ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Out of the last ten Cursed clears, all ten picked up Surge at L4-5.

Only one picked up L5 Cleave, and another picked up L1 Surge/Cleave. Despite that, multiple of them were using a twohander. None were using sword/shield.

As Cursed is, generally, one of the more balanced classes(good but clearly not overpowered seems to be the general consensus based on what I've seen), I don't think nerfing Surge is the right answer.

Surge's popularity seems simple; It provides a reasonably powerful effect and does it regardless of what you're equipped with, and then the secondary, equip-oriented effect is more of a bonus impact. Neither of the other two talents provide a real bonus impact, just become better at what they do.

Additionally, Sword/Shield has the added issue of not being very good for Cursed in general, due to their slugfest oriented nature. They need more damage than Sword/Shield can provide, and Repel is a purely defensive talent right now. As such, no Cursed at all really run it.

Solutions:

A: Give Cleave and Repel their current weapon oriented bonuses(the additional damage/chance on Cleave and the additional chance on Repel, when using a twohander or sword/shield) no matter what weapon is being used. This makes them more similar to Surge, in that there's a powerful main effect to use no matter what.

B: Give Cleave/Repel new secondary effects for when you're using a twohander/sword and shield.

For Cleave, I suggest +critical hit rate and +critical hit modifier if using a twohanded weapon(TalentStatDamage Strength 5, 10 and 10, 20 respectively sounds good).

For Repel, I suggest a chance to add a 100% power shield bash to any swing of any attack, of (TalentStatDamage Strength, 30, 50, cap at 100)% chance. This gives Sword/Shield an interesting pseudo-dualwield when using a Sword/Shield, which should keep their damage up high enough to make Sword/Shield useful.

Thoughts?

Sounds good to me.

I think I found why my Cursed never get past a certain point.

As for your idea, it seems good. We don't want one tree to rule them all, and you seem to have proposed a few fair solutions.

I have an addon planned to muss around with the Cursed capstones, but I want to get Stoics feature-complete first (and before I do that, I want to finish the shadowblade I'm playing.) Adding shieldbashes to Repel was one of the ideas, another was to give each a 5-turn buff when activated to encourage taking two or three and swapping between them.

Joining the "sounds okay" chorus.

In full agreement.

I like this idea.

For repel, how about increasing hate (2-3 points) when blocking? This would make it a good hate recovery option for anyone, while helping to boost damage for weapon/shield oriented builds.