ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

There's no reason to be wed to the Diablo II and such elder ARPG/MMO'ish notions of "wasted/sink" points trying to travel through a line/down a tree/across a ludicrous web of minor percentage points etc for ToME 4 for the skills you actually care about when you seek them for your playstyle--surely it is far better to allow folks to free-form it as they see fit for more personalized characters and themed builds?

The ideal would be able to rearrange given skills within a line to where you can access it at the requisite level and stat score thresholds---but as a much easier stopgap, why not just de-link the entire lot of them in the exact fashion as has already been long since done to good effect with the Generic Weapons & Armor Training skill line?

You get your needed raw skill and/or stat points and/or levels as it goes---then have at it without needing to mess about in the slightest nor ponder about any temp point allotment nonsense as it is then a non-issue as you can spend them deliberately.

Break these old conventions and free people and add-on developers up to have more creative room to work in---the project already challenges a number of old tropes, so what's one more where nothing of value is lost?

Speaking as someone that's designed a few classes I kinda like the skill tree progression. It lets me do things like assume that a player will have Talent A before getting Talent B.

A good example of this is the slumber tree for Solipsists. Every talent in that tree modifies sleep effects. If the player could skip Slumber they could come back and be like, "what's with Dreamscape? It doesn't work". Well yeah, it only works on sleeping targets. "Well that's dumb."

There's also a certain amount of finesse involved in trying to make sure that every talent in a tree is good without just being a skill point tax on later talents.

In other words the constraints can actually foster creativity.

That said I will be doing a tree for paradox mages that is decoupled and mindslayers already do this as well. So it can be done. It's not a hard limitation of the system but rather a design standard that Darkgod has set. But it's only the standard. It's not a hard rule and people can certainly draw outside the lines a bit if it suits their ideas.

Aside from that, it really wouldn't be to difficult to build an add-on that did as you proposed. The game is moddable and if people want to mod it because they feel they'd have more fun playing it a certain way, more power to them.

Anyway that's my thoughts on it.

I dislike the Diablo standard of "I will sink as many points as possible into the talents I like and never, ever use any talents that have moderate utility, because that would lower my raw killing power, regardless of how effective it is.".

This change would increase that effect.

In other words, you're trading one overly central and annoying playstyle decision("I do not want to invest points in things I don't need") for another ("I only want things that fit my vision of how I can play-I should never have to adjust my playstyle to this skill oriented game!").

If I could see some way this improved the skill ceiling of the game or general nuisance value, etc., but it's mostly a psychological desire on the part of some players to remove this, rather than something imbalancing or useless.

If something never gets used at L1, it does need to have its talent curve buffed up. But that's the extent to which I, personally, feel it's a problem. It doesn't matter if the player wants something-the question, with a high challenge game, is often if they have to have it. And that's basically how strategic gaming skill works-adjusting to that properly and making the most of it.

And optimally, required skill point sinks should be exactly that-a system of things you have to have, and therefore need to make the most of. If they're entirely useless, that's bad, but if they just don't fit your playstyle, that's not necessarily bad design.

(Do note I mean "required skill sinks" in the sense of needing an L1 to get to the next level. Required skill sinks in the case of "This class needs this talent at L5 to function" are a little different, and can range from reasonably good ideas(Arcane Blade's rather unique curve owes in part to a lot of very powerful sinks like this) to fairly poor ones(Skirmisher's Stamina values sound a lot like this).)

Primarily, my thinking was along thematic lines to improve flavour---some of the biggest examples include Aether and Earth Archmages having to fiddle around with other things until Level 4/just to make it to Level 4 as opposed to just being able to jump right into the theme the way Fire, Cold, and Lightning ones can and begin chasing the themed specialist dream in earnest. It'd be one thing if there was actual synergy within a line as per the Solipsist example---but the outstanding majority of the classes really don't have that going on.

Also, remember that the requisites would still be there, so it isn't quite like I'm saying let folks have The Fearscape at lvl1 greatly reduced in power to scale or some such wackiness---it would still take a fair bit of game time survival as usual to get the various levels and stat numbers to start throwing into what valuable capstone or latter day skills that there are for most classes in general. Min-max power gaming isn't really my bag, but considering how long it can take in real time to net those 4 level increments and the general diminishment of The Ding when there's nothing you can do with the given points to proper satisfy----it is noticeable when you step back on it all as perhaps not as interesting.

Things have improved somewhat as far as stark diminishing returns and one-point wonder talents as of late---but there's still surely a heap of things to bear in mind with the various ongoing class renovations...especially most of the older ones that could surely benefit as much as the Berserker has.

Certainly, the above is a good example that culling skills in lieu of better ones, or moving scattering modest benefits into passives as opposed to yet more point investing, is a viable way about things.

Most classes can be seen as a palette upon which some number of theme builds can be wrought and painted across Maj'Eyal, weird and otherwise---this is a key strength of the game versus a great many others and I reckon enabling that with ease is probably more to the benefit in the long haul. Should one then step back and audit what the experience would be getting any given one off the ground with skill/generic points alone as opposed to being utterly gear locked, which is a bad idea given even the item vault isn't quite situated in such a way as to really allow for special builds of that sort even if they'd be very good indeed---this seems about the only way to do it barring massive redesigns and new talents.

Pie in the sky, but I'd really like to see DG take a page from the venerable DoomRL as far as challenge mode character builds in terms of another angle around this.

Primarily, my thinking was along thematic lines to improve flavour---some of the biggest examples include Aether and Earth Archmages having to fiddle around with other things until Level 4/just to make it to Level 4 as opposed to just being able to jump right into the theme the way Fire, Cold, and Lightning ones can and begin chasing the themed specialist dream in earnest.

I would have no objections to swapping Manathrust and Arcane Power's positions and Pulverizing Auger/... Stone Skin, isn't it? on Earth.

That's a reasonable enough change.

For the rest... I personally am taking a note from other Roguelikes with my own viewpoint on low level talents, actually.

Just, a very odd note.

Sub-optimal consumables.

In many Roguelikes, you don't get the exact option you want to deal with a given situation every single time; In DoomRL, for example, you would like large Medkits and controlled phases all the time instead of random ones and small ones. But you have to make do, and you can do some startlingly good things with those, with skill. In Dungeon Crawl, scrolls of fog(which is just a temporary LoS blocker along the line of Creeping Darkness) are considered junk by newbies, but highly useful to the experienced. Not optimal but useful.

Of course, ToME lacks such an effect-no consumables. And indeed, that effect has its ups and downs. Most players can win if the RNG blesses them with high powered consumables. So a more stabilized version has its advantages.

To me, what an L1 talent should be like is exactly that, though; Something you can make do with, that provides you with an action better than the nothing you'd have if your cooldowns are down, offensively, or a weak but useful strategic option defensively. Yes, L1 of a talent is nowhere near optimal... but optimally, L1 of a talent should be something you can get use out of. I would say many talents manage this, but optimally I would like all of them to.

And yes, the player would like to not have to have L1 talents. But, they need to. Because, like weaker consumables, the game is both balanced for it and made more interesting by it, at least potentially in the latter case. I like to think that's being worked towards well.

Obviously I can't speak for DarkGod on this, this is just how I think personally.

Continuing the Archmage example then, wouldn't that make it a pretty clear case that having a Sustain for a Lvl 1 ability in any given tree is probably a bad idea unless it happens to be quite a potent/interesting one that will gain newfound utility beyond a humble start should further investments happen? I also reject the notion that every talent needs to even have a 5 point ceiling when you get right down to it---we've definitely come a long way into a far better place versus the days of 10 lvl Armor Training and there's nothing wrong with an actual one-point capped wonder made sufficiently potent and interesting(I reckon Prodigies are very much a WIP behind the scenes with still quite a lot being kicked around...). Active abilities are the #1 thing that will get most characters to level 4 at the very least given tactical positioning and whatnot considering you are quite outnumbered. Stone Skin kinda has a benefit, but not really especially for the early game save one particular gimmick build, and Arcane Power really doesn't in this context even with the addition of the Arcane Res that was recently added.

Letting players have ample agency in the early game character creation and beyond is definitely something to strive for---no reason to go down the Crawl and/or Nethack route of treasure/encounter grinder.

I'd be happy with Manathrust and Pulverising Augur being slot 1.
Caster categories should almost always have an offensive talent as their first slot.
Especially with a class like Archmage where you tend to focus on one or two elements.

They used to not be linked except by convention. There used to be some mindslayer trees that were flat when I first found T4. The way their locked trees are single element boosters while their base trees have the elements in sequence they should probably go back to having flat trees so you can make a thermal mindslayer without having to take kinetic stuff first.

Wyrmics would probably also benefit from being able to take their talents out of order so they could choose utility first or combat first in any given aspect.

Making selected trees flat does not force all trees to be flat. Ones where later talents rely on earlier talents obviously shouldn't be. Ones where you can already get stuff out of order from escort quests probably should lose the n talents in category prerequisites on at least some of their talents.

Umm, those Mindslayer categories currently are flat.