ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

An anchorite is a mage that spent years of lonely and contemplative studies. This hermitic life has dramatically weakened their body and long hours reading books with a candle left them almost blind. Fortunately, they develloped an ability to summon guardian angels to help them to bypass these handicaps.

Life rating: -5
Most important stats: magic, willpower

Class tree, unlocked.

Guardian Angels

Call angels
Activated
Mana cost 20
Coldown 10..4
Spawn a new guardian angel around you. You can have 1..3 guardian angels active. Guardian angels max life will be 20..40 % of your max life. Newly created angels share all your stats, powers, saves, resistances and immunities and can cast all your spells and runes, but they have a -95% all damage penalty.
You can always locate your guardian angels and you can see in range 8 around them.
If your last angel is destroyed, a new angel will be spawned automatically.

Investing a point in this talent has the following effects:
Your vision radius is permanently set to 2 tiles and cannot be increased nor reduced with items.
You are immune to blindness and do not need light to see in this radius 2 area.
Your maximum life is permanently reduced by 50%.

Empathic angels
Sustained
Mana cost 50
Cooldown 10
20..40% of any damage received by you or any of your guardian angels is not taken, but shared to the other party members (including you)
Investing a point in this talent makes you and your angels immune to any damage dealt by other party members.

War angels
Activated, instant
Manacost 40
Cooldown 40..25

Channel a spell from the position of one of your angels. Casting this spell will take the normal time.
Investing in this talent also has the passive effect to reduce the all damage penalty of your guardian angels to -90..-70%

Sacrifice angel
Activated
Manacost 90
Cooldown 20
Sacrifice one of your guardian angels. Doing so, you regain 30..60% of his life and mana. When sacrified, angels will explode in a radius 1..2, doing 10..30 blight damage and will spread to a foe in this range 1..3 random detrimental effects removed from you.
Using this talent puts Call Angel on an 8 turns cooldown.
Damage scales with your spellpower.

This is the only specific tree of anchorites. Besides that, they get all other archmage trees, with the same locked/unlocked status.

Comments?

Feel like classes should be more distinct than "Same class but with an extra tree and 1 less life rating"

Cool tree idea, although would need retheming probably.

I think the class is quite distinct from archmages, despite the common trees they have.
There is not only a -1 life, but also the 50% life reduction (meaning you only gain 2 life/con and your gain from levelup is also halfed) and the pathetic 2-tiles vision radius. You could not survive more than 10 turns without your angels seeing for you and taking part of the damage.

So you MUST massively invest in this tree for survival and the management of the other trees is somehow challenging, IMO.

My point is more that I'd rather it be more fully fleshed into a distinct class, rather than just be a different flavour of Archmage

Alternately, make it yet another unlockable archmage tree Seems better suited for that than a new class as it stands

Also, angels? Where are angels coming from in Maj'Eyal? The closest things we have are Radiant Horrors, and I'm pretty sure that *that's* not what you mean.

You want a bunch of minions who will float aroudn and let you see through them? Part of me wants to make some sort of a tie-in to the headless horrors, much like a number of the other horrors have their own class-analogues

Sirrocco wrote:Alternately, make it yet another unlockable archmage tree Seems better suited for that than a new class as it stands

Also, angels? Where are angels coming from in Maj'Eyal? The closest things we have are Radiant Horrors, and I'm pretty sure that *that's* not what you mean.

You want a bunch of minions who will float aroudn and let you see through them? Part of me wants to make some sort of a tie-in to the headless horrors, much like a number of the other horrors have their own class-analogues

Most of the horrors are based on classes, not the other way around, of course

The class concept is very interesting, but I'd have to agree that it needs some fleshing out, at the very least in terms of the "angels" descriptor. "Guardians", perhaps, but "Angel" has too many connotations.

If we're going for the unlockable tree, what would we want the condition to be?

PureQuestion wrote:Most of the horrors are based on classes, not the other way around, of course

Well, sure - but making a class that's similar to the headless horror, and then adjusting the Headless Horror appropriately so that it suddenly was a class-based horror might be kind of cool.

...and for the unlock, killing a headless horror should do it, if there aren't any better choices. In a different thread, it was pointed out to me that unlocks are better when they don't take spoilers. Anyone who makes it far enough in the game is likely to have means, motive, and opportunity to do in one of them.

This can be a racial tree for the headless horror "race".
Indeed it could be fun to add such talents to any caster, psionic, etc. The eyes/angels should not be allowed to summon, of course, but they can have their own racial talents (blink, maybe some blinding stuff if not too OP).
And with warriors, it is probably risky with the health penalty, but may be interesting to play.
Not sure horrors would be coherent with nature-based classes. Should probably be forbidden.

Horrors aren't necessarily magic - Oozing Horrors are antimagic, in fact. I think all classes ought to be allowed, but Zigur probably shouldn't be an option.

jotwebe wrote:Horrors aren't necessarily magic - Oozing Horrors are antimagic, in fact. I think all classes ought to be allowed, but Zigur probably shouldn't be an option.

I share this opinion.

+1

I agree that this would be better as a race.
No need to replicate headless horrors though.

ghostbuster wrote:Fortunately, they develloped an ability to summon guardian angels to help them to bypass these handicaps.

Reskin the Golemancy and Advanced Golemancy trees to summon a companion named "BMX Bandit".