ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Everyone is aware that Archmages are waaaaaay too strong (and boring IMO) right now. Here's what I'd suggest to change that.

- Air: increase the min damages on Air to make it more consistent; make Feather Wind give way more movement speed and drain mana and change Thunderstorm to be an active that creates a thunderstorm on the target area; striking x enemies for lightning damage every turn. Also make it so you can target Thunderstorm on yourself and then have the effect follow you.
- Arcane: keep as is
- Earth: remove Stone Skin; move all exisiting skills one up; reduce the CD of Pulverizing Auger by 2 to make it more competetive as a beam; change Mudslide to create temporary stone walls on random spots; change Stone Wall to create a linear stone wall instead (similar to the Wyrmic ice wall); add new skill (I am bad at names) that makes it so whenever you destroy a wall you inflict a little damage, bleed and blind to all enemies near that wall. Probably instant-cast
- Fire: reduce stun duration on Flameshock, it gives an alreaedy strong build too much CC; change Inferno or nerf Inferno/Harmony/Elemental Surge madness. This gives Wildfire-mages WAY too much survivabilty and global speed.
- Phantasm: slightly increase damage of Illuminate; remove Blur Sight, replace it with an ability that summons a decoy. That decoy then taunts all enemies in an AoE; move Defense bonus to Phantasmal Shield.
- Water: increase damage of Glacial Vapour, reduce duration, increase freeze chance slightly; make Tidal Waves targetable (small conveniance); make Shivgoroth Form instant-cast.
- Aegis: keep or slightly decrease all values
- Conveyance: keep
- Divination: keep
- Aether: make Aether Beam be considered a trap
- Ice: Increase the duration of Frozen Ground's pin to 5 or 6; have Shatter stun targets
- Meta: keep
- Stone: make Earthquake targetable (same as Thunderstorm), also add wall-destruction that works like Tidal Waves (slowly extending)
- Storm: increase damage of Nova; increase damage of Shock slightly
- Temporal: reduce values of Time Shield or make it cost a turn
- Wildfire: nerf Burning Wake/Harmony/Elemental Surge madness; make cleansing flames only remove magical effects (similar to the fire salve)

Some of these changes might be going too far but honestly, Archmages have been on the top for so long, they could use some time in a lower tier

I agree on Air/Storm buffs and targetable Earthquake (which it was in Dragon Age: Origins and ToME4 copypasted a lot of skills from there )

The primary issue with archmages is reportedly the Aegis tree. I've never been able to make it work, but people report five digit shields from it. Just reducing the numbers slightly isn't going to help. You'd have to reduce them enough to make it completely useless early on to make the spellpower cubed term not a problem later.

If you think archmage is overpowered that is the thing to change if nothing else. The heal into shield dynamic needs to be removed. I believe they also need sustainable defenses. The elitists don't seem to notice because they all play on levels where autoexplore is useless, but mages are not durable enough on normal to operate with the level of play expected for normal, ie. the use of autoexplore.

If you think they're boring, I made a stab at that a while back. If someone wants to help with coding I'm willing to try to get it going again. I ran into issues with the very act of defining an extension and have no clue what the problem was, but the mod itself should be number tweaking and copypasta within my very limited Lua ability.

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=43509
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=43567
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=43816

MERGE AEGIS AND DIVINATION

that... is a strange idea... there is the sustain that reduces damage of a certain type, but otherwise the two have nothing in common.
1 is about protecting you with heals and massive shields, the other makes you aware about potential dangers.