ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Are the unlocks already present in the game (svn), or do I just have to flag myself to try these out?

Work in progress

If you flag chronomancers please don't bother reporting any bugs. They're not done and I know several abilities need work.

But you're welcome to check out what's there if you like, just don't expect then to be playable.

Doomed, though, are pretty interesting and seem somewhat complete, if lacking talent trees outside their class-specific ones. Their early game is viciously difficult, though

Got one up to level 7 so far, killed Bill. Cursed grounds + willful strike can get you through the early bits, providing you start with a regeneration infusion. If you don't, you're screwed, period. Not really sure how things are going to play out, but it's a neat playstyle. Immobile creatures are your friend, heh. Lay feed hate&health on them and sit for a bit. If you see one, it's probably a good idea to leave it alive to feed on when you're damaged or low on hate.

Creeping darkness looks like it might manage as a decent damage dealer and willful strike is excellent for dealing with melee threats, but we'll see how things go. Doomed dudes seem to have a serious ranged weakness for something magic focused.

For doomed, please do report bugs and comments/suggestions. They were largely developed in the confines of Trollshaws Lvl 1 so they are likely to have some balance issues. I don't think I even took one to another dungeon until about a week ago.

I just sent in a patch that upgrades shadows a bit. They are one of the cooler Doomed features but were a little weak to help you out at the start. They should be more aggressive now and cast heal (on themselves) and lightning. I had allowed the lightning attack from about range 3 thinking "How often are you going to be standing between your shadow and his target?" My first character out was killed by a loud ZAP from the shadow. I decided to have them cast from range 1.

Doomed was intended to strike from the shadows at short range. With the more powerful shadows you should be able to work more in the background like an alchemist. Or you can use creeping dark to protect you from ranged attacks. With Dark Vision you attack through the creeping dark (when they can't). Dark Torrent can cause them to lose their targeting so they will stop coming at you through the dark. At least that was the intention. The class is still a little experimental.

The most glaring thing I've seen with Doomed so far, balance wise, is the fact that the Necromancer slaughtered a solid four skeleton/ghoul starting fellows in a row... and I still haven't gotten an undead doomed out of the ruins. Compare this to every other class, which I can usually manage to get at least one in four or so, at the worst, out of the ruins. Starting Doomed simply do not have the tools needed to deal with things like 90+ damage manathrusts and pinning arrows. Or OOD weapon-equipped skeletons. Or those freaking traps. Or... you get the idea.

Re: Shadows: They didn't save my poor starting bugger. Level one shadows are basically worse than useless in 15b. I left them be after that, so I can't say what a higher level talent would do for you. Can you have more than one? What the cormac Doomed I had had been doing wass laying down cursed grounds and either knocking things into them with willful strike, or using WS to clear a spot to drop one.

Reproach has probably doubled the amount of damage I put out on a sequential turn basis, though probably only increased average damage by about a third. The range on it is absolute crap, though, which is really odd when willful strike (which I thought for probably around 6-7 doomed characters was a melee attack) has longer range. Maybe have it hit everything around you, keeping the price the same or stunning/confusing/dazing (pick one). Creeping darkness is interesting, and the damage helps out, but its coverage and area of effect is very sporadic. It also doesn't have a duration listed in the description.

In a general sense, damage seems low and there's a lack of early-game status effects or escape options -- if willful strike's cooldown wasn't so low, every melee creature and its little brother would be having doomedsnacks for breakfast, constantly. Feed hate is nice, but having it makes hate somewhat trivial, especially if you come across immobile enemies, whom you can leave alive and 'farm' for hate, health, etc. Keeping hate maxed is a non-issue even without jellies and molds to cultivate.

That said, Unnatural Body does not evenremotely provide the degree of healing the early game doomed needs. If one does not start off with a regen infusion, Doomed are unplayable -- they cannot be gotten off the ground. This is especially true for undead starters. And ghouls... oy, poor ghouls. The reduced speed combined with the Doomed's utter lack of meaningful ranged (or any, honestly, compared to pretty much everything else ) damage makes Doomed ghouls a deathtrap.

There's probably more to be said, but I dig the WIP thing -- and take everything with a grain of salt, I haven't exactly gotten far with one of the critters, only to the point of killing Bill. Suggestion wise, something melee-ish or whatever would help. Staff combat, I'unno -- something to give a bit of extra damage boost early on. Doomed seriously needs an extra generic tree or two, as well.

Anyway, I babbled and went mostly offtopic and everything, so hopefully at least some of it'll help out. Seems interesting so far, just could stand a bit more fleshing out, numbers tweaking, and playtesting.

Frumple wrote:If one does not start off with a regen infusion, Doomed are unplayable -- they cannot be gotten off the ground.

Undead aside, do they start with 10 gold pieces? That's enough to buy a non-ego regen infusion.

(No idea what I'm talking about, really... I've only played released versions, and every character I've started in 15b has started with a regen infusion and a wild infusion, plus some also start with a manasurge rune.)

greycat wrote: Undead aside, do they start with 10 gold pieces? That's enough to buy a non-ego regen infusion.

No shops at the bottom of the blighted ruins, which is where you need it. Maybe the necromancer could install a infusion/rune vending machine?

Benli

The talent description on Call Shadows is vague in my opinion. It's a sustain that continually calls shadows but it's written more like an activate.

I'd start it off with, While this ability is active you will continually call up to %d shadows to aid you in battle.

Or something like that.

Dark Torrent says it has a chance to blind but aside from a saving throw that chance seems to be 100%. Blind Resistance is very rare in the east and a three second blind on a three second cooldown is very powerful even more so on a beam. Also Blinded comes with it's own log so I'd avoid having another one as it gets spammy. Blah is blinded. Blah stumbles in the darkness. (again especially with a beam).

Creeping Darkness is really cool but I'm not really sure what it's meant to do... it seemed very hit or miss. Maybe this is another vague tooltip issue. I didn't dig through the code to much to try to understand it.

I can't say I really played one though. I goofed around in trollshaws to check them out and that was it.

All of that aside...

Thanks for coding these. I think I can make some fun monsters with these dark effects

Ah... I didn't know they started somewhere other than the Trollshaws. I figured they were like the Cursed.

edge2054 wrote:The talent description on Call Shadows is vague in my opinion. It's a sustain that continually calls shadows but it's written more like an activate.

Changed.

edge2054 wrote:Dark Torrent says it has a chance to blind but aside from a saving throw that chance seems to be 100%. Blind Resistance is very rare in the east and a three second blind on a three second cooldown is very powerful even more so on a beam.

I'll probably change this one. The real ability here was not just blindness but "forgetfulness" which makes the opponent forget about you. I may move to that Punishment tree if it seems like its needed. Its could be an alternative escape to teleporting (hide around a corner or in your creeping darkness and make everyone forget you).

yufra wrote:Creeping Darkness is really cool but I'm not really sure what it's meant to do...

In addition to some damage, Creeping darkness blocks line of sight which protects you from ranged attacks. Dark Vision allows you to see creatures through the creeping dark (and normal dark) so you can attack them "from the shadows". This makes up for the class's lack of range. I'll review the descriptions and make that stuff more obvious.

That said, Unnatural Body does not evenremotely provide the degree of healing the early game doomed needs.

Lack of healing was just a last minute experiment. I put it in there after I saw everyone got the regeneration infusion. With that and Unnatural Body and Feed Health I felt like there was no real challenge to keeping health up anymore. The game seems to be moving away from death by attrition so theres not a lot of point in putting it in there.

I might rearrange Punishments to:
Give you Reproach before Cursed Ground so you can get an extra attack at startup.
Add stun to Cursed Ground.
Change Madness to daze more often or maybe act like Gloom in dishing out lots of random effects.

Undead starting characters of any class start in a place that is not the trollshaws.

I know that part. That's why I said "Undead aside".

Presumably, the Blighted Ruins is where the undead characters start.

I just died on my L21 Doomed:

http://te4.org/characters/1842/tome/179 ... 1cc000edf0


Feed
-Feed ending as soon as LOS breaks means you can't use it around corners. Again, this is annoying.
-Feed isn't really worth raising, you get tons of hate without even trying.
-The regeneration from Feed Health is quite weak; it feels like that should be a bigger effect than the Con boost.
-The drain from Feed Health can't kill enemies. This feels wrong.
-Feed Power is OK, not that exciting though.
-Feed Strength is extremely powerful against bosses that resist their own element (Urkis)

Force of Will
-Willful Strike is awesome.
-Deflection is OK but nothing too special.
-Blast is fine. It could stand to gain a bit of range with power, maybe.
-Unseen Force is great; I like the way it scales.

Darkness
-Why does this use Magic? It's the only talent tree that does.
-Creeping Darkness is probably too powerful if you want to abuse it but I didn't feel like it.
-Dark Vision just showing monsters, as opposed to walls/floor, is seriously annoying.

Punishments
-Reproach is really interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about it - sometimes I liked how it worked and sometimes I hated it.
-Didn't really like the idea of bouncing things back and forth onto Cursed Ground. Felt like it would be a ton of hassle.
-Agony isn't worth raising. It lasts a long time but doesn't really do much damage - better to leave it at 1 and use it to proc Madness.
-Madness is *awesome*.

Cursed Form
-Unnatural Body is basically mandatory, I don't see how you could get by without it raised high.
-Seethe is awful.
-Relentless is great, of course.

Dark Figure
-Radiant Fear is extremely powerful for a first tier ability. Is it unresistable?
-Suppression is kind of meh. Not really worth raising given how many other things there are to increase.
-Cruel Vigor is *amazing* - no downside.
-Did not try Pity but it would have to scale pretty well to be meaningful.

Traveler
-I didn't raise this at all because of how immensely unfun it looked. A talent to make you earn more XP, really?

Random feedback:

General
-Early game is very annoying.
-Why do Doomed start off with a staff? As far as I can tell none of their abilities make use of one.
-Some of the Doomed abilities fire through walls and others don't; this is annoying.
-The balance between the class/generic trees is very odd, and they don't get any 'actually' generic trees
-Way too many passive abilities; there's a very strong incentive to just dip into all of them you can get as fast as possible
-Hate is far too easy to raise without even using Feed. You can also use Feed on immobile monsters, so any time you find one you get right back up to 10+.
-There's no way I would've gotten as far as I did without Mind Sear from a Loremaster. Getting a mind damage bolt spell means being able to 25% stun/para/conf/whatever an entire hallway of stuff.
-Overall Doomed is very annoying to play and I felt pretty crippled the entire game. Their damage output is just awful.