ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Wanted to throw the idea out there to make Paradox not a personal resource but one that is shared and acted on by all temporal wardens and mages in the zone. In that sense, paradoxes influence the space-time in a localised area, and the temporal classes either work with or against each other in making it go up and down. Battles with more than one temporal fighter would be either a tight tug of war or a chaos storm of energy and anomalies, and it would really flesh out the idea of temporal wardens and paradox mages being out there, smoothing out the fabric of space-time.
It'd be quite a change, code-wise, but I think the efforts would pay off, and of all the resource types, this is the one that'd make sense to share it across creatures in an area. It'd also make temporal-on-temporal fights more interesting than just resistance vs resistance.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.....
In the higher difficulties, paradox is a real annoyance, even if you are a warrior or a mage. With reality smearing, killing a TW or PM with 10k+ life will generate a high paradox and anomalies that are a real nuisance. Especially the one that generates tons of time elementals for tens of turns. If the paradox is shared, the game will becomes completely unplayable.

ghostbuster wrote:No, no, no, no, no, no, no.....
In the higher difficulties, paradox is a real annoyance, even if you are a warrior or a mage. With reality smearing, killing a TW or PM with 10k+ life will generate a high paradox and anomalies that are a real nuisance. Especially the one that generates tons of time elementals for tens of turns. If the paradox is shared, the game will becomes completely unplayable.

Good point. To be clear, when I suggest making it zone-wide, I only mean the resource itself, not the anomalies. The anomalies would still be targeting the paradox users as they do now.

If you're not a chronomancer class, then paradox is really only a tug of war between the temporal foes on the map and whatever levels they're each set to, which is not really that different to what we have now. I'm not sure what the variety of temporal foes there are currently, but a zone-wide system would mean the devs ensuring there's a good variety of paradox levels set so that some are inclined to push it up and some push it down, with boss foes having more impact on it.

If making it zone-wide is a neat enough idea for the game lore, then some of the anomalies might also naturally need reworking.

I agree that it would make sense lorewise.
And PM or TW are already immune to most nasty debuffs a la manaclash and having something to annoy them is probably good.

Good point. To be clear, when I suggest making it zone-wide, I only mean the resource itself, not the anomalies. The anomalies would still be targeting the paradox users as they do now.

Many anomalies are already zone-wide. Especially the ones that summon monsters. And this is the problem. Having a zone wide resources with zone wide effects is completely untweakable. How can you have something that has some significant effects in a normal zone where the player is the only chronomancer and does not turn in an out of control cataclysm in the daikara temporal portal where you may have tens of chronos?
And for several difficulties. I already sometimes have the feeling that paradox has too powerful effects in the higher difficulties.

Tuning talents and effects is already complex when only an actor is considered, but it would be impossible zone wide.