ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

There is a large number of egos that have activatable abilities, allowing the player to balance out their racial and class limitations through gear. Don't have a decent escape mechanism? Disengage rings and boots are your friend. Just got off elven cultist's wild ride? Better pop that cure illness totem.

Or at least in theory. In practice the long global cooldowns on charms make the majority of those egos not very useful, as the players are forced to save their only charm cooldown for the most dire of situations. Sure, a cure illness totem is great, but most will bite the bullet and endure their elven STDs rather than find themselves in a position, where their only non-inscription escape mechanism is on 20 second cooldown. Charm Mastery is not much help here, a 12 second cooldown on your escape is only marginally better.

This is what makes artifacts like Eden's Guile, Wanderer's Rest, Wrap of Stone, Spellhunt Remnants, Egg-sac and so on, so great. There is no massive opportunity cost. There are no cooldowns. Why, on higher difficulties it becomes a lot harder to win the game if you're somehow unlucky enough to miss out on every single one of these wonderful items. And the worst part is, while there are some egos that can poorly mimic what these artifacts deliver (dispersion gloves is to Spellhunt is what blinding speed cloak is to Eden's), the global cooldown makes these already weaker abilities absolutely inadequate.

Here's my suggestion.

Split the ego charms in 5 groups:

• Body Armor - head, belt, body, boots, gloves (?)
• Accessories - L ring, R ring, amulet, cloak (?!)
• Arms - right hand, left hand
• Lite - not too many ability egos here, but the existing ones (Retch, Track, Sun Flare) are pretty strong
• Tools

Cooldowns on charms are applied only within these groups.
Bam! Suddenly they're a lot more useful. Suddenly the player has a lot more gear choices to make. Sweet.

My division is purely intuitive and a bit arbitrary, of course. Should the cloak slot fall into body armor, or accessories? Or perhaps it could be grouped with Lite? May be gloves should fall into Arms category ? It kiiiiiinda makes sense and would help out pugilistic classes! Is 5 groups too many? Is the grouping too uneven? Perhaps a combination of intuitiveness and sound game design is best.

Thoughts?

I like it better than the current system. It isn't very adequate in vanilla, because of, as you stated, the global cooldowns. They make it impossible to actually excel with them.

I highly approve of this. This may actually make me pay more attention to totems, when they will not stop my staff blasts from working.

Multiple cooldown sections is too confusing.
I'm not sure why using an item has to put other items on cooldown.
But if it has to be done, how about put the other items on half the cooldown, rather than full?

If we wanted, it could be "use a torque, all torques go on cooldown." A ring, a cloak, a pair of gloves, a wand, all of those would put every other item of the same category on cooldown. And any other categories I haven't mentioned. Probably has some flaws, though, I'll admit.

But other than rings, you can only equip 1 of those at a time...

Much simpler to just make charms the exception that runs on a separate cooldown, and nearly as effective, I think.

Sweet, some feedback!

It seems that the main concern expressed so far is the complexity of the proposed system. It's a good counterpoint.

The balance between utter uselessness and charm overdependency is quite difficult to strike. Remove the cooldown entirely and suddenly we'll have players running around with swift hands and a dozen of "of skullcracker" helmets and hats of earthrunes. Enforce it too harshly and we'll have the current situation, where outside of some cases item abilities are almost an afterthought. It's not a question of simply adjusting cooldown durations either, - it doesn't matter if the cooldown is 40 turns or 10 turns, if it's messing with my torc of psychoportation, it ain't gonna be used.

The goal here isn't complexity for complexity's sake, it's to relax the system just enough to allow for interesting equipment choices and new strategies.

Besides, I think a simple adjustment to ability descriptions is more than enough to clear things up for the player. Instead of:

Uses 20/20 charges and puts all other charms on 20 turn cooldown.

It could read:

Uses 20/20 charges and puts all other accessory/body/arm/tool/lite abilities on 20 turn cooldown.

Sounds pretty clear to me. By the time a new player finishes Dreadfell, they would've seen dozens of items with talents and would have a good idea of what goes where.

SageAcrin wrote:Much simpler to just make charms the exception that runs on a separate cooldown, and nearly as effective, I think.

Good idea and a big improvement to the current situation, but I can't help but think of this as a half-measure. You'll just end up creating two charm groups, actual charms, which are fairly limited in the range of abilities they offer (psychoportation, illness/poison cures and raw damage) and "everything else" group which offers extremely diverse range of abilities, the vast majority of which will go underused because they share a cooldown with each other.

Actually, that was part of the point from changing from individual cooldowns, to one united one.

Though... hmmm. The real purpose of that involved people stacking a few specific things(Stone Wall hats being the one that stands out in memory most) and swapping them constantly, to produce an overly powerful universal effect via carrying around a lot of one thing.

Maybe there could just be slot based CDs instead of a universal one? That is, each charm slot has its own CD, so swapping the same thing and spamming it over and over doesn't work... but all of those egos are still individually useful. It would just kill swap-ego-gear tactics.

That sounds good. Easy to explain ("puts all charms/hats/gloves into X cooldown"), prevents cheese, and makes those obscure talent egos much more useful.