ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I imagine this must have been brought up before, but it seems like there is a problem with the darkfire spell. At level 4+, its radius surpasses its range, so you end up having to hit yourself with it in order to use it. At talent level 5, when it is cast at maximum range you actually still have to run two tiles to get out of the way before it impacts, which makes it impossible to move out of the range unless you're willing to burn a transport ability or movement infusion.

Was that intentional? It seems like it shouldn't be that way. It's strange to add a disincentive to raise the talent to high levels.

Proposed changes (one of the following):

1. Extend the range of darkfire. Maybe even as a function of talent level.

2. Make the darkfire damage not affect its caster. This makes sense especially when you take black rings into account, which are quite capable of casting darkfire at close range and causing significant damage to the caster as a random proc. Optionally, this could kick in at level 3 or 5 of darkfire. Lv 3 would make it kick in for the black ring proc, while lv 5 would restrict damage mitigation to the classes that have the tree.

3. Make darkfire damage not affect demons. Though more indirect, the advantage here is that it requires an additional talent point investment and vim sustain cost in order to escape darkfire damage, which brings it more in line with the resource costs for self-attack mitigation in other classes, eg. alchemist and necromancer. Though the talent point cost isn't as steep as these other classes, darkfire is also arguably a less powerful spell than bombs or animate, and the 90 vim cost is extremely steep. The drawback here is that it would not be available to characters using black rings without the ability to turn into a demon. Drawback/balancing feature: a lot of enemies are demons, so this would make darkfire unable to hurt them.

4. Make darkfire heal demons. The argument here follows from above. In order to get this benefit, you must use a 90 vim sustain and spend a talent point. If it seems too powerful, it could even be a result that kicks in at talent level 3 or 5 in either the flame of urh'rok or darkfire talents. (note: I know there is a mod that does this, but I'm interested in the official gameplay set and the appropriate balancing measures.)

4. Cap the radius of darkfire such that it doesn't hit the caster when shot to maximum range. Probably the least desirable option.

5. Make darkfire have a recoil, such that the caster actually is thrown back out of the area of effect when casting the spell. That would make this spell interesting for tactical mobility, especially when it gives them the option to cast it one tile away and get quite a significant push.

I think it is meant to convey that you are messing with dangerous powers. And then you get Flame of Urh'Rok to mitigate some of the risk.
Hitting yourself with fire/darkness is not a huge issue for Corruptors as they are unlikely to be carrying resistance penetration for those types.
That said I would not object to changing the fire component to demonfire.

I can see what you mean, but in that case it seems strange that that flavor only comes in at talent level 4. In effect, it just causes you to want to leave the level low so you don't accidentally kill yourself. It seems like a flaw to build a poison pill into a talent at 4-5 levels, essentially punishing you for training it.

In my particular case, I'm noticing it on a doombringer, so fire damage is actually pretty primary for me.

Why not? It kind of fits the trope where greed for more power was the cause of your doom Like you are at 2/5 its fine. More power! 3/5 fine. More power again! 4/5, not fine anymore, you got burned.

In enclosed spaces you can't always cast it far enough away to avoid being hit, so it doesn't really only appear with 5 points investment.

Mordy wrote:Why not? It kind of fits the trope where greed for more power was the cause of your doom Like you are at 2/5 its fine. More power! 3/5 fine. More power again! 4/5, not fine anymore, you got burned.

Yeah but it doesn't even have much power. Maybe if it did twice as much damage this would be a fine point.

In principle, it can be made to have significant power by wearing +% fire/darkness dam gear, wearing on-hit(spell) gear which should trigger a lot in a diameter 7 blast containing many targets, leveraging the +dam abilities/equipment based on current vim, improving spellpower, etc.

It's just not really feasible to invest those kinds of resources to make it potent when you're going to hit yourself with all of that every time you cast the spell.