ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

With the future change for escorts, antimagic will be less appealling for players. Gaining access to AM escort rewards was one of the main motivations to go antimagic (at least for me). I think this change is good, as it gives the player extra flexibility to build his character, but I fear that the advantages of AM will not be sufficient to attract players.

The antimagic tree is good, and the fungus access also, otherwise, there are mostly drawbacks to go AM.
Concerning objetcs, I did some statistics.
Among the 233 artifacts in the SVN, 99 are arcane and 11 antimagic. Some are powerful and 4 or 5 among them give a bonus to AM users, but none is really garanteed, and with the extra number of artifacts, they will be less likely to appear and an AM player can never find any AM artifact during the whole game. More the best artifacts, even for warriors, are arcane.

The situation is slightly similar for egos. Among the 592 existing egos, 183 are arcane and 26 AM. So a random double ego item has approximately 50% chance to be unwearable by an AM user.
And of course, there is also the rune and wand penalty.

I think there should be extra advantages for AM, otherwise there would no reasons to get antimagic, except for a specific challenge.

Some ideas to boost AM:

- give the player when he gets AM a significant boost to spellsave and mindpower

- give access to a locked tree with advanced AM talents (mindpower boost, bonus for wearing AM items, life regen when hit by magic damage, teledetection of magic NPCs, etc...)

- give AM players access to a special quest with a garanteed powerful artifact

- give *all* AM egos and artifacts a bonus for forbid_arcane players (+stats, extra save, damage, resists, etc).

- maybe some new egos and artifacts (and I suggested one in the artifact idea thread)

It's... always been a challenge option. Fairly sure it's intended to be a challenge option. The antimagic tree and fungus access do plenty to incentivize going antimagic though, even with the formally AM-locked escort rewards now being more easily accessed. They're both tremendously powerful; not quite enough to match losing access to arcane items, perhaps -- though that's very much arguable and can vary by class and build -- but again, AM's meant to be a lil' bit of a challenge. Arcane doesn't bring nearly as much to the table that not!arcane doesn't, anymore. Cutting out (a little less than) half the artifacts and egos still leaves plenty to choose from and use.

New artifacts would be nice (always, ahaha!) but the rest I'm not so sure about. There's already a couple classes that are honestly flatly better as antimagic than not (mindslayers come to mind, and solipsists are probably in the same boat) and incintivizing that even more might end up breaking something, yeah.

Look up "Breath of Eyal" in world artifacts, for a bit of effort made on the artifact end. (I think there's some new AM egos coming, as well?)

The issue is that AM is a specific playing niche, so flooding the market with AM-when literally every class can play without AM, and about half can do it at all, many never having very good of use for it-is undesirable. Making AM options strong instead-so that you get fewer, less flexible, but stronger, options as AM-seems much better than just making a lot of AM.

Adding more benefits to AM might be neat...but to be honest, Fungus is quite powerful, as is Antimagic, and both are still unique to AM. I was worried that AM was crowding out arcane for some classes(Berserker, Wyrmic, Summoner) a few versions ago, so I'm not entirely sure why you'd think they'd need a major buff.

(Also, AM doesn't really feel like a challenge option, so much as an advanced player's option. Some classes do better with AM, some worse. But even in the worse cases, you may want the advantages anyways, for a specific build idea. But if you just mash into AM without knowing what you're doing, you'll quickly get messed up by not having proper escapes and die.)

This doesn't say that I'm entirely against buffs, though. In particular, all AM Forces getting bonuses on AM would be nice enough. Doesn't have to be big ones, but it makes it a nice theme for them.

I agree with many of your remarks. Yes AM is challenging, and should remain like that. It is a niche and it is probably a good thing. And I do not think that a major boost is required. I did some suggestions to indicate possibilities, but of course I do not think that all should be added. Some new artifacts would be welcome (yeah, Breath of Eyal is great!), and some garanteed ones as well (Guidance?). A specific quest could be fun and attracting for players. And some resonnance between AM items and AM players thematically interesting.

I did some (simple) data mining in the char vault. AM is around 30% of wilders, 30% of psionics (10% solipcists, 50% psionic), 50% doomed and 10% fighters (20% for zerkers). So one can consider this percentage as significant. But if you look more closely, for instance for the mindstar wearing classes (doomed and psionics), most of the AM players have gained and unlocked the mindstar mastery tree and a similar proportion know other talents given by AM escorst (mostly Nature touch). Now that it will be possible to get it for every character, gaining AM will be less interesting. And I just fear that there is a drop of this number.
Maybe not mostly for the mindstar oriented classes, as the gain of AM may be larger than its restriction for them. Not so much arcane items are interesting for them... But for Berzerkers or Wyrmics, for instance, you can have much better weapons without AM and the escort change may impact the number of AM players.

Raw percents are going to bias against fighters there.

Many new players are going to pick up Bulwark or Berserker, and either not be aware of the AM option, or be warned away from it as an option, or experiment with it and get burned due to not realizing how complicated it is to deal with its downsides. And, frankly, AM is a little backended-since it grants you skills, you could have just as easily built up other good skills, early. It starts to shine later, when you run out of major skill options.

So the classes with much larger percents-which tend to get played by newbies-are going to have less AM. I can only give my opinion, not statistics, on Berserker(As I have not looked up the percentage of winning Berserkers that have AM), but I feel it's an incredibly strong option for them.

Incidentally, endgame, I would call the Gaping Maw the best option for both Wyrmic and Berserker, if you get the AM boost. I don't feel like they...eveeentually...end up bad on weapons, especially since a fair deal of later options(Such as Murderblade) at the tier 4 level are, I believe, still accessable. They similarly don't miss out on much for body armor later, mostly just on incidental slots like Light(if they don't get Guidance) or Gloves(And the critical ego gloves are AM compatible at least).

Not to invalidate your point about better weapons-early that is biased against AM, somewhat. I'm just commenting.

I wouldn't mind seeing Guidance get a 100% rate of drop. It'd even be funny(and fitting) if Ummswilik or however his name is spelled(the Dragon Turtle) dropped it. Eldritch Pearl and Guidance are very, very close to mutually exclusive, and it would give an interesting parity.

Antimagics in a decent place now. It easily used to be super challenge mode, and now its pretty close to alternative play style.

However, it is rough on generic points.