ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

A lot of what I've heard from higher end difficulty players is that Con is somewhere between questionable and useless, due to the much higher damage margins involved on Nightmare and up.

This is sorta a shame, and Con isn't so powerful on Normal that it's OP to buff.

My idea is to add a 0.2% per point Healing Modifier bonus to it. Simple, not dangerous, and will make it at least worth consideration as a tertiary stat on Nightmare and up. It's not a perfect fix, but it's an improvement on the situation without much risk.

As an added bonus, this makes building Con for "logical" classes like Bulwark and Berserker-who get relatively less % of added durability from more HP-more useful, which is a nice perk.

I remember Starkeep had an addon that did some pretty substantial buffs to Con.

"Constitution now adds the following bonuses per point: 3 Con, 0.25% max health, 0.5% heal mod, 0.5% Stun Immunity, and 1 Max Stamina."

All of those combined might be overkill, but healing mod like you suggested is definitely a good start. It would be nice to have a Stamina bonus on it too, but maybe that overlaps with Willpower too much.

I like the idea of adding to healing mod… makes sense.

I would also like to suggest that each point in Constitution add to your hit point gain per level, but not retroactively. I'm not sure how much would be appropriate but it would make buffing Constitution early in a game worthwhile as it would have long-term benefits.

I forgot who, but someone in IRC suggested reducing fatigue with CON. I like that idea as it stays in theme and it probably doesn't run the risk of making CON a must-have.

Hmmm, 0.2% Fatigue Reduction and 0.2% Healing Modifier would buff mana mages a bit(who often end up with a little extra costs from wearing heavy helmets and boots), but I don't see it being at all overpowered.

It's an interesting option and certainly benefits stamina characters heavily, who thematically need the Con buff. I like that addition.

what would make more sense is more generics using constitution with ways to get tree or few skills, and more skills. For now constitution is used only by berserker. So it is by most part conditioning, and thick skin for genericks. What I would actully like to see more con based skill trees. Or maybe more con based classes.

SageAcrin wrote:A lot of what I've heard from higher end difficulty players is that Con is somewhere between questionable and useless, due to the much higher damage margins involved on Nightmare and up.

This is sorta a shame, and Con isn't so powerful on Normal that it's OP to buff.

My idea is to add a 0.2% per point Healing Modifier bonus to it. Simple, not dangerous, and will make it at least worth consideration as a tertiary stat on Nightmare and up. It's not a perfect fix, but it's an improvement on the situation without much risk.

As an added bonus, this makes building Con for "logical" classes like Bulwark and Berserker-who get relatively less % of added durability from more HP-more useful, which is a nice perk.

While I am not opposed to the idea, this would only make sense to go for as a tertiary stat with a class that runs Aegis.

Con is basically useless because 1) the hp buffer gained from it is insignificant compared to heroism infusions, shield runes and +hp items, 2) almost no skills run off con, and you can item swap to qualify for thick skin. Dex reduces the chance of being critted and so is a much better defensive stat.

If you really want to make it significant, you'd have to tone down heroism and shields, and significantly boost hp gain from con.

Yeah, I'm mostly talking about giving it a tertiary role, not overhauling a lot of the game (via adding more Con trees or overhauling infusions and runes, and such).

Con's difficult to make a main stat, and I'm not sure it'd be a good idea to make it one, given how people react to multiple attribute dependency. I'd rather make it a useful third/fourth choice on all difficulties.

As a few others said, Con should add both a flat HP boost, as well as a % based HP and healing mod boost.

The problem is that as it stands, dumping 50 points in con (making it max out at 60 instead of the base 10) means a whopping difference of 200 HP at max level. This is almost a joke. Now, if that extra 50 points of con meant another, oh, 25% max health? Now we're talking about something I'd spend points on.

It's pretty common in other games for constitution (or vitality or whatever similar stat) to boost the effectiveness of healing items. This is an important bonus, because when you have thousands of HP, a few more hitpoints won't matter. But being able to get yourself to full health with half as many potions (Or in this game's case, inscriptions) is noteworthy and makes you feel like you invested your points wisely.

In the past, Con actually used to be one of the best stats. 200 extra life meant that, if you had a max life of around 1000, you could take 20% more damage without being one-shot, which is pretty amazing. Compared to 50 physical power/save, for example, that was a great deal. And that was at its worst, which is endgame. Early in the game, say if you had 200 max life, a SINGLE point of Con increased the damage it would require to oneshot you by 2%. That's almost as good as Thick Skin. That's two stat points comparing favorably to a generic point. How often does that happen?

As supermini already pointed out, the big thing that changed was heroism infusions. Now max life from anything else has a drastically reduced effect, because who in their right mind isn't going to use a heroism infusion? So if we have a stat that used to be strong, but was eclipsed by a new thing that just blows everything out of the water, it seems like the logical thing would be to nerf the new thing instead of buffing what used to be strong. In general, this is what I would recommend, but heroism infusions just make this game better. They reduce one-shot deaths while not being overpowered for any other purpose, which is a fantastic thing. In fact, larger life pools for characters in general would help fix a major part of what is lame about ToME's gameplay, which is instant deaths.

Basically, this is a long-winded way of acknowledging that buffing Con would be egregious power creep, but in this case it's creeping in the right direction. So buff away!

Don't do healing mod though. Most heals in this game already heal you for over half of your health and you can use them every 15 turns or so. Heals in general are too strong. Heal mod would help in an area that's already too easy to manage (small amounts of damage over time) while doing absolutely nothing to help with what player characters really need help with (large amounts of damage all at once). You shouldn't be 90% of your health in one turn, then healing it all back in the next. Just do a straight life boost.

donkatsu wrote:In the past, Con actually used to be one of the best stats. 200 extra life meant that, if you had a max life of around 1000, you could take 20% more damage without being one-shot, which is pretty amazing. Compared to 50 physical power/save, for example, that was a great deal. And that was at its worst, which is endgame. Early in the game, say if you had 200 max life, a SINGLE point of Con increased the damage it would require to oneshot you by 2%. That's almost as good as Thick Skin. That's two stat points comparing favorably to a generic point. How often does that happen?
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You are right and wrong A you mentioned heroism infusions are quite well balanced for timed effect, plus it is not really good to invest in dood stat which scales nothing. Each class has some kind of safety mechanism scaling with one of stats or just power(if you kill something in one turn or too fast full set of abilities stops matter too much(only few possible from list you can't risk. I my oppinion magic and willpower are best for third skill. You most likely to have some mindpowers from Zigur or magic skills from escort, or just spells from items.
Dexterity helps a bit with crits, but usuallly classes require it don't have some sorts of damage resistances like corruptors, archmages, and defilers.
Strength is probably worst stat just caring capacity(we already long gone from angband where caring capacity matters, there are few usable items from inventory to care, and they are usually not savior.
Cunning is so so, if your class powered by crits it is good(extra crit damage or procs. Othervise well 50% extra effect just nice but maybe not nicer then some racial scaling dunno.)
Constitution has only one generic tree, and maybe few berserker class trees to scale and scaling not that great. Few more generics you might earn through travels could solve it. Though 50 to stat is like 33 worth of levels unless you are yeek archmage with 4 hp per level growth. 3 constitution if there is choice between of constitution or with health I pick last(goes up to +60 live and had at lvl1 rare with +100 extra life)

I'd love to see thick skin and all combat veteran skills scale with constitution.

Maybe add in some resource scaling too? Perhaps not for all resources, but it'd make more sense to scale Stamina with Constitution than Willpower.

Strongpoint wrote:I'd love to see thick skin and all combat veteran skills scale with constitution.

Seconded. That would also make Combat Veteran skills stronger, which can't be a bad thing.

Fhtagn wrote:

Strongpoint wrote:I'd love to see thick skin and all combat veteran skills scale with constitution.

Seconded. That would also make Combat Veteran skills stronger, which can't be a bad thing.

Getting rid of Combat Veteran entirely would be better, though.

Just roll Combat Veteran and Thick Skin into the base effect of Constitution.

That way you won't stack +Con gear to buy talents, you'll stack +Con gear to walk around wearing.