ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

EDIT: Going to compile the various posted ideas for easier inspecting by certain persons who would have some power to implement them!


Grmblplan: Make it so that when grappling with someone, you have damage sharing with them. This both makes sense (If you're grappling, it'd be hard to hit just you!), would add some much needed mitigation, and would be fun/interesting. Perhaps make it scale with one of the grappling talents, ideally getting up to something like an 80%/20% split (them, you).

Shibarideas: Replace unarmed discipline with something like this:

Unarmed Discipline / Advanced Unarmed Combat / Dragon Brawler Z / I really have no idea what to name anything

Mind Over Retarded Burst Damage (Passive): Each time you deal a critical strike you gain Awesome Shield for 10 seconds, reducing the next attack over 70% of your max HP by 10%..60%. This triggers off crits to keep you from having it up when not actively attacking easily and to reduce its early game power. By endgame you'll be activating it every attack turn, but it won't generally be expended as 70% is a very steep requirement. As with the old version, the goal is to have some buffer against the worst damage spikes while not gaining much overall damage mitigation. This also fits nicely with encouraging attack instead of defense--you don't get your shield if you use a turn activating a regen.

Tempo (Finisher, CD10-20): You punch guy for 50%..150% weapon damage. For each combo point spent, your Technique or Race talent with the longest remaining cooldown has its cooldown reduced by 1..3. Welcome back Blinding Speed, Rush, Timeless, Wrath of the Woods, etc. I like this the more I think about it, but I adjusted it to a flat CD reduction so it isn't so generous with racials. The damage component can be made trivial, its mostly there to make sure shield procs.

Essence Smash (Combo generator, CD10): Strips 1..3 physical and magical buffs from the target. Low to moderate damage. For each buff removed you gain 1 combo point. This is designed to be "notably better" than Spellhunt Remnants on single targets with high buff counts but not outdamage Double Jab on anything with only a few buffs.

Roundhouse Kick (Finisher, CD something): You do a kicky spinny thing to all enemies within 2 radius. Effected enemies are knocked back 1..5 spaces based on combo points. If they collide with a wall or another unit they take additional damage and are stunned. Damage should be low to moderate, not great even if they collide. I strongly feel this needs to be radius 2-3 to be an effective mechanic, or we run into the Whirlwind problem of it only being useful when you're positioned in a stupid way.

The numbers given are just to help illustrate the design of the skill and are very rough. I'd be happy to fill in the numbers, theme, description, or whatever on any of them if it would be helpful.

A note on finishers. If all of my proposals were added there would be 6 total finishers not counting anything potentially added to Grappling, and several are *extremely* powerful. The reason for this is I want combo points to be a scarce resource that multiple powerful effects are competing to use. This might warrant combo point generation changes, but I'd want to toy with the changed class before having any useful input on that.

FINISHING MOVES
Uppercut
This is fine as is.

Concussive Blow: The problem here is just power. AoE is not an important niche for character power, but it is an important niche for fun. Having to single target every trash MOB isn't fun.
- Change scaling to phys power not Str, this is not a useful distinction
- Cooldown from 10 to 0. This lets it serve as the 'unimportant' combo point dump that you can spam to AOE clear stuff that doesn't pose a threat anyway.
- Adjust damage such that the AoE part is the highest. No reason to encourage using this over Double Jab/Flurry on a single target.
- Radius progression to 1,2,2,3,4. Its okay for melee to have AoE that doesn't require them to be in stupid positions like Whirlwind, I promise! Mages regularly obliterate everything on screen at bigger radii and range 10.


Body Blow: Not at all sure this is worth keeping, really weird ability. Renaming "Knockout" and keeping some of the "disable off targets" theme.
- Instant cast. Non-melee classes have quite a few ridiculously strong instant casts even though they need them less.
- No stamina drain. Tacking on random effects that are essentially meaningless is not good design, it just clutters tooltips.
- Now applies Sleep instead of Daze. This limits its usefulness on the main target (though its instant and still DPS) while being incredibly good at disabling off targets. If one wants to limits its "just use for DPS" role you can make the Sleep debuff conditional on their HP being above x%.
- Probably adjust damage lower

Haymaker: Removed. In theory the idea of a high damage finisher makes a lot of sense, in practice this is a class with Double Jab on an insanely short CD and Flurry of Fists. You'd have to make some really stupid numbers to make a finishing move based on just damage compete with that.

Soaring Leap: You instantly leap 1..5 spaces depending on combo points. This definitely seems like the most appropriate gap fill, giving Brawlers a third mobility skill that can be used as an escape, but only if they've been fighting to generate CP. I think it could have a free attack or small radius AoE on landing, too, but this more conservative version is still very good.


MISC CHANGES

Hack'nback
- Instant cast

Heave
- Instant cast
- Possibly buff the power vs. save

Mobile Defense
- Also gives you a chance to evade any damage equal to 30% of your Defence. Scaling can be whatever, target number is about 25% damage mitigation at 80 Defence. Leaves Tide is precedent for the weirdness of "dodging" any damage type. This should NOT be a save check against Accuracy, the fact its only a % chance to mitigate damage makes it unreliable enough already.


Doctornullness: A throwing tree:

This tree would allow access to Throwing Stance, which would be a "defensive" stance in contrast to Striking Stance. While in Throwing Stance, you'd gain a bonus to Defense, and have abilities like:
- Redirect Charge (passive while in Throwing Stance; 1 turn cooldown): when some jerk Rushes you, reduce his accuracy by X. If he misses you, you can hurl him 2-10 squares away and slow him.
- Offensive Flip (activated; 5 turn cooldown): Swap places with someone 1-4 squares away, daze him, and deal damage.
- Redirect Attack (activated; instant; 10 turn cooldown): Pick an adjacent foe. When that foe attacks you or casts a spell at you while adjacent, he must roll against your physical power. If he loses, he instead targets a random square where you're not.
- Toss Foe (activated; 4 turn cooldown): Pick up a foe of your size or smaller, and hurl it in the direction of your choosing. If it hits another enemy, great! You damage both of those jerks.

Superminiiiiiiiii:

Unarmed Discipline:
Push kick: strike targets in a line, the more targets there are, the more damage they take, from slamming into each other.
Alternative, does the same thing it does now and lets you leap to a location afterwards (like hack and back, only ending with a leap).
Defensive throw: throw enemy x spaces, if they hit the wall, make it explode with aoe physical + daze damage.
Alternative, does the same thing it does now, but gives you 300% move speed bonus for 1 turn when it triggers. With heightened reflexes and this, it could be fun.
Breath control: How about 5/10/15/20/25 move speed bonus and 8/16/24/32/40 to physical saves?
Roundhouse kick: Frontal arc finisher is ok, make it do crazy damage though - it is cd 12 ability in a locked tree, after all.

Grappling needs to be respecced to just be weapontalent damage, anyways. It's insanely hard to have a non-equipment formula compete with an equipment formula on an unlockable category; Those formula tend to be strong early and weak late, which is the exact worst thing to have in an unlockable.

Having said that, I like this idea as something to do alongside that. Grappling is a good defensive skill anyways because of the silence; Adding more to that is a nice idea.

I like both of these ideas, and would also like to suggest that Brawlers receive a new generic tree that makes use of size categories.

My proposals. I'm ignoring Grappling as Grmbl is looking at that already and Unarmed Discipline because.. Not sure where to start, but I'll get to it. I would be more than happy to extensively test these changes.

FINISHING MOVES

Uppercut
This is fine as is.

Concussive Blow: The problem here is just power. AoE is not an important niche for character power, but it is an important niche for fun. Having to single target every trash MOB isn't fun.
- Change scaling to phys power not Str, this is not a useful distinction
- Cooldown from 10 to 0. This lets it serve as the 'unimportant' combo point dump that you can spam to AOE clear stuff that doesn't pose a threat anyway.
- Adjust damage such that the AoE part is the highest. No reason to encourage using this over Double Jab/Flurry on a single target.
- Radius progression to 1,2,2,3,4. Its okay for melee to have AoE that doesn't require them to be in stupid positions like Whirlwind, I promise! Mages regularly obliterate everything on screen at bigger radii and range 10.


Body Blow: Not at all sure this is worth keeping, really weird ability. Renaming "Knockout" and keeping some of the "disable off targets" theme.
- Instant cast. Non-melee classes have quite a few ridiculously strong instant casts even though they need them less.
- No stamina drain. Tacking on random effects that are essentially meaningless is not good design, it just clutters tooltips.
- Now applies Sleep instead of Daze. This limits its usefulness on the main target (though its instant and still DPS) while being incredibly good at disabling off targets. If one wants to limits its "just use for DPS" role you can make the Sleep debuff conditional on their HP being above x%.
- Probably adjust damage lower

Haymaker: Removed. In theory the idea of a high damage finisher makes a lot of sense, in practice this is a class with Double Jab on an insanely short CD and Flurry of Fists. You'd have to make some really stupid numbers to make a finishing move based on just damage compete with that.

Soaring Leap: You instantly leap 1..5 spaces depending on combo points. This definitely seems like the most appropriate gap fill, giving Brawlers a third mobility skill that can be used as an escape, but only if they've been fighting to generate CP. I think it could have a free attack or small radius AoE on landing, too, but this more conservative version is still very good.


MISC CHANGES

Hack'nback
- Instant cast

Heave
- Instant cast
- Possibly buff the power vs. save

Mobile Defense
- Also gives you a chance to evade any damage equal to 30% of your Defence. Scaling can be whatever, target number is about 25% damage mitigation at 80 Defence. Leaves Tide is precedent for the weirdness of "dodging" any damage type. This should NOT be a save check against Accuracy, the fact its only a % chance to mitigate damage makes it unreliable enough already.


These are large buffs by design, I understand that Knockout and Mobile Defence would be among the stronger abilities in the game. My goal with these changes is to make a melee that can actually fight like a melee and not be blatantly inferior to every ranged class. By fight like a melee I mean potentially being in the open without feeling like you're being retarded for not LOS pulling and killing things one at a time. You may not feel like this on Normal, but realize that if you played like melee are *forced* to play on Nightmare/Insane you would not die ever. The imbalance is on all difficulties, just masked. We can't easily make fighting in the open an optimal decision, but we can mitigate how terrible it is and encourage more playstyle diversity. Actually Rushing a caster that isn't isolated on Nightmare for once sounds pretty fun to me!

This would also set a record for instant casts on one class. I kept most of it to utility abilities that require you to be adjacent to something. Melee being able to do a lot of things at instant speed is a great way to encourage risky positioning and help balance their inherent disadvantages in general. By keeping it mostly limited to low damage abilities we avoid making the class degenerate on normal. If players aren't permakiting everything to death with instacast Virulent Disease I'm not at all worried about these.

Edit: I've revised this post a little bit, finalizing the new talent proposal. I feel that these changes are all great and simple to implement. I'm much less of a fan of my Unarmed Disc proposal in the next post, overall.

Hum, I like those Finishing Move ideas(Suggest Soaring Stomp as the name for the last one, have its range scale with Combo if possible).

With how generally useless two of the unlockable categories are, it's easy to forget that non-Uppercut Finishing Moves are lackluster as well.

Heave/Hack'n'back being instant would be neat, too.

*Glances over some half-finished categories.* I really need to finish these, but haven't felt up to it lately... I've got an idea involving magical evasion, but it was going to all damage mitigation(Lowering the damage via clever movements), not perfect dodges. Part of the problem with absolute dodging for any damage is, it's annoyingly hard to keep from double-dipping on physicals, making it even harder to hit them physically...

After reading the Brawler guide, it sounds like the whole Combo Points thing isn't working. It sounds like it's optimal to just stick to Pugilism, largely ignore Finishing Moves, and totally ignore Grappling. That could be fixed, though...

IMHO Grappling just needs to go away. If it's strong, then it's overpowered against a single foe like a Boss (or like the PC if some random Rare has the Grappling tree). If it's not strong, then it's just plain useless.

Replace it with Melee Throws. This tree would allow access to Throwing Stance, which would be a "defensive" stance in contrast to Striking Stance. While in Throwing Stance, you'd gain a bonus to Defense, and have abilities like:
- Redirect Charge (passive while in Throwing Stance; 1 turn cooldown): when some jerk Rushes you, reduce his accuracy by X. If he misses you, you can hurl him 2-10 squares away and slow him.
- Offensive Flip (activated; 5 turn cooldown): Swap places with someone 1-4 squares away, daze him, and deal damage.
- Redirect Attack (activated; instant; 10 turn cooldown): Pick an adjacent foe. When that foe attacks you or casts a spell at you while adjacent, he must roll against your physical power. If he loses, he instead targets a random square where you're not.
- Toss Foe (activated; 4 turn cooldown): Pick up a foe of your size or smaller, and hurl it in the direction of your choosing. If it hits another enemy, great! You damage both of those jerks.


Instead of combo points, have a tree of Set Up moves which do little damage but inflict physical conditions. Then, have the Finishing Moves talents "cash in" those conditions for raw damage (and maybe a mental condition, if the target survives the damage). Now the Brawler's fight is about setting up his big Finishing Move, rather than about spamming fast high-damage attacks and glove procs.

Then, the Pugilism tree and the Melee Throws trees could also impose conditions, and they'd harmonize well with talents like Rush or Dirty Fighting.

Yeah, not really sure what would ideally replace Haymaker. I had the Leap skill in my head for so long I didn't give it much thought, then realized a non-mobility skill might be better so tossed the others in.

Unarmed Discipline is going to be.. Fun. I'll probably look into that tomorrow, and I know Grmbl is looking into Grappling. In keeping with the "Combo points matter" theme of my proposals I'll probably have at least one finishing move in Unarmed Discipline.

I would actually much prefer the Defense scaler to be flat mitigation personally, but I find other people care much more about theme than I do. Defense is dodging, dodging is random, mitigation from it gets stuck being random too, blah blah. Went with the idea I suspected would get more support :p.

Grappling actually has an interesting niche use, it just stuffs a ton of your damage to do it. (Namely, it currently functions as a Silence effect, a nice and uncommon status.).

Toss in a way to make it a Disarm effect and make it weapon talent and suddenly we've got something here. It doesn't have to be high damage to compete with Pugilism, just have some good utility.

Not that I'm knocking a throws tree, either. I wouldn't mind seeing Brawlers get an extra tree in general.

Yeah, the rare/rarely resisted aspect of Sleep was a big part of why I choose it, too. Definitely true of Silence and Disarm. Sounds good to me, I just have no specific input on Grappling because I personally don't like the theme or the gameplay type associated with it. I definitely think it can be made unique and viable, and a lot of players want it to be.

Now, Unarmed Discipline. Every talent is awful, simply one of the worst trees in the game. The only vaguely passable talent is the stun on dodge, and anti-melee is a very narrowly useful niche that Cunning / Tactical is already covering for those who want it. My current strong opinion is it should just be scrapped, not modified, unless anyone has a good reason not to.

Currently leaning towards a tree that has 2 more finishers and 2 misc, as I have more finisher ideas than I listed and I really like things competing with combo points. Adrenaline Rush and Light of Foot could use replacing too, unless we want to go the "pretend stamina matters at some point in the future and leave these as is" route.

I'm a mechanics guy, not a theme guy, so tell me if this bothers anyone. The current model I'm tossing around for replacing Unarmed Discipline is Spiritual Combat, basically veering into traditional Monk land a bit. The reason for this is so I can have a few effects that aren't easily justified when thinking about pure physical combat. The base Brawler class clearly avoided this route deliberately, but I figure since its an unlocked category its probably fine to bend theme a bit. Thoughts?

Nope it's not
But theme can be adjusted, go on spit ideas

I like the finishing moves ideas. Hack and back and heave being instant would open some interesting tactical possibilities, so I'm all for that.

Unarmed Discipline:

Push kick: strike targets in a line, the more targets there are, the more damage they take, from slamming into each other.

Alternative, does the same thing it does now and lets you leap to a location afterwards (like hack and back, only ending with a leap).

Defensive throw: throw enemy x spaces, if they hit the wall, make it explode with aoe physical + daze damage.

Alternative, does the same thing it does now, but gives you 300% move speed bonus for 1 turn when it triggers. With heightened reflexes and this, it could be fun.

Breath control: How about 5/10/15/20/25 move speed bonus and 8/16/24/32/40 to physical saves?

Roundhouse kick: Frontal arc finisher is ok, make it do crazy damage though - it is cd 12 ability in a locked tree, after all.

Talent idea:

Passive talent that gives enemy a chance hit random nearby target when he misses you with melee attack or hit a wall damaging itself for some% of damage

Maybe not that good, but it would be hilarious
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One labor intensive thing that I'd rlike to see : Talent tree that add some damage and\or effects depending on rings equiped... They are on hands after all. Of cause that's too much work for not that much gain (all that egos, gems, artifacts... that's a lot...)

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Another unlikely thing that would be interesting for me: Talent tree that lets brawler to somehow combine equipped one-handed weapon and punches in free hand but I suspect that is much better concept for some other class, fencer or something like that

From a thematic standpoint, throws could work, but some of those aren't common. (How often does an enemy rush you? Is countering that worth investing talent points for JUST that?) But I like the idea. Instead of REPLACING grapples, however, work with them.

While grappling a target, use your grip on it, and hurl it over your shoulder. This would flip the monsters position from in front of you, to behind you, possibly allowing you to even maintain contact and your grappling hold on it. Bonus damage could apply if you throw it in this fashion, such that it collides with another enemy.

Could expand the 'throw an enemy smaller then you' talent to do the same thing. Grappled enemies can be thrown for damage, bonus for hitting other enemies/walls/etc.

Perhaps some sort of damage bonus applied to melee bumping grappled enemies. (Picture the typical bully holding someone in a headlock, while repeatedly punching the gut, kneeing the crotch, etc.) Any number of interesting possibilities, thematically.

For that matter, defensive throws could be an interesting sustain. Cut speed (or even prevent movement) but allow you to defensively hurl enemies around that melee you with X percent change based on talent level, by intercepting attacks and countering with a throw, be it to back, side, etc. Would offer nifty method of damage mitigation on melee targets.

Also, I can sort of see a possibility to using enemies as a human(ish) shield against other targets. See that orc archer over there? Grab his buddy meleeing you, and interpose him between the two of you!

Should all fit thematically.

Alright, sounds like Grappling = defensive has got some traction.

Regarding the "throw on Rush" thing, I was intending that to include all such teleport-and-attack effects (Blindside, whatever it is Devourers do, etc.). They aren't going to happen in every encounter, but they do happen predictably often enough that you might want to walk around in Grappling Stance just in case.

Love the idea of redirecting damage to the jerk you've got grabbed. That would both mitigate damage to yourself AND raise the damage from Grappling, which seems to have been the chief complaint against Grappling as a whole.


If we're keeping Combo Points as a thing, then expand the pool of talents which grant them. Rush really ought to grant one, same with Dirty Fighting and friends. If it costs Stamina, and you're in one of the Brawler stances, you should get a Combo Point.

Okay I don't know how you people did it, but I obviously need to look into the security of my talent design notes...