ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

One thing I've frequently found in being a relative newcomer to ToME is that I spend a lot of time tabbing out and checking the wiki or guides to find out just which attributes of a talent scale with level. Sure, you can check by dumping point in, but sometimes the abilities will only increase with every other point, or fewer. And when I'm looking at a fresh character type I've never tried, and I see a level 12 (or 22) ability that I'm going to want to account for in planning out my character, I need to look outside the game for the information I need.

So I'd recommend a simple change. At least simple on the concept end – maybe less simple on the coding end.* Just give values that scale based on talent level a unique color on the tooltip. You could also color-code values that scale with attributes, but 1) that could cause information overload and clutter and 2) those interactions are usually explicitly stated in the tooltip anyways.

*Knowing nothing about the engine, I'm going to assume that custom text color is possible in the tooltips, since resource costs all have unique colors. Although I know that doesn't necessarily mean what I'm proposing would be possible.

It is possible but would require heavy amounts of metaprogramming and static code analysis. And that will still probably be faster than updating by hand.
You see, the amount of talents in this game is ridiculously huge. Every class (of which there are, erm, about 20? I can't count) have around 4 unique categories which each have 4 talents. That amounts to... a lot! (Again, I can't count. But that's 320. Which is ballpark right.) Updating descs by hand seems like a huge waste of time.
There is, however, the automatic spoiler generator: https://github.com/tometips/tometips/. It does some amazing stuff with fake dummies and magic functions. But it's also running on a not-real game! To do that stuff in real time would be probably horrendously slow. Unless we keep a database of it.

There are right about 200 categories. One has five talents, the rest have four, and there are actually a few random extra abilities like Beyond the Flesh or Striking Stance.

Overall, there at least 800 talents and possibly up to around 900, if you include NPC only ones.

So yeah. A lot. And that's without addons.

An alternative proposal has been made on IRC (all credit to HousePet) to highlight the numbers which change with talent level at some point, up to the cap.
Would this solve it, Lyoncet?

0player wrote:An alternative proposal has been made on IRC (all credit to HousePet) to highlight the numbers which change with talent level at some point, up to the cap.
Would this solve it, Lyoncet?

Hmm, I think that's pretty much what I'm talking about. Just giving some visual indication of what scales with level. Not necessarily max values or anything like that, just letting the player say, "Oh OK, so values X Y and Z will scale with talent rank and values A and B are static."

Also, thanks for the tip on the auto-spoilers. I'll keep it bookmarked.

I also realize I should have clarified that I do realize that the values that will increase with one extra point do display in a different color – but on ranks where an extra point won't increase it, or when the talent doesn't have any points in it (i.e. because it's locked), it would be helpful. It seems like that was communicated despite my neglecting to mention it, but I just wanted to be sure.

So have it say radius [2->2] then.

Well, using Unicode private area to get diffWith to recognize that as a difference, perhaps.

HousePet wrote:So have it say radius [2->2] then.

That'd work too. Or even just have it say "Deals 100 [->115] damage in radius 2."

If the 2 doesn't scale with talent level, just leave it as the default white text color (or black in this example). Again, not knowing the coding I have no idea of whether these changes would be any more or less work. That's just what I was visualizing.

Now that I think about it, it'd be possible to code this. Right now it just generates the talent description, and then temporarily bumps its level up and generates the description again, and then compares the two. We could add a third where it bumps all your stats to 1000 and talent level to 100 and then color anything that changes.

I've been marking my newer addons (like Weird Wyrmic for instance) to have talents explicitly declare what scales with what.
So like if something scaled with talent level and physical power it'd read: "...does 57 [*, phys] damage..."
Any thoughts/opinions on that?

I'd really like little mini-icons for each stat we could just stick directly into the text, but I don't think that's going to happen.

Also, I've considered messing with the engine to let talents know where they're being accessed, and having them report different descriptions based on that. So, say you have a talent that gives an active and a passive effect. If you're looking at it from your hotkey bar, then we could just have it display the active effect, so you don't have to wade through the passive text when you're trying to use it.

That sounds fantastic, especially for items. I hate having to wait for all the stats to scroll by to see what exactly my latest item can do, so if the item showed only "Can cast X" when viewed in inventory and showed "Item Name: X" on the hotbar, that'd be glorious.

Actually, it'd be great to have differentiations between what scales with what. I know there are a couple of abilities (Crippling Shot is one, I think) where the optimal point distribution is only 2 or 3, since the main effect scales with talent level and stats and your stats are high enough by endgame to max it without needing all the talent points.

grayswandir wrote:So like if something scaled with talent level and physical power it'd read: "...does 57 [*, phys] damage..."
Any thoughts/opinions on that?

Your notation confuses me and I am good at this game's mechanics.

grayswandir wrote:I'd really like little mini-icons for each stat we could just stick directly into the text

That would be great.

grayswandir wrote:Also, I've considered messing with the engine to let talents know where they're being accessed, and having them report different descriptions based on that. So, say you have a talent that gives an active and a passive effect. If you're looking at it from your hotkey bar, then we could just have it display the active effect, so you don't have to wade through the passive text when you're trying to use it.

That makes a lot of sense.

Similarly for sustains, just show the sustain info in the "active effects" area, right?

Having mini-icons is possible: the text has support for display entities inside for a long time now. The problemis that it requires updating tons of descriptions by hand.