Tormented Souls Pack: Warlock Brainstorming

[Sradac]

So I've decided I already have a dex / mindpower focused Predator, and a str / mindpower focused Dread Knight, it will only make sense for me to make a spellpower / mindpower focused class next. And I want to roll all of them into one pack like doctornull and housepet have done.

So my next endeavor is going to be the Warlock. My initial concept was something like bringing back the OLD doomed.

If you read the doomeds description, it talks about how they were former mages whose vie for too much power doomed them into the life they are now, blah blah blah. However, the current version of the doomed really dosen't reflect this. At all.

The old one did. They had both spells and mindpowers. Sure they needed balance and help, but it was a great concept.

So I want to do this, with the Warlock.

Basic Lore, in a nutshell, because I suck horribly at story telling and writing out detailed compelling lore is this:

Code: Select all

Warlocks are a Myth, just like Witches and Naloren. Or so they say. Stories of them have been told since well before the Spellblaze.  At first, a few souls spread rumors that it was indeed Warlocks that caused the spellblaze.  That was until the truth was found out.

A Warlocks bargain for Power was similar to that of the Doomed, however they had very specific requirements...and very specific detriments.  While they wanted greater power to dominate the will or those around them using sheer mindpower, they still wanted to hold onto some of their Arcane secrets.  They refused to relinquish their most potent and powerful of abilities.  

Because of their refusal to comply, they have been completely severed from the flow of Mana on Maj'Eyal and as such, they cannot access the majority of their knowledge they once had.

There are a few pieces of Magic they retained though.  Their most prized abilities.  The tradeoff on somehow using their willpower to hold onto these secrets is that it is extremely taxing on their psyche to recollect and cast these spells.

Something like that. I was inspired by the Mesmer addon at how well it did a 0 resource class. So my basic idea is a Doomed meets Mesmer. Plenty of your normal Hate using afflicted talents, but also a few new Spell trees that have no resources. These are the secrets they held onto. And they are POWERFUL. However, they have EXTREMELY long cooldowns on these abilities. These aren't your average, everyday spells. These are the most forbidden and forgotten magics since long before the spellblaze.

So I need some help on this one actually. I can't come up with any good ideas. I WANTED to bring back primal magic, but those talents are broke to hell. The code in them is super obsolete with all the new dev thats gone into t-engine and I wouldn't even begin to know how to start fixing primal magic.

So, sure, I can give them force of will, and punishments, probably gestures and dark sustenance, but I need more. I need powerful magic that can have very very long cooldowns but the effect will actually make a difference in battle.

I also want these guys to be balanced evenly between spellpower and mindpower. I attempted to have them start with a short-staff in their pain hand and a mindstar in their offhand (since gestures technically only needs a mindstar in the offhand to work), but it looks like you can't assign ego's to weapons on birth. If nothing else I suppose you can just swap between mindstar and staff, or focus on one or the other.

Actually now that I think about it I can just hook combat.lua to make Staves increase both mindpower and spellpower (probably?)

So in summary, I need some help brainstorming. I have the base concept in mind, doomed that forcibly held onto some of the magic they once knew and because of this they were cut out of the flow of mana, those spells no longer use any resource at all, but have extreme cooldowns. Inspired by both the Warlock from D&D and the Mesmer addon.

As far as the types and what they do....really not sure. Arcane damage is most likely a must, but I don't know what else. And they need some way to augment their staff / mindstar style to work together in harmony.

[HousePet]

I suspect the Doomed lore is basically not canon, but anyway mechanics.

A spellpower using class is going to have the stats to use mana using spells from alternate sources. To counter this, you could give them negative mana regeneration.
Negative mana regeneration itself could be an interesting mechanism. You build your Hate up and then use it regain a large amount of Mana which you then have to use quickly before it drains away.

[Sradac]

It's been a while since I played it, how did you handle it with your druid? Do all of the powers scale off spellpower but are just considered nature gifts so Zigur dosen't murder them? Or were you able to find a balance?

[HousePet]

I set the talents to be both spell and nature gifts, so Zigur patrols still hate you. But since I didn't give you an arcane resource bar, you can still enter Zigur and do the quest for a different reward.

To manage the arcane vs nature balance, I hacked it so that spell failure chance wouldn't apply to nature spells, gave an effective willpower bonus for equipping arcane disrupting equipment, and removed the spellpower penalty.
The end result is you can choose between having arcane spells/runes or arcane disrupting equipment.

[jotwebe]

The problem with balancing things via extremely long cooldown is that ~50 is about the max you can do, above that it only means that you can do things once per fight, barring rare circumstances where it's impossible to retreat.

A real time game can do things differently - real time cooldowns need real time to come back. A game with a hunger clock can do things differently - if you wait out your cooldown, it'll cost you in food. ToME is neither, and so it makes little difference whether a talent has a cooldown of 50, 100 or 1000 turns.

Hate comes closest to time pressure, but it stabilizes eventually. It's going to be difficult to hit that sweet spot where it's not totally obvious that you want to do one of two things: Either ignore your once-in-three-hundred-turns talents, or always rest up and deal with starting fights low on hate.

[joebobjoe]

Perhaps do something along the lines of the Deeprock form line for the Arcane Secrets. One major power that each skill improves an aspect of or gives additional uses. My main idea for one is a sustain that's instant to activate and gives large boosts that increase the longer you sustain it but gets a higher and higher chance to deactivate itself giving debuffs of increasing severity the longer it was sustained. You can cancel it early instantly but you still get the debuffs. So you might get one that rips open a portal to the fearscape to summon temporarily friendly demons that increase in power the longer you hold the portal open until it finally collapses. The demons remain friendly for some turns after the portal closes until they turn on you simultaneously. Or maybe one that's like the Necromancer's ability to make Husks (not sure on drawbacks) with maximum grade of enemy being based on investment into the initial skill while upgrades might give them resistance, increased damage, or various other useful sustains.