ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Would it be at all possible for someone (or someones) to put their ideas on how far you should take talents in each class on the wiki? Seems a little aggravating to finally clear one of the intermediate dungeons (Maze, old forest, etc) only to die in the next one because you didn't spend your talent points correctly. Not talking WoW-styled "character builds" or anything, just helpful pointers on what makes each class shine.

For fighters, shield wall is something you'll definitely want maxed and on constantly: Once you've got a good steel/dwarven-steel weapon the damage decrease is minimal, while the armour/defence increase and full stun resistance isn't. You'll be using shield pummel for it's stunning rather than its damage, and since (as far as I know) the success and duration of its stun isn't greatly effected by skill level, one point should be enough in it. Assault is another good fighter skill that only needs one point put into it - with one point or five, the vast majority of the damage it deals will be the two guaranteed critical hits.

The armour training talents only need one point put into them; the benefits of extra points (in beta 10 at least) aren't that great. Naturally, weapon combat and your mastery of choice should be raised whenever you have the chance, as should health.

For archmages, it's already been mentioned a few times around here that to get full effectivity from your phase door/teleport (choice of location and the ability to use it on others) you only need 4 points put into it rather than 5, since your mastery level will put your effective skill level at 5 anyway. Sense is a given, although like phase door and teleport you'll get full sensing (enemies, items and traps) at 4 rather than 5. Any abilities you plan to have sustained (arcane power, stone skin, etc.) should be maxed eventually since their benefit will increase but their cost won't. However, you shouldn't neglect your main damage-dealing spells, especially early on. One point into freeze is enough for it's freezing effect, and like shield pummel further points only do little to improve the chance of a successful freeze. Also, with the utility that fully-controllable phase door provides, you might be able to hold off putting skill points into teleport for a while, instead spending them elsewhere.

I imagine the wiki will see a lot more guides and updates posted once we're out of beta.

Right now things can change pretty rapidly and there's a lot of balancing going on between builds, in other words, a talent that's worthless this month may be great next month.

If you want help with specific class for now I'd just use the forums. I can't say I've beat the game yet but I love to theory craft and would be happy to offer my opinion on builds for the classes I'm familiar with.

Burb Lulls wrote:You'll be using shield pummel for it's stunning rather than its damage, and since (as far as I know) the success and duration of its stun isn't greatly effected by skill level, one point should be enough in it.

Hmm, yeah. According to the lua file the formula is: So at 1 point (with fighter 1.30 mastery) the average stun length should be 2.65 turns; at 5/5 points it averages to 5.25, but the cooldown is 6 turns. Am I missing something here? Cuz Bill just trashed my newest skeleton fighter thanks to cooldown and nowhere to run from Bill and his friends that happened to be near him (and he critted me for most of my health first round he could attack). Can't read lua better or I'd be able to show the success rate, but at 5/5 it seemed to stun everything well enough.

Since you seem to be interested in the Lua code, I can point you towards another other piece of code that determines the stun duration. If you look at the "STUNNED" effect in timed_effects.lua you will notice a call to updateEffectDuration, a function defined in tome/class/Actor.lua. This will reduce the duration of various effects depending on the rank (normal, elite, boss, etc) so that you will notice a stun lasts longer on a normal troll compared to Bill.