ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The Character menu has a pretty good breakdown of my stats, but sometimes, all I want to do is try them out on some enemies and see what the combat log has to say. Unfortunately, the enemies I want to try things on frequently have annoying traits like different armor levels, or irritating quirks like trying to kill me! Enter: the training dummy. The basic idea is that it's an "enemy" that cannot be killed so you can make gear swaps, talent swaps etc. and see the difference in your damage output. Ideally, there would be a level nearby that the player could activate, and activating it would prompt the player to set the dummy's armor/hardness, saves and resistances. I could imagine this either being available in the Fortress for a moderate fee, or available in some town that charges you for the privilege of unlocking the training area.

I think this is a good idea, but I would go a step further.

Add a "danger room" to the fortress where you can try out your skills on various opponents. It would have a permanent training dummy that you can beat on any time you want. You could also specify a simplified scenario (a la arena fight) where, for a certain amount of energy per opponent, the fortress can create some NPC's to fight (probably random elites that you can specify a class for). There would be no xp or loot, of course, and no risk of dying. (The scenario ends when you run out of health or vanquish all of the opponents.)

This was suggested a few years back as well, here's the thread for reference/ideas: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=26855

I was actually working on something like that at one point. My version was a shop in Last Hope that led to a big room with a bunch of inactive golems connected to data terminals, with various combinations of armor/save/resist/etc (to be fleshed out later). The idea was that you would pound on a golem with various weapons, and the data terminal would record data for each weapon about how much damage it did, so that you could do quantitative weapon comparisons --- which sounds like exactly what you want. I eventually scrapped it, as I recall, when I ran in to the problem that the part of the code that actually does the weapon damage computation doesn't have access to enough information about which weapon is doing the damage to do the kind of data recording I wanted to do.

Tada! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqydg4OrK1c
Will also have resists/armour controls

darkgod wrote:Tada! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqydg4OrK1c
Will also have resists/armour controls

Will beating on the training dummies count towards various "do x damage with y" achievements?

no

Just making sure!