ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I've done some playing as Temporal Warden and tried to assess how viable it is to play. Its then that Ive realized that the class has some serious problems in the way it's structured. For one, it has some nice skills, like damage smearing, stat buffs and temporal damage ...but the way those are utilized leave the class both vulnerable, unable to deal major damage and overreliant on teleportation and the aforementioned stat sustains.

Firstly, the class cannot work without strength of purpose. That talent is a must to keep this melee oriented class up in damage department, mostly because for some reason most of the skills require willpower and magic. The sole dual-tree uses dexterity - a stat not boosted or required by any other temporal tree, leaving warden with almost no options for actual physical attacks, not to mention that dual wielding of weapons with no dex means about half the damage lost AND the fact that the weapon mastery for one-handed weapons and off-hand is split between 2 talents.

This leaves warden with folding, which is pitiful. At level 18 it was still dealing bonus of ~9 temporal damage, the paradox reduction effect was almost not noticeable, especially since lack of additional physical attacks forces the warden to spam it's temporal talents. Even worse, since spamming those can very well lead to deactivation of Strength of Purpose, which not only completelly disables Warden's damage output for 10+ turns, but may also pin it down if it was wearing alot of plate gear. And that all on top of talents plain not working due to paradox, which seems to backfire alot even on about 4% - which is the min. value you have for having folding, purpose and feed on at the same time - mind you, ESSENTIAL TALENTS WARDEN NEEDS TO HAVE ON AT ALL TIMES TO DO JACK.

I cant count the amount of times Ive felt uneasy using talents at all because I knew it could randomly screw me over and just up and kill the char, punishing it for using talents it needs just to stay playable.

This leaves Warden the option to just straight up mage it, but even there, most of those talents are either low range, require phasing through enemies or are only aquired as the final talent of the tree. It's impossible to play warden right without abusing teleportation, minmaxing everything and just plain having lots of luck.

ymmv, but I think Temporal Wardens are one of the best classes due to their versatility.

I don't buy the lack of damage argument. My last TW used mindstars in both hands until I completed the Crystal Set at clvl 50. I didn't have any problem killing things.

There are a lot of variations in how to play and progress TWs, so it's best to play them in a way that matches your style. I guess TWs were toned done a little while ago, because they were considered to be one of the more overpowered classes.

Some tips:

--You don't always need to use all the sustains, especially both Strength of Purpose and Quantum feed. Perhaps you'd prefer to heavily invest stat points into Str and use Quantum feed to help your Mag, so Strength of Purpose can't be dispersed and leave you encumbered.

--The previous tip isn't always true. There are plenty of TWs that are sustain-heavy, but which mostly ignore activated talents, so you can pretty much ignore high paradox levels.

--Pay attention to fatigue. It increases the chances of bad paradox stuff happening. You probably shouldn't be wearing plate mail if you plan on using activated talents.

--Invest in Wil.

--There are more TW tips, strategies, builds, and discussions here in the forum if you want to seek more help.

I build them as such, and they play pretty well: max dex, go for all the teleport talents and archery talents. Ignore most of the magic ones, and try to get haste if you can afford to.

I'm not convinced they're underpowered but I am open to suggestions and feedback on TWs. However, I see no ideas in this thread Alex.

More options for weapon choice, make them less dependant on the sustains, give them something to boost temporal damage or resi with.

They might be plain underpowered, but I really like the structure of TWs (and all of edge's classes, to be honest). Lots of options, and the spread on the stat distribution means a focused build is actually more powerful than a build that tries to do everything. The main issue I have with TWs (and archers) is the lack of significant AoE damage, but the mobility options help offset that.

They're not underpowered, and they're not reliant on sustains either. What makes you think this class can't work without Strength of Purpose? My TW winner never even activated Strength of Purpose for the entire game. I never used Quantum Feed, either. I think it's possible to come up with some very weak TW builds, since you have so much freedom, but the strongest builds will blow through the game with ease.

As the others said, Temporal Wardens can be built in so many ways it can be confusing, but they are in no way underpowered.
They're definitely the class I've fared the best with and that's with going always sustains-heavy.

Sure, Paradox failures can be lethal and you can have lots of them in a row even with 3-4% failure rate, but having as low fatigue as possible (the Feathersteel Amulet is a great artifact for this) and maxed Weapon Folding makes paradox management really easy. (Also, maxed Weapon Folding deals decent bonus damage and it's totally worth the investment)
You should also consider getting either a Teleportation rune, a Movement infusion (I recommend this one if you're interested in stacking speed bonuses) or a psychoportation torque, so that you have a failure-proof way to escape if you don't think you can risk Dimensional Step or Banish failing on you.

As a reference on a way to build them, you can take a look at this char, which died a lot due to stupid mistakes and a couple of times because of failures. I'm in no way good and this kind of build has its loose ends (really frail, used only cloth/light armor, ridiculously low stamina) but it managed to reach a decent level 44 and really flew through through the 30s yawning.

http://te4.org/characters/19173/tome/f3 ... 5367133f6e