ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Should I save it until the end-game weapon, or just use it at once?

Ah yes... the Crystal Focus.
When melded with a normal, plain weapon, the results are great.
More damage, random magic damage, pushed crits, pushed APR, pushed spellpower. An all-terrain bonus-fest.

Sadly bugged to hell.

Occasionally (had it go both ways) on the Imbue screen it will not activate, and the natural reaction of the erstwhile Player is to click multiple times apon the weapon out of sheer indignant righteousness. This has the unique effect of actually imbuing the crystal focus each click making a game-breaking kill everything weapon with a typical damage range in the hundreds of thousands. Read the new sig of Darkgod for the record damage of this bug. (I think its' around two Billion damage - the RNG flags the sucker with an exponential value!)

Awesome, right?
It also makes your Rod of Recall dissappear, rendering this bug a potential game-breaker.

Flog it at a store is my advice. Though tempting to meld with a kicking normal high-metal double-hander for the uber-bonuses, the stress just ain't worth it.
Of course you can break it loose and use the Debug screen to re-rez the Rod of Recall (though I sadly don't know how to do that yet and have a level 17 Alchemist in purgatory due to this--)

Hope this Edifies.
The Knight in Tarnished Armour

If you're worried about the Rod of Recall bug, just drop the rod before you attempt to Use the crystal focus.
But be sure to remember to pick up the rod again.

The benefits are major and the bugs avoidable. I recommend the crystal focus heavily. Keep it until you find a max power weapon of choice (Greatmaul (72) or mace (48), if you're going for maximum benefit) and then slam that thing in it. Make sure to press th'enter button only once and then cancel out, and drop the rod of recall if you're feeling paranoid.

In exchange, you get the best weapon in the game for melee classes, hands down. The only thing that even remotely comes close to matching what a crystalline weapon can give you is the spellblade, and that's only on arcane blades (Use the focus on a max power dagger (40), instead, and off hand that beast.), sun paladins, temporal wardens (Do what arcane blades do!), and maybe reavers (Who use a crystalline voratun mace in their main hand and th'spellblade in their off hand!).

For every other melee class, a max power crystalline weapon is better than literally anything they can find in 20b. A little bit of patience and care is definitely a fair cost for such a boon!

I wish it wasn't so useless for ranged weapons.

I clicked it three times, so can't use it now - would be cheating. But from the tests I did it didn't seems so important for dagger wielders.

Probably less so for rogues, yes -- but again, if you use the crystal focus on a top-tier voratun weapon, it will produce the most damaging weapon of that type you can possibly find, period. Rogues like damage as much as everyone, heh. Having one of your attacks doing raw arcane damage (which basically nothing resists), is just an additional boon. Plus it boosts the physical damage on your other weapon by a bit. The only possible reason I could think of for not wanting, very badly, a crystalline dagger is if you're running a heavy stealth build and want to stab things with the silent blade... and even that might not be incentive enough. A crystalline focus voratun dagger is going to be capable of having over twice the base power of the silent blade -- in fact, it is going to have at minimum 54 power, a full 29 points above the silent blade.

For shadowblades, however, a focused dagger is probably the best dagger they hope to find -- on top of other things, it adds 12 spellpower, which boosts some of th'SB's talents... though admitably not terribly many. Still, what would you rather use, that you can't just wear in the offhand?

For everyone non-rogue that feels like dual wielding, especially for the magic-influenced classes I mentioned above, a focused dagger is, again, pretty much the best thing they can hope for. Highest damage you're going to find, basically unresisted damage type, and both spellpower and physical power get boosted. Sure, you can probably finish the game without it, but it's certainly the best artifact any melee class can hope to find, if they expect to last long enough to actually find a max power voratun weapon.

Really depends (for a rogue or sb anyways) on how heavily you're investing in flurry and other damage boosting talents.

Otherwise elemental weapons of daylight are probably best since the elemental damage is not diminished by flurries damage penalty or the offhand penalty. If you're actually investing in your weapon damage though and pumping flurry, dual-strike, or working a shadowstrike or backstab build then Crystal Focus is probably the best weapon in the game (ponders building a shadow strike crystal focus rogue... hmm...)

Frumple wrote:Keep it until you find a max power weapon of choice (Greatmaul (72) or mace (48), if you're going for maximum benefit) and then slam that thing in it.

The crystal focus has been downgraded to a 1.25 multiplier from a 1.5 multiplier in Beta 21. Its still an excellent weapon choice, but you might be able to get better mileage out of other weapons depending on your talent and gear setup. Physical damage % is somewhat more common than arcane % damage increase. However even if you find better, I'd still keep it around for high physical resist enemies (say one of the end bosses...).

Also, because of the way damage gets calculated, a Greatmaul (72) [1.5 range, 3% crit] is not necessarily better than a Greatsword (66) [1.6 range, 5% crit]. Attack power eventually has a square root taken before getting multiplied into the final damage. Damage range is a straight up multiplier, and varies between 1 and the range value.

On average, a Greatsword will have a 1.3 damage range multplier ((1+1.6)/2 = 1.3), while a Greatmaul will have a 1.25 damage range multplier ((1+1.5)/2 = 1.25). Thats 4% in favor the Greatsword. (1.3/1.25 = 1.04). The attack power is in favor of the Greatmaul in the ratio of (sqrt(72/10 -1)*0.8+1)/(sqrt(66/10 - 1)*0.8 +1) = 1.0341. Plus there's an extra 2% crit on the Greatsword, which when you assume no other crit sources, is a 1.0083 multplier in favor of the Greatsword ((0.05*0.5)/(0.03*0.5) = 1.0083.

So the Greatsword does more damage on average, but is more random than the Greatmaul. Although they're both within 1.5% of each other in damage. However, they begin to diverge on the several % scale when attack power from other sources (say Arcane Destruction) comes in, since the attack power ratio in favor of the Greatmaul decreases, while the Greatsword continues to get 4% more damage due to damage range. So when Arcane Destruction is comparable to the weapon attack power (not hard at level 50), then the Greatsword is doing 3.8% more damage than the Greatmaul on average (although even with near infinite attack power and minimum crit it won't ever do more than 4.8 % more than the Greatmaul).

Final conclusion, if you want consistency, pick Voratun Greatmaul (72). If you want more variation and more average damage, pick Voratun Greatsword (66). Both are within 5% damage of each other for nearly all cases I can think of, assuming identical modifiers.

I'd say final conclusion is grab use whatever you find first. No point waiting around for an extra few points of damage :P

This thing can't be fused with Slings? I have a plain Rough leather sling in my inventory (I'm not wielding it) and when I use the Crystal, I don't see the sling. Does it only work on melee weapons?

Impressive necromancy!

But no, the vanilla version can't be used on slings. However, the Arcanum addon version one can.

It sucks on:
-staves
-gloves

Its pretty good on everything else. It has to major pluses, it increase the base damage and gives you a weapon that does pure Arcane.

While its tempting to consider the fact that it can turn the base damage of a T5 to higher values than you may otherwise get. In reality the pure Arcane damage is probably the most advantageous aspect of it. In reality you can find an equally good or better randart(or whatever) weapon since the number of actual extra abilities is fairly small for the crystal focus weapon. However it is fairly rare to find a good that also has alternate damage and sometimes you really need the alternate damage.

So in general I would encourage people to think of the Crystal Focus as a means to get a damage alternate from what you normally do for thing that resist physical (or you need to kill a luminous horror).

Whether you do this at t5 or lower down will kind of depend on how much res pen your class can get and when you will get it.

In the end you can always find a comparable weapon to a t5 crystal weapon, but the crystal focus has the ability to make something you can barely kill into something you can kill fairly well.

In the end you will eventually run into something that severely resists whatever your main damage types are, so you need to either cultivate a reliable alternate type or fairly good res pen.

I don't believe I've ever found the crystal focus and a white voratun weapon of the desired type on the same melee character so I'd say it's not significant just because it can never be used.

It messes up your physical damage stacking on the most popular arcane blade build, which makes it a downgrade. Two handed paladins now have skill based damage stacking in physical as well so they should also probably avoid it. It might be good for an alchemist if the staff type can still be changed and it's probably good for bulwarks since Shield Wall has a physical damage penalty.

Atarlost wrote:It might be good for an alchemist if the staff type can still be changed…

I just tried this a few days ago, and unless I missed it, it doesn't grant Command Staff so using it on a staff is pretty worthless.