ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

A lot of classes are getting some love in 1.2, so I've been thinking about one of my favorites, the Temporal Warden.

TWs have two problems, balance-wise: they're ridiculously strong in the endgame and ridiculously weak in the early game. For the first problem, the main culprit is Damage Smearing, which converts all damage to temporal and can be kept up almost indefinitely (but is pretty mediocre early on). For the second, the main problem is the lack of much in the way of early-game damage and survivability talents.

I therefore suggest two fixes:

1. Make Damage Smearing a sustain that increases Paradox slightly when hit, disactivating if it fails the paradox check (similar to AM Shield). Make the smeared damage half physical and half temporal. This will still be quite strong in the endgame, but significantly weaker than before, since making the damage come from multiple types removes the possibility of cheesing wands and staves of warding and also makes stacking temporal resistance less effective. (Physical resistance is relatively difficult to find). It will also make the talent less boring to use and a bit stronger early on. Making Damage Smearing a sustain would also make it less dumb to pick a race other than Shalore, although Shaloren would still probably make the best TWs.

2. Rearrange TW talents so that they have some damage-dealing and protection talents at Level 1. Temporal Wake should be moved to L1, possibly as a result of shuffling around Invigorate and/or Strength of Purpose. Move Displace Damage to L1 or L4.

These are relatively small changes (no new talents, only one significantly altered talent), but I think they would make the class significantly better balanced.

1. Agree on making smeared damage half physical and half temporal. But I think Damage Smearing is already very powerful at early game and making it a sustain is way too strong. Damage Smearing is not only good for making damage into temporal one, but more importantly is that it spreads out damage over a few turns. The talent had saved me for numerous times even when I did not stack temporal resistance. Making Damage Smearing a sustain virtually prevents all stupid careless deaths.

2. Agreed, I always find it weird to have Temporal wake at L4

And I would like to suggest a big tweak here. I see that one of the core concept for TW is that they can switch between weapon sets instantaneously, and they should switch into melee/bows depending on situations. But it is clear that the bows (especially for the Epoch's Curve) are far superior to dual weapons for a TW and the dual weapons talents offers no synergy to the bows. Most players just cheese Celerity by placing a staff in the alternate weapon set to buff the spells or placing a blazebringer item to cheese Elemental Harmony. So I would suggest replacing the dual weapon talents with Shield Offence and have Celerity remove the cooldown for Block when switching between sets. The shields would give some survivability to the TW, and Overpower synergizes with bows quite well. And most importantly the Blocks can allow some tactical play and it would work very well with a bow.