ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

At the moment vampires are in the description of the Undead race meta-category, but are not a playable race. That makes me a bit sad.
Equally, if not more importantly, vampire enemies are a bit bland, being more like one-trick spellcasters/summoners than powerful life-stealing beings.

Racials:
Vampiric Condition
Passive. +1 Str, +1 Mag, +8% cold res, +2% cold res cap, +8% nature res, +2% nature res cap, -6% light res, -5% light res cap per talent level. Resistances should scale with raw talent level (up to level 5) while stats scale with effective infinitely.
Blood Drain
Active. All damage dealt to enemies that are within (1,2,3,3,4) tiles away will heal you for X% of the damage done, scaling with Magic, for the next 8 turns. Damage dealt to enemies out of range will still result in life drain, but effects will diminish significantly with distance. I'm thinking this would replace Vampiric Gift on most enemy vampires.
Evil Eye
Active, range (1,2,3,3,4). Level/magic check (similar to dominant will) vs a single enemy, checking confusion resistance. If it passes, the enemy is dazed for a few turns. If it fails or is resisted, the turn is not used (like dirty fighting).
Mistform (latest ideas from Bpat) (still under construction!)
Active, instant. Cooldown (47,44,41,38,35). Turn into an incorporeal cloud of mist for 3 turns, increasing movement speed by 200-400%, scaling with Magic, and making you immune to all non-mind damage and all physical and magical debuffs. This effect ends once you do anything other than move. Telekinetically wielded weapons will not attack while in mistform.

Base Stats:
Base status resistances that go with vampires (I forget what all they are)
+3 Str
+2 Mag
+1 Dex
-1 Con
+2 Cun
10 life per level
die at -3 life per level
25% exp penalty.

Vampire Enemies
Asthetics: Move Master Vampire the most powerful vampire - Elder Vampire takes Master's V. old spot and skillset, etc, so hierarchy is as follows: Lesser, Normal, Elder, Lord, Master.
Remove Vampiric Gift from all V. except Master V.
Remove Blurred Mortality from all V. except Master V.
All V. have greater bonuses to resistances from the first Vampire racial.
All V. have runes (1,2,3,3,4) based on hierarchy.
All V. have level-appropriate racials.
Lesser V. gets Invoke Darkness
Normal V. gets Circle of Death, Stun
Elder V. gets Invoke Darkness, Cold Flames, Stun
V. Lord gets Invoke Darkness, Circle of Death, Fear the Night, Impending Doom, Forgery of Haze, Stun
Master V. gets all of V. Lord's plus Rigor Mortis, Frostdusk, Cold Flames, Vampiric Gift, Freeze, Blurred Mortality. Not quite as tough as The Master, but definitely a dangerous foe.

Critique welcomed - I know I'm no expert!

Orangeflame wrote:Dazzle (blatantly ripped from Slash'Em) (open to suggestions)
Active, range (1,2,3,3,4). Level/spellpower check (similar to dominant will) vs a single enemy. If it passes, the enemy is dazed for a few turns. If it fails or is resisted, the turn is not used (like dirty fighting).

Shader effect would obviously be sparkles.


No but seriously don't call it Dazzle. Call it something darkly emo-goth like Domination Gaze or Bewitching Glance or Evil Eye.

Vampires are currently pretty bad, so yeah this is a good idea. My idea for Vampire abilities (as NPCs) was the following:
Draining Bite - Lifedrain damage, Stun, Bleed. Replaces Stun on existing Vampires.
Vampiric Embrace - Grapples, inflicts constant Lifedrain damage. Draining Bite does something extra, like a guaranteed crit or extra damage when used against grappled targets.
Feeding Frenzy - Grants inherent Lifedrain damage on attacks. Against bleeding targets, gain a temporary boost to the lifedrain.
These were designed as NPC abilities, so would probably need changing for a player. Other suggestions include the whole Mistform thing (or even a cloud of bats?) as a defensive/mobility talent.
And yeah, Dazzle would just make me think of Edward Cullen. Vampires in myth have been known to have mental powers of a sort, so one of Doctornull's names with Daze or perhaps a Beckon effect would be good.
Honestly, there's enough here to make a whole Vampire class.

Personally, I want to stay away from making it bleeding based, as there would be too much overlap with other addon classes like the flenser and blood knight.

Adding a stun anything longer than a 1 or 2 turns to the Bite would be too powerful, especially if the player is using a class that has stuns of it's own, like berserker. A little bit of bleed damage would be good thematically, though!

Agreed, the bleeds were a leftover from my notes on how to buff NPC vampires and necromancer summons, which is also the origin of the grapple/frenzy. I think giving it a bleeding DoT that also caused attacks against the bleeding target to drain life would be thematic and unique.

For a powerful 4th tier talent I think Mistform would be best, as Ghoul/Skeleton both have incredible durability - perhaps on taking fatal damage you turn into an invulnerable, fast travelling cloud of mist for a couple of turns, like so?

Mistform
Passive. On taking fatal damage you become an intangible cloud of mist for X turns. While in this form you may pass through walls, gain X% increased movement speed and are immune to all attacks. On reforming you will be greatly weakened, with your maximum health and global speed reduced. This weakness will partially fade over time, but you will not fully recover until you have fed X times via your Draining Bite. You will not be able to make use of Mistform until you have fed a further X times.

So it'd be a good anti-death talent like Cauterize, but with a pretty powerful drawback. If you aren't able to escape or your foes aren't near dead themself, the speed/health debuff will leave you pretty defenceless. And it wouldn't be up every fight, as you'd need to spend a fair amount of fights afterwards feeding, first to recover from the debuff and then even more to get Mistform back.

Hunger Passive lifedrain that scales with your missing life.

Bloodlust Heal X% of bleeding damage inflicted in radius 3.

Vampires more interesting as enemies? Yes, and triple yes!!

Vampires as a player race...no. Part of my reason is that the first major boss and dungeon are themed around a really powerful vampire, and vampires are portrayed as cold and malevolent masters of other undead when they actually manage to retain their intelligence and their sanity doesn't drown in the hunger of the void. I'd rather see a mainline wight or shade player race. To make it a tad interesting, lore-wise, wights more closely resemble vengeful spirits than necromantic constructs (though they can be constructed through a magically tortuous death). Your character would wake up in the starting necromancer dungeon, but it's in disarray as a mob with torches and some marauder talents has come to destroy the foul place, you take the cloak and try to make your escape, but can't resist your hatred and cannot leave a level without killing everyone, including a partially-constructed, partly-destroyed, flaming runed bone giant at the very end. Having regained your senses a bit, you are free to roam, but retain access to the lair, which you can attach to the fortress with a portal for suitable energy. It's strongly implied that you are the shade of the necromancer himself, who was easily killed by the mob.

There are player corrupters, ghouls and skeletons, all of which are portrayed either as mindless constructs or vicious killers when played by NPCs. I don't see how Vampire is any different.

Vampire is cliche, especially the wish-fulfilling I-wanna-play-a-vampire bit. From the roguelikes that I know, vampiric player races are generally not that fun. The demand of being subservient to external lore and generally stylish tends to make the actual game mechanics meh. In this game I think it hinders the story to have vampires as a player race. A deus ex machina for constructs being conscious is fine, for me, as a rare fluke of some exotic/incompetent form of necromancy, compared with a reduction of the in-game idea that advanced vampires control other undead.

I have a plan that includes becoming a Vampire after siding with the Master.

A neater idea.

I think the biggest problem with vampires is deciding how to do the lifedrain. Sticking to realworld lore means a bite, but that's a melee attack, which would automatically preference the race to melee units (and the +Str/+Mag already preferences them to Arcane Blades, not that I disagree with those stat boosts). Other options could include a cone type ranged blood drain, which could still be said to be you consuming the blood, you just don't have to bite the neck. Likewise, a single-target with long range would work. These, however, would make the Vampire more caster-oriented. I mean, those would still WORK for meleers, they just FEEL more caster-themed. I think the most reasonable, most class-generic thing would be to grant either passive life-drain or a temporary on-activate life drain (maybe 3 turns of 100% chance for 100% heal, or something).

Actually, I think I like that on-activate ability, just so long as it's instant cast.

I love the Mistform idea. It fits thematically, it's not OP, and it gives an interesting game element. Maybe make it something like +300% movement speed. If given for 3 turns, that means you could only get 9 tiles away, but in many areas that's enough to get through a wall. At the same time, like many teleports, that's no guarantee of safety unelss you've already explored that area. Additionally, the lingering weakness means you probably couldn't just flee, rest up, and return at 100%.

I like the idea of a cone-shaped drain - but for fairness, I think it should give less healing/damage dealt the more enemies are hit by it. It shouldn't be only effective against crowds and useless against single targets, or a full heal from a crowd and a decent heal from a single target.

Mistform is cool, but I'm not a huge fan of total invulnerability. In addition to the wall-phasing and +300% move speed, how about immunity to all new status effects, positive and negative, while it's active; restores you to 1 hp; and reduces all incoming damage by a flat (60, 67, 72, 77, 80)% that is applied after everything else, like meditation's end damage penalty, but defensively?


Making changes to OP.

Orangeflame wrote:Racials:
Vampiric Condition
Passive. +1 Str, +1 Mag, +16% cold res, +2%cold res cap, +16% nature res, +2% nature res cap, -10% light res, -5% light res cap per talent level. Resistances should scale with raw talent level (up to level 5) while stats scale with effective infinitely.
Blood Drain
Active, range 3 cone. Deals damage based on spellpower/level, healing the user for (80, 90, 100, 110, 120)% of the damage dealt divided by the number of enemies targeted. I'm thinking this would replace Vampiric Gift on most enemy vampires.
Evil Eye
Active, range (1,2,3,3,4). Level/spellpower check (similar to dominant will) vs a single enemy. If it passes, the enemy is dazed for a few turns. If it fails or is resisted, the turn is not used (like dirty fighting).
Mistform (thanks Razakai) (under construction!)
Passive. Upon receiving a blow that would kill you, you lose your form and become an intangible cloud of mist for 3 turns, removing all physical status effects upon you and restoring you to 1 hp. While in mistform, you have +300% move speed, are immune to all new status effects, good and bad, can move through walls, and receive (60, 67, 72, 77, 80)% less damage from all sources. When this effect runs out, you are weakened, lowering your max hp by (40, 50, 55, 58, 60)% and your global speed is set to 80%. Afterwards, each enemy hurt by your Blood Drain will restore you 1% global speed and 2% max life, doubled for kills. This talent will only come off of cooldown after you have been fully restored.

Vampiric Condition is too good since cold and nature are among the most threatening damage types in ToME while light damage isn't ever a serious threat. Instead of 16% cold and nature resistance and -10% light resistance, both these numbers should be reduced by 40-50%. The resistance caps are fine.

I don't really like the idea of Blood Drain being useful as an offense ability since it will be either too good or a waste of a turn. Instead, I recommend replacing it with a passive or temporary lifesteal boosting talent.

Evil Eye is good, if a bit weak. It should scale with Magic instead of Spellpower for consistency with other racials and it should be a bit stronger. It should probably confuse as well since many enemies are immune to stun/daze.

Mistform is too complicated and not very good since if you're at 1 hp, you'll die in a hit regardless of damage reduction. I recommend changing it to an activated talent that lasts 3 turns, gives 200-400% movement speed scaling with Magic, and makes you immune to all non-mind damage and all physical and magical debuffs, but it ends early if you use any talent. Cooldown would be 47/44/41/38/35. This way it can still be good for escaping but it won't just be a weaker and more complicated Cauterize.

Wouldn't Blood Drain be almost like a crowd-form of Blood Spear? Although the argument of it being too useful is valid...

For Mistform, perhaps it cancels except with Vampire racials? Or is that too powerful as well?