ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

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This is just a quick little addon. I haven't yet done any balance testing on it - it might be too strong?

Changes around the Spell/Phantasm tree.

Shadowblades will lose the ability to cast illuminate at will for damage, but they get a few other things to make up for it.

T1 - Illuminate: Light up the area and blind in a big radius.
T2 - Blur Image: Gives defense, bonus stealth, and projectile evasion.
T3 - Dancing Lights: Every turn, summon a short-lived light in radius 4. Nearby enemies will be taunted by it, changing their target and making them deal less damage to other things while the light is alive.
T4 - Counter Flare: Whenever you lose a damage shield or break stealth, cast illuminate. This illuminate will also deal damage equal to a % of the damage shield's power or your stealth.

I like these changes alot. Phantasm definitely needed fixing, and these seem good.
It does seem a shame for AMs to lose Invisibility, if only for flavour reasons. Still, Counter Flare synergizes with them better.
One thing I'd probably keep an eye on is how high AMs can stack shield strength using Bathe in Light/Arcane Reconstruction crits, you might need to put a damage cap on it depending on how high the % is.

Heh, that was pretty much exactly my thought process. "I really feel like AMs should get invisibility, but I just can't think of a way to make it viable, so off it goes."

And yeah, I'd like to make the damage worthwhile on non-uber-boosted shields, but not be super insane on crazy high values. Maybe something like feed the shield's damage value through the save scaling function first?

In any case, the next step for me is to actually play through with an archmage and see how they feel. Any feedback/testing is appreciated.

Invisibility in general kinda needs looking at I think. On every Shalore character I disable the invis passive as it feels actively detrimental rather than useful.
And I'm unfamiliar with how save scaling works, but that sounds about right. So at 100% coefficient a 300pt shield would do 300 damage, but at 600 it might only do 400, and progressively smaller benefits from there. Sounds like a pain to code and balance though, so I'll leave it up to you to decide.

I like the idea that an Archmage "goes invisible" by blinding everyone in LoS.

Can you make Illuminate either smart about friendly-fire? It'd be neat if my Gandalf could light up a cavern without frying all the hobbit he's escorting.

Regarding the summons, is that a sustain or a duration? The way the multi-hued crystals do it in the alt.OldForest seemed pretty good: they just summon 3-4 wisps at once, with a cooldown.

I like the changes for shadowblades and will start testing them tomorrow.
Always felt Illuminatedmg + stealth to be op and a bit boring till lvl 20 and not useful after lvl 30. the rest of the tree was never worth investing a point as shadowblade before in my opinion.
As i love the stealthtree im happy to see some more talents, which are synergetic with it and iam anxious to test them.

ok did some testing with a nightmare skeleton sb, but only reached lvl 22. stopped playing because of counterflare bug, which provided me with a perma reflectionshield. i ran some other addon: landmark, storewishlist and faster rest on slower computers, but i dont think they collided in any way.

-The new blur is useful and might be really good on a high magic stealthbuild.
-dancing lights are great too but maybe op if fully skilled, as they provide a huge dmg reduce
-counterflare is working with stealth but not with shields. Instead of casting illuminate a lua error emerged and the shield was restored. this happens if the shield time wears off. but it also happens if shield is depleted i believe.

i added a screenshot of the error. All in all i really like your addon and will do some further testing regarding the power of the skills, if you dealt with the bug. i just hate playing buggy/invincible;)
Thx for your good work.
Tagedieb

Thanks for the feedback! Shields should be fixed.

hm deleted the old addon and used the new with my old lvl22 sb save.
I get no lua errors but as soon as a shield runs out the game crashes.
Not sure if my save is damaged because of the former errors or if your addon is still buggy.
Might run a new char to test it and tell you about it

That would be... um...

Did you have the sustain on when you switched versions? Did you try turning counterflare on/off?

Couldnt continue last save, game crashed whenever a shield ran out, no matter what i tried. (switching counterflare off, was the first i tried)

played another skel sb nightmare to lvl23, so i can say for sure it was because of the savefile and not the addon.
-Counterflare worked so far and is strong but seems balanced for sb and is fun (not sure about AM, might be op because of aegis)
-blur doesnt seem worth more then 1 point so far but might change with higher magic.
-didnt really try dancing lights often, but it seems to provide good protection.

Got a infinite bug now, which has something to do with your addon and produces lua errors. couldnt even save, so im back to dreadfall lvl1 from dreadfall lvl 8 and dont like to continue for now

Version _1 isn't working for me:

Tagedieb wrote:Got a infinite bug now, which has something to do with your addon and produces lua errors. couldnt even save, so im back to dreadfall lvl1 from dreadfall lvl 8 and dont like to continue for now

That bug usually isn't infinite... Anyway, fixed.

New version:
Changed around dancing lights. It no longer summons every turn - leveling the talent increases the frequency. The lights last longer and have a bigger radius. Damage reduction now goes from 25%-40% ish. You won't summon anything if no enemies are in sight.
I also made a new particle effect for illuminate / dancing lights.
Shadowblades now get phantasm at 1.2 mastery instead of 1.0.

Hey Gray , im back with another feedback:
-Dancing lights are great now. especially good for a stealthbuild to keep the enemies distracted, while stabbing.
-Counterflare is very strong. my nightmare testbuild was able to do 1700 dmg at lvl 28 with the skeletonshield and 1300 with a normal shield. the key to this dmg is stealth. the dmg from breaking stealth is mediocre in comparison (ca. 500). But i guess its ok, as you will not be able to grow numbers very much higher from then on. But this was with old 1.0 tree, so the 1.2 for sbs will grow numbers even more. Im not sure, if its necessary to boost shadowblades in this way.

Deactivating a shield manualy triggers the effect too, If you have a few shields u can abuse this by activating shield and immidiatly deactivating it manualy, which will trigger the dmg then proceed with next shield. Why this is a funny tactical decision with 1 or even 2 shields, i can see me running 4 shield runes and the 3 shields from sb trees and doing huge dmg just by deactivating them....
- Blur is useful, and i will test later if its possible to get unbreakable stealth on nightmare with it on a
hvy stealthbuild.

All in all its a great fun addon, which has a significant impact on the playstyle of the shadowblades.
Thx for that!

I tried using this add-on with HousePet's Arcanum add-on, and the third talent (dancing lights) is bugged. Simply moving my cursor over it causes a Lua error: