ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So I've been installing mods recently and some of them seem to be making certain things easier. I decided to go back to normal difficulty even though I haven't beaten it on easy, but now I'm feeling somewhat guilty for some of the mods I've installed (or have been considering installing).

Which mods? Many of the class/race mods are actually pretty decent. Offhand I can recommend arcanum and verdant classpacks, and doctornull's classpack, assuming it hasn't broken yet. Things like adventurer+ though can easily escalate.

Infinite500 is a 'gotta have this' mod as well, and personally I swear by 'opt-in adventurers' because being screwed by 4 adventurer parties clustering around your dungeon entrance and forcing you into instagib fights is just wrong...

I agree that there are some "cheat" addons, but if you've ever seen Mex's class/race tier list, he said that most addons classes/races fall around a C (Mid-Tier). It's all personal preference.

"...doctornull's..."
if that's the one with "blood mage", "flenser", "storm warden" and others, they work perfectly fine for me.
unless there has been an update to the base game in the last week, which i haven't heard about...

if that was the one that added bards and melody, then i haven't tried.

but yeah, content addon's are perfectly fine most of the time, just avoid the balance shifting ones.
and don't pick the protoss race... it was designed to be op.

There's a mod that lets you choose your escort for escort missions. So I'm able to get the Light spells which give healing and shields (although I just noticed the MAG requirements are pretty high for certain builds). And another one lets you buy the rewards (although they do cost 1000 gold). And then a generalist class mod I was thinking about trying out which gives all the talents for that class. It would be fine if most were locked, but most are unlocked.

A "power level" rating to go along with the actual rating on the addon pages might be nice.

Yeah, I don't think addon classes are all broken or overpowered. I'm guilty of making my Necromancer rework significantly more powerful in some ways, but there's some quite well balanced ones out there... or ones that just end up being weak. I think Nullpack is generally quite balanced, Stoic is also very well made and didn't strike me as overpowered. Arcanum generally increases your power level but not to a broken degree.

You can always ignore certain parts of an addon if you find them making things too easy.

I wasn't referring to the class packs specifically. Just wanted to make that clear since some of the comments might have assumed that. However, even the vanilla classes aren't altogether balanced from what I've heard. For example, one person said that with some classes he plays an a high difficulty and others he plays on normal.

I think with modding gameplay things are subjective and really depends on the individual and their play style. This is something I struggled with back when I was modding Skyrim. I'm glad that I was able to go on to Dark Souls and Tales of Maj'Eyal which are both games that are much more balanced in their vanilla form. That's not to say that things couldn't be improved with mods.