-shotting you, the odds of being able to win without a single death have been greatly increased. If the difficulty level of the game was acceptable before (and ToME was already easier than the majority of major roguelikes), then it will be too easy now. If it was too hard, then of course all is well.

Also, you're forgetting every floor of every Pride.

Edit: Okay looking back I realized that I did in fact imply that b39 could do with a little bit of an overall difficulty increase, but that's just my personal taste and I hardly expect anyone to cater to it. The main point was that charm rewards have the potential to be every bit as interesting as talent rewards.

The Pride Randbosses never seem nearly as bad; it ends up being so much worse when the randboss can be any enemy.

I think there's a point that I'm trying to make being missed here.

Charms set *all your other charms on cooldown* for a given span of time, as well as any non-artifacts.

It's not the nerfing I'm worried about, as I tried to make very clear here; It's the fact that these simply do not come anywhere close to the strategic value of getting a skill from an escort, and that classes of skill are, inherently, a much more interesting choice. There isn't any way around this, because charms come from other sources, and in the end, there is already about a dozen+ options for this one, single, solitary slot, which runs off one, single, solitary cooldown.

Put it this way; You can get Mind Sear from an Escort. Okay, good, that doesn't impact anything else you get later. You will, if you have any use for Mind Sear, probably use it somewhat, because it doesn't damage anything else.

However, Mind Sear charms would have to compete with all other forms of damage charms, ranging from those you find laying around to the ground to those you find from other Escorts. On average, you are going to find a better charm for your build.

Escorts, as they stand, often involve utilizing sub-optimal skills-Choosing between, say, a skill that runs off Magic or a stat you don't really need-well. However, it is *always* a bonus, right now, which means that it is in your best interests to figure out how to utilize them. Unless you get a category of skill, at which point this requires retooling any build you've came up with, often fairly majorly, lest you just waste a bonus to your overall build.

(After all, it's not doing anything if you don't unlock it and put Generic in it, so there goes a Category point and ...call it five to ten? Generic, that you weren't doing something more important with.)

Changing them to a charm skill would simply make half the Escorts useless for half the builds. You aren't going to make, say, a Warrior's potential charms useful to a Necromancer, unless I'm missing something here; They simply will get more out of any healing, teleportation, damage spell, etc. charm. By contrast, a Warrior is low impact right now, but useful still.

Heck, Necromancers have fairly low Generic sinks; I'm sure someone could get decent impact out of learning Conditioning with a Necromancer, so that they live to escape if something goes south with their support. Non-optimal, perhaps, but it is, currently, something that the player can choose if they want a more interesting, original build.

It makes Escorts unimportant unless one happens to be very specifically rewarding you. And it also narrows build choices. I'm really not on about the nerfing; If the skills need to be worse, that's fine and not my decision. I'm saying it makes the game more boring, especially in the earlygame, which is from what I gather something Darkgod has been trying hard to avoid.

As to the "not important to some degree"...well, I disagree strongly with all your examples, I'm afraid. Repeat Sun Paladins grant substantially more saves or the option of an instant swap physical resist when you want it; I have no idea why you think that's useless.

Seers are something I never mind seeing more than once; Arcane Eye is a great way to scout out areas, Premonition is one of the better non-Mana-class skills in general, and Vision is really, really nice for High Peak, preventing you from having to cross those nasty, nasty random bosses if you can find a way to the stairs around them(which you can, by High Peak).

Admittedly, it is a rare Loremaster that I want to see twice, but, then, it's a rare Loremaster that I want to see once. They don't provide very notable advantages, relatively speaking. But that is, again, a matter of rebalance; If there's an issue with the balance of the skills *in* Escorts, simply chucking the system to fix it is a really weird way to do it. Tossing the baby out with the bathwater, as it were.

To sum this up in a nice short version:

Right now, if I get, say, the Escort I want right off the bat, because I got lucky, the next eight Escorts all provide interesting and unique decisions anyways. Maybe not high impact. But, interesting.

If they start awarding charms, can you honestly tell me this same situation won't degenerate to "Get charm from said first great guy, don't care about next eight because setting my escape/heal/useful constantly spammed skill on cooldown is less useful for me, don't care after I get a more useful ego/randart Charm at all."? Because I'm not seeing a way, personally, and would like to be shown one if it exists.

I think that if I got, say, a Providence Charm, I might very well stab all the next eight escorts for the achievement, because of how little they matter.

No, I understood your point the first time around and I apologize for not making it clear. Allow me to try to explain a little better.

Charms sharing the same cooldown mean that they compete, to a certain extent, yes. But as long as they serve different functions, you don't have just one "best" charm that you're going to use whenever your charms come off of cooldown. If you need to escape, your cure poisons charm does nothing for you. If you need to cure poisons, your thermal shield charm does nothing for you. It doesn't matter how good your cure poisons charm is, it's not going to help you escape. Similarly, it doesn't matter how good your thermal shield charm is, it's not going to help you with that nasty crippling poison. Thus, multiple charms have the potential to be useful. I'm not saying they always will be-- that depends on the implementation. But as long as each charm has a unique, specialized function, the shared cooldown will not make it so that you only have one useful charm.

The extra 4 to physical and spell saves from one extra Sun Paladin is really not that big of a deal. Yes, it's a slight bonus that you're missing out on, but you can't seriously say that it's "important to some degree" unless you have very low standards of what qualifies as 'important'. The first level of Premonition is good, as is Arcane Eye, but leveling them from repeat escorts is an extremely minor benefit not worth mentioning. The difference between level 0.7 and 1.4 Premonition is tiny. I'm not saying it's zero, I'm just refuting that it's always "important to some degree". Maybe I'm just bitter that I got six Sun Paladin escorts on my last character, and no Seers or Anorithils. But these kinds of things do happen in the current system.

As for not having generic trees to unlock, I consider that a problem of the class. Hopefully, eventually every class will have enough places to put their class and generic points without resorting to non-native trees. In the meantime, there's always Harmony and Cursed Aura. Getting rid of escort category rewards will reduce the number of possible builds, but if that's really undesirable you could always just give every class every generic tree, locked, at 0.7 mastery. Bam, instant versatility.

I did personally agree with your last point, however.

donkatsu wrote:However, I'm not sure this overhaul is worth the time to implement, either. There are much simpler solutions to fixing escort quests.

But as long as they serve different functions, you don't have just one "best" charm that you're going to use whenever your charms come off of cooldown. If you need to escape, your cure poisons charm does nothing for you. If you need to cure poisons, your thermal shield charm does nothing for you. It doesn't matter how good your cure poisons charm is, it's not going to help you escape. Similarly, it doesn't matter how good your thermal shield charm is, it's not going to help you with that nasty crippling poison. Thus, multiple charms have the potential to be useful. I'm not saying they always will be-- that depends on the implementation. But as long as each charm has a unique, specialized function, the shared cooldown will not make it so that you only have one useful charm.

Theoretically yes, but not true in practice, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, there's the general nature of Charms. If you are going to cure poisons, using a dedicated Physical Wild is more optimal; You only have one universal cooldown, however said Wild will run on a different cooldown(obviously this depends on if the enemy has a good Stun or not, but in general). If you have 70% fire resist, your Thermal Shield is not going to be particularly important.

If you have ways to deal with these issues in other ways, you should use them, because they run on separate cooldowns(or, potentially, not cooldowns at all, in the case of some skills such as the shields or thorny skin). Yes, they're nice in an extreme case; I'm pretty sure I'm going to be lugging around a few dozen Charms for the theoretical extreme of getting a really nasty Fire/Wildfire Elite, or just in case I get pinned between a Ghoulking and an Armored Skeleton Warrior. You don't survive reliably in a roguelike without planning for the very worst case.

But having said that, by and large, you're going to use whatever you find key to your class, which cannot be reproduced in other areas. If you're, say, an Anorithil, that's going to perhaps be wands. In general, it's going to be healing or teleportation. Especially teleportation. Psychoportation works through Antimagic, works through confusion(Cute trick with itemcasts, and why you should love Serpent Cloak), and is an extremely powerful(though not entirely reliable) escape that not a lot of classes get naturally.

You don't want your teleports to fail if you can help it. You don't want your teleport on cooldown if you suddenly decide you need it. An extreme situation escape is much weaker if you can't rely on it as much as possible.

Of course, as it stands, all the charms in general have some niche for someone, but here comes the other half of the issue.

You can't always create charms for a given class, that do have a niche. If you have passive and sustained charms, there comes a question of how cooldowns interact with them. If using an active charm sets your passive or sustain on cooldown, it becomes constantly unreliable as support, and lowers the usefulness of those aforementioned odd niche items even further; Now you have to decide if curing that disease is worth at temporary loss in saves(for a Chant of Fortitude charm, say), which, if you're in a combat situation still, may just get you diseased again instantly, for example. It's an addition in complexity with a lot of work behind it, for diminishing returns, as all of this is still fundamentally fighting over one cooldown.

If you don't create those, of course, it becomes nearly instantly unworkable. What do you make for an active skill Fighter charm that won't be less useful than, say, Mind Sear, for most characters? (Especially now that Mind Sear's going the easier to heal, less common to consume, Psi route instead of Equi?) You could, of course, retool the entire Escort set to fit this, concievably, but it's going to end up ruling out nearly every physical fighter.

The extra 4 to physical and spell saves from one extra Sun Paladin is really not that big of a deal.

Actually that varies a lot. I seem to recall Chant of Fortitude runs off a standard spell equation, so you get about a 40% boost from L1 to L2, and another 30%(on the base, not on the L2) or so for the L3. This ends up being a lot more than 4 if you're a dedicated mage, though not so much if you're a Bulwark whose only real source of Spellpower is lugging a specific fixedart lamp around. Of course...

Maybe I'm just bitter that I got six Sun Paladin escorts on my last character, and no Seers or Anorithils. But these kinds of things do happen in the current system.

...if you get stuck with having to raise Chant of Fortitude from L4 to L5, yeah, you're not likely to see much more than 4 points on anyone. So yeah, that's always sad. Of course, a limit on a specific type of Escort would, honestly, be a welcome change; Getting five Anorithils and hitting L5 Providence is ridiculous, getting five Warriors and hitting L5 Unflinching is silly, yet getting five Seers and hitting L5 on Premonition is...yeah. Not very useful, or fun.

(Also, I feel your pain. My poor, poor Paradox Mage never saw an Anorithil. Not that she really needed it, but I wanted the hilarity of a mail wearing tank healer Paradox Mage.)

I think in theory the permanent stat bonuses are there to counterbalance that possibility, but...well. While the stat bonuses may even outweigh a skill in many cases, they never are as much fun as a skill, so few people seem to take them. I know I've passed up times where a stat struck me as the objective best answer, solely because it was also the most boring answer.

I'm not going to say that Escorts are the only answer to the flexible skill ideals. Perhaps it would in fact be better to make skillsets more reliably available; Move current Escort skillsets to tutors throughout the world, who grant you one of the skills they normally can or their skillset, then make common Escorts give charms.

I could see that, and it actually has an interesting rebalance effect, potentially; Loremasters as an early option when their abilities are most useful, Anorithils and Sun Paladins-both of which have strong effects-as a set of Far East tutors, where they stand out less and require lategame retools of build for their categories, something the game basically does not ask of you as it stands, that sort of thing. Adding a bunch of Generic categories flat rate is also an interesting idea.

I did personally agree with your last point, however.
donkatsu wrote:
However, I'm not sure this overhaul is worth the time to implement, either. There are much simpler solutions to fixing escort quests.

Ah, yeah, sorry about that. Missed that particular line.

As to b39 challenge...mmm, I think that, at least for my tastes (which may be on the higher side of challenge; I got into Roguelikes playing Dungeon Crawl, and only gave it up only when they stopped adding meaningfully to the game with newer versions, IMO.) the game may need some little tweaks upward on challenge, now that the random god-elite with that can hit a player every time, period, and possess 140 Armor with 100% armor hardiness(Or 85 Defense, your preference. I was scared to *death* of running into one of those with the Cursed...) can't happen(not that I've tried to compile b39 yet; I just follow the tracker because it's fun. So that's mostly going on b38 plus knowledge of b39's changes.).

But if DarkGod implements randomized Elites as a general thing, which I seem to recall being in the planned ideas section somewhere, that challenge issue may be fixed quite rapidly(How would you like to turn a corner while tactically retreating from a known, fixed position elite, only to run into a randomly placed elite Orc Pyromancer that can Fearscape you? Sounds interestingly hard to me.). Quantity of varied elites seems more interesting than quality, honestly. I wouldn't worry about it a lot.

Chiming in here mainly to just say that I agree with SageAcrin on this; while I would definitely support changing the escort system for reasons both of you two have hashed out, I would find the base suggestion pretty limiting.

I guess my issue beyond what's been mainly discussed is that escorts are one of the major delinearizations in the game - they permit for a level of improvisation in builds beyond what most any other aspect does. There's a lot of room for almost all classes to muck around with how they're built, but in general, a Bulwark is still going to be distinctly a Bulwark on average, outside of challenge or gimmick builds. But said Bulwark (often) has a category point to spare, and the element of choice - waiting to see what you get from the escort shuffle (I wound up running for Stone Alchemy on my winning Bulwark), or going for Curses or Harmony (in b39, Antimagic will be practical as well, especially for the Fungus tree) - is something I think adds a fair bit at least to the planning stages, as well as to gameplay. At least for me.

This being said! I would support moving the escort skills/skill tree offerings to tutors or quest rewards in the East/West as SageAcrin mentioned (they can probably be expanded and rebalanced from there, as well), and if that happens I've got far less qualms with escorts offering charms. I guess I just think limiting long-term options is a somewhat harsh thing to do without a counterbalance, and I pretty much agree with SageAcrin about how charms will effectively be used (at least for my own playstyle - I won't bother swapping charms out much at all because that interferes with gameplay to me, so I would be highly likely to save one escort at best and then just push the rest off a cliff).