ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

There's Warrior/Archer, and now there's Mage/Magebow, so I'd like to add a member of the Rogue metaclass: the Skirmisher. This class is more intended to be a sling specialist, although the option is there to use a bow instead if preferred. They're basically the Rogue with ranged instead of dual weapons, with mastery level for the bow/sling specialties nerfed a bit compared to Archer. Poison is also available (locked at start) and also nerfed a bit compared to Rogue's version. I'm also adding a new talent tree to replace Trapping, called Grenades (see below).
I'm pretty sure I can code the new effects, looking at how things like Doomed's Darkness talent to calculate lingering area effects. I'll come back in a while when I have it ready to play with, but if anyone has any feedback in advance or seens anything blatantly broken, please feel free.

Skirmisher custom class, Rogue meta-class
+4 Dex
+5 Cun
Starting Life: 100
+0 life per level

Starting equipment:
Rough leather sling
Iron bullets
Elm long bow
Quiver of elm arrows
Iron dagger
Rough leather armour

Starting talents:
Sling Mastery (this can be unassigned at start and reassigned to Bow Mastery if desired)
Stealth
Grenade Mastery
Flare
Steady Shot
Shoot generic talent

Talents:
Generic:
Technique/Field Control (1.1)
Technique/Combat Training (1.2)
Cunning/Survival (1.2)

Class:
Technique/Archery - bows (1.2)
Technique/Archery - slings (1.2)
Technique/Archery training (1.2)
Technique/Archery prowess (1.2)
Technique/Combat techniques (0.9, locked)
Technique/Combat veteran (1.0)
Cunning/Lethality (1.2, locked)
Cunning/Stealth (1.3)
Cunning/Poisons (1.2, locked)

New talent tree:
Cunning/Grenades (1.3):
1: Grenade Mastery:
r1: Glue grenade
- Active, Single target physical pin for 1 + (Talent) turns, radius 1 at rank 4
Lingering puddle of glue also pins for 1 + (Talent) turns

r2: Grease grenade
- Active, Radius 1 slow movement, radius 2 at rank 4
Lingering puddle of grease lasts for 1 + (Talent) turns
Reduces movement by 1 + (Cun * 0.15)% per talent level while in puddle, wears off shortly after leaving puddle
Flying/levitating are unaffected

r3: Stink grenade
- Active, Radius 1 physical daze, radius 2 at rank 4
Lingering cloud of stink lasts for Talent turns
Daze lasts for Talent turns, reset (save/resist check) each new turn still in cloud
unbreathing, poison immune are not affected

r4 Concussion grenade
- Active, Radius 1 physical stun for (Talent) turns, radius 2 at rank 5
Physical disarm (targets drop their weapons)

r5: Flash grenade
- Active, Radius 3 physical blind for Talent turns
Lingering smoke reduces vision radius by (X) for duration of the cloud
Reduces accuracy by 1 + (Cun * 0.1) per level while inside cloud
(would have preferred something a little more subtle but oh well, as lukep says all monsters have 10 infravision)

2: Lure: (as rogue)

3: Secret Ingredient
- Passive, improve the strength of all grenade recipes by 5% per adjusted talent level (up to 32.5%), and duration of effects by 1 per talent level

4: Recycler
- Passive, reduce the cooldown of all grenades by 1 per talent level

edit: reduced base durations, instead allowing Secret Ingredient to increase durations.
Note: getTalentLevelRaw() will be used for durations for individual grenades, because increasing the mastery by spending category point or by amulet will increase everything anyway due to Secret Ingredient's effect. Otherwise I guess durations would get fairly crazy.

update: taking Mobility away again, after all Rogues only have 3 generic talents themselves and they're okay as they are. If you want generics you can get them from escort awards.

Update: I realized Cunning wasn't actually being used for anything, so the strength of the effects (e.g., the number the target has to save against) comes from Cunning - makes sense to me, you're smarter and produce more effective recipes. This also makes the Secret Ingredient skill nicer than it would have been otherwise, because usually this is done with Accuracy, which tends to be extremely high for melee types anyway.

This concept looks good, we can always use more bow/sling classes. Some comments:

- You could start them with an iron dagger equipped in the offhand. This would not affect gameplay significantly, but would give players the idea that it can be done.
- If you want players to have a quick and painless choice between slings and bows, you can start them with a bow/arrows in the swap slot. Personally, I like the idea of a Sling focused class, as there are already TW's and Mindslayers that have Bow talents.
- "Snares" name idea: concoctions (or really, anything that suggests a mixture of stuff without being overtly magical)
- You will want more generic talents available. If you put 1 into armour training, 5 into accuracy, and 5 into thick skin, you will have 30 more generic points to spread among 40 possible places (8 talents at 5 points each) This is not essential at all this early in development though.
- A better place to look for making map effects happen might be Glacial Vapours or Gravity Well instead of Creeping Darkness. This is because Doomed Darkness can spread and is therefore much more complex than normal talents.
- re: Flash Pot. All enemies have 10 infravision, meaning that they will not be affected by this at all, as presented.

Good luck, I look forward to trying this class out.

Regarding starting equipment, doesn't that come out of your stat points? If these are essentially free then fine, but if they're going to cost you stat points for stuff you're immediately going to sell/transmute then I don't think I want to do that.

Regarding generic talents, yes, 3 trees is not much. I considered giving Mobility here, and it makes sense, so I'll add it. It could be obtained for antimagic types via one of the escort awards, but for non-Zigur types it'd be welcome. Updating the OP for that.

For the new talent, I think I'm gonna go with "Grenades" since the use of this word seems to go back to around 1590. Thanks for the feedback!

Kaballah wrote:Regarding starting equipment, doesn't that come out of your stat points? If these are essentially free then fine, but if they're going to cost you stat points for stuff you're immediately going to sell/transmute then I don't think I want to do that.

Starting equipment forces you to spend your first stat points so that you meet the requirements for them, so it is not an issue for adding a dagger.

With this class, you will spend stat points automatically until you reach at least 11 STR (rough leather armour) and 11 DEX (rough leather sling, pouch of iron shot). Adding an iron dagger as well would not increase the DEX requirement past 11.

Okey doke, I'll add those items then, thanks.

I really like the idea, i often tried to build a rogue around slings and traps but it never really worked out past lvl 25 as the dmg was too low. regarding to the poisontree, i tried a while ago to use poison on a rogue with a sling and it didnt work, as it only affects melee weapons. Has it been changed or do you intend the poisontree for melee weapons?

Honestly it hadn't occurred to me to check that yet, I assumed it'd work. I'll look into that, thanks for pointing that out.

Keep in mind this class is not going to outdamage a rogue in pretty much any situation, because a) you don't have damage from traps, and b) dual daggers can end up doing pretty ridiculous damage - but instead you'll have the flexibility of range and crowd control, along with stealth.

Regarding poisons - this is built into mod/class/interface/Combat.lua and it seems very intentionally written to only allow poisoning via melee weapons (barehanded melee is also not allowed to transmit poison). Looking at the code for Archery.lua, the Stealth/Shadowstrike talent won't work with it either, or Lethality/Lethality, or Dirty Fighting/Backstab. While I'm looking, I see that pretty much no class's damage buffing ability is extended to Archery.lua except for Mindslayer's Conduit.

I could probably superload (oops) Archery.lua's archery_projectile() function but there's a couple of major problems there:
Is this intended to be impossible, or are these features just "not yet implemented" for archery? If you're not supposed to be able to use shadowstrike or lethality or poisons via archery because of balance reasons, okay, then this class concept is pretty much not what I'd hoped for and I guess I'll quit working on it.

If it's okay then there will probably be compatibility problems with this class and any other that also modifies/overloads mod/class/interface/Archery.lua.

I'm pretty sure I can code this but if Darkgod/etc consider allowing archery to have these goodies (stealth crits, lethality, poison etc) to be overpowered then welp.

It probably hasn't been tried, Kaballah, and the current implementation might be for historical reasons. Archer and rogue are pretty old classes, if I understand correctly, and there's no reason why they would be coded to combine the two, except to make the rare bow/sling rogue less powerful. I think you could neglect poison and add some damage effects to Grenades, and perhaps add a separate locked "Skirmisher" or "Assassin" category to introduce the effects from Lethality.

Thanks Bricks, after thinking about this a bit more and talking with people ingame, I don't really see anything amazingly broken with this concept. I'll go ahead and modify the base archery to enable these talents (Vile Poisons, Lethality and Shadowstrike). When it's done I'll work with Daftigod to get it packaged with his class pack bundle to prevent compatibility problems there.

Duh, it turns out Archery.lua pulls its crit chance and crit severity from Combat.lua, in the _M:physicalCrit function, so Lethality and Shadowstrike already work with projectiles. Just adding poisons will be pretty simple after all.

I need a little balancing advice: I want to base the strength of grenade effects (i.e. the number you save against) off your Cunning score. Is it okay to have the base strength just equal to Cunning, and have it improved by the Secret Ingredient skill? Will that be too high, too low?

You definitely want to run it through the scaling system. So something like This makes it follow the same tier system as physical power, the saves, etc.

Since you're not running off of mindpower or something that already exists, this will be lower compared to other things because you won't be able to boost it through equipment. Secret Ingredient offsets this, but you may want to make it a little stronger.

Thanks, I'll implement the rescale function and I'll increase the bonus from Secret Ingredient a bit.