ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I have just binge-d Homestuck and is a little shell-shocked by it. As the one of the side results, here is this idea of class that is (very loosely) based on certain Homestuck concepts.


Master of Aspects class talents are not abilities, but halves of abilities. You have to combine two of them to get a useful activate-able ability or sustain.

One half of talents is 24 essences, combined in 6 aspect trees, each tree using separate resource:

Arcane: Fire Water Air Earth (Mana)
Heart: Love Hate Courage Terror (Psi)
Doom: Despair Misfortune Insanity Impotence (Hate)
Fate: Time Space Causality Entropy (Paradox)
Wild: Nature Life Moss? Beast (Wild)
Twilight: Light Darkness Birth Death (Light/Dark)

Other half is forms

Wielder: Blade Shield Armour Bow (combat bonuses to self and allies)
Mage: Beam Ball Cone Sphere (archmagey area effect stuff)
Seer: See Show Pursue Avoid (effects like in Divination tree and some PM/TW time abilities)
Caller: Summon Attack Share Sacrifice (create summons tied to respective essence, buff and control them)
Bringer: Gift Blessing(area effect) Curse Form (buffs, debuffs, shapeshifting)
Rogue: Steal Conceal Imitate Step (buff self+debuff enemy, stealth and mobility)

(These are very rough drafts, of cause)

Each talent can be learned independently from others in the same tree (similar to certain Mindslayer talents), but they have significant synergy bonuses.

To gain ability, you "entangle" one form and one essence. Power and cost of resulting ability depends on talent level of components. Entangling occupies both talents, so they can't be used for other combination. You can "detangle" them at any moment, freeing them up again, but there is a cooldown.

Talents that have level 6+ can be used in two abilities at once, but all trees starts with multiplier x1.0, so you will have to use class point for this.

24*24 pairs is 576 potential abilities, which is probably a little too much. But it's ok if some pairs just do not work, or are very similar to other abilities, or have weak effect, or even are detrimental.

Examples:

Fire Blade - your melee attack now have added fire damage.
Summon Insanity - create Cursed summon. He shares Fire Blade sustain.
Summon Water - you have 6 level Summon skill, so you could use additional summon - Naga.
Share Courage - your summons now have crit and attack chance buff and a defence debuff, and you have opposite effects on you.
Steal Air - you cast Silence on enemy, while gaining move speed bonus.
Despair Attack - your summons teleport to target and attack, while laying attack damage reduction debuff on enemies in radius 2.
Earth Sacrifice - your summons die, while casting Earthquake centred on them.
Time Step - your step out of time for a moment, effect similar to Temporal Reprieve. Probably not the best use for both Step and Time talents.

It's actually similar in some ways to the old runecrafter. Theming it that way might make it more palatable, or it might not. No one played runecrafters in T2 because they were never properly implemented and finding and carrying enough runes to be useful with a fixed bag size was impractical so there's not as much nostalgia for them as for some other lost classes.

Might be tricky at the UI level. Are you creating a fake talent (similar to Beyond the Flesh) for every combo? That's going to get really messy really fast. The idea's good, but the button bar replacing the old multi-key commands may make it unwieldy.

Hmm.. Make it work like DoTA 2's Invoker? Pick some aspects and then combine it with a form and then you get a talent. The combination talent would have a cool down and you would have 6(?) ability slots. Once an ability is used, it returns to its form of combination talent.

But I agree, it would be VERY painstaking to make a talent for every combo, especially considering how many there are.

Yeah, it really needs GUI to make it work, but I think it's quite possible.

About the difficulty of making all those combinations, I think it could be possible to make use of some sort of system.

Such as, each Essence has a set of associated categorized effects and traits. And then Form take certain effect category, modifies it's power and apply to the targets inherent to this form.

For example, Time has: Blessing - Global Speed+, Curse - Primary Stats-, Lack (debuff that happens when you have less of it) - Global Speed-, Freedom (like Lack, but buff) - Temporal Reprieve effect, Damage - temporal damage.

Then Blade deals Damage effect on strike, Ball does Damage and Curse effect in circle, Beam does x2 damage in line, etc.

I've coded something similar in NWN, for a Warlock, Shaman, Favoured Soul and Psion classes.
You cast an essence and then a shape and the code creates an effect based on those two spells.
Should be much easier to do in a game that is open source.

Invoker-style stuff (with "execute combo" button) is definitely reasonable. So is making the second talent in a combo automatically recognize the first talent in the combo already cast, and call code from some table to do it.
Actually this is reminiscent of Magicka to me, in that most of the combos would probably be pretty generic and there would only be a few interesting ones.