ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

This is my preliminary sketch of a rogue-oriented temporal class, the Gemini. The class seems pretty complex in terms of mechanics, to me, so it seems better to discuss it first and see if it's a good idea before anyone tries to implement any part of it. Balance at this stage is only approximate, and if the class were implemented I suspect that development would proceed as is typical for new classes in vanilla tome. That is, it would start off uber-powerful and get nerfed from there, based on feedback from actual gameplay.

Those in the Gemini Guild cooperate from time to time in important tasks, though the organization mostly acts as a hub of information and a source of training for those new to their art: a blend of basic skullduggery with the practical knowledge of a branch of spacetime theory that is very poorly understood by even the most advanced theoreticians of Point Zero, in which a subspace can be made to interact with itself as its own dual. The Gemini Guild doesn't insist on moral scruples of any kind and while some Gemini have found their way into the employ of the Keepers of Reality, it's far more common to find the Gemini within the ranks of various teams of temporal bandits -- even the occasional temporal parasite, if it's sufficiently cunning and capable of communication with the people of Maj'Eyal. There is really only one ethical precept common to Gemini: that when it comes to brass tacks, they can only trust themselves.

Gemini don't have an additive penalty to life rating: instead their hit points are half of what they would be, rounded up. Of existing class talents, they get dual techniques and time travel (locked). So far I can sketch one unlocked tree for class talents and one unlocked. The unlocked tree:

Temporal Duplicity

1.Gemini, active. My estimate for the cost is around 200 paradox or so. Cooldown is 6.
Brings your alternate self into reality. Both you and your twin get -20%+5%*tlvl resist all for 5 turns. Your alternate has movement speed +10%*tlvl, separate inventory, separate rune slots and all your talents, but no real volition or sophisticated intelligence apart from your magical direction and is unable to use any active talents except runes/infusions and dual weapon techniques, the latter capped at your mastery in this skill. If you die you become your twin, with your talents at the same cooldown level as before in your prior body and your paradox level the same. The talent can't be used when you have a twin, and if you get left without a twin then the talent goes into cooldown. If you have no twin for 7 turns, you die. Your twin is otherwise like a pet that follows you as close as possible when no enemies are in sight, but with some special properties, to limit abuse. If you get beyond 6 tiles of your twin then your twin blinks as close to you as possible, and if there are no places for it to blink to within 6 tiles, it perishes. Each time your twin attacks something you can't see costs you 30 paradox, with checks for anomalies. Each turn when your twin exists but is not in sight costs 30 paradox, with anomaly checks.

2. Temporal Cloak-and-Dagger, instant sustain, cooldown 4. Cost is maybe 80 paradox. Your alternate is in stealth mode, with a little less power than the rogue at equivalent mastery. However it doesn't matter what can see it when you activate the sustain: nothing can prevent entry. You get the effect of the shadowstrike passive at half mastery, and for damage purposes, when using daggers, you substitute cunning for str; on your offhand you also substitute mag for dex. Stealth power scales with cunning and paradox.

3. Soulthread Relay, active, ~20 paradox, cooldown around 10 - tlvl. Become your twin, and your twin becomes you. Deal tlvl strikes with your offhand weapon as temporal damage randomly to adjacent foes if any are present after your 'main' self switches. There is bonus damage on these strikes that scales with spellpower and paradox. Each strike consumes 20 stamina, and can't be realized without the required stamina.

4. Poof, active, cooldown 15. Named after an incident famous to both temporal wardens and gemini alike, in which a cadet in the warden academy was discovered as a Gemini operative. Your twin detonates as a cloud of temporal vapor with radius 4 and duration similar to that of arctic vapor, dealing a little bit less damage to foes than that spell; you instead recover 20 paradox for each turn inside the cloud. Paradox recovery scales with willpower and paradox, damage with spellpower and paradox.

And the locked tree:

Pandimensional Ninpo. Mastery 1.0

1. Dualspace Blasting, active, cooldown 8, 60 paradox. Manipulates your intersection with dualspace to create a violent explosion. That is, your twin is annihilated, doing half fire, half temporal damage in radius two. Temporal damage scales with spellpower and paradox; fire damage scales with cunning. When you have a twin again your twin has an irremovable status for 10 turns. It cannot heal and loses 10% of max hp per turn.

2. Mist Spider Lock, sustain, cooldown 30, 150 paradox. Famed technique of the legendary Gemini, Mist and Spider. Strike with both weapons and attempt to pin for 3 turns. Then switch with your twin. Your twin is now in a deadly embrace with your target and cannot act normally. Instead each turn it strikes the target with both weapons and reduces air by 8 + tlvl for every 10% reduction in monster's current hp. While the sustain is active your twin has +4*(tlvl+1)% resist all and -30+5*(tlvl+1)% evasion against the target only. If the twin is forced to blink, or if the target teleports, or moves to another tile at a faster speed than your twin, then the sustain deactivates, but the sustain won't deactivate if the target moves a tile and 5the tile that it left is vacant for the twin to occupy. The twin is essentially being dragged along by whatever it grips in its relatively lightweight, temporally phased state, but is still capable of losing grasp if the target moves too fast. At talent level three the twin will attempt to pin each round it attacks, with chance based on cunning, and will not blink to you as usual if you get out of range of it. At level 5 it also prevents the target from teleporting.

3. Dualspace Glitch, cooldown 30, 60 paradox and 60 stamina. Strike target, dealing offhand damage as temporal. For each 10% of target's current hp in damage from mainhand, reduce target's air by 6+tlvl. Mainhand damage scales with tlvl and temporal damage scales with tlvl and spellpower and paradox. If the target dies because of this attack then a new twin is created in its place. You cannot switch into this twin if you already have a twin present, but if there are only two of you on the board then it becomes your actual dual; think of the twins that you switch between as '+' and '-'; the third one would be '='. If +,-,and = are already present then the glitch attack cannot introduce a third twin. Every that you have three of you in play costs you 30 paradox, with appropriate anomaly checks. If the third twin = is introduced by the glitch then it has the same inventory and runes/infusions as your current alternate. At level 5 the hit to air can critical.

4. Dualspace Patching, sustain, cooldown 15, 100 paradox. Legendary technique of the legendary Gemini, Mist and Spider (&Lock). Nullifies the cost of sustaining the 3rd twin =. Instead you can't use any of your active talents except runes and infusions. When the sustain ends these blocked talents are all in cooldown at 3*(6-tlvl) turns.

Again, this is probably a very complicated sort of class to design to completion and explain to players through the TOME interface, my main preliminary interest is whether this sort of idea for a class would be fun to play or not.

Interesting.

I think some of your numbers are much too high, like expecting a Rogue to have a spare 100 Stamina or throwing out 200 Paradox every 6 rounds, but some of it looks fun.

Also I think some of your mechanical ideas are far too punitive: you have multiple ways to destroy your Twin, which puts the Make A Twin talent on cooldown 6 ... but you need your Twin back in 7 turns or you die, so if you fail the one Paradox check you get when bringing it back, you die.

Think about how much that would suck in the Sandworm Lair, for example, or the Race Through Fire.

Think about how much that would suck in the Sandworm Lair, for example, or the Race Through Fire

Point taken. I was thinking the 200 figure approximately in terms of what TW's have to carry as a sustain. Note that you don't have to carry that level of Paradox, you merely need to find a way to pay it down in order to do new chronomancy. Still the cost of various talents could be reduced, as you suggest; I just want them a bit on the high side to make buying your way into the static history tree seem attractive, and to make an investment into WIL seem tempting even as paradox scaling on damage levels off: standard scaling is as square root, as I recall. Maybe add a second unlocked tree with some basic dual-person techniques, with the higher tier skills having effects like reducing paradox or raising the death countdown, if your twin is not yet present. Poof can also be be adjusted to give more impressive recovery.

I assume that a movement infusion is very important to the class, as is a good backing from wilds. It would be interesting to arrange the class so that a relatively common way to die would be to find your other half dead and for some reason be unable to act in time.

On paper this sounds interesting. I can only imagine what kind of goodies it would get from existing talent trees.

Speed boost from TW, Step Up tree, the light armor boosting general tree, TW like phase/tele and that kind of stuff, right? I'm drooling over the concept already. Ultra fast dagger stabber pain in and out of reality. What could be better than that? Having the same DOUBLE.

Yes, lots of stabbing. The blinking tree for chronomancers seems like a good possibility for generics, as does a stamina-using tree from the maurauder, though I want to be a little bit cautious in not reducing the specialness of that non-paradoxical class.

Since the extra twin and the talent to revive it are in and of themselves a good source of resiliance against hp loss, the compensatory danger of the class should come from losing control in various ways; either through paradox, if you have to use twin-revival talents too often just to stay alive mid-battle, or through status maladies that make you unable to act when your twin is dead, or through the twin itself not always doing exactly what you want. Previous poster commented on the low countdown of the Gemini death due to lack of twin, and that should probably raise by one to give players 2 chances to revive their twin by default, but you get the general idea that this is an important way to check the power of the class. Thematically, this fits with the general theme of a chronomancer with no ethics or basic concern for continuum stability. They are spendthrifts of the paradox resource; we want the gemini to be powerful but somewhat glassy.

I'm tempted to not give them the chronomancer mobility tree, since the low cost talents in that tree may seem a little unusual compared with the high cost class talents. If we limit their mobility a bit then that may have the benefit of creating a third locked tree for the class, to give some difficult choices in what to unlock. Various combinations of blinking, rushing, and switching with your twin can make for talents that provide some pretty powerful tactical control, and other effects in the tree might help you with your twin countdown, or destroy the alternate twin to merge hp temporarily, that kind of thing: higher level control and utility may be worth the price of a cat point.

It might be neat to be a little tricky with the escort quests for this class. Temporal warden escorts could instead be random elite temporal warden enemies that teleport away as their first action, or something like that. This could help reflect the idea that the chronomantic rogues are not always on the right side of the law.

Sounds funky

Sounds very interesting. I agree that the downsides to Gemini need tweaking a little bit (having a summon that kills you when it dies, even with a time delay, seems ... harsh). It also sounds more like a sustain-type talent than an active one, since you want it on all the time.

Parcae2 wrote:Sounds very interesting. I agree that the downsides to Gemini need tweaking a little bit (having a summon that kills you when it dies, even with a time delay, seems ... harsh). It also sounds more like a sustain-type talent than an active one, since you want it on all the time.

I agree, general brainstorming is appreciated. I'm not going to be developing the idea any time soon, so I rather encourage anyone who is interested to help think this through into something that seems fun so that at some point someone can build it into something that is fun.

Having the twin-spawn talent as a special kind of active seemed appropriate to me since you want to be able to pay down the paradox cost before any countdown begins. If it seems we need a little buffing to get past the death of your other half prior to level 10 then I'm sure we could find some. For instance the stealth talent could be permastealth, and that's available at level 4. At level 10 and level 20 you are supposed to be opening locked trees which add value to the class' profile of strengths and weaknesses. The current new tree is pretty good, I think if the costs and cooldowns of all the talents are appropriately scaled. Note that you get a second twin revival technique for any time you want, and can also bank the twin that comes out of the talent as a spare. The first talent in that tree, the second suicide talent, is meant to complement your damage potential and help reward you for discarding a twin that is nearly dead. Whatever the damage from that talent should be, it should be immense. Get a third tree that provides some general purpose mobility, maybe some healing or a damage-increasing sustain, and throw in a third way of helping out with the death timer, and I think you have a pretty strong class that can make many problems quite easy by choosing the right locked trees, but which can't solve all its problems because it cannot develop all three simultaneously.

In some sense it's hard to really know how strong or weak the class will be until you try it, since the class gimmick would change gameplay in important ways. This makes balancing more difficult but has the potential to add more interesting variety to the roster of classes.

Some effects that might go in another tree:

1. A melee attack that blinks your twin to the opposite side of the enemy, with extra attacks if this blink is carried out.
2. A rush attack that also switches roles with your twin. Probably bonus damage here is appropriate too.
3. Maybe a sustain like weapon folding that works on all of you.
4. Maybe a heroism effect that is stronger when there are fewer of you.
5. Maybe a ranged melee attack with an arbitrary target. Maybe with chance of some debuff.
6. Probably another talent to provide dedicated countdown-control. For instance something that summons a twin for a few turns, thus resetting the death countdown as a side effect, but still allowing the standard Gemini talent to cool down.
7. Maybe squeeze in some mild paradox recovery as a side effect on one of these talents, too.

One idea for the tree name, just to provide flavor or inspiration to the thinking process: how about "Soulthread Twining?"
That is, you are getting better at dealing with a multi-threaded way of being, even on those occasions when your twin thread has come loose momentarily.

I think it would be quite possible to squeeze this into two or three categories to stick to Temporal Warden.