ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Working on ranged and ammo egos.

I've copied a lot of the weapon egos over and have them working but I'd like for them to have more variety and their own feel to them so any thoughts on names, themes, or power sets would be appreciated.

pin and/or knockback on crit seems an obvious one that would be interesting to an archer but not as much to melee.

Bag of sling bullets of fire burst - 100% fire damage. On hit applies a burning effect to the target and anyone adjacent to the target

Bag of sling stones of air burst - on hit, deals some damage to all enemies adjacent to the target and pushes them 1 away from the target

Arrows of slimy burst - deals a small-to-moderate amount of slime damage to the target and everyone adjacent

Arrows of freezing burst - as above, but with ice damage

Blood Drinker Arrows - applies a DoT to the target of drain damage, as it sticks in the wound and slowly sucks the life out.

Arrows of Lesser Pestilence - some percentage of damage done is blight damage, and there is a chance that each arrow will inflict a relatively minor disease

Arrows of Greater Pestilence - as above, but the chance is higher, and if you inflict disease it picks at random from a list.

Bow of Thoughtfulness - Deals mind damage, gives a bonus to mindpower, gives a bonus to the TK archery tree (category mod, cooldowns, or both), and when telekinetically wielded, automatically targets and fires one arrow every 4-6 turns or so at an enemy in range

Bow of Temporal Stitching - teals temporal damage, and reduces paradox (by a small amount) on hit.

Launchers:

"of Psychokinesis"-Psionic lesser ego launcher, chance of knockback(Mindpower vs physical save?).

"of Mindhooking"-Psionic lesser(greater?) ego launcher, high chance of drawing an enemy towards you(Mindpower vs physical save). Good for a swap off for certain kinds of physical fighter.

"of Shattering"-Psionic greater ego launcher, small(10%?) chance of converting arrows into a piercing ray.

"of the Sandstorm"-Nature lesser ego. 5-10?% chance to inflict Blindness(3 turns), physical power vs physical save. Small Physical Damage% boost.

"of Thorns"-Nature lesser ego. Small amount of added bleeding damage, Nature damage conversion/damage% boost.

"Fungal"-Nature lesser/greater ego. +.1 Fungus tree, can be triggered for a regeneration effect. (If this was Greater, I'd suggest some small status chance as well. Confusion? Blindness? Maybe one picked at random?)

"of Dampening"-Antimagic lesser ego, grants spellsave and small amounts of elemental resistances.

"Mage Hunter's"-Antimagic greater ego, grants +.1 to Antimagic, adds Manaburn damage(possible small chance of low level Mana Clash on-hit?).

"of Curses"-Arcane Greater Ego, high (25%-50%, I'm thinking the higher end-keep reading) chance of inflicting Curse of Vulnerability(L1) on enemies on hit, but faces the standard spellpower vs spellsave check. +spellpower, probably a fairly decent amount(+10?). An elemental ego would be quite powerful if it happened to appear on the same bow, but otherwise I don't think this is too much.

Ammo-

"Mindstar-Imbued"-Nature greater ego, deals Mind/Nature/Slime/Manaburn damage in small amounts/damage conversion to those types.
("Explosive"-Master greater ego, deals small amounts of physical damage/chance of bleeding on hit to a 1 radius area around the target. Lower than usual capacity.-Edit: Wait, right, this is already an artifact in trunk, more or less. Never mind!)
"Barbed"-Master (lesser? greater?) ego, inflicts Deep Wounds.
"of Recursion"-Arcane greater ego, small chance of doublehitting/firing two projectiles on a shot, heavy temporal conversion? I am not entirely sure I have this idea hammered out into a final form, but the name was too good to pass up.

Look at/grab ideas from my first attempt at expanding ranged egos, if you haven't already. Now on to my idea(s):

(note, I will be saying bow/arrow for brevity, take it to mean bow or sling and arrow or shot)

- Make most of the egos be bow/arrow ego sets based around damage types, similar to how the wyrm mindstars are (but preferably not requiring you to use the item).
- Make the ammo have simple, single damage types (as a suffix, with bonuses such as reloading, capacity and self-loading as a prefix). For example, a quiver of elm arrows of fire would give +5 fire damage on hit and the ability to form sets with a fire bow.
- have bows have (some) greater egos that give multiple damage types for sets. For example, an elemental bow can form sets with fire, cold, acid, or lightning arrows, as well as giving +2 fire/cold/lightning/acid damage.
- have each set give damage conversion as well as some other bonus, in line with the weapon egos. For example, a quiver of Fire and an elemental bow would give the fire set bonuses, for (10 * quiver material level) damage conversion to fire and + (1 * bow material level) global speed.

Damage type set ideas: fixed (10 * quiver material level)% damage conversion to stated type, other bonus is for the bow, based on material level.

Physical: Physical bleed damage, +(sand mindstar set) bonuses
Arcane: Arcane (plain?) damage, + spellpower
Fire: modified fireburn damage (deals 100% fire + 50% burn, instead of 50% + 50%), +1*ML global speed
Cold: Ice damage, + armour
Lightning: Lightning Daze damage (modified to actually have a chance of dazing...), + all stats
Acid: Acid Blind damage, +life regen
Nature: (some type of) poison damage, + resist all
Blight: corrupted blood damage, + ???
Light: Illuminating Light damage (light damage + chance of Illuminated status effect), + heal mod
Darkness: ???(darkness stun?) damage, + see through stealth/invisibility
Mind: Mind/madness damage (can cause debuffs as Doomed passive?), + mindpower
Temporal: Temporal + slow damage, + ???

Bow egos, and their sets: (note, they also give other bonuses)
(basic elements, some other ones as well as single possibilities): obvious ones
(mindslayer pairs [thermal/kinetic/charged]): obvious ones
Elemental: fire/acid/lightning/cold
Nightmares: Darkness/mind
Refractive: Light/darkness
Corrupt: Blight/Darkness
Wyrm's: cold/physical/acid/fire

As said above, arrow egos would be restricted to a single possible set, to prevent completing more than one with the bow (eg. thermal arrows + elemental bow)

Examples of completed sets:



Wyrm's yew longbow:
+ (some bonuses related to wyrms)
+ 3% global speed (from set)

quiver of elven wood arrows of fire
+ 8 fire damage on hit (ranged)
Damage conversion: 40% fire+burn (from set)




Refractive Dragonbone longbow
+ 2 light radius
+ 15% healing modifier

Quiver of dragonbone arrows of light
+ 12 accuracy
+ 7% chance to blind, +15 light damage on hit (ranged)
Damage conversion: 50% illuminating light (from set)

This may or may not be what you are looking for. Is there somewhere that you have started/will start on this, that we can look at it and critique it?

Oh, and some things I would not like (and reasons):
- AoE weapon damage, either ball or beam. The potential for abuse/unintended power is very high with scatter shot and volley of arrows. (note: burst damage like a flaming weapon is fine, in moderation, I'm talking about weapon damage, similar to shattering impact)
- range boosts above 10. Nothing else can go that far, archery shouldn't be able to either.
- boosts to anything other than archery in the quiver. This has never been in ToME 4, which is very good (I'm thinking of ToME 2's artifact arrows here)
- highly desirable effects on crit. Archers can get 100% crit rate with Aim, making "rare" effects happen all the time, unbalancing them.
- 100% of status effect (eg. poison, burning, bleeding) on hit. It clogs up your status effects and makes curing dangerous effects very difficult. I'm also guilty of this in my ideas (and, melee weapons are too. My mindslayer inflicted an average of 7 effects in the first round of combat with an enemy. Providence? bah. Wild infusions? meh.)

"of Lameness" - applies a move-speed debuff on hit

"Shining" ammo - +light damage, lights up areas you shoot at (temporarily lights up the squares the ammo moves over?)

"Terrifying" - has a chance to apply whichever one of the Fears it is that makes the target run away

lukep wrote: This may or may not be what you are looking for. Is there somewhere that you have started/will start on this, that we can look at it and critique it?

I like the idea of sets but I'm not sure how much time I want to spend on bows and ammo. I got pretty burned out working through Staves and Mindstars so I'm hoping I can hammer out some simpler things and move on to other egos. That said if anyone wants to contribute code to this I'd be more then willing to accept some help.

Here's what I have so far, I just pushed the branch so that commit contains a lot of other stuff including functions I had to add and some random artifact stuff.

https://gitorious.org/te4/te4/commit/ab ... 21afff1820

Note that right now it's a whole lot of copy and paste from the weapon egos.

Oh, and some things I would not like (and reasons):
- AoE weapon damage, either ball or beam. The potential for abuse/unintended power is very high with scatter shot and volley of arrows. (note: burst damage like a flaming weapon is fine, in moderation, I'm talking about weapon damage, similar to shattering impact)
- range boosts above 10. Nothing else can go that far, archery shouldn't be able to either.
- boosts to anything other than archery in the quiver. This has never been in ToME 4, which is very good (I'm thinking of ToME 2's artifact arrows here)
- highly desirable effects on crit. Archers can get 100% crit rate with Aim, making "rare" effects happen all the time, unbalancing them.
- 100% of status effect (eg. poison, burning, bleeding) on hit. It clogs up your status effects and makes curing dangerous effects very difficult. I'm also guilty of this in my ideas (and, melee weapons are too. My mindslayer inflicted an average of 7 effects in the first round of combat with an enemy. Providence? bah. Wild infusions? meh.)

Are range boosts above 10 already possible? I haven't really messed with the egos already in the game that increase range.

I agree with number 2 and have been trying to follow that line of thinking. Inversely I've been trying to keep most of the damage stuff off bows (but have been a lot less strict on bows but I don't want to make bows ammo but not ammo).

This might be a general issue already. If there's weapon crit effects that are too good we should discuss them.

If this is more of a general issue we can look at it and scratch stuff like FIREBURN off the weapons lists. That said some of the 100% status effects are more then just dots such as Insidious Poison, etc.

of returning: +1 ammo on miss, maybe chance to return on hit too
bouncing: hit a nearby second target for 50% damage
of marking: marks target for 3 turns for increased damage/crit/attack, stacks a few times
ethereal: lets you shoot through walls

Ethereal+Cursed sounds... a little broken. For that matter, ethereal + (insert telepathy here) is broken, and doesn't require you to do anything so silly as build a cursed around ranged combat. Clearing vaults without opening their doors? Might be a bit much.

I just took a look at what you had uploaded there. It looks pretty good overall, and is certainly an improvement over the b40 ones.

Some comments:

- unless it was changed, a single item can only have one special on crit (and presumably on-hit as well). I would restrict them to either prefixes or suffixes for any one item type. EDIT: or change the code that calls it.
- Arrows of gravity look extremely powerful. With Rapid Fire, an archer can shoot 2x per round, with a 25% chance to pin for 3 turns; an average of 1.5 turns of pinning per turn from that ego (or an average just under one without rapid fire). Basically the same thing with arrows of wind as well.
- Throat Seeking bows look very powerful, not because of the fact that they can silence, but because they can brainlock (I think.)
- burst on hit and on crit are both much more powerful than their melee counterparts. Shooting a scatter shot into a full room with 100% crit rate would result in the centre enemies getting hit 21 times by a burst on crit. Piercing arrow would result in 5 hits.
- I believe that ranger's dragonbone longbows of true flight would have 12 range, due to bonuses to range not capping at 10. I think this can be changed by replacing: with: for both egos.

Thanks for the feedback luke.

For burst weapons I can add some code that prevents an arrow from bursting twice. So basically if the player pays for more than one shot with ammo (like Volley) they get multiple bursts, if they don't (like scatter shot) than they just get the one.