ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

People have mentioned quite a few things about mindslayers, or mind-based chars in general, that could be improved. Strangely, i haven't seen anyone reporting what IMO is the #1 problem for mind-based chars, easily overshadowing any other issues: DROPS.

On average, perhaps every 2nd floor of a zone, i get an item dropped that is relevant to my char at all. Notice that i say "relevant", not "useful right now". So, i don't even get "inferior but relevant" dropped regularily. Meanwhile, i find swords, axes, staffs and shields dropped left and right - all which aren't even relevant to my class.

In the time i get a single goddamn plain ego-less mindstar dropped, i have collected 20-30 swords, maces and axes - most of them actually having egos. Soo, its not even the case that item-drops aren't weighted enough towards mindslayers - no, instead it seems as if drops are intentionally weighted AGAINST mindstars and the like. Otherwise, i cannot explain how i regularily get i.e. 5 swords for 1 mindstar ratios. And that's not accounting for that a fighter isn't limited to just swords. Same goes for staffs - i'll find 5 staffs before i find a single mindstar.

With those kinds of drops, it imo is no wonder, that on the statistics page, warriors and mages dominate over the mind-based classes in terms of popularity. As a mind-based char, you seem to be thrown into a world, that only knows physical and magic weaponry, which is ironic given ToME4's lore.

Or is this only because as class i did choose adventurer instead of psionic? If yes, since adventurer supposedly is a superclass of all classes, shouldn't it consider mind-biased chars as well?

RNG is random. My Alchemist found two artifact mindstars in the Tier 1 zones. Meanwhile I had to go and buy a semi-decent staff...

Mind classes have, run for run, substantially higher averages of win rates than physical and magical classes, on an average of all the classes represented by each. I don't know if this is due to gear or their designs, I admit, but I'm inclined to think their gear is part of it.

The reason they're "less popular" is that none of them start unlocked, and that the earliest unlock mind class(Summoner) is a very specific, rather passive, playstyle. (Well, Cursed is also a Mind/Physical hybrid, and it's more popular than half the starting unlocks. Not sure if this counts for your purposes.)

Mindstars are generally about as common as daggers, overall, in my experience; Not as common as some other weapons, due to less enemies wielding them, but usually not so much that you can't get by. You can get a bad run early, though, for luck.

To be honest, I am more of the opinion that Mind oriented gear needs to be nerfed rather than buffed, if someone made me choose between the two, but I think it's in a good spot right now.

man i remember when swords were what mindslayers actually used.

Fastest way to get good Mindstar drops is to put on a Rune and kill some hostile Zigur patrols.

PureQuestion,

With strong talents which benifit from wielding gems/mindstars -and have Will/Cun requirements- is there a reason to bash at things with a sword?

I haven't really played Mindslayer, though I'm trying to now with a 2 sword/no mindlash build, but would making the mobility tree scale with Strength encourage this more traditional style?

Perhaps giving the class one of those tasty little berserker 2-handed trees, or even it's own melee tree, would be nice.

I love the idea of the class, but it feels too geared towards being just another mind-caster. I guess it's hard to balance a melee class that gets an extra free attack at the end of every turn from a 2-handed weapon.

-Sorry for going off topic.

Orange: No, there isn't. But Mindslayers were designed to be a melee class; in fact, they predate the addition of Mindstars.

Essentially, modern Mindslayer is a mess of a strange class to start with, which has had the game evolve around it.

It hasn't been overhauled because, I think, no one's really sure which way to do it, and because it works right now.

SageAcrin wrote:Mindstars are generally about as common as daggers, overall, in my experience; Not as common as some other weapons, due to less enemies wielding them...

This from my experience is true - i do find daggers about as rarely as i find mindstars. The most common stuff i find is heavy and massive armor, various kinds of axes and two-handed swords, shields and staffs. So, fighter and mage stuff (however, light defense equipment is someway rare too, so i figure mages would have it just as hard as me, finding relevant clothing equipment).

I should have mentioned, that the observations in the initial post, were gathered from:

1. About 20 hours distributed over two chars, about a year ago.

2. About 30 hours distributed over two chars, currently.

In other words, nope, this isn't just some RNG bad luck.

And yes, i do usually find 1-3 mindstars in ALL of the beginner zones, but that compares to over 100 items consisting of axes, heavy swords, shields and staffs. That doesn't seem balanced at all. I especially find it surprising, how often shields, heavy and massive armor drops. After all, each of them is just one type of equipment, so if the RNG just randomly picks from equipment-TYPES, that does not add up.

Given that some other types of equipment is just as rare as mindstars (i.e. daggers), perhaps the problem isn't that mindstar drops are nerfed, but that some other types of equipment (shield, heavy/massive armor, axes and heavy swords) is too frequently dropped, thus stealing the slots from other types of gear.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like mind classes are less gear dependent too; for example, as an archer, you really need some good arrows, but the benefits mindslayers get from their gear, compared to naked, are less essential. Wielding any higher tier gem can get you decent mindlash damage, with skill investment.

morganp wrote:Maybe it's just me, but I feel like mind classes are less gear dependent too; for example, as an archer, you really need some good arrows, but the benefits mindslayers get from their gear, compared to naked, are less essential. Wielding any higher tier gem can get you decent mindlash damage, with skill investment.

Great, so instead of doing what mindslayers are supposed to be doing (melee), we just spam mindlash even harder. Awesome, i'm sure that is the right approach to fix mindstar based classes. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Aren't you complaining about getting too many weapons?

HousePet wrote:Aren't you complaining about getting too many weapons?

Too many weapons (and armor) geared for fighters, yes.

Also, i've just looked through the inventories of data/general/npc - the stuff in there matches my observations... shields, heavy armor and axes everywhere.... other stuff, not so much.

EDIT: Also interesting about the zigurath template - there are no mindstars mentioned there at all. However, all of them (obviously) are forbidden from carrying arcane equipment. Since mindstars are not arcane-based, i guess the reason for more frequent mindstar drops from them, is simply that they're not allowed to carry arcane-powered equipment.

EDIT 2: Okay, now this is just funny - in addition to lots of NPCs carrying axes and heavy armor, if you look at the rarity values of items (see here if you dont want to read lua source: http://te4.org/wiki/Item_list), heavy armor has a LOWER rarity value than light armor. Thus, both in inventories and on the floor, heavy stuff is overrepresented.

lyx wrote:Great, so instead of doing what mindslayers are supposed to be doing (melee), we just spam mindlash even harder. Awesome, i'm sure that is the right approach to fix mindstar based classes. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

No, I'm saying that better gear doesn't benefit a mindslayer as much as most warriors, since they don't have much in the way of melee talents that scale with weapon damage; likewise, their tanking ability also has more to do with talents than armor. We could rework the class to be more melee oriented; but if you're going for a melee mindstar build, well, your damage bonuses from (non-artifact) mindstars only count for so much. If you're going pure melee, you can use swords... Otherwise, mindlash is great for the ranged fighter, your choice of gems or mindstars.

Besides, if Mindslayers were only meant for melee, why even have the ability to wield a gem? I think it's fine to leave it as either/or.

The fundamental problem is that with neither mobility nor a usable ranged attack that isn't reliant on a mindstar or gem focus to not completely suck they're kind of locked into mindstars. Mindstars are so powerful they completely distort all the mindpower classes by letting them stack will and cunning without neglecting their melee ability.