ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So, I and some others were talking in #tome and some different ideas were brought up on things to do with category Mastery. Personally, I rather like the idea of doing more things with Mastery as a component of build, and think that changing it could perhaps add some more depth to the game.

First idea: Increase mastery based on category investment. For every 4 talent points spent in a category, increase mastery by 0.10.

Second idea: Give "mastery points" separate from category points that you gain at specific levels (and in the infinite dungeon above 50, at levels that are multiples of a certain number- Say, 15) Each mastery point is worth 0.10 mastery. Perhaps 3 mastery points at level 1, and 1 each at 5, 15, 30, 45, and 50.

Third idea: Give category point investments into mastery a huge boost. Change it from 0.2 to something like 0.5, with an additional bonus of 20% cooldown reduction. You could also invest multiple category points into one category in the infinite dungeon, with increasing returns (to help encourage specialization by partially acting against the diminishing returns of infinite scaling). The cooldown bonus would act on 20% of current value, not original value, so 5 category points would not reduce all cooldowns to 0. Perhaps each category point could also increase talent level caps as well? This would primarily be valuable in the infinite dungeon, where you might not otherwise have good places to spend talent points at extremely high levels.

I'd like to see a combination of all three of these, personally.

At the bare minimum 0.5 is about as much as is needed to make a reasonable difference due to the infinite scaling methods. It seems like a lot but it's really not.

My vote goes to cost reduction, a fairly unique idea, not cooldown reduction.

I didn't actually think of cost reduction. That might work better.

Seian Verian wrote:This would primarily be valuable in the infinite dungeon, where you might not otherwise have good places to spend talent points at extremely high levels.

IIRC, once you reach level 60, all talent level caps are increased by 1 per 10 levels, so 6 at 60, 7 at 70, and so on. That means you only can keep three class trees and two generics at full investment at extreme levels.

Oh. I wasn't aware of that! So maybe it's unneeded.

I wonder if cooldown reduction might cause some unforeseen complications with certain trees balanced around specific cooldowns. Perhaps instead each tree should get a unique bonus for investing a point? Such as Ice would grant Freeze resistance penetration, Necrotic Minions gives each minion a new ability ala Blighted Summoning and so on. Would be alot of work though.

Razakai wrote:I wonder if cooldown reduction might cause some unforeseen complications with certain trees balanced around specific cooldowns. Perhaps instead each tree should get a unique bonus for investing a point? Such as Ice would grant Freeze resistance penetration, Necrotic Minions gives each minion a new ability ala Blighted Summoning and so on. Would be alot of work though.

This is sort of vaguely present in the game with Wyrmics. Their drake trees each increase the appropriate resistance by 1% per talent point invested. I feel like it definitely could be made something more unique on a per-tree basis, by looking at and altering the Wyrmic code.

I think making it 0.4 instead of 0.2 would be a good start, anyways.

I've never seen any solution to this that people agreed on, but 0.4 is safe and simple.

So further to my previous suggestion, I put together a rough outline of category (or mastery, as suggested earlier) point bonuses, just for the mage classes. Not remotely balanced, just giving an idea of what I think:

Fire - Increases Fire damage and resistance by 10%
Water - Increases Water damage and resistance by 10%
Air - Increases Air damage and resistance by 10%
Earth - Increases Physical damage and resistance by 10%
Arcane - Increases Arcane damage by 10% and Mana Regeneration by 0.5

Aether - Increases Spell Speed by 20%
Wildfire - Dealing Fire damage has a chance to summon a Faeros to assist
Ice - Increases damage dealt to Frozen targets by 20%, and deals Cold damage to targets that resist your Freeze effects
Storm - Lightning damage has a 25% chance to chain to a target within range 5.
Stone - Each turn you remain stationary increases all damage and resistances by 5%, stacking up to 5 times

Temporal - Increases Global Speed by 10%
Meta - Increases your total Spellpower by 30%
Phantasm - Removes the damage penalty of Invisibility effects
Divination - Grants Telepathy/All within radius 5

Nightfall - Increases Darkness damage and resistance by 10%
Grave - Grants 10% Lifesteal
Necrotic Minions - Increases all damage and resistances of undead minions by 10%
Advanced Necrotic Minions - Grants all undead minions an additional ability
Necrosis - While below 0 health, increases all damage and resistances by 50%
Shades - absolutely no idea, can't think of any coherent, thematic bonus for this tree

Explosive Admixtures - Reduces the cooldown of Throw Bomb by 1 and Shockwave Bomb by 2
Golemancy - Increases the damage and resistances of your Golem by 20%
Infusion - Increases your Fire, Acid, Lightning and Cold resistance penetration by 15%
Advanced Golemancy - Grants your Golem a prodigy
Fire Alchemy - Increases your Fire damage and penetration by 10%

Staff Combat - Increases Staff damage by 20%, and Channel Staff becomes a beam
Stone Alchemy - Gem bonuses are increased by 50%

Some good ideas there.

I liked this idea back when Housepet first suggested it, started up a list along these lines, and showed it to friends.

The reactions I got were very negative on kneejerk, and even when I talked a while about it, it still struck them as a massive complexity boost/coding requirement for very little actual gain to the game, so I tossed the idea.

I can post the two metacategories I did complete if there's interest, I suppose, but it did somewhat kill my enthusiasm; I couldn't come up with a good argument about the coding required.

How would you communicate these to the player?

That's a shame. I don't see it as being lots of extra work if we stick with simple passive benefits like +damage and modifications to existing talents. Is there some existing function to check if a tree has been assigned a cat point? If so it seems like a simple coding job, providing the bonuses aren't too complex.
I'd be curious to see the categories. If they did get in, I'd probably want a way of obtaining these outside of category points - maybe the previous suggestion of 'mastery points' which can be used only to improve existing categories, with existing cat points usable for this too on top of their normal functions. Of course that would lead to the problem of it being too obvious - a wildfire archmage would just mastery point fire and wildfire 100% of the time. Unless you could pick from 2-3 bonuses? Would be interesting to 'evolve' trees at a high level to pick from a unique benefit, but that would be a massive design investment.

Mewtarthio wrote:How would you communicate these to the player?

Each category actually has its own description field.

There has been a pair of hooks around for ages that would make this very easy to code.