ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So, I've noticed that most people still aren't using charm mastry. It's still underpowered. I ignore pretty much the whole tree. I was running an archmage today with 4 points in illuminate (for the damage), and happened to have a staff of illumination, casting illuminate at TL 1 or 2. I kept hitting the wrong one, and wasn't dealing damage, and I was thinking...


If you know a talent at a higher level than an item does, it's not like I think the item should automatically get a higher talent level, but if you know the skill, I would think that charm mastry should buff the level of the skill on the item. Maybe the higher of the items level or your level in the skill, capped on your skill level end by your charm mastry level? It's just a thought, it would buff charm mastry to a usable level. Of course, this would only really work for the items that use talents that we can gain, but it's still something. Thoughts? It's probably a bit abusable, cuz with the right setup you could spam the crap out of some skills.

It would be good if it would affect more than just cooldowns. It should affect the effectiveness of charms by the same percentage as the cooldown. The teleport range of psychoport torques and teleport amulets, the damage of the attack charms, the healing of healing charms, the shields of shielding charms,(including staff and artifact activations, too), etc.

I actually get a ton of use out of Charm Mastery, and I suspect that the reason it isn't used by others is that its description makes it sound like it doesn't work on artifact cooldowns, which it does. And there are artifacts with incredibly strong activated abilities. With 5.5 Charm Mastery, you can get:

2 consecutive uses of Spellhunt Remnants instead of just 1
48 consecutive turns of Spydric Poison instead of just 18 (overkill, but funny)
42 turns of silence from Pendant of the Sun and Moons instead of 21 (also overkill, still funny).
3 consecutive Worm Rots from Life Drinker instead of just 1
2 sets of spiders from Egg-sac of Ungole instead of just 1

Just to name a few handy things.