Assassin - Complete Rogue Rework v1.8

[Razakai]

http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/assassin

I've always liked the Rogue archetype in games, but the Rogue in ToME is often considered to fall short of other classes. This is an attempt to address this, by giving Rogue new tools to bring them up to par with other classes and fulfill the 'assassin' fantasy you get in games like Assassin's Creed, Dishonored etc.

The addon grants Rogues dozens of new abilities and several unlockable and baseline trees. Many of these include the use of tools such as poison darts, garrote and other rogue's tools. Existing trees have also been reworked, such as vast improvements to Trapping, new Survival and Mobility trees and more.

A detailed, commented changelist can be found here.

--

Changelog

v1.8
- Tinker escorts correctly offer the option to learn tinkering trees.
- Quickdraw checks for chance rather than always activating.
- Skirmisher starts with the new Mobility tree.

v1.7
- Fixed a bug where Fumble was not being removed correctly.
- Added the first round of new icons, credit to Trenggiling.

v1.6
- The numbers on many talents have been rebalanced.
- Fixed a number of tooltip issues.
- More skills will no longer break stealth on use.
- Rogues and Marauders start with the correct skills.
- Flurry has been reworked.
- Soothing Shadows now correctly displays the life and stamina regen granted.
- Lethality grants offhand weapon damage rather than crit damage bonus.
- Parry no longer has an active component, but the damage blocked has been increased. Now causes your parries and dodges to apply Exposed, which causes your next attack to deal additional physical damage.
- Tempo has been reworked. Now causes your Exposed hits to restore energy and stamina, and gives a small chance to Expose on hit.
- Lunge no longer scales based on Exposed stats. Now has a cooldown (reduced for each time you Expose an enemy), always cripples, and inflicts high mainhand damage.
- Dirty Fighting has been added to Rogues as a locked tree and heavily reworked.
- Dirty Fighting (talent) reduces the stun, pin, blind and confusion resistance of targets by 50% in addition to stunning them.
- Backstab now grants a damage boost for each disabling effect the target is under, and has a chance to inflict random status effects against disabled targets.
- Feint has been replaced with Distract, which Blinds or Confuses enemies in a small cone and reduces the accuracy/movement speed.
- Cripple has been replaced with Twist the Knife, a melee attack that extends the duration of debuffs and strips beneficial effects/sustains for each debuff active.
- Disengage's movement speed boost has been increased, and it now grants evasion at level 4.
- Increased the cooldown of Danger Sense.

v1.5
- Artifice tools learned via Cunning Tools and Intricate Tools will use the correct talent level.
- Fixed a bug where Master Artificer was not giving an option for Rogue's Brew.

v1.4
- Learning Augmented Mobility talents from an escort no longer grants TK weapon talents.

v1.3
- Parry no longer causes an error when triggering against a trap or environmental damage.
- Mutilate correctly grants Deadly Throw when learned with Throwing Knives.
- Increased the cost of Blade Flurry.
- Deadly Poison correctly works with ranged attacks.
- Warrior and Rogue subclasses with the Acrobatics and Field Control trees have had them removed due to overlap with the new Mobility tree. Some classes have been given the new Mobility tree as a replacement.
- Marauder and Shadowblade have had Dual Weapon Training replaced with Duellist.
- Marauder now has Throwing Knives.
- Brawler's Reflex Defense has been reworked due to overlap with Trained Reactions.
- Marauder's Thuggery tree has received changes to compensate for the loss of Dual Weapon Training.

v1.2
- Learning Rogue's Tools will display the damage of gloves for the purposes of Hidden Blades.
- Fixed a bug preventing the use of Garrote.
- Hidden Blades and Garrote only trigger against adjacent targets.
- Fan of Knives no longer costs ammo.
- Quickdraw has been reduced in power.
- Poison Gas Trap no longer deals friendly fire.
- Artifice has been reworked. Rogue's, Cunning and Intricate Tools each provide a single tool from a shared pool, and the power of tools is entirely dependent on the talent used to select them. Tools have had their effects and power levels revised.
- Hide in Plain Sight and Unseen Actions have been removed and replaced with Soothing Darkness and Shadow Dance.

v1.1
- Fixed an error caused by Rogue NPCs using Sticky Smoke
- Hide in Plain Sight's cooldown correctly decreases with talent level

v1.0
- Now available on Steam.
- Added the Artifice tree, which allows the use of powerful tools and devices. See the detailed changelist for further information.
- Placed an upper limit on the duration of Hide in Plain Sight and Unseen Actions.
- Fixed a number of tooltips.
- Feint now correctly applies Avoidance rather than Evasion.
- Rogue now starts with Parry rather than Trap Mastery.
- Escorts have been updated with new rewards to account for the Survival and Mobility changes.
- The Poisons tree can be learned correctly by Adventurers at level 1.
- Reduced the level requirement of Throwing Knives to 7 x Talent Level rather than 8.

v0.1
Release

[ghostbuster]

Outstanding work. Very clever and interesting rework of rogues.

I will test the class, but here are a couple of preliminary remarks.

Lacerating strikes seems too powerful. Unless the target is bleed immune, it gives you when maxed ~150% weapon damage on any attack whithout any counterpart. It is partly DoT and I agree with your anti-RNG arguments, but the bleed damage should be largely reduced.

I fear what can be the impact of these mods for NPCs in the higher difficulties or for randbosses. When I play a rogue, I consider them rather weak, but rogue randbosses are some of the most dangerous foes. Stealth combined with another powerful class can be extremely lethal. My two last death where against a rogue/archmage and (i think) a rogue/marauder. Talents like hide in plain sight that make the foe undetectable can be insanely dangerous. With a foe with a level 10 or 15 or more in this talent, the cooldown will be smaller than the duration and the foe will be forever invisible, without any penalty....

You should take into account the mods in survival, mobility, etc, to modify in the addon escort rewards.

[rekenner]

1) You bastard, making traps a world altering talent. =P

2) You mention Weapons Mastery in the Throwing Knives talent, did you mean Dagger Mastery?

3) I noticed you removed the Dual Weapon tree, which means Dual Weapon Training is also removed - So you never gain full offhand damage? I imagine the intent is that you do enough damage with talents that it's not really needed?

[Radon26]

the version i downloaded... has no dirty fighting, and no artifice.
i assume artifice may not yet be coded, but dirty fighting is written on the plan.

[Micbran]

The Artifice and Dirty Fighting trees mentioned in the changelist are in progress, and will be added in a future patch.

Ahem.

[Razakai]

Ghostbuster:

-From what I saw of Lacerating Strikes when testing, it didn't end up too bad due to the way bleed stacking works. 5/5ing it and attacking a mob with some iron daggers (14/10 main/offhand damage) resulted in 10 bleed damage per turn max. So roughly 100% weapon damage per turn maxed out. That's pretty good, but there's a lot of bleed immunes and there's a lot more places to spend generics now. If it does turn out to be dealing huge damage it'll get nerfed though.
-HiP does break on any attack etc. It's powerful when stacked with the new Unseen Actions, but as that has a long cooldown you can't keep it up for long. The new Heightened Senses also protects against unseen enemies with some flat damage reduction. Might make HiP not stack with UA though.
-Yeah, forgot about escorts, will alter the rewards.

rekenner

- That's not intentional, I'll make Trap Mastery a regular talent that'll just unlearn traps when you unlearn it.
- Yes, should read Dagger Mastery, will fix.
- Flurry now grants increased offhand damage. Reason #1 was Flurry was often a 1 point wonder as it only gave more weapon damage with points, #2 was just as there was nowhere suitable for it.

Radon26

- Both of those are being worked on atm. Got some of the artifice talents working so hopefully will have them up by end of week.

[rekenner]

I actually thought the trap thing was intentional. The way I've played rogues was point juggling for traps to get through the godawful early game and then not using them (though, they seem much more viable here).

[Razakai]

I actually thought the trap thing was intentional. The way I've played rogues was point juggling for traps to get through the godawful early game and then not using them (though, they seem much more viable here).

It's probably not such a bad thing, as traps are (or should be) far stronger than before seeing as they can crit, no longer friendly fire (outside of poison gas) and have stronger effects. Still, best to give people the option of point juggling if they really want to.

I also noticed that Rogues are starting with Explosive Trap, which is unintentional. Will fix that.

[ghostbuster]

There is an error in the description of numbing poison. Its effect is correct, but the description corresponds to the leeching poison effect.

The throwing knifes apply the melee_project effects and not the ranged_project effects. It makes sense either thematically (they are knives) or in terms of gameplay (as it is what the player will try to stack), but it is somehow confusing. Maybe it should be mentioned somewhere.
Also, when the user runs out of knives, the 'Throwing Knives' icon disappears. It can be confusing and unclear why it is no longer possible to throw knives. Maybe it would be better to add to the icon the number of remaining knives and just to display '0' when there are no knives left.

Besides that, the class is really fun to play.

[Radon26]

so i wanted to unlock poisons category... "this talent tree only provides talents starting at lvl 10" which with this addon, is not true.
i wanted to make an adventurer using some of the abilities, but apparently i have to wait with poisons.

[Razakai]

http://te4.org/node/5766

v1.0:

- Now available on Steam.
- Added the Artifice tree, which allows the use of powerful tools and devices. See the detailed changelist for further information.
- Placed an upper limit on the duration of Hide in Plain Sight and Unseen Actions.
- Fixed a number of tooltips.
- Feint now correctly applies Avoidance rather than Evasion.
- Rogue now starts with Parry rather than Trap Mastery.
- Escorts have been updated with new rewards to account for the Survival and Mobility changes.
- The Poisons tree can be learned correctly by Adventurers at level 1.
- Reduced the level requirement of Throwing Knives to 7 x Talent Level rather than 8.

[Radon26]

throwing knifes can be put on cool down. is that intended?

[ghostbuster]

With V1.0, I had LUA error after firing a knife.

Code: Select all

[LOG]   Emuth the stone troll shoots!
[ARCHERY ACQUIRE TARGETS WITH]  rough leather sling of lightning        pouch of iron shots of daylight
[PROJECTILE SPEED] ::   10
[SHOOT] speed   0.88888888888889        =>      888.88888888889
[SHOOT WITH]    rough leather sling of lightning        pouch of iron shots of daylight
Adding entity   20289   after   11376
Lua Error: /data-assassin/damage_types.lua:122: attempt to index local 'dam' (a number value)
        At [C]:-1 __index
        At /data-assassin/damage_types.lua:122 projector
        At /engine/interface/ActorProject.lua:397 projectDoAct
        At /engine/interface/ActorProject.lua:484 projectDoStop
        At /engine/Projectile.lua:228 act
        At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:126 tickLevel
        At /engine/GameEnergyBased.lua:62 tick
        At /engine/GameTurnBased.lua:46 tick
        At /mod/class/Game.lua:1259

Also, the behavior of Hide in plain Sight when investing in the talent is weird. Its cooldown is 15, then it rises to 16, to redecrease later to 15....

[Radon26]

no rush, i know this still in heavy work, but are there any plans to make the changes to stealth, lethality, dirty fighting and the others not applied?
it would be nice to be able to pick and chose some of them classic and some changed. I'm pretty sure HP did that to his addons so it's probably not too difficult... probably.

[64legos]

Found a bug: