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Just a Crystal Vector in the Arena!

Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2013 10:09 pm
by grooog
Race: Crystal. Class: Vector. Here's what we look like currently:

Image

Race/class summary: The race cannot walk, it has a racial short range teleport with a 3 turn cooldown instead. It also has an equipment slot for gems. The class is basically a remix of Archer and Corruptor. While the Archer talents and Corruptor talents have not been tweaked for this remix, the Debility tree starts you off by giving all your arrows a little blight damage, a chance of inflicting a disease, and 2 vim on hit.

The sad tale of my gems: The crystal race starts with a single tier 1 gem in its inventory, since you can wear 1 gem as equipment. Not thinking, I sold it at the start of my arena career and only one gem has dropped during this entire game. It was a beautiful tier 3 gem that gave me +3 to all stats, quite handy when you consider that Vectors love Dex, Mag, and Cun, as well as having a use for the other 3 stats.

Naturally, shortly after acquiring that lovely gem, I reached a point where, against an Orc Corruptor, all my other defensive skills were on cooldown and I had to consume that gem in order to use my racial heal. The orc nearly smeared me across the floor anyway, but I narrowly survived primarily due to slowing the crap out of him with 3 different spells or attacks. I'm not actually sure whether slows stack or how, but it seemed to work, I archered his face off while he was slowed.

Notable current equipment:

Image

Assume anything not shown is either a green item that doesn't notably improve any of my important attributes, or is just a depressingly empty slot.

Debility is a really handy tree, and doesn't detract from shooting foes in the face. As for plague, skill 1 aka VD is very handy, but Scatter Shot alone has similar functionality to using Cyst Burst + Catalepsy. Scatter shot requires fewer turns, and fewer enemies are immune to it, whereas Epidemic is the only Plague skill that completely ignores undead/construct/crystal immunities. I would move the point out of Cyst Burst if I could, luckily I was able to recover the other points I had in CB and catalepsy shortly after realizing I didn't need them.

A crystal's inherently frequent teleportation helps a lot for a ranged class that doesn't have a steady supply of pets. My life is even easier when I play classes that have Thought Form or oozes or whatnot, but this race does a great job of rounding out classes that do not.

Happy to answer any questions, and highly interested in any suggestions!

Re: Just a Crystal Vector in the Arena!

Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2013 10:34 pm
by Doctornull
This character, right?
http://te4.org/characters/78970/tome/80 ... c33ddf8925

Thanks to your IRC feedback I'm going to be tweaking the Crystal racial talents... no longer will their racial heal consume your gemstone. It's a bit unfortunate, since I did like that aspect of resource management, but gem drops seem to be too unreliable in variant campaigns.

Cheers, and I look forward to hearing about your Arena win! ;)

Re: Just a Crystal Vector in the Arena!

Posted: Sat Nov 23, 2013 10:39 am
by Doctornull
Play-testing the new v10 talents I got to level 25 in the Arena:
http://te4.org/characters/52902/tome/00 ... b15950869c

Then I accidentally hit Escape and exited the 2nd boss store before I had a chance to buy anything, which probably hosed the character since I'll never get a better bow. Ugh.

Re: Just a Crystal Vector in the Arena!

Posted: Sat Nov 23, 2013 1:58 pm
by PureQuestion
Resource management of that kind is against ToME's design anyway :)

We should really look into dealing with that one Mindslayer talent.

And maybe Alchemist bombs.

Re: Just a Crystal Vector in the Arena!

Posted: Mon Nov 25, 2013 10:00 pm
by orange<
Does the lack of moving mean you can't autoexplore?
Or have you found a workaround for that?

Re: Just a Crystal Vector in the Arena!

Posted: Mon Nov 25, 2013 10:11 pm
by Doctornull
orange< wrote:Does the lack of moving mean you can't autoexplore?
Or have you found a workaround for that?
There's a racial talent you can sustain to move (and thus auto-explore), but it nerfs your damage output by -95%. Starting the sustain costs a turn, but turning it off is free (instant).

So you can auto-explore, but in combat you tend to use your 3 CD racial teleport instead.

It's a decent hybrid of convenience and thematic tactical restrictions.

Re: Just a Crystal Vector in the Arena!

Posted: Mon Nov 25, 2013 10:15 pm
by orange<
That is so awesome!

Is it this one?
http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/new-ge ... ystal-race

Re: Just a Crystal Vector in the Arena!

Posted: Mon Nov 25, 2013 10:16 pm
by Doctornull
orange< wrote:That is so awesome!

Is it this one?
http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/new-ge ... ystal-race
That's the original, which I forked to fix some bugs.
My fork is here: http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/new-gems

If jayseesee comes back, my fork might go away ;)