ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

One of the most annoying part of playing ice mages (and perhaps many other mages. I don't play mages too much) is killing yourself in one shot even though you have 70% cold resist simply because your cold resist pen affects your self. Could this perhaps be changed?

spell/meta - "spellcraft"
You learn to finely craft and tune your offensive spells.
You try to carve a hole in spells that affect an area to avoid damaging yourself. The chance of success is 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 100%.
In addition, you hone your damaging spells to spellshock their targets. Whenever you deal damage with a spell you attempt to spellshock them with 55, 74, 89, 102, 114 more Spellpower than normal. Spellshocked targets suffer a temporary 20% penalty to damage resistances.

also, STOP HITTING YOUSELF.

Chill of the tomb, being pulled into your own ice shards, etc. Necro can't pick up meta and adventures have access to it but I'm sure the cat point could be better spent.

I think it is fine.
With great nukes comes great danger and it makes Luck more useful (not that anything really tells you what luck does).

It doesn't make luck more useful. If you manage to get 150 luck, your chance of damaging yourself with a spell is...80% instead of 100%. Woohoo.

And the reason this is an issue with ice mages is that shivgoroth form gives lots of cold damage affinity, suggesting that you would want to hit yourself - in which case having Uttercold sustained is actively bad.

Yes, the actual effect of luck on self damage from spells is way too small.

minmay wrote:It doesn't make luck more useful. If you manage to get 150 luck, your chance of damaging yourself with a spell is...80% instead of 100%. Woohoo.

And the reason this is an issue with ice mages is that shivgoroth form gives lots of cold damage affinity, suggesting that you would want to hit yourself - in which case having Uttercold sustained is actively bad.

Agreed. I've played a Necromancer (or it might have been an arch-necromancer adventurer) and been using Chill of the Tomb to heal myself in SHivgoroth form, and then suddenly I put a point in Uttercold and it kills me instead.

I guess its just a situation where Uttercold is not suitable for your build.

But considering how necessary resist penetration is and considering how shivgorath form gives you cold affinity, it seems kinda silly. If I'm going to bother to build 70% cold resist, I could at least not one shot myself with one spell through that said resist. Doesn't really make playing an ice Mage any easier.

Could give Shivgoroth Form higher cold resistance, like 200%.
But resist penetration is not necessary, unless you make it so by only speccing a single element.

HousePet wrote:But resist penetration is not necessary, unless you make it so by only speccing a single element.

Welcome to ToME, that's what classes tend to do here, especially the one we're talking about (Archmage).

With great power comes great downsides!

HousePet wrote:With great power comes great downsides!

But only for water/ice, which is already possibly the suckiest element. Other builds can use meta to avoid killing themselves. Earth/Stone has some cooldown issues, but at least all of the spells work. It's not full of always miss crap like Ice Shards or only one workable nuke that has a cooldown that actually gets worse as you level it up like freeze. Maybe thunderstorm is worse, but air/storm also has no friendly fire risk ever.

Wildfire Archmages don't want to use meta and I thought that Thunderstorm could hit you if you were adjacent to an enemy.

Last time I checked, you could still cast Freeze on yourself by mistake by aiming as an NPC behind a wall :p