ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Brainstorming based on: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=40996

More skill training

• Take away Survival from nearly everyone; offer it for 500 gp in Last Hope or Thalore-town, with another 750 gp to bump up mastery
• Lower mastery values for Combat Training by 0.10 across the board; sell +0.20 training in Last Hope for 500 gp
• Sell individual talent training, all the stuff you could get from Escorts, for 750 gp per generic point

Item Tweaking

• Sell access to alchemical imbue gemstones for 200 gp per tier of the gemstone (so embedding a t5 would cost 1k gp). Body armor only, of course.

Escorts
Sell a limited Golem (can't level, can't be healed) companion at Shalore-town.

Treasure Maps
Sell access to a couple of high-XP dungeons. In terms of balance, these would function like less random Farportal realms. This would also be a neat interface for quest addons to hook into, since each purchased quest would have an opportunity cost.

Highway Robbery
Allow the player to buy a way out of an encounter with Adventurers (not Patrols though).

Skill Training:

With the huge reduction of Traps there is no need for every class to have cunning/survival, so I agree it could be removed from most classes. And there is still the rogue escort quest that could give it out.

Don't think selling actual points is a good idea though. Alchemists would become GODS!

I would like to see a few more training options. Like training Bows in Shatur, Slings in Derth, Unarmed in the Ring of Blood.

Item tweaking:

Access to imbuing a gemstone is quite powerful and might have too big an impact on end game.

The only thing I can think of that wouldn't up endgame power much is the ability to tier up items.

Mercenaries:

Could have a small range of mercenaries available. They could be useful early for mages who run into resistance to their main element. I'd make them costly, but return half the cost if you return them home alive.

HousePet wrote:Don't think selling actual points is a good idea though. Alchemists would become GODS!

Yeah, hmm.

a) Maybe we don't care? Alchemists are not supposed to be a challenge class.

b) Maybe you can only buy one point per skill, so Escorts remain important and valuable.

I'm still hoping for at least semi-custom forging items in the Fortress. It costs a lot of gold (this process uses a different kind of power than the other Fortress processes, and the leftovers of gold were originally used to fuel it and similar armament powers), but you can choose not only the type of weapon and tier (not always tier 5, so it can open early), but at least have some say over the number and type of enchantments. I've seen a lot of suggestions, gaining enchantments over time through quests, through transmogrifying enough items with those enchantments, just choosing categories of enchantments and the specifics are random, etc. This would become a gold sink across the board for the game and would reduce some of the potential late-game frustration on not finding ANY decent X.

Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, allow someone somewhere to strip enchantments OFF equipment, so we have more access to white tier 5 weapons, armor, and jewelry for the Crystal set and gems.

Both sound good, but based on what I understand of the nature of ToME, we'd need some serious drawbacks. Perhaps only allow x forges per character, for example? And of course, make it very expensive.

As for a class... An "artificer" (I hope I'm using this term properly!) would be a really cool class. I'd be inclined to try my hand at them... If I had any actual ability to create that sort of thing.

item tweaking sounds really op and really meta
the limited golem and such would get used all the time by high level players
the selling skills from escorts parts, i like it and i dont like it at the same time
it takes away from people making themselves make a new character over and over and over again because they dont get a certain escort tree, but its also overcentralizing anyway, or something

i like the treasure maps idea, and I REALLY like the highway robbery idea, which should be limited to an amount that isn't based on your character level

furthermore, the artifacts from the dude in the assassin tunnels are a good enough way to dump money
if you do all the content you'll likely have enough money for 2 or 3 artifacts by the time you hit the level cap