ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

First of all, many rogue talents already use accuracy vs saving throw to land status effects so physical power on knife mastery really only serves to increase damage.

So the idea is to roll knife mastery into Combat Accuracy. Something like increases Accuracy by X and Knife damage by Y%. Then to have knives scale damage based off Accuracy instead of Physical Power.

Weapon Mastery would stay as it is.

So basically we'd have two talents, one for accuracy and knife damage, one for physical power and non-knife damage.

Sounds good to me.

I've pushed for rolling Knife Mastery into Weapon Mastery before, but this is an interesting alternative.

Both simple and intuitive. I like it a lot. It also means boosting Accuracy on high Dex characters isn't wasted.

Brilliant.

I disagree with having knifes scale with accuracy instead of physical power, as that makes them a special case. Every weapon currently scales with physical power.

Basically the above two posts.

If you want to make knives be more accuracy dependent, just give them a nicer accuracy bonus, or something.

What I did was:

- Weapon Mastery: knives, axes, swords, shields, bows, slings, etc. (basically everything except staff, mindstar, and Exotic weapons) -- at 80% effectiveness, no stat requirement, level requirement only

- Agile Mastery: knives & whips -- Dexterity requirement, 100% effectiveness

- Greatweapon Mastery: 1-h and 2-h weapons including Tridents (but not daggers, whips or shields) -- Strength requirement, 100% effectiveness -- this is what the Warrior escort can give

Items can be made to alter the mastery level of a skill tree, so why not use this?

My proposal

I suggest having seperate trees for "Agile Combat" and "Mighty Combat".

• Daggers, whips and tridents favor the Agile tree and apply a strong penalty to the Mighty tree.
  Mauls, maces and axes favor the Mighty tree and give a strong penalty to the Agile tree.
  Swords are equally good with either tree.

It better to start with a generous mastery level and apply penalies, than it is to give bonuses. Otherwise dual-wielding would get a double benefit.

Each tree has seperate skills for 1-handed and 2-handed weapons.

Agile Combat/2-handed starts locked. It is taught by the Warrior escort in place of Exotic Weapons Mastery.

The player need only focus on one of these four talents, whatever weapon combination they choose. They can use unusual weapons and still benefit from this skill, albeit at a penalty.

Agile/2H is a more desirable unlock than Exotic because it is also useful for swords. Some of the best weapon artifacts are two-handed swords.

NB I did have a dive into the code to see how it could be implemented. It is a little trickier than I thought it would be because 1-handed and 2-handed versions of the same weapon use the same label. I think that is the only difficulty.

Merging knife mastery with another tree sounds great! Can't think of any reason not to.

I would like to revive an old suggestion I've made when then masteries were 10 talent points each: just get rid of Combat Accuracy. Apply the increased accuracy effect to the respective mastery, so Weapon Mastery (or Heavy Weapons Mastery) would add accuracy when using swords, axes and hammers (I'd put tridents here too) and Dagger Mastery (or Light Weapons Mastery) when using daggers (and whips). Also get rid of Exotic Weapon Mastery.

Another option about exotic mastery, in lines with this suggestion. Keep the general idea of a bonus in all exotics for Legacy of the Naloren, with the theory that nagas have a Third Way of weapon techniques based on their restricted (but high) agility and their extreme strength in manipulating a weapon along certain lines of motion.

However, do away with exotic mastery as a category in itself otherwise. Have warrior and rogue escorts give you the option of a passive that you can take at one level only, which acts as a flag. Warriors can make it so that you gain proficiency in tridents along with swords and mauls, while thieves can train you to gain proficiency with whips according to your investment in training knives, however we want to handle knife mastery. When you get Legacy of the Naloren on top of your usual escort training you are even better with exotic weapons than you are with their standard counterparts, and even if you don't want to go Legacy you can become decent with exotics if you are diligent with escorts and not too unlucky. Further, escorts are now offering an option that is somewhat niche and has no equivalent elsewhere in any class, helping to keep classes unique, the prodigies that unlock out-of-class trees special, and exotics worth thinking about for a player who is cunning and has good knowledge both of their class and of the range of available fixed artifacts.

Also, more exotic categories would be kind of neat, with the main idea of exotics being to drop a few fixarts that might make for an interesting sidegrade on many classes, while Legacy of the Naloren exists in part to reward you for committing to a sidegrade strategy. Escorts act as a way of restricting the drops of exotic weapons without actually restricting the drops. To be interesting, exotic weapon fixarts should be more or less guaranteed to drop so that the player can actually see what they do and contemplate using them on their current build, or some future. In line with the idea that exotics are meant to be relatively special and weird sidegrade choices, everything about them should scale with proficiency, so that people don't wield them merely for their spell-on-hits, passive bonuses, added talents, etc, which exotics should have because of the opportunity cost of kitting for them and the general inability to get them from general randart drops which often generate something quite powerful just because of the large numbers generated.

edge2054 wrote: So basically we'd have two talents, one for accuracy and knife damage, one for physical power and non-knife damage.

We're creating a special exception for dagger users that means that all the items and egos that are already in the game that have physical power are no longer useful for dagger users and all accuracy is doubly valuable for them because it's both accuracy and physical power rolled into one. Dex becomes the ultimate stat because it's power and accuracy and crit reduction and defense.

In the end, I'm not sure what benefit this would have? Is the point to increase the damage of rogues or increase their available generic points or make 1h-and-dagger dual wielding easier?

My intention was the later.

I'd consider making the solution specific to a class where this makes sense. Marauders, ABs already do really good damage and dual wielding 1h + dagger doesn't really need to be made easier for them. TWs are an interesting case where this is very thematic and very hard to pull off, so maybe they need a special rule in one of their fundamental class talents (weapon folding, maybe) that either 1) allows them to use higher of the two masteries for the other as well or 2) scales damage bonuses of daggers from accuracy rather than phys power.

Swordbreakers are weak knives that have a chance to disarm on hit, and give bonuses to dual weapon defense. Rapiers are 1h weapons that use dagger mastery and rely on strength