ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

One of the way shadowblade gets played is cunning/ambush. It is a locked high level tree unique to the shadowblade.

It REALLY benefits from at least 2 points in tracking. Tracking is not available to shadowblades. You can do this with equipment of course since tracking on equipment is very common. However there is no good reason that shadowblades should not have the ability from the get go.

Tracking happens to be one of thew zigur betray escort rewards. Shadowblades can never betray because they start with a mana bar.

Shadowblades should both NOT start with a mana bar unless they CHOOSE to start with a spell and they should not start with a manasurge rune inscribed. It should be in the inventory.

They should ALSO start with the technique / field control tree locked but otherwise available. Trade it for the locked divination tree if you have to, but honestly you could just make it another locked tree and everyone would be happy.

Not doing this makes the unique aspect of a shadowblade only really playable by an adventurer and that just seems wrong.

Er, all of this can be done right now.

Zigur betrayal checks if you have any is_spell learned. Don't have any is_spell talents learned and ditch your Manasurge.

Now you can Zigur Betrayal.

Antimagic-or rather, Zigur's appearance on the world map-checks if you start with a magic related resource bar. Zigur Betrayal functions differently.

(Also I'm not sure what you're doing with tracking that you couldn't do with Arcane Eye-it can be cast through walls and see enemies-anyways, but that's neither here nor there...)

Oh you can do it with arcane eye it is just not nearly as satisfying somehow :p

Arcane eye cannot see through walls though it can be CAST through them, so you have to guess right where the room is and that is tedious as all hell. You will have to cast arcane eye 15 times to find what you are looking for waiting 150 turns instead of just using tracking once. Shadowblades have a very high cunning anyway which means that tracking has a very large range.

This makes ambuscade/shadowstep with the shadow a very fun way to minimize risk.

I am tired of having to equip a telescope or wear armor of delving to use a core class ability.

P.S. Shadowblades should start with Zigur on the map. They are going to betray zigur of course, but they should know where it is :p They are not obvious casters early up, and are sneaky. (they really want to be using mindstars and mindstar mastery as well)

Arcane Eye/Track + Ambuscade + Shadowstep has always seemed like a problematic combo to me. It's the most powerful way that I've found to kill things totally risk-free, and being able to kill things totally risk-free is boring (although the flavor is really cool the first time you figure it out). The other ways, such as ball spells from out of LoS and controllable summons, also accomplish the same thing eventually but they're not nearly as effective. The recently-added random walk has presented no practical deterrence to these strategies.

So making the Ambuscade combo more accessible isn't a bad idea, but before you do that, NPCs need to be able to figure out where the player is if they're getting attacked. It doesn't have to be instantly, but it does have to be faster than random walk.