ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

It always struck me as odd and kind of cheaty that the optimal strategy is to have 1/5 in all of your active talents, then shuffle around your 4 reassignable class points or 3 reassignable generic points each turn so that whenever you use an active talent, it's at 5/5 (or 4/5 for generic talents).

Could there be some sort of penalty for reassigning your points in the middle of combat? Like maybe you can't respec when there are enemies in sight, or putting points into a talent resets the cooldown of that talent?

I don't really care much what other people do-the only time I respec, outside of the intended purpose(respeccing to get rid of skills I find that aren't working as well as I expected for my build/as well as I expected in general), is to give Combat Accuracy to people, and that is still only for some specific classes that mostly just need better accuracy answers(mostly Cursed really). But I do agree that the situation you mentioned is theoretically optimal, which is weird.

Having it reset the cooldown would actually be...a really good, simple way to make it impractical, though. You could still abuse it, but it would definitely take a massive amount of the power out of it. It's pretty hard to effectively juggle passives to get an advantage(the main exception is that same Combat Accuracy issue, and if you have any other option besides that, you're better off taking it, believe me.).

Having it reset the cooldown would also be really annoying for those of us that don't abuse the system and are just upgrading talents like normal.

One approach could be to have every point investment add just 1 to the cooldown. So abuse is still possible, but not as convenient or optimal mid-battle.

Fully resetting the cooldown would be a disadvantage for Afflicted with their decaying and not trivially restorable Hate. Not allowing talent point redistribution when enemies are in sight is probably the better option.

Or perhaps a radius around the player, regardless of LoS. I could totally see one-turn blinding myself to get around the limitation

Or just ducking around a corner or something. Doomed could trade off some of those wiggly class points for the ability to block their own LoS at any moment; alchemists have smoke bombs that'd do the same thing. There's probably a few more; archmagi with stone wall, wyrmics with quake... so forth, so on.

Point being that in sight is possibly a poor check to use. Simple range wouldn't be the best, either (because you could use it as a really poor sort of monster detection), but it'd be somewhat harder to circumvent.

I'm not sure I'd actually suggest it, but perhaps only be allowed while in town and/or there's no hostiles on the level?

God no. This is a minor issue, let's not make every level up a chore because some people like to abuse the system for minor games.

Agreed. The flexibility to play with the points is nice. The abuse potential is something that you'd really have to be going out of your way to do, and I'd hate to add elaborate machinery to the engine to remove it.

Really the only solution would be to force people to allocate stat points when they level up, and only permit skill reassignments when there are free stat points available. I like the current setup better.

I'm not sure what the big deal about the cooldown thing is, though.

Newly learned skills already are on cooldown to prevent learning a skill at L1, using it, etc. as abuse. This would just be an extension of that, and just as annoying as that already is-which is to say, mostly it just means you need to hit R after a reskill if you want every single skill off cooldown.

Of course, I don't really care much either, as I said.

What about just limiting the number of times you can respec? Say, in addition to only being able to unlearn the last X points you spent, you can only unlearn a total of Y points per level. That way, you'd still be able to shuffle points around a bit, but you wouldn't be able to do it constantly.

SageAcrin wrote: Newly learned skills already are on cooldown to prevent learning a skill at L1, using it, etc. as abuse. This would just be an extension of that, and just as annoying as that already is-which is to say, mostly it just means you need to hit R after a reskill if you want every single skill off cooldown.

You level up mid-battle, go increase a useful skill you regularly use already, and suddenly it's on 12 cooldown. It's not usually crippling but it's god damn annoying. I'd rather leave players to their abuses than have overly annoying things in the way of regular play.

What about a short delay in effectiveness increase? So you could take a talent from one to five mid-fight, but it'd take 2-3 turns before the talent's tlvl ticked up one. The delay would be reduced or removed if there wasn't anything in LoS or a radius around the player.

That'd mostly remove what donkat was abusing without seriously messing with much. Could probably specifically tie it to respec instead of normal talent increase, as per level up, as well.

Might not be worth the time to code it, but it might plug an abuse hole.

E: And if you wanted to be particularly careful, have it only tick up on ready talents, so you couldn't preemptively swap stuff around in anticipation for when a talent comes off CD.

Nice idea, but I think it's too complex, both to code and to make clear to the player. If there's to be a fix it should be a simple one.

You level up mid-battle, go increase a useful skill you regularly use already, and suddenly it's on 12 cooldown. It's not usually crippling but it's god damn annoying. I'd rather leave players to their abuses than have overly annoying things in the way of regular play.

Yeah, but it wouldn't take long to get used to it.

Just level up after your immediate combat.

From what it looks like, talents have 4 states:

• Not learned (gray border)
• Learned (white border, can't unlearn)
• Learned recently (blue border, last 4 class / 3 generic points that were confirmed, can unlearn*)
• Just learned (yellow border, unconfirmed choices, can unlearn*)

The only thing we should be concerned with are the blue border talents, nothing else matters here.

When are appropriate and intended times for a player to re-spec?

There are two instances where it makes sense to me to allow the player to unlearn blue-border talents:

• After a level up, before you've accepted any changes to the talent and stat point screen. Basically, you get one chance per level to re-spec "mid-battle."
• Any time you're on the world map and below max level. I think it's a bit exploitative to constantly shuffle around 7 talent points when you're level 50.

Unused class and generic points shouldn't be affected at all and should be able to be assigned any time.

* There are some corner cases where you can't unlearn blue- and yellow-border talents. One that comes to mind is if you have the Spell / Divination tree unlocked with no talents assigned. You complete a "Lost Seer" escort quest and select the +1 Vision talent reward (3rd in the talent tree list). Then, with an unused generic point, you assign a point into the Keen Senses talent (2nd in the list, prerequisites are met because it doesn't care what talent you have a point in, any one point in the tree other that Keen Senses will work). Keen Senses will not be able to be unlearned because there's no points in Arcane Eye (1st in the list).

Could make leveling up take a turn?