ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I had once started a thread about changing some Solipsists' talents, but the suggestions I made were horrible so I don't want to bump that up. I guess I will just start a new thread instead to organize some suggestions I have seen elsewhere and add a little bit of my thoughts.

For one thing, Solipsists' talent trees are very disjointed and it often appears to me they are just random trees got jumbled together and you call it a class. Even the themes of the trees are a bit random (and I vehemently dislike the ESP-themed Psychic Assault). No disrespect to the devs, back in 2012 (see this thread http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=34089 about how the class was originally conceptualized) it was a class that people would feel excited about. But it is now 2019 and we now have much better designed classes than before, and looking into that thread you would see Solipsist has not been changed a bit for more than 7 years.

Synergy between trees
I don’t have much idea about how to make the trees work better together, but I happen to stumble upon a tree suggestion posted in Discord by Orange. I don’t know how many people would see it in Discord so I would post it here, seems very cool to me.

https://pastebin.com/SQSg0UyN

The dreams related trees are so bloated so I think at least Slumber and Nightmare could be combined into one tree to make way for this. Or just replace the Dream Smith tree with this tree

Trees
I will start by the tree that is universally considered as horrible:

Discharge
Just don’t make it break with movement. It is the show stopper of the whole talent tree. Some people think it would need to be redone entirely along with Feedback, I tend to agree but I can’t think of any good suggestions for it. At least this one should be an easy change so we could quickly see how much removing the movement limitation helps the tree

Dreamforge
The dream forge tree just has too low numbers to do anything (except for the forge shield talent, which I would elaborate a bit in the Talents section of this thread). They are actually good utilities so buffing the numbers would be all we need.

Thought-forms
A whole thread dedicated to this has been posted so let me just reference the post here http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=47490
And please let me shoot talents through my thoughtforms, and vice-versa for bowman

Talents

Dismissal and Forge Shield

These are for chip damage reduction, but does Solipsist needs so many talents for damage reduction? Solipsist already has a built-in damage reduction from Solipsism, which pairs very well with Antimagic Shield. So Dismissal and Forge Shield seems a bit of an overkill in terms of chip damage reduction. However, when it comes to protecting Solipsist from being one-shotted, these talents do absolutely nothing. Also, Forge Shield seems to be more useful for sticking counterstrike to enemies rather than for damage reduction. So I would propose these changes to these talents

Dismissal: If an attack takes a substantial proportion of your HP (proportion decreases with your talent level) then you roll x% (x could be larger than 100) of your mental save against that attack’s power to dismiss it

Forge Shield: When you successfully dismiss an attack, for x turns you can mentally forge a shield whose block value is x times the damage of that attack. This functions exactly the same as block and enemy will be inflicted with counterstrike if the attack is fully blocked. This talent has a cooldown which decreases with talent level

Note that the above talents work better without Antimagic Shield, so these changes could make magic build compete with Antimagic ones. One thing I dislike about Solipsist is that it often forces people to take Antimagic for the Solipsism + Antimagic Shield combo

Other changes

Changing dream forge and nightmare damage type to mind damage

Maybe it is just me, but I feel the dream forge damage type quite annoying with the fire DOT. And why do we have darkness damage for the Nightmare tree? It is a mind class after all so just stick the damage type to mind for those trees. We don’t have much enemies with high mind resistance anyway so we don’t need the fire and darkness damage afterall, and they are too minuscule anyway.

Actually I think we could change all damage type to mind damage too.

Remove talent point prerequisite for Solipsism
Why do I need to be taxed with the solipsism threshold increase from Balance if I just want to take Clarity?

I've been thinking a lot about discharge recently and I think minor buffs to most of the talents could make it pretty good. I really like the idea of needing to take damage to make use of it, but at the moment it feels more like passive damage, so these changes are made with that in mind.

Discharge Category: Increase mind damage by 1-2% per talent point invested in this tree

Mind Storm: This is the core talent and it's too weak currently, but instead of increasing the damage of each bolt, I want to make it much stronger when you take a lot of damage, and unchanged if nothing is getting past your defenses. Double the number of extra bolts that can be generated from excess feedback, and increase the amount of excess feedback needed to produce a bolt by 1-2 (other changes make up for this). Also either get rid of the movement restriction, or make it instant and halve the cooldown.

Feedback loop: Make this instant, let it ignore the decay reduction of biofeedback, increase max feedback while active, and when it ends generate mind bolts for every 5 feedback you are over maximum

Backlash: Not much reason to invest beyond 1 as is, maybe each time an enemy is hit with this give them a small stacking debuff to mind res that scales with talent level?

Biofeedback: Make everything scale slightly better with talent level, and/or increase heal mod slightly based on current feedback (mostly so it can at least be considered for spare points if not investing in discharge)

Amplification: Make feedback gain scale better with talent level

Feedback as a resource: Let self inflicted damage create feedback (only really useful for adventurers but could make for interesting builds)

Thought about this more and I really don't like what I came up with for feedback loop, it might just need to be replaced entirely.

A fun sounding/maybe terrible alternate is a sustain that damages you for a percent of all damage you do, and converts it to feedback at an improved rate, or converts it directly to mind bolts if you're already at max feedback, without counting against the max bolts per turn from excess feedback.

If I have my way I would just redesign the tree, keep it making your character stronger as you take damage but changing how it works completely. No matter what, if we keep its main mechanism as passive bolt firing, the tree would still be boring on one hand and easy to exploit on another.

And I don’t like how the tree is themed. “Unleash your subconscious on the world around you” seems a bit out of place (all Solipsist trees except for Solipsism are quite out of place but this one stucks me especially so, other than “Psychic Assault”). I think some religion / intoxication themes, like Trance, Enlightenment, Meditation, etc. would fit the class’s theme much better.

I would design something along the line of such:

Tree: Penance
Through punishment to oneself you attain a higher form of mental awareness. The more painful the reality is, the more elevated is your mind

Trance
Passive, you can select between 3 trances whose effect will intensify with your remaining Feedback pool:

- Trance of the superman
You have x% chance to shrug off a detrimental status every turn and your movement speed is increased by y%

- Trance of the nightmare
You ignore x% of sleep immunity

- Trance of the void
Distorted target in sight will have a x% chance to be confused for a few turns

Mental Flagellation
You mentally flog yourself by imagination, reducing your psi by x and increase your feedback by y. Enemies in radius x will also feel the impact of the lash mentally and will be brainlocked

Ecstasy
Your trances grants extra effect for x turns, for a feedback cost:

- Trance of the superman
Your gain access to all Two-Handed Assault talents, which you could use with your dream hammer

- Trance of the nightmare
Blur the boundary of consciousness, enemies in range x will be put in a lucid dream during which they could act freely, but still considered as asleep so as to make them more vulnerable to certain effects (such as Inner Demons, Night Terror, and Waking Nightmare).

- Trance of the void
You emit a distorting aura, enemies in range x will be distorted. Your distortion talents’ cooldown also refreshes twice as fast

The Enlightened One
All three trances will be activated at the same time for x turns.

Pisastrish wrote:Backlash: Not much reason to invest beyond 1 as is, maybe each time an enemy is hit with this give them a small stacking debuff to mind res that scales with talent level?

to make backlash be worth more than 1 point, then make its damage, instead of being limited by your feedback gain from the attack, scale with both your mindpower and the feedback gain from the attack
something like:
x% of mindpower*feedback generated from the attack=backlash damage
x% of mindpower would scale with your talent level

so if you get something like x=5 and you have 80 mindpower, then that'd be 4 damage per feedback generated from the attack, resulting in 600 damage from a hit that generates 150 feedback
but, usually, attacks don't generate 150 feedback
x probably shouldn't be equal to your raw or effective talent level, and even if it doesn't, I could see this scaling very hard in ID due to amplification

maybe it'd help if, instead of enemies having higher talent levels due to level/difficulty increases, they had higher talent masteries instead