ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

"Your dedication to your trade has gained you great expertise in your profession, but this happens at the expense of more mundane skills."

Each class type (Warriors, Mages, Wilders, etc) would gain a prestige category with skills that truly epitomizes the class.

Opening this category would require a category point like any other locked category and a permanent loss of few stat points in stats the class least uses. The tree would appear on Generics list and would require generic points to spec into. That's the sacrifice you have to make in other department when you push yourself to the limits to learn your profession.

My idea of prestige category would be such that it requires a sacrifice, like antimagic (no arcane equipment) and is not something you just leisurely pick to make your character stronger.

Having such skill tree would stray players from going to usual Celestial Light and Stone Alchemy route, offering a new way to build your characters.

The skills in prestige trees would have to fit all subclasses of the same class type. This might prove troublesome, for example Berserker and Archer are a bit different.

I would imagine these skills to be more of an endgame fun than early game picks, so a lv30 requirement might be in order, maybe 36 to go with your last category point. After all a character can't be an expert in their class before he actually learns a decent number of class skills.

Any thoughts? Ideas for prestige trees?

It's an intriguing idea but I'm not sure if it's a viable one… considering the range of resources and styles of play. More so, you have the problem of potential power-creep.

I also think a lot of generics offer up some of these high-utility benefits already such as the Conditioning tree. Celestial/Light is another one…

I'm going to offer an alternative… what if we did away with the escort categories (but left them in the prodigies) entirely and replaced them with categories that normally don't exist on any class.

Create 5 or 6 different categories that offer a selection of the benefits related to or directly from escort categories and call them Prestige Categories. They needn't be thematically consistent necessarily… just a collection of skills that focuses of 1 of 5 primary attributes:

1. Magic offense

2. Mental offense

3. Physical offense

4. Speed

5. Defense

6. Utility

Fungus already covers regen and harmony and vile life cover other varied elements but these would simply enhance the basics. They wouldn't offer powerful new skills but instead would enhance the things you already want to focus on.

For example. Magic Offense could offer bonuses to one elemental type (as per the Higher skill), mana regen, spell crit, and maybe a synergy skill that does something like offering a bonus to using two different elements together or in quick succession. Think of using fire and then a freeze effect… super heating and freezing… have it cause additional damage or whatnot.

The same could be true of other classes such as confuse reducing fear immunity… that would make fear useful against Atamathon even.

I don't know… just speculating.

Thoughts?