ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

While fundamental changes to wyrmic talent tree seems difficult, I see most agree that wyrmic has a zillion talents and too much filler among them.

So here's my proposal about merging some talents. They are not too well thought-out, but more based on my intuition of what seems fun:


Weapon-damage based offense
- Merge ice claw with swallow, attempt to swallow enemies in a short cone, regaining life and equilibrium depending on number of enemies swallowed
- Merge Dissolve with Prismatic slash: Keep dissolve's 4 strike, but each time you strike you trigger one of blinding sand, disarming acid, freezing and slowing ice, dazing lightning or stunning flames, with equal odds (50% chance for each).
- Wing buffet: removed, why would you want to knock your enemies back? And you wyrmic has plenty of cone shaped attack already
- Quake: Keep, although I don't like how it ties offense with escape I can't think of a good way to change it. I suggested a while ago about removing the displace-to-self and making it a sustain, but this change does not seem popular

Flat damage offense
- Breaths: Combined into a single talent and you can select the aspect of your breath, cooldown is reset as you score a mental crit with it (so people who like to spam breaths need not worry)
- Merge Corrosive Mist with Tornado: Exhale a mist of energy that has 20-30% chance to stun enemies caught inside per turn so it could be a decent defense option, which wyrmic sorely lacks
- Merge Acidic Spray with Static Field: Shoot a beam of energy which do what Static Field does. Static Field is more likely to be used to rare+, so area effect does not really make sense.
- Bellowing Roar: Make it scale better, reduced potency at early level but increase effectiveness at higher level
- Devouring Flame: Significantly increase the life drain % and put a cap to the amount drained

I'm sorry but almost every single one of these changes would actually be terrible for Wyrmic.

Wing buffet is effectively a better Projection ego for any weapon procs you have. In my opinion Wyrmic's advantage as a weapon damage class is his variety of AoE/ranged attacks that reliably apply weapon damage and procs. Removing it would gut this potential by half.

Merged Ice Claw with Swallow? AoE 300+% weapon damage as nature + culling strike?

Breaths combined into single talent would make them even less of an option. Cooldown reset tied to mental crit is useless early game and broken late game, thus, another terrible balance idea :/

If anything, the mindpower and spellpower scaling talents (ie everything that is not weapon talent or a breath) could use a buff to make them a workable build option cause as of now I can think of just 3 wyrmic builds that can effectively win: 1) weapon damage abuser wyrmic, 2) breath caster wyrmic, 3) Undead Drake Raze shenanigans wyrmic.

Did not think much in terms of balance when I was proposing the changes. But if the talents are merged then of course there should be some tweaks to the numbers.

For the breaths, I would say this is the intended effect. They are now ok early game but weak late game, this change would make them ok early game and great late game as befit a capstone talent. Individually the breaths deal less damage than weapon based attacks like Dissolve / Ice Claw, and their equilibrium cost is high, so I doubt whether it would be so OP, again the numbers could be tweaked for balance e.g. x% to reset cooldown

The visualization of a cone Swallow just makes me think of Kirby. I don't really think that's the image Swallow is supposed to bring up.

The thing at it's current state about big changes to Wyrmic trees though, is that it means either the addon specific trees are stuck behind or they would also need to be radically changed.

I wouldn't mind changes to Wyrmic talents but you provide no argument as to why you think they need less talents/ trees and if anything I think they need more trees (e: another casting tree, maybe a passive/ proc tree). The ton of trees is what makes them fun. There are just so many ways you can build a functional Wyrmic.

Edit: Its also why Archmage is fun once you've unlocked all their trees.

Nakarai wrote:I wouldn't mind changes to Wyrmic talents but you provide no argument as to why you think they need less talents/ trees and if anything I think they need more trees (e: another casting tree, maybe a passive/ proc tree). The ton of trees is what makes them fun. There are just so many ways you can build a functional Wyrmic.

Edit: Its also why Archmage is fun once you've unlocked all their trees.

I did not propose less trees or less talents actually. My argument was that they have too many fillers among their talents, and you will see how it makes no room for build diversity.

Without considering the addon trees, in Wyrmic trees we have:
- 7 long range, cone-shaped attacks (Breaths and Wing Buffet)
- Excluding these, then we have a number of fillers: Devouring Flames, Tornado and Corrosive Mist, and semi-fillers like Acidic Spray and Bellowing Roar.
- Then you are left with the core talents that every Wyrmic would take (except for maybe Static Field and Icy Skin)

You can have a look at the Character Vault, then you will see there is virtually no build diversity in Wyrmic: Mostly they are a mix of the core talents, then one or two long range cone attacks, then some of them would also learn some talents in the Psi-blade or 2h trees, that's all the build diversity you could find in Wyrmic.

And also by looking into the Character Vault, you would see Archmage is not a good comparison to Wyrmic. Archmage has much more synergies between the talents, and much less fillers. So in their case more trees / more talents do make Archmage fun, while the same argument can't be applied to Wyrmic.

I am more for adding good talents to Wyrmic, but firstly we should trim away the fillers for the existing trees to make room for that