ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

That talent is good in theory, deals damage to enemies in range as long as active, sorta like a sustainable version of the other elemental AoE ultimates. It's hefty cost you can bear with, the 100 sustain on top of increasing mana cost with every strike.

However, something should be done about the drain. Currently the mechanic of the spell is to hit multiple enemies each turn, with increasing mana costs, meaning about 7.5 mana drained with up to 5 enemies hit - 37.5 mana per turn. Incredibly high cost to sustain it on top of the already massive (for early levels anyway) 100 mana.

HOWEVER, even worse is the fact that once you drain your mana up to 0 this way, Thunderstorm completelly screws you by deactivating all mana-based sustains. You are literally stuck with no mana to teleport, heal or attack, all support sustains are down with no adequate reason as to why, other than Thunderstorm doing what it was bloody well supposed to do.

I propose that Thunderstorm either doesnt drain mana if you dont have enough at the moment, or only deactivates itself in that event.

If you have a sufficiently high crit chance and items that regen mana on crit, it can be considered as an incredibly powerful mana generator instead...

Yup, thunderstorm is useless. Chain lightning is as well. They both need to be modified to do something reasonable.

The only problem with chain lightning is the mana cost. Regular lightning already beams so the added utility for chaining is not worth 4X the mana. It should cost 15 mana instead of 40.

We have enough dungeons above ground that thunderstorm could be made into an above ground only effect. I like the high mana sustain model but think it should just have a range centered around the caster, anyone within that range takes lightning damage each round. Sorta like the fire alchemy does. Would make it wicked good at killing huge groups of weenies, which is what it should be doing.

Y'oure very unfair to chain lightning
And thunderstorm has it's uses, ghostbuster found one

Chain Lightning's ability to hit lots of enemies around corners is really cool, especially when used in tandem with Hurricane. Thunderstorm is interesting, but in general I don't like resource-draining sustains. You'd probably have to focus a build around it and 'abuse' some mechanics, like ghostbuster suggested. If anything, I think it could use a lower sustain cost.

Hitting enemies out of line of sight I think is broken right now though. Which was my favorite part of the spell.

With some luck though it can tag an enemy twice.

As to thunderstorm, if it only drained mana if there was mana to drain instead of desustaining everything if it couldn't fire I think it would be a lot more friendly.

For that matter, there are some builds of archmage that *like* pouring mana down a hole.

Mind you, that's still something of an edge case.

It is also incredibly easy to walk into the thunderstorm balls and cook yourself, at least it is with an arcane blade.

Chain lightning can be pretty decent in an open area where enemies are swarming you and are too rude to just line up behind each other. As a last resort way to get out of a group surrounding me, I've found it quite helpful on multiple occasions. The cost is too high for it to be my go-to starting a fight, but it's frequently been a good choice when my AoE spells are on cooldown and I need to take out multiple enemies attacking me from different directions.