ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Should Fire Beacon be enabled in the Vor Pride? It feels a little out of place.

Edit: Oh, look, the Examine while in the transmog menu glitch that kicks you out of the transmog menu is still here. Just lost an Ureslak's Femur. At least I still get the Examine.

@Kamani
Incoming essay:
Fire Beacon in Vor Pride was something I wanted to do for a long time, both story-wise and balance-wise.

Balance-wise: Vor Pride is a place where 50% of enemies you fight are Pyromancers-- HIGHLY ineffectual and hardly worth regarding if you are a fire dragon. The most dangerous thing they can do is Flameshock you and your drakelings-- But more often than not, their fire ends up killing nearby orcs-- Or worse: Their own selves. This said, the only dangerous thing about Vor Pride (to a fire dragon) are the Cryomancer. Ice magic, in general, is *already* highly disruptive, and definitely 3 times worse to suffer than any fire magic. If you get unlucky and there are 9 Cryomancers and only 2 Pyromancers at the door, they will *HAPPILY* push your stuff in and there is very little a Fire Drake can do about it (besides Tyrannic Aura, of course). As such, the zone could, at random, be terribly easy-- Or terribly frustrating. This was a good opportunity for the following:

Story-wise: As said in the reflection, there's an uncomfortable shifting of hot and cold there, which screw up the regulation of a fire dragon's body temperature. So, to give the zone's difficulty some consistency, I took the difficulty away from the random generator, and placed the burden more-so on your own stats (IE: Cold Res up, Max Stamina down). This effectively makes Cryomancers less deadly, but Pyromancers harder to get rid of. Particularly, it protects your Drakelings (somewhat) from being sniped out by unusually large bursts of cold damage-- A problem I noticed all too often there (for example, a sudden 900-damage "Freeze" from a single High Cryomancer).


As you can imagine, when you create a class that can selectively become immune to one of the damage types in the game (or ALL of them, in the case of Multi-Hued Drake Scales), you gotta place some odd difficulty tweaks here or there throughout the game...

Didn’t consider that. I had multi hued drake scales, so I was functionally invincible.

Something important: Drakelings are randomly losing their water breathing. I was heading back to Lake of Nur (I forgot to do it...) and my drakelings randomly drowned. Two of them had aqua stones, and I had the one Pearl dropped by the naga boss. I even put one of the aqua stones on and off. Still drowned.

Edit: I think it may have happened some time soon after I got water breathing from the underwater dungeon dragon.

Edit: Still getting Cherish This: Cherish This: Dragons must stand together kind of stuff for the high peak reflections.

Edit: And also reflections referring to which battle style they took. What would happen if I said no there?

So what exactly do I need to do to finish the Minotaur reflections?

Also, it seems like the Minotaur has some sort of encounter in the ring of blood, since it has some special dialogue and there's a blue animal-person there, but I played it two different ways: when I just killed the ringmaster, I couldn't interact with the blue person, and when I decided to play the same, the red orb ate my money without doing anything, and the blue person... still wouldn't interact with me. How's that supposed to go?

Not directly related to OotS, but what are the console commands to spawn in items? I'm not really interested in beating the game with consecutive Ritches until I find the Rift. If there's some other way to force-unlock item-based unlockables, I'm all ears.

Also, Flamespit scales with WILLpower, but does it scale with MINDpower or PHYSICAL power? Ritches feel like they have to make the choice between going hard into Flamespit, or using the entire rest of the class, but it seems pretty intentionally designed, and I can deal with that.

Don’t know.

That blue person shouldn’t spawn there.

If you want to cheat, add neka_reflections_ritch = true to the file allow_build.profile in the T-Engine profiles folder (offline\modules\tome).

@McAllister
RE: Finishing the quest
"Saving escorts" and "never turning down opportunities", in summary (that includes the Dark Crypt!).

RE: Minotaur's interaction at Ring of Blood
Minotaur has some "different" dialogue with certain NPCs whom "offer" adventure-- The Ringmaster is one of them. This is mainly to serve as a hint that you're accomplishing the goals of your Reflections quest.

RE: Blue person at the Ring of Blood
He's one of two special "Friendly Myths". All Avatars can encounter them, and their location changes each game. What they offer is based on what "kind" of Avatar you are (Savage, Noble, neither), but more often than not, they will simply ignore you because you won't satisfy the conditions to have them speak with you...

RE: Orb ate my money
... Did you try kicking it and yelling at it a lot...?

RE: Item-based unlockables
What Kamani said.

RE: Flamespit doesn't scale with Mindpower
Precisely. "Flamespit" scales on Willpower in order to ease you into Ritch's other Willpower trees and get you started on building up a nice healthy pool of Stamina. It's also like that to prevent the player from simply going into 100% DEX and then maxing out Predation-- Which would give you the best of both worlds with little to no investment.


@Kamani
He actually does spawn at the Ring of Blood. It's one of his many locations-- Right next to the orb.

Oh, I thought McAllister meant it was IN the ring. That makes far more sense.

Ah! I did run into a caterpillar (seemed to be an Alice in Wonderland reference, nicely done) and it helped my Minotaur: made Noble Animal visible at 0.80, iirc. Good to know that not every encounter with each of those characters will mean anything.

And thanks, both of you, for all the other information. I appreciated the detailed breakdown of the Fire Drake reflections, but it sounds like the Minotaur's are a bit simpler. My friend's playing through as a Hydra now: any hints on how to complete their reflections?

@McAllister
Hydra's are much easier, but stranger.

Basically, every time a head is lost to bad equilibrium, it might freak out and say something. Sometimes, they'll say things about your past...
Also, try being friendly with The Summoner.

Kamani wrote:Don’t know.

That blue person shouldn’t spawn there.

If you want to cheat, add neka_reflections_ritch = true to the file allow_build.profile in the T-Engine profiles folder (offline\modules\tome).

Very cool, two notes: first, I'd also love to have the text for customizeable hydra heads, and second, as soon as I try to equip the Rift Blade, the the game freezes and the screen starts flickering black until I kill the program. Did I miss a step?

@McAllister
You don't have any other add-ons active, do you? This is a familiar-sounding bug...

nekarcos wrote:@McAllister
You don't have any other add-ons active, do you? This is a familiar-sounding bug...

Just tested it, I even disabled Ashes and Embers, the only "add-on" I had on was Item Vault.

@McAllister
I'll need an error log then. You can find it wherever your Tales of Maj'Eyal's installation directory is. The file is called "te4_log.txt", and it contains any errors that occurred during your LAST session (particularly, flashing black screens).

nekarcos wrote:@McAllister
I'll need an error log then. You can find it wherever your Tales of Maj'Eyal's installation directory is. The file is called "te4_log.txt", and it contains any errors that occurred during your LAST session (particularly, flashing black screens).

It's basically a ton of these:

Lua Error: /mod/class/uiset/Minimalist.lua bad argument #2 to 'long_desc' (no value)
At [C]:-1
At [C]:-1 long_desc
At /mod/class/uiset/Minimalist.lua:1147 handleEffect
At /mod/class/uiset/Minimalist.lua:1352 displayBuffs
At /mod/class/uiset/Minimalist.lua:1993 display
At /mod/class/Game.lua:1732

And then there's one of these thrown in every so often:

SDL_WINDOWEVENT_MOVED: ignored due to fullscreen
SDL_WINDOWEVENT_RESIZED: ignored due to fullscreen
[ENGINE] Setting requested FPS to 2 (500 ms)