ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Sacrifice is the third skill in the Advanced Necrotic Minions tree. It reduces all damage that would otherwise do more than X% of your health to that number. Also, nobody ever takes it because it is incredibly fiddly to use; you need to summon minions (since they've probably all collapsed into dust following you around), summon a Bone Giant (if you don't have one following you around, and, given that Assemble is also a very unpopular skill, you probably don't), and, finally, cast the spell itself. It's a LOT of bother for a decent but hardly imbalanced spike damage protector, especially since the biggest use for a spike damage protector is the first few turns of a battle.

Since the biggest cost of Sacrifice, besides time and sanity, is the souls needed to assemble the bone giant, I suggest that it be changed to a sustain that drains a soul every X turns when within sight of an enemy.

Sure, why not?

It's less of an action cost, but it wouldn't become incredibly powerful with that. Constantly draining souls is a questionable thing in general, after all, and you'd lose the ability to "buffer" the cost(get 10 souls, make a Bone Golem, get back to ten souls).

Can't see any reason this wouldn't be a good idea.

Parcae2 wrote:Since the biggest cost of Sacrifice, besides time and sanity, is the souls needed to assemble the bone giant, I suggest that it be changed to a sustain that drains a soul every X turns when within sight of an enemy.

Huh, this is a really interesting idea.

I'm not sure if I like that it drains souls when it's not being used, though... what if it drained (10 - talent level) souls whenever it did its thing? So you have it at first rank, you lose 9 souls but you don't die to spike damage; you have it at rank 5, you lose 5 souls and don't die. (Or something like that. )

This would make minions a more tactically varied decision during boss fights, since summoning minions may remove your spike damage protection.