ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I would really like to understand what happened =/ It was the first time I could get a melee character to the eastern continent, and I had some very good pieces of equipment. everything was going far, until that orc ambush...

There were summoners and necromancers. I had cleared nearly all the orcs, but got badly hurt doing so (~350hp remaining, healing and heroism on cooldown for ~4 turns...). Only the summons remained (about 6-7 of them) with a summoner (and a stealthy assassin).

What happened is that I thought I had killed every orc, until I noticed the summoner. I hit him, then I saw tons of text scrolling and died. From my last hit to my death, there was only a split second, but it seems like LOTS of things happened.

The final blow I landed is in the middle of the first screenshot (313 physical damage). The remaining is what happened after the hit:
http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/885 ... D837ED864/
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/885 ... FF26C6EE7/
http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/885 ... 7E284808B/

Character in vault (you can see buffs/debuffs I had at the time): http://te4.org/characters/52481/tome/c2 ... b3ea38646e

I know there's a lot of stuff, but anyone has any idea about what happened after the last blow I dealt to the summoner? It's like lots of turns elapsed in a split second, resulting in my character's death. I've played over 50 roguelike characters, and I never had anything similar happening to me before. I really thought I could survive this ambush despite being hurt, so it's quite disappointing to lose this character without understanding what happened =/

Thanks for any help you can bring, and happy new year ^^

By the look of it, you have Chant of Fortitude set to auto cast.
Which it was trying to do, but it kept failing due to arcane disrupting equipment.
This ate up all the turns until you died.

You are right in that yes, I had Chant of Fortitude on autocast with anti-magic equipment. However, it has a use speed of "instant", so it should not use up my turns. I only use "Auto-use when available" with instant actions. Otherwise I use "auto-cast when no enemies are visible".

I haven't looked at the link provided, unfortunately, but is it possible you fell asleep? Or perhaps became stunned and "robbed" of control in some way? That would be my first guess, especially for a melee character.

Kelovar wrote:You are right in that yes, I had Chant of Fortitude on autocast with anti-magic equipment. However, it has a use speed of "instant", so it should not use up my turns. I only use "Auto-use when available" with instant actions. Otherwise I use "auto-cast when no enemies are visible".

I doubt that made a difference.

The key thing to examine is the log, but you don't provide it here. so it is guesswork really. gramd master assassin's are very deadly, as are summoners, so having both is nasty. and remember with summoners, kill their summons first, not them, as they have very long cds on their talents, much longer than the class when we play it.

Overall, though, your Cursed isn't wearing the right gear imo. I would look to increase stats, mindpower, saves, and accuracy, for starters.

movement options are critical to survive in tome, and you haven't used blindside, one of the best in the game, nor preternatural senses, which gives excellent scouting.

jenx wrote:The key thing to examine is the log, but you don't provide it here. so it is guesswork really.

erm.. click on the three links in the first post please.

I had no problem with my gear so far. Rampage + movement infusion + reckless charge were fine as far as movement is concerned. Not sure why I would want more mindpower or accuracy... resistances and defensive stats are much more important to me, especially if I already deal tons of damage. Anyways, that is not the issue here.

Kelovar wrote:You are right in that yes, I had Chant of Fortitude on autocast with anti-magic equipment. However, it has a use speed of "instant", so it should not use up my turns. I only use "Auto-use when available" with instant actions. Otherwise I use "auto-cast when no enemies are visible".

You lose your turn when you try to cast a spell that fails due to disruption, even if it's normally instant.

Really????? Wow... Never saw that being mentioned in the game. I love those hidden mechanics...

Ok, well, never again will I use any kind of auto-cast except those for when there is no enemy in sight, since they can turn into instadeath... (why do that option even exists?). I mean, this time, it was caused by my equipment, but the same thing could have happened with an anti-magic enemy...

That also means that I was very lucky that my previous character, a temporal warden, went as far as level 43, since all of his instant buffs were on auto-cast, and I met many anti-magic rares... Never had any trouble like that though... only my active spells seemed to cause me to waste turns. Or is it a new "feature"?

Anyways thank you for your help.

You shouldn't mix antimagic equipment with magic talents.
Also, the debuff from antimagic equipment is different to the debuffs used by antimagic enemies.

And no, this is not a new feature.

The only things that can hit you with spell disruption are:
-Wearing antimagic equipment
-casting spells on an enemy that has the Spell Feedback prodigy (only Champions of Urh'Rok and a few unique NPCs have this)
-a side-effect of the Solipsist talent Dreamforge, which requres the user to stand still for five turns before it starts happening
-VERY rare chance for any melee/archer enemy to spawn with a weapon/quiver of disruption/Spellhunt Remnants, hit you, and pass the mindpower vs mental save check to apply the effect

In other words, autocast is very safe except for freak occurances.

stinkstink wrote:In other words, autocast is very safe except for freak occurances.

Which means that it is not safe st all ^^ Freak situations WILL happen, and playing on roguelike, I have to take them into account. From now on, all of my sustain auto-casts will be set for outside of battle.

I do know that antimagic and magic don't mix well; what I didn't know is that instant spells can use a turn. That's extremely counter-intuitive (and not indicated anywhere, unless I'm wrong). I mean, I didn't care much to lose randomly 5 in saves. Since the spell was instant, I was like "oh well, no reason not to keep it on auto-use, since it doesn't use up an action". And for the previous dungeons I ran (Vor armory, the worm cave in the East), that's what happened, and I never noticed any turn being wasted on it (despite using that spell with magic-disrupting equipment all this time)...

Anyways, lesson learned: always set sustain auto-cast outside of battle. Thank you ^^

Kelovar wrote:

jenx wrote:The key thing to examine is the log, but you don't provide it here. so it is guessacuracy, work really.

erm.. click on the three links in the first post please.

I had no problem with my gear so far. Rampage + movement infusion + reckless charge were fine as far as movement is concerned. Not sure why I would want more mindpower or accuracy... resistances and defensive stats are much more important to me, especially if I already deal tons of damage. Anyways, that is not the issue here.

no, the game log in te4.txt or something like that. that holds tens times as much information as you provided.

blindside has several advantages over these three talents. you'll have to try it to see. (hint, vaults, and to spots where there are no enemies)
mindpower - because gloom talents require it. at high levels, most things will start to resist your gloom talents otherwise.
accuracy - ditto, high level characters you simply won't hit. yours is mid 40s, anything mid 50s or above has 90% chance not to be hit by you, unless the code has changed in the recent releases.

the thing about the east is that the npcs don't simply scale up to in a linear fashion from the west. in most cases there is a major jump in their abilities. so you will encounter bosses with *** in mindpower, or defence or accuracy, or saves or .... *** means 100 or higher (300 or higher scaled). you will encounter creatures that can blind you not for 6 turns but for 20 turns, and so forth. so for you to land your talents, you need your power at 80 to 100, and saves likewise. and talents won't get you anywhere near that. only gear will.

and by dealing tons of damage in the east, you are wanting your player to hit npcs for 1000 hp and upwards. if you want to do atamathon, triple that. and most characters can, but only with very careful gear selection.

and as for your stats, you want your core stats to be well over 100. examine winners in the classes you like to play, particularly winners on roguelike, and you'll see what I'm talking about. with heroism infusions, many winners get stats over 150. and the difference it makes is massive.

Thanks for the advice!

Could you tell me exactly where to get the log text file, because when I asked in the chat, nobody knew! That's why I resorted to screenshots...

Kelovar wrote:Thanks for the advice!

Could you tell me exactly where to get the log text file, because when I asked in the chat, nobody knew! That's why I resorted to screenshots...

in windows, right above the executable normally, if sorted alphabetically in explorer.

you must get it straight away, as it will get cleared if you exit the game.

This is one of those things that makes perfect sense (as otherwise, Antimagic gear would have no downside for many Runes/instant sustains, which are, for many classes, the only spells they even use) but can be frustrating if you don't think of it, yes.

I had a near death to it once. Never occurred to me to complain though. I'm not even sure where you'd put the tooltip to warn of the effect... certainly not on every instant spell...

Thinking on it, though, I guess Antimagic could just put Instant talents on cooldown instead of taking a turn, when they fail. Though, that makes them far worse for people that actually know the risk(I've used a Shielding Rune with heavy Antimagic jamming on, even knowing this exists, and it was an interesting choice if weird on how I had to use it...I wouldn't if it would go on CD when it failed instead of using a turn.).