ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I don't understand why Anthorils get so many spells that only hit a small radius centered around them. Anthorils don't get the survivability needed to stay that close to enemies; Celestial/Light can only do so much. I propose Sunburst, Sunflare, Twilight Surge, and Mind Blast be given a range of 6 or 7 and made smite-targetable. (I'm not sure if smite-targetable is the ToME4 word for it. In DCSS spells like Starfall, that you can target on any in-range square you can see, are called smite-targetable.)

Anyway, I think it would not only make those spells more useful, but would make sense flavour-wise (calling down the sun and stars) and would gel with the rest of the Anthoril abilities.

Anorithils seem pretty survivable to me, at least on Normal. You can pick up several Crowd Control abilities on Anorithils that a well-managed player can avoid dying for a lot of the game.

Recently when I did a Higher Anorithil recently, outside of a few early deaths I pretty well didn't die until very near the end of the game.

That said, I do think that Sunburst* might be an okay candidate for this. It doesn't offer enough damage or utility like the other talents listed to really make up investing in it.

*Edit, listed Sun Flare which is fine.

Not survivable enough for those spells to really be worth it. I mean, Twilight Surge has a radius of 2. Two! It's practically a melee ability. You put a single point in it to get to Starfall, and maybe sometimes use it for a tiny amount of extra negative energy if you can spare the turn. It might as well not exist. But if it's got 6 range or so, suddenly it becomes worth using on groups of enemies. Same thing with Sunburst, except nobody even puts one point in it because it's the tier 4 talent.

Mind Blast and Sun Flare are both okay, I guess. Blind and Confusion are pretty nice. Still, I think that they should be given a range and probably have their radius reduced a bit so you don't have to worry about hitting yourself with them, and also because Anthorils generally have smallish AoE radii.

Anorithils are very good at melee range. You have to have something to counter the healing, shielding and curing they get.

Actually I disagree that Anorithils have good defense, in fact, they probably have the third-weakest defense out of all the mage classes only beating Alchemist and Paradox Mage, since Aegis, Bone Shield, and Necromancer's various defenses are all better than just Light and Circle of Warding.

Don't forget chants and hymns: Hymn of Preservation can give around 55% stun, blindness, and confusion resistance at the end of the game; a hymn either something like +70 physical and spell save, or 20% physical resistance, or 20% elemental resistance (well, not worth much in the East); two other circles can give you +30 defense and silence immunity.

They are great at dealing with status effects but lack huge shields.

That's true, status resistances are nice, but Hymn of Preservation severely cuts your damage due to being mutually exclusive with Hymn of Moonlight. Chants are getting defensive buffs next patch so they should be better for defense after that.

bpat wrote:Chants are getting defensive buffs next patch so they should be better for defense after that.

Oh good. I was worried they'd be forever useless.

And yeah, Anthorils can achieve 100% stun resist with just a couple of rings + some generic points and that's really nice, but that means you don't get to use Hymn of Moonlight so there's little reason to be close to enemies anyway. You can use Moonlight to rip through medium-sized groups of trash mobs, but it's not useful when you're actually in danger of dying; i.e. fighting massive hordes of enemies, or a single very dangerous enemy like a unique or boss. Against massive hordes, you run out of negative energy and can't cast 3/4ths of your spells. Against single dangerous targets, it doesn't do nearly enough damage to matter and you really want that stun resist.

Wait, why is Sun Flare is just Illuminate but with half the radius? It's kind of stepping on Phantasm's toes there.

Izicata wrote:I don't understand why Anthorils get so many spells that only hit a small radius centered around them. Anthorils don't get the survivability needed to stay that close to enemies; Celestial/Light can only do so much. I propose Sunburst, Sunflare, Twilight Surge, and Mind Blast be given a range of 6 or 7 and made smite-targetable. (I'm not sure if smite-targetable is the ToME4 word for it. In DCSS spells like Starfall, that you can target on any in-range square you can see, are called smite-targetable.)

Anyway, I think it would not only make those spells more useful, but would make sense flavour-wise (calling down the sun and stars) and would gel with the rest of the Anthoril abilities.

Maybe what you really want is the Sun Bow Paladin. They shoot bolts of pure sunshine from their Celestial bows, blinding their foes and raining fire on their enemies.

I had a go at putting together a Sun Bow talent tree for paladins, after reading another thread about the love that archers don't get enough of. Using arrows to target spells was definitely part of their schtick.