The Ruined (afflicted subclass)

[Erenion]

Adds the Ruined, a spell/mind hybrid class.

http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/ruined
Since the Ruined are (mostly) mages gone totally insane due to the curse, they use mana and hate as their resources.
They usually wield staves, but some have been seen using mindstars as well.

Talent Categories
Spell/Air
Spell/Destruction
Spell/Cataclysm (locked)
Cursed/Pain
Cursed/Suffering (locked)
Cursed/Crescendo
Cursed/Loss (locked)
Cursed/Fears (locked)

Cursed/Cursed Form
Cursed/Dark Sustenance
Cursed/Hollow
Spell/Conveyance

Talent Overwiew

Spell/Destruction
Your everyday spells for lightning damage.

Thunderstrike
Deal moderate lightning damage in an area. If only one target is hit, you apply Lightning Rod to that target.

Searing Bolt
Deal moderate damage to everything in a line. For every enemy affected by Lightning Rod, you deal 20% increased damage (to all targets).

Arcing Power (passive)
Whenever you cast a non-instant spell, you shock up to %d nearby enemies affected by Lightning Rod, dealing lightning damage.
Each bolt crits and applies Lightning Strikes Twice individually.
Learning this also teaches you the Static Charge talent, which applies Lightning Rod to all enemies in an area.

Blind Rage (sustain)
Unleash a powerful storm, dazing nearby enemies every turn and dealing a small amount of damage to them.
While the storm rages, you deal increased lightning damage.

Maintaining this is draining, and you lose an increasing amount of health every turn this is active. This cannot kill you or bring you below 0 health.
If the life loss would bring you to 0 health, the damage dealt by this talent is doubled.
Blind Rage and Resilience cannot be active at the same time, activating one will deactivate the other.


Spell/Cataclysm
Dealing more lightning damage, plus some utility.

Conduit of Ruin
Lightning Rod now reduces lightning resistance.
While Blind Rage is sustained, gain resistance to stun, silence and confusion.

Lightning Flash
Teleport to target location, dealing a small amount of damage and applying Lightning Rod to all targets near your arrival point.

Lightning Strikes Twice
Every time you deal more than a certain amount of lightning damage in a single attack, you have a chance of applying Lightning Rod to all enemies hit.

Infusion of Madness
Consume all of your mana to create an unstable shell of mana around a target. After 3 turns, this shell will detonate, dealing lightning damage in an aoe (does not friendlyfire).
This can only be used while Blind Rage is active and it will deactivate Blind Rage.


Cursed/Pain
Here come the debuffs.

Pain
Deals a small amount of mind damage and applies a debuff to the target, reducing the damage they deal.
At higher levels, this also reduces movement speed.

Harvest of Tears
Deal mind damage to all enemies that are affected by Pain within an area and stun them.

Repentance
Pain now also applies a secondary debuff that reduces enemy saves and adds a martyrdom effect.

Resilience (sustain)
Gain absolute damage resistance, a bonus to all saves and regenerate a portion of your maximum health per turn - but reduce the damage you deal significantly.
Blind Rage and Resilience cannot be active at the same time, activating one will deactivate the other.


Cursed/Suffering
Moar debuffs!

Conduit of Woe
Whenever you take damage, if the damage was 100 or higher, you deal damage to a random nearby enemy equal to a percentage of that damage.
You apply Pain to them as well.
Passively increase the healing provided by Resilience.
Passively increase mind power when dual wielding mindstars if psiblades isn't active.

Seal Mind
Time Prison. But with mind power!
(To be honest, this is kind of a filler ability.)

Mental Wound
Places a debuff upon the target that causes it to bleed for a percentage of all damage taken (as mind damage).

Deepest Pain
Pins, blinds, silences and confuses a single target. These debuffs ignore immunities, but the target can make an additional mental save at reduced power against each of them.
Only usable while Resilience is active.


Cursed/Crescendo
Hybrid mind/spell category based on crits.

Surging Cadence
Whenever you land any crit, gain bonus critmult for a short time.
Whenever you land a mental crit, gain bonus spellpower for a short time.
Whenever you land a spellcrit, gain bonus mindpower for a short time.

Destructive Cadence
Whenever you land a spellcrit, deal mind damage to nearby enemies and gain some hate.
Whenever you land a mental crit, deal lightning damage to nearby enemies and gain some mana.

Resonating Cadence
Using a spell after using a mind power, and the other way around, increases your damage and critchance for a short time.

Deadly Cadence
Mark an enemy. Whenever you crit, that enemy takes a percentage of the damage the crit dealt.


Cursed/Loss
And this is why that one enemy can't have nice things.

Lose Memory
Put a few talents on a short cooldown.

Lose Power
Reduce your victims physical, spell and mind power for a short duration.

Lose Dreams
Kill. The. Sustains.

Lose Sanity
Renders a single target nearly unable to act for a short duration.


Cursed/Hollow
Surviving below 0 health - and the benefits of being that low.

Broken Body, Twisted Mind
Permanently reduces the amount of life you gain from CON, but you gain a non-insignificant amount of die_at.

Persistence
When falling below 0 health, gain a regeneration effect.

Spite (sustain)
Reduces all damage you take by a flat amount. When starting a turn below 0 health, you go boom.

Broken Spirit, Stolen Life
Drain an enemy, stealing life equal to a percentage of the amount you are below 0.
Only usable while below 0 life.


DISCLAIMER:
This is my first addon, and I don't know how well balanced it is.
If you have any feedback or (balance or other) suggestions for me, please leave them in the comments.

[astralInferno]

This writeup looks really cool! I'm looking forward to trying it out, but I dont know how long it'll take.
As for an alternate name for Emptiness, can I suggest Hollow? or Void?

(This will also cause Issues if used alongside my afflicted class - they both add a cursed/torture category. this probably isn't a huge issue but one of us should probably change the code name, if not the display name.)

[Erenion]

Void sounds pretty neat, thanks!
And no problem, I'll just change the file name. (Yours was there first, I'll just change mine)

Anyway, I've been thinking about moving the resource generation from Emptiness to Crescendo (maybe to Destructive Cadence) and adding another durability talent instead. Would that be too much or does the class need it, in your opinion?

EDIT: On second thought, Void would cause issues with EoR + the Empyreal class. Renamed it to Hollow instead.
Also, renamed Torture to Suffering.

[Chronosplit]

This is a really interesting class lore-wise and Lightning is always pretty neat. I have a couple gripes though.

1. Starting trees are pretty thin meaning there aren't many options to take the class, and sometimes you're just floating points somewhere to transfer later because there's nothing to do with them. More locked trees than unlocked means in a normal game, depending on what talents are valued your precious category points may need to be spent on Class trees alone.
2. Generics. If I chose not to curse my items there are only three trees out of the gate with no locked options here. Given that there is one which I personally tend to just dump one point into Feed and leave alone, I am constantly swimming in points. My categories are once again pressed by class trees already so unlocking something like Harmony, Chants, or Light may not be an option. Combat Training is an option, but with mages not much dumping is always necessary.
3. Mobility for a caster can be a big deal. I'm not really sure if 5/5 Pain and Lightning Flash are quite enough to deal with this, it's less than what movement-challenged classes can usually net. Movement infusions and Phase Door/Teleport runes run into the Cat point issue, limiting them (and Ogre won't be able to help come 1.5).

My suggestions? More generics, no question there. Conveyance maybe, Survival at least wouldn't be bad to run off of a high Cun. One or two more lower level class trees would be nice, maybe even make Fears unlocked at the start if you want since it's lower level.

[astralInferno]

EDIT: On second thought, Void would cause issues with EoR + the Empyreal class. Renamed it to Hollow instead.
Also, renamed Torture to Suffering.

Void wouldn't actually be an issue there! Celestial/Void and Cursed/Void can both exist without an issue.

...ahhhhahahaha. The addon has a Suffering tree as well. DXD
What you Can do is... let me just demonstrate
newTalentType{ allow_random=true, is_mind=true, type="cursed/torturetwo", name = "torture", description = "Powerful techniques to manipulate and outlast your target with your corrupted mind."}
If I remember correctly, this would still show up as torture without causing a duplication error.

[Erenion]

Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

Conveyance could definitely be an option, I was also thinking about Survival, but with 1.5 I'm not sure about that one anymore.
I was initially planning on making two generic categories, but somewhere along the line, most of the stuff planned for the second one ended up in Hollow or Crescendo, so I just cut the second generic tree.

Concerning class trees:
- Unlocking Fears might be an option. Not sure about that one though.
- The second option would be to simply give them another (unlocked) class tree. Spell/Air might be an idea. Any other suggestions here?
- The third idea would of course be to simply code another unlocked class tree. Again, any suggestions?
- The fourth idea here would be to unlock Loss. However, I have a feeling that this would make the class too strong.

After playing the current version from 1 to Ardhungol, I have discovered two things:
- Mana becomes a bit of an issue sometimes (in drawn-out fights)
- You deal really high damage as long as you have mana, but your durability is... well, if you meet a rare with an unlucky combination come midgame, you have a problem. (Then again, I'm used to being fairly tanky, but this is still... extreme)
- Mobility wasn't that much of an issue for me, but I can see why the relative lack of mobility is a problem. (I play a lot of Doomed, and this class is really mobile compared to them)

So, after a bit more thought, I'll probably:
- give them Conveyance as an unlocked generic tree
- move the resource regen from Spite to Crescendo and put another durability talent there instead.
- keep the name for Suffering, because I like it, but rename it in the code so it doesn't cause issues

For class categories, I'll wait on your feedback.

[Chronosplit]

Air would be useful yes, the movement buff in Feather Wind may even be useful if investment was wanted. Maybe even take another tree from Doomed, but I'm not completely sure about it. I get the feeling that Punishments might have it's uses, but Force of Will may or may not be OP when talking about Deflection and crit chance buffing (considering there's a whole tree based on critical hit effects, but then again as I say that I remember that Halfling exists).

I agree with the rest, but Loss I agree would be too much at start. Most of what I could think of for whole new trees either strays into different elements, but one thing I was surprised to see missing was anything having to do with storms.

[Erenion]

Force of Will doesn't buff crit chance, it buffs crit multiplier. But yeah, combined with the new Spite, Deflection would be really strong.
The only thing I'm worried about with Spell/Air is Thunderstorm, because of the "resource on crit" mechanic. Then again, it would mean you could play a more mind-focused build, because of Thunderstorm keeping you topped up on Hate while your mind crits generate enough mana for Thunderstorm to keep going.

You know what, I'll add Spell/Air for now. Let's just see how it works out.

Also, I had some more free time yesterday, so we now have a new unique horror, a new fixedart and an unlock condition (which is disabled for now, because I want feedback on the class). If you have any feedback concerning fixedarts / the horror, please tell me.

I also reworked Crescendo a bit, after having several people tell me ingame that it was feeling a bit underwhelming.
Also, nerfed Surging Cadence. Getting 130 spellpower from it lategame (on a pure mind build) is NOT OK.

[Erenion]

Updated to 1.0.6

New features:
- reworked Arcing Power and Unleashed Madness
- more particles!
- Tidied up Crescendo (no more 6 buffs cluttering up your buff bar!)
- minor balance changes

[Erenion]

Updated to 1.0.7

Changelist:
- Tidied up some code in Resilience and Blind Rage
- Made both Resilience and Blind Rage instant use
- Reworked Arcing Power (again)

[Erenion]

Updated to 1.0.8

Changelist:
- buffed Destructive Cadence (radius now scales, cap now scales better after TL5)
- changed Spite explosion to trigger when starting a turn below 0 health, has 8 turn cd
- Spite explosion now scales with spellpower, damage is half mind, half lightning, also damage reduced
- buffed Conduit of Woe, rescaled its mindpower bonus, now increases Resilience heal
- buffed Deep Pain (additional saves are at reduced power)
- buffed Resilience (now ablsolute res instead of resall)
- buffed Blind Rage (niche buff)
- minor balance changes
- clarified some descriptions

[Erenion]

Updated to 1.0.9.

Changelog:
- Conduit of Woe now actually increases Resilience heal at lower levels instead of decreasing it
- Pain description now shows slow before TL3, also changed to use raw talent level
- Capped damage and critmult from the Crescendo tree
- Spite cooldown effect is now beneficial so it no longer interrupts rest
- Infusion of Madness now applies Lightning Rod
- removed hate cost on Twisted Spirit. Why was it there anyway?
- Lose Memory now shows what it has disrupted

[Velikolepni]

I've spent some time playing with this class on Nightmare. Brought an orc/ruined to level 40+ and a higher/ruined to almost level 30. I really like the idea of a "mage combo class" that requires the use of skills in a particular order to maximize power. It's also a mid range mage/doomed that feels like a more fun anorithil. All in all, I really like it and I hope that it can be improved further and (praise be to Darkgod) maybe even added to the official roster.

There are however some things that bug me however.

Typos and small things:
1) In the description of "Infusion of Madness", Lightning Rod is not written in dark red.
2) "epmty" in the description of Lightning Flash

Remarks on the class:
1) There is no real way to deal damage with mindpower on this class and this means that one has to build around lightning (via Air or Destruction). This also implies that it is not really useful to use mindstars since they don't give a bonus to lightning damage most of the time. Pain does too little damage and last only 4 rounds and Harvest of Tears has too long a cooldown. In common situations, one can affect at most 3 enemies with it, unless a lot of mobs are close (but everything close dies to "Destructive Cadence" anyway if one uses the standard lightning spells). Basically, mindpowers currently are only support and no offense. Maybe make the harvest cooldown lower and pain last longer, add another tree or change some of the other talents to deal damage?
2) This class has 3 unlockable trees (Fears, Loss, Suffering) that a mindpower build can use, but they are all support and no damage. I would suggest adding the cursed/punishments tree as a locked one, maybe replacing Fears by it. That would broaden the build options a bit. Now, if it is really intended that mind powers remains purely support on this class, then that's too bad but I can understand it.
3) The talent "Infusion of Madness" is almost useless in its current incarnation. Sure, it does a lot of damage, but completely draining mana kills almost all the offense and destroys 3 of your escape tools (Lightning Flash, the teleport and phase door talents of the conveyance discipline). Hence, it can either be used only at the end of a fight (meaning that it's essentially useless) or in conjunction with a manasurge rune, which encourages players to choose Cornac or Ogre. These two are already among the top species and it would be nice if alternatives were possible. I can think of three things:
i) Change the way the mana is spent so that one can use "Highborn's bloom" or "Hidden resources" to power Infusion of Madness. Since it can only be used once every 40 rounds anyway, that should not make it too powerful.
ii) Related to remarks 1) and 2). If there were proper mindpower/hate ways to deal damage, then it would be possible to use them afterwards and recover mana that way while waiting. Currently, that's not really an option.
iii) Change the way the power works. Maybe make it cost, 50% of your current mana and 50% of your current hate instead, scaling a bit slower?

4) There are some redundancies in powers. For example: Loss/Lose Sanity, Suffering/Seal Mind and Suffering/Deepest Pain all basically disable a target for a given amounth of time. Furthermore, "Seal Mind" being a spell is just needlessly finicky for little practical reason. It's very important for this class to know what is a spell and what is a mind power and I think that each tree should be consistent (basically, things should be color coded).

5) I think that it would be more fun to rework the "hollow" generic talent tree so that it works a bit like solipsisms. By that I mean that further investments in the tree would lower the max life but increase the amount that one can spend in the negatives. Furthermore, some of the talents could be reworked to give various boni, so that it is really worth trying to be at negative life. A possible idea would be to rework "Broken Spirit, Stolen Life" or "Persistence" (which I don't really see myself putting a lot of point in in their current incarnation, since I very rarely spend much time bellow zero hp) to also give a lot of mana. That would be a possible solution to point 3).




Unrelated questions:
1) what are good prodigies to take for this class?
2) I don't quite understad the idea: "The only thing I'm worried about with Spell/Air is Thunderstorm, because of the "resource on crit" mechanic. Then again, it would mean you could play a more mind-focused build, because of Thunderstorm keeping you topped up on Hate while your mind crits generate enough mana for Thunderstorm to keep going." How would such a build look like in the current incarnation of the class? I tried using thunderstorm but since it does not trigger "Destructive Cadence" I decided to ditch it.

[Erenion]

Thanks for the feedback!

Right now, I'm debating a few changes.
What I've done so far:
- Added Cursed/Punishments as an unlocked tree. (not sure about this one. It will need testing.)
- Slightly tweaked Persistence. It will now accelerate talent cooldowns if you are below 0 life.


What I'm still planning on doing:
- Reworking Infusion of Madness, Broken Spirit and Seal Mind.
- Plan for Broken Spirit: blood locks you at 0 life, sets you to -1 life, massively increases die_at from Broken Body, grants some other boni.

When I was building the class, I designed it so that the class's offense would scale mostly on spellpower, with the defense scaling almost exclusively on mindpower. However, you are right in the fact that this discourages mindpower builds. Because of this, Punishments will likely be added unlocked (so you can go mindstars both early on and later on), and I'll likely change Seal Mind to be a mindpower-based offensive talent.
Deepest Pain and Lose Sanity will likely both stay the same.
Fears are mostly there because they, to me, are a part of Afflicted - just like Cursed Form.

[Velikolepni]

What I've done so far:
- Added Cursed/Punishments as an unlocked tree. (not sure about this one. It will need testing.)
- Slightly tweaked Persistence. It will now accelerate talent cooldowns if you are below 0 life.

That sounds great already. I can't wait to try it out!

What I'm still planning on doing:
- Reworking Infusion of Madness, Broken Spirit and Seal Mind.
- Plan for Broken Spirit: blood locks you at 0 life, sets you to -1 life, massively increases die_at from Broken Body, grants some other boni.

The plan for Broken Spirit sounds delicious and appropriately thematic. The thing is, what does the class actually need in such a case? Apart from some defensive buffs and maybe mana regen, I can't see much. It already does a lot of damage.

Just a small question: how do Thunderstorm and resilience interact? Is the damage of Thunderstorm reduced? (It's not "you" that's doing the damage)