ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Tireless Combatant
Your will carries you through the most difficult struggles, allowing you to fight on when others would have collapsed from exhaustion.

Thoughts: Class category that benefits anyone using Stamina, but ideal for classes that normally invest in Will as top 3 stat. Skirmisher prioritizes Dex and Cunning, so adding this as a way of encouraging them to invest in Will afterwards would work well. Will scaling is not really necessary, since Will increases your max Stamina and that makes all of these abilities better by itself. Will is the required stat, though, to rank these up.

Breathing Room
Passive. Any time you do not have an opponent in a square adjacent to you, you restore x (1.5 * e.rank) Stamina at start of your turn. At rank 3 you also restore an equal amount of health any time Breathing Room activates.

Thoughts - Quick math: at effective rank 7 you would gain 10.5 Stamina and HP per turn. This talent benefits ranged / hit and run style characters more than straight melee fighters.

Dauntless Challenger
Passive. When the going gets tough, you get tougher. Gain (0.5 x e.rank * enemies in LoS) Stamina regen and beginning at rank 3 (3 x e.rank * enemies in LoS) bonus healing. The bonuses cap at 4 enemies in LoS.

Thoughts - Quick math: at effective rank 7 you would gain 3.5 Stamina regen and 7 HP regen per enemy. This talent benefits melee characters quite a bit more than Breathing Room will.

Steady Pace
Sustain. Instant. Control your movements to conserve your energy. While Pace Yourself is activated you are globally slowed by 10%, but receive a (10 + (5 * e.rank))% discount on all Stamina based abilities. At rank 3 the slow is reduced to 5%, and at rank 5 the slow is removed. No cooldown.

Thoughts - Quick math: at effective rank 7 you would gain a 45% Stamina discount. Good with any type of Stamina dependent class.

The Eternal Warrior
Passive. For each round in which you spend Stamina, gain a stack of the Eternal War buff. These expire after 3 turns, but new stacks refresh the duration. Max stacks 5.
For each stack of Eternal Warrior you gain (.5 * e.rank) Resist All and Resist All cap. At Rank 5, Breathing Room and Dauntless Challenger are 20% more effective.

Guess I'll take the position of looking at the elephant in the room - how does this fit in to the grand scheme of things in the game?

First, this category is based off the most powerful Stat in game. Besides the corresponding importance for Anti-Magic Categories, the Stat alone is extremely powerful for any and all classes with left over stat points to spend for the various bonuses it provides - and even more powerful for min-maxer players. Personally I don't think Willpower needs the help - but maybe Constitution?

Second, we have Combat Veteran which gives bonuses to Stamina and Hitpoints - and Spell Saves as well. Is this Category going to replace Combat Veteran or run along side of it in all instances? It might actually make sense to consider updating Combat Veteran with some of these ideas instead of making a new category.

Davion Fuxa wrote:Guess I'll take the position of looking at the elephant in the room - how does this fit in to the grand scheme of things in the game?

Did the elephant obscure this text:

ideal for classes that do not normally invest in Will

?

What I Davion Fuxa means is characters like an Anti-Magic Bulwark will build Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower, so the Willpower wouldn't be purely for this category but something they build anyway.

bpat wrote:What I Davion Fuxa means is characters like an Anti-Magic Bulwark will build Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower, so the Willpower wouldn't be purely for this category but something they build anyway.

As a third stat do people usually get over 50 in something? I was not thinking this would replace Combat Veteran on everything, just a few classes that don't normally want Will at all (Rogue metaclasses). Unless Antimagic Rogues are a big thing too?

I don't actually know a lot about Will outside of it being a primary stat for Cursed types and Psionics. So anyone with Antimagic 3rds it too then?

On Normal/Nightmare you can afford to max out three stats, on Insane/Madness you can take about 58 in the third. I don't like to go Anti-Magic but if I did I would definitely max Willpower or at least take it fourth after Cunning (but most people like Cunning a lot less than I do and would take Willpower third over Cunning).

Antimagic rogues are pretty great. Most of the rogue talents depend on accuracy instead of dexterity directly - since mindstars use willpower for accuracy you can ignore dex completely except for talent requirements. And yeah, all the antimagic talents depend on mindpower.

Anyone looking to get use out of their Anti-Magic Talents will indeed train up Willpower; on that point your already looking at the 3rd Core stat for anyone who went that direction in their game.

However, while bpat's correct in that I was referring to Anti-Magic, I was also referring to Non-AM's as well looking into investing in Willpower. Minor or major investments in Willpower can have some incredible outputs that really can't be ignored:

• -Players will invest in Willpower because Willpower is the go to stat that provides more benefits then Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Magic, or Cunning can match alone when your core stats are filled. Even if there might be an small influence* by another stat, some players will still invest in Willpower over them.
  -Players who really concentrate on raising their Willpower past 60 can also benefit from one of the powerful Willpower Prodigies.

Also to throw it in so it isn't forgotten - some Racial Talents (specifically Thalores here, since they draw the most notice for it) are based on Willpower.

*As a note to the small influence I'm mentioning - I'd note that when I was playing my non-AM Shaloran Berserker I had reached a point where I was trying to decide how to further develop my character. I could have focused my points into raising Dexterity, Cunning, or Willpower; this would likely be the same for most other Berserkers as well.

Both Dexterity and Cunning had locked Category trees that could provide some interesting benefits. Dexterity had Archery Training and Field Control locked up, Cunning had Dirty Fighting locked. In addition to these trees I got some minor benefits from Dexterity - Defense, Ranged Defense, and Accuracy; it also boosted some of my Talents on my Berserker a bit. In Cunning I got some bigger benefits in the form of Mental Save and Critical Hit Chance.

Willpower in comparison had no locked category, but the investment in the Stat itself would far surpass Dexterity and match Cunning quite easily (surpassing it for sure when Dirty Fighting was ruled out). Willpower would have been the optimum stat in my opinion (at this time, since I sort of know the value of having more Saves) if I had decided to unlock Superiority or Warcries on my that character - I'll note I didn't, I chose not to unlock Superiority or Warcries so Cunning simply looked stronger, especially for a Shaloran Berserker. That character went on to also unlock a Cunning Prodigy as well.

Hmm. Well my original reasoning was that the stat that increased your Stamina would be a good one for a Stamina oriented resource management tree. If Will is already a good stat then I suppose I could just balance this for 100 Will and offer it as a straight up replacement for Combat Veteran on anyone.

That probably means removing most of the influence of Will and relegating the stat to the requirement for ranking up the skills. Probably by some sort of diminishing returns.

edit: every talent revised, with a clearer optimum point spend for melee vs. ranged characters.