ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Command Alchemist Staff
Alchemist only replacement for Command Staff - now limited to 5 elements (phys, fire, acid, frost, lightning). Command Alchemist Staff is now an Instant ability. Cooldown lowered to 3.

Your Bombs now match your Staff element, removing the need to swap your Infusion and your Staff to maximize your damage output. New players don't realize swapping your Staff element to match your Bomb element boosts Bomb damage, so this takes care of that aspect for them.

X Infusion renamed X Mastery - you gain the same benefit you currently do from leveling these, they are just passive now and activated by Command Alchemist Staff. Applying an element without X Infusion ranks just gives your Bomb that damage type without any additional benefits provided by the X Infusion skills currently (bonus dmg, bonus debuffs).

Throw Bomb
Tooltip adjusted to mention "use Command Alchemist Staff to select an element for your Bomb".

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Alchemists are meant to be the most newbie friendly caster, but having to spend 2 turns aligning your elements when you run into something immune or highly resistant to X is a pain. This would be less of a problem if you did not start in Scintillating Caves as the "Mage" race (Shalore) where there are lots of 100% immune Crystals running around, immune to 2 of your 3 starting bomb elements.

Newbies don't know they can leave the Scintillating Caves so don't tell me they should do that

Solution: reduce number of actions needed by the player to 1, and make that action instant to reduce the annoyance factor of having to do it at all in the middle of a threatening situation. Superior new player experience achieved!

I think having the infusions automatically swap your staff's element to the corresponding damage type would be a simpler, less limiting option.

stinkstink wrote:I think having the infusions automatically swap your staff's element to the corresponding damage type would be a simpler, less limiting option.

What is being limited? Having to go through 2 menus to change your element on a class that is clearly defined as only caring about 4 (and kind of sort of physical on the Alchemist itself) is unnecessary and a UI flaw.

I was gonna say Spire of Telos, but I just looked at the code and was misremembering how it worked. I'm still loathe to put any potential limit on wacky gimmick builds, though.

stinkstink wrote:I was gonna say Spire of Telos, but I just looked at the code and was misremembering how it worked. I'm still loathe to put any potential limit on wacky gimmick builds, though.

If this wasn't intended as "Intro to Casters 101" I would agree about not limiting wacky builds, but sometimes guiding with a firm hand is better when people don't know wtf is going on

Alchemist is not complicated.
Restricting strange options doesn't help the player learn that they aren't helpful.
Not every staff can be tuned.
The starting bonus of a staff is 10%, you won't notice that it is missing at low levels. You don't need to switch it to blast something that is immune to your normal bomb colour.

HousePet wrote:Not every staff can be tuned.

This is what I love about you, even when you're being contrarian you manage to say something useful sometimes I didn't realize this was a thing, how strange. I guess it must only be uniques that you can't tune? Or is this a property that shows up in randarts too?

Reality is contrary.