ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

If you float 4 talent points you can use all of your level one abilities at level 5 whenever you want. This is arguably fine in normal mode where people don't want to play optimally and convenience and comfort should take priority over optimal play not being incredibly boring but nightmare and insane are challenge modes and that challenge should not be balanced around or diminishable by your willingness to hit -shift-g rightmouse, rightmouse, rightmouse, rightmouse, leftmouse, leftmouse, leftmouse, leftmouse, escape, click yes- whether every turn, a few times per hard fight, or anything more than almost never. Challenge modes should not have adjustable difficulty reducers at all, least of all ones that you pay for by repetitive execution of tedious, easy tasks. Also adjustable difficulty dilutes the shared frame of reference that makes character reports so interesting to read as well as makes it harder to talk about balance.


hard modes should take what makes Tome4 interesting: what it's about, and force you to do it somewhere between better, much better and perfectly depending on the intended difficulty, or die, and there should be no diluting the challenge with unfun, easy, crap. If it's too difficult after you remove the gimmicks and tedium to power converters, make it easier until you have the same total difficulty as before but with x% more difficulty in interesting and difficult decisions and x% less in your willingness to perform boring exploits.

Don't get me wrong, I do like the fact that roguelikes can be tests of patience, will, dedication and determination, and that can come out best with a clunky interface and otherwise bad design: I've completed Nethack and ADOM, and yes putting work into a character does make you invest more and can make it more thrilling, but that kind of challenge is is ENDLESSLY available elsewhere and a complete waste of what makes Tome4 special.

What Tome4 does best is trying to guide your avatar down one of the narrow threads of possibility that can save the world. Your guy handles all the peon stuff like actually swinging the weapons, summoning the power of the arcane, eating, becoming invincible, raising the dead and finding somewhere to shit.

What you do is make the decisions: how best to fight or flee? Which? Or occasionaly, both. How to approach each fight, how exactly to dodge that projectile to position yourself right to take on the rest of the crowd, who the priority targets are, based on how much of a threat they are, how tough they are, how easily you can attack them, and what position you'll have to put yourself in to do so, the highest dps skill rotation, the highest burst ability order to kill that guy that needs to die now, the position that will let you beam/Aoe/ the most enemies at once while exposing you the least, Should you heal now or try to gib the enemy that's putting you in danger? Sometimes, if things go badly all you can do is pick the best dice to roll: e.g. Is a random torque/teleport here here more dangerous than standing and fighting? And of course build and equipment choices (Potentially changing directions to compensate for or take advantage of drops, though this could be a much bigger thing if categories were more equal) What order to take things on. etc etc etc.

That kind of thing is what you should have to do better and more consistently to succeed (or have a chance) in nightmare and insane.


The one nerf to sustains (can't run around with a 5 point sustain on a 1 point skill anymore) is a good sign but nowhere near enough
On a necro I can walk around with blurred mortality on all the time in case my arcane eye misses a stealthed enemy that could oneshot me. I can always use summon minions at level 5 from 1 points investment. I can walk around with a maxed aura so my summoned minions don't die (though that probably shouldn't be happening so easily anyway) I can always cast impending doom, banesmoke , icebomb and EVERYTHING at level 5 off one point investment as well as being able to give myself a 200hp cushion with no notice as early as level 3 or 4. I could also level up my nectrotic aura for 1 turn before a guaranteed kill to capture a soul if I'm tight on them and animus hoarder too to maybe get multiple. I essentially get lichform for free. You get the picture. The difference between a necro doing all that and not is day and pitchest, blackest, deathly cold night. It might sound pretty cool from a distance and thinking about how to exploit it is interesting, once, but the actual process is -shift-g, move mouse, rightmouse, rightmouse, rightmouse, rightmouse, move mouse, leftmouse, leftmouse, leftmouse, leftmouse, escape, click yes- and it's not the least bit fun or even difficult.


Whatever the total difficulty of the mode is, either part of it is in your willingness to endure this mind numbing procedure, and not in using the right talents at the right time on the right enemies, timing your shields/regens/heals, positioning, gear and talent decisions, bringing it down to the wire when necessarry, running when appropriate, understanding enemy attack patterns etc.

Or the boredom test is tacked on top of the balanced difficulty making it nothing but a real life cost to playing the mode.

If I wanted to test my determination with an annoying interface and pointlessly difficult execution of basic moves I wouldn't be playing Tome. If I wanted to not take advantage of massive, free (in game) power boosts I wouldn't be playing insane or nightmare.



I don't think I'd like combat talent point juggling eliminated completely in those modes. It would be a very interesting resource if limited. This has been discussed before so I'm going to repost ideas from this thread http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=38616here (some of which do advocate eliminating combat juggling): and maybe add one or two of of my own. The only objections in that thread are irrelevant if the change is limited to nightmare and up.

Ideas that eliminate combat juggling:

Only reassign points at level up -Doctornull
Only reassign points on world map -Doctornull
Put any talent you train up (not just from 0) on a longish (15-20) turn cooldown -Hachem_Muche
^except on levelup -Sageacrin

Ideas that reduce or eliminate strategic juggling too (points in and out of e.g. accuracy depending on area).

Make it so that only talents at level 1 are unlearnable -Minmay
Just don't allow any respecs ever -me. (including this for completeness' sake)

Ideas that heavily limit combat juggling

Reassign once per X turns -Crim, The Red Thunder (X was 20 in Thunder's post)
Don't let talents on cooldown have points taken from them -Hachem_Muche (lets you choose what talent to put to 5 every time you enter a fight so still encourages tedious exploitation)
Give people X (1 would be my first instinct) juggles per area they enter that are only usable in that area or the world map. Going out and in doesn't reset them. You can only have one that's usable on the world map at any time, and that point is overwritten (lost) if you enter a new area. -me
Possibly also allow a juggle at the start of every zone in combination with ^idea (mb except single area zones) -me

Hard to categorise

Reassign only when no talents are on cooldown -Crim, The Red Thunder (still lets you summon level 5 zombies off level 1 skill, maybe also shields and other things)
Give juggled talents a 1 turn cooldown -sageacrin (I think it would still be possible to exploit)

All of these except 3 solve the problem in different ways depending on whether people want to eliminate it entirely or just limit it.




Any objections to the general principle? Better ideas, sideways ideas? Please post what you think, especially if its hell yeah that would really improve nightmare and insane modes so it can be done ASAP.


If there is (hypothetically maybe, definitely not, but just in case) something I'm missing that makes this not a huge and straightfoward upgrade to nightmare and insane there could be alternate modes like nightmare (decisions) and insane(decisions) that limit juggling but are otherwise 70 or 80% (or whatever difference the change causes) difficult for people who want the challenge that Tome could be offering that is available nowhere else.



Also cheese and gimmicks, and boring easy crap should be reduced. Mindblast torque from zigur is a prime example. Runs should not depend on random spawns and it takes away from the uniqueness of melee if they just spam spells at enemies anyway. Whether it means an option to make berserkers angrier and rogues more sneaky in hard modes, or simply scaling the difficulty to the class there should be a a challenge available to play a rogue as a rogue but better, or a mindslayer as a mindslayer but better.

Equilibrium not increasing on rest is another boredom tax/boredom balance. You can always find some way to bring it to minimum so it should just happen automatically.


__


Unrelated but somewhat relevant good ideas from that thread:

Allow (possibly even more) juggling in the training room (why is this room locked at all btw?) -me to solve the problem of e.g. finding out how powerful ghoul rot lvl5 summoned ghoul is -pointed out by b0rsuk. (this might sound irrelevant but someone who plays insane might well try out an ability for the first time on nightmare)


allow full respec from eidolon -atarlost

Just bringing them up again because they seem like they might be good ideas try not to spend the majority of your post discussing these last two.

Bump. Seriously this is a straightforward improvement the only objections to fixing juggling were were that that change would affect a lot of people who it currently doesn't affect. This already affects everyone playing nightmare and up.

Agreed, and I've been wanting to suggest the same thing as well, actually. Freshly learned talents already start in cooldown, doing the same to upgraded talents would, I think, solve this issue the best. Having the possibility to float talent points outside of combat is healthy I think, and helps niche builds get going without wasting valuable generics.

Since you mentioned Equilibrium, I feel I should bring up paradox regeneration being painfully slow and tedious, even with Static History on autocast.

I agree with all these points. Point shuffling outside of combat could even stand to be a bit less restrictive, but point shuffling in combat should either be completely impossible or come with very significant downsides.

duckduckMOO wrote:Ideas that eliminate combat juggling:

Only reassign points at level up -Doctornull
Only reassign points on world map -Doctornull

Just a note here: both of these suggestions are for a FULL RESPEC* of points either once per level (convenient but tricky since you are not required to assign all points each level); or allowing you to FULL RESPEC any number of time you want but only on the world map.

Honestly I dislike the point-juggling meta-game. There are already talents which prohibit respec, and that mechanism seems sufficient to handle really problematic stuff.



*) Except for talents which prohibit reassignment, like Solipsism.

imo there shouldn't be reassigning skill points at all, once you learned them you are set

also, it's a bit of offtopic, but imo (i played a few roguelikes, won dcss, adom and incursion several times, didn't win tome except arena though, mostly because i constantly get bored with my characters) a roguelike should have 1 difficulty option (~normal) and 1 death option (permanent death), challenges should be self imposed rather than code imposed by increasing numbers. higher difficulties especially without permadeath look rather like something from jrpg world than roguelike, they decrease versatility of the game which is not that versatile already for a roguelike

btw i don't get why you even mention adom as if it had something like point juggling, adom doesn't even let you improve msicklick when you set your skill points, also it's many times more versatile than tome and allows a lot of crazy and interesting stuff

kyuubee wrote:imo there shouldn't be reassigning skill points at all, once you learned them you are set

That makes experimentation very expensive in terms of hours of my life invested, and heavily rewards reading spoilers over doing experimentation.

I personally find that kind of game play pretty shitty.

Doctornull wrote:

kyuubee wrote:imo there shouldn't be reassigning skill points at all, once you learned them you are set

That makes experimentation very expensive in terms of hours of my life invested, and heavily rewards reading spoilers over doing experimentation.

I personally find that kind of game play pretty shitty.

Then maybe you should be able to to assign "hypothetical" points in the talent screen so you would what skill does what instead of not getting rid of point juggling? It's already really hard to figure out how the skills scale in terms of points invested: I mean, if I have only one point to spend on a new skill tree, I won't have any idea how the last skill on that tree scales in terms of points invested, right? Maybe this could be fixed instead? So that you could see what the effects of points on any given skill would be if you had enough points/ unlocked the category at your current stats?

Mankeli wrote:Then maybe you should be able to to assign "hypothetical" points in the talent screen so you would what skill does what instead of not getting rid of point juggling? It's already really hard to figure out how the skills scale in terms of points invested: I mean, if I have only one point to spend on a new skill tree, I won't have any idea how the last skill on that tree scales in terms of points invested, right? Maybe this could be fixed instead? So that you could see what the effects of points on any given skill would be if you had enough points/ unlocked the category at your current stats?

Hmm, that would be interesting. I'm not sure it would solve all problems -- some people need to experience the talents in the heat of combat to get a genuine feel for them -- but what you propose would certainly be an improvement.

kyuubee wrote:imo there shouldn't be reassigning skill points at all, once you learned them you are set

also, it's a bit of offtopic, but imo (i played a few roguelikes, won dcss, adom and incursion several times, didn't win tome except arena though, mostly because i constantly get bored with my characters) a roguelike should have 1 difficulty option (~normal) and 1 death option (permanent death), challenges should be self imposed rather than code imposed by increasing numbers. higher difficulties especially without permadeath look rather like something from jrpg world than roguelike, they decrease versatility of the game which is not that versatile already for a roguelike

btw i don't get why you even mention adom as if it had something like point juggling, adom doesn't even let you improve msicklick when you set your skill points, also it's many times more versatile than tome and allows a lot of crazy and interesting stuff

Adom has altar camping and herb farming both boring ways to gain power and imo clunky controls. I wasn't saying those games had stuff like juggling anyway only that some bad design and clunky controls made them more challenging. Of those I mentioned Nethack was much less friendly and powder more friendly.

About higher difficulties, well, handicaps make things difficult in specific ways, but hard modes can turn things up generally. They serve different purposes. handicaps can can be implemented as play modes anyway, effectively turning them into subdifficulties which are the same but more convenient so I don't see any advantage in handicaps.

If increasing the difficulty railroads builds, rebalance the builds. Figuring out what tree is straight up strongest is interesting once but after that it's known, and what skills are best will be documented anyway, so it's best to simply balance all talents then people have to choose the one that is best for how their game is developing or simply their favourite/fits their playstyle rather than going down the known strongest build route.

By JRPG do you mean you simply sit their longer to kill higher hp monsters? There's no need for it to be like that and I don't think it even is like that in Tome, nightmare enemies are mostly more dangerous not more tough. I can't comment on insane because I haven't played it since I stopped playing -because of this whole issue- and I'm not going to slog through nightmare like this to unlock it unless I'm very very bored and don't fancy my chances without any juggling.
There shouldn't be any reason to play higher difficulties without permadeath. That's a cover up for unfair/unavoidable deaths which should not be minimised in every difficulty, not for a (much) higher death rate. And so what if it's not like a roguelike in adventure mode? Adventure mode isn't supposed to be like a roguelike

There is a natural problem with making combat more dangerous though and that's getting oneshot/having to constantly scout. Honestly the only way I see around this is some internal conwhatensy? solution like giving everyone telepathy 10 or 15 in higher difficulty modes or if you could just see every mage/archer enemy at all times, or if high densities of dangerous talents on enemies showed up as a red glob on the map/screen but constant scouting/vigilance doesn't ruin it for me like the option to juggle talents/ game balance around that fact does, and there's an easy to solution to the bigger problem. Anyway I didn't get oneshot from outside LoS yet on nightmare while autoexploring though I did die on first dungeon when I ran into two snake rares between me and the exit. I'd also like escapes to be much more limited so the focus is less on diligently running away and more on approaching and winning combats better but people may not share my preference.

If increasing the difficulty railroads playstyle into e.g. exploiting LoS and targetting just fix the problem! It's not inherent to hard modes. In this case the hard mode is overscaled, AI targetting should be improved, invincibility is too strong either in itself or in conjunction with other things (is it mostly in conjunction with super stacking buffs that lets you get things done in your limited turns of Invuln?) and enemies don't react properly to LoS (this could be hard to fix) The reason things get gimmicky on insane and up is because those gimmicks are just the strongest way to play period and they're the only things that can deal with an overscaled mode. "Insane is Insane." No it's not insane to to be railroaded into one style. It's dull. If the gimmicks were fixed and the mode was bought down correspondingly you'd have an equally "insane" difficulty but there'd be more and better ways to play it.

General reply:

I would prefer any change to be as small as possible initially just so this can be fixed asap, so I'd prefer if it not be a complete elimination of redistribution or to allow full respecs as part of any initial change. There are plenty of those suggestions that would predictably fix this and predictably affect nothing else so it would be best to just do one of those and then think about other changes.

Generally agree with you.

My preferred solution would be to get something like 10-20 respec points per level, and taking away a talent point would use up a respec point permanently. You could still try things out, or float points strategically, or once in a while boost your 1-point placeholder talent to 5 when it really counts.

Respecs only on the worldmap sounds okay as well, but would be a bit clunky. Putting changed talents on cooldown would work too, I think - anyway exploiting that would mean epic amounts of hit and run tedium- sure some people would still do it, but I would no longer be tempted.

Bump. No one likes unrestricted juggling and balance around that possibility. Haven't played much since this thread was posted a month ago because it ruins the mode for me.

duckduckMOO wrote:Bump. No one likes unrestricted juggling and balance around that possibility. Haven't played much since this thread was posted a month ago because it ruins the mode for me.

Honestly even if juggling were unrestricted all it would do for me is allow certain niche builds that only come together at high levels, which is an itch I currently scratch using Infinite Farportal.

That's why I'm personally in favor of unrestricted rebuild OUTSIDE of combat (on the wilderness map, in a city, whatever). Strategic and UI convenience, with all the tactical difficulty of no rebuilds during combat.

Doctornull wrote:

duckduckMOO wrote:Bump. No one likes unrestricted juggling and balance around that possibility. Haven't played much since this thread was posted a month ago because it ruins the mode for me.

Honestly even if juggling were unrestricted all it would do for me is allow certain niche builds that only come together at high levels, which is an itch I currently scratch using Infinite Farportal.

That's why I'm personally in favor of unrestricted rebuild OUTSIDE of combat (on the wilderness map, in a city, whatever). Strategic and UI convenience, with all the tactical difficulty of no rebuilds during combat.

I meant in combat juggling. How far you can respec and how you can abuse juggling are seperate issues.

i think there is a much more elegant way to approach higher difficulty in Tome.

Rather than increasing the amount of damage and the level of talents, increase the npc hitpoints significantly, and improve their ai.

that way, they are not senidng 15k thundrbolts = one-shotting, and you can'e knock them over with just the standard sequence of attacks.

in other words, increase their survivability and stamina and healing, rather than their dmg output.