Class Idea: Muscle Wizard

[LtLukoziuz]

Hey all, you might have seen me in the game chat lately and a couple of days ago I stumbled upon some of my old adventurers and one of them was the Arcane Blade/Brawler mix. I remember having fun with it, but alas, Arcane Blade (and Magus in DnD) are a terrible idea lore-wise from my perspective. I see them as show-offs, characters who can project spells through their weapon, but don't actually give any thought into producing their own spells, instead using the same old Mage lists. That is not cool, and instead, I have started tinkering with an idea of Muscle Wizard - a reject Brawler and then a reject Archmage who decided to combine the two and create his own actual magical discipline - ala Arcane Monk, just instead of being one with the soul, chakras and other spiritual crap, Muscle Wizard harnesses the Mana and makes it perform wonders. ((I am known as proud Anti-Zigurian, which might have given influence in that. DOWN WITH ZIGUR!!!))

So, this is what I currently have created (I will copy the short backstory and description at the bottom of the post so that only those who want to delve deeper would need to enter GDrive): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
And the current planned skill trees look like this for those who don't want to open the spreadsheet or individual talent tree pages: https://puu.sh/yeBCQ/cdaf406d87.png

However, there are two problems if I will be the one making this Class Addon.
a) I am terrible at balancing. People in the chat might have noticed that I still play in Normal Adventure difficulty, that power gaming for me is far far away in the list of my characters and that fun and lore factors are more important for me than actual winning (although I do like winning). If I was the one doing all the numbers and crunch - almost surely I will either make this overpowered or under-powered by a huge margin.
b) I have little experience in addon making. I have once taken an adventurer modifying addon, and manually added some features to it to make adventurers more to my feel (like changing masteries to 1.3x, modifying count of starting category/class talent points), but I have not done any actual huge thing. I am a fairly decent code-reader in general (currently work as a QA worker in Unity), but making my own code is a tougher challenge. Maybe I will make this myself in the long long future, but it would take me way more time than for anyone who has even basic grasp with how addon making works here.

So all this post, and what do I want from it? Mainly - criticism and idea suggestion. As you can see, there is still a great lack of trees in Generic side, and the Level 10 Class Trees don't have skills in them yet. I want the Level 10 Class Trees to feel like the Player Muscle Wizard was the first one creating the said discipline, like the very first unnamed Muscle Wizard was both a Shitty Brawler and a Shitty Archmage, so the Player Character would also be Shitty X but manage to turn that into great strength through their over talents. Also - I would like criticism both on generic passive tree I have currently written up and the Level 0 trees I made. Does it feel like a stereotypical Muscle Wizard, or do you feel that it could be made better, or some skills changed/improved to better represent Melee Magicing? Any other feedback would also be very appreciated. Each page in google drive should be commentable, but I would like to keep discussion here for brevity's sake.

And now, the backstory and description of Muscle Wizard:

The very first Muscle Wizard was a Slave fighting for his life in Slaver Arena. There he was taught the art of pugilism, but he wasn't brightest combatant. He wasn't very athletic nor brawny, and his wits weren't the fastest for arena. Luck seemed to lead him more than his skill. At the age of 17, a generous merchant bought him out, not wanting the poor sod to die, but asides from giving some spare change and a set of proper clothes, he left the young man alone.
After some travelling around Maj‘Eyal, the newly-made adventurer managed to attract Angolwen‘s attention as a possible pupil in magical arts. The aptitude was there, and eventually he was taken in for further tutoring. At first it looked like he was going to be a great Archmage, but the man‘s thoughts often wondered to his arena life, and the small set of skills he learned there. And so, during his spare time, he was learning how to channel his mana into his body, and perform feats of which other pugilists would only be amazed.
But being a closed community, it wasn‘t long until rumours spread through Angolwen about this magical pugilist. At first they tolerated this, maybe slightly hoping that this could be possibly a new way to promote magic. But these free time “training sessions” soon started taking time into his actual lessons, and more and more this man started rejecting the old dogmas of mages and believing that only his style was the true magic. This angered the community, and after few faked accusations, he was expelled from the hidden city.
However, finding his destiny, he ventured off into northern mountains to train under his own. There, he finished refining the art of magical pugilism, and even systemized it into actual magical disciplines, thinking that Angolwen might give him the second chance. But that never happened to the full effect, and eventually he started taking his own pupils and spreading the art so that it wouldn’t be gone with him.
In current day, Muscle Wizards are barely tolerated by Angolwen, and those who deem themselves worthy, can get access into the hidden city, but few people in there actually like them.

Muscle Wizards are people who decided that neither pure magic nor pure fighting arts were their passion. Instead, they channel mana to power their bodies and perform feats that no normal pugilist could perform. They believe that Spellblaze could have been avoided if the mages kept all the magic in themselves, instead of shooting it around like a toy.
Muscle Wizards don’t favor any single attribute while training. Instead, they use their experience and magical essence to “grow” their bodies in all aspects, eventually surpassing generic Heroes who have to focus in few areas. This also means that it is a much more accessible form of magic, as even the lowliest meek can through training accommodate his body to the needed strength. All Talents of Muscle Wizards are powered with Mana alone. Any strenuous Stamina requiring feats feed of the Mana instead.
Starting Attributes: +0 to All. HP modifier: +0.

[minmay]

a) 11 class talent trees is a huge number. Yes, archmage has 13, but 4 of those are never worth unlocking and lots of the talents in the remaining trees are crap (arcane vortex, chain lightning, mudslide, the entire phantasm tree...); that is not a model you want to emulate.

b) You have like 10 different talents for making a melee attack. This is way too many. You have a bunch of spell damage talents too despite this ostensibly being a melee class?

c) Players will just invest in two of the Body talents and ignore the rest, since they are mutually exclusive. This is why even though there are three Chants and three Hymns, their levels are controlled by a single talent, encouraging you to switch between them instead of only using one.
Psionic/Absorption manages to have mutually exclusive sustains where you're still encouraged to invest in all three, but that's because having all three is the only way to cover all damage types and you can swap them instantly...and the swapping is more of an annoying chore than a difficult tactical decision.

d) I am not convinced that this class would play significantly differently from grapple-less Brawler, aside from struggling to meet armour requirements (and having no physical power, but I assume that was just an accidental omission). It seems to be trying to do basically the same thing as Primal Chosen (which is itself a failure imo).

e) It is very rare for someone to want to code someone else's ideas for free. You will most likely have to program this class yourself if you want to play it.

[astralInferno]

b) You have like 10 different talents for making a melee attack. This is way too many. You have a bunch of spell damage talents too despite this ostensibly being a melee class?

Ten might be a little too many, but it depends on the cooldown. IMO, if you ever have all your talents off cooldown and have to use a bump attack, that's a failure.

Primal Chosen (which is itself a failure imo).

r00d.

[LtLukoziuz]

a) 11 class talent trees is a huge number. Yes, archmage has 13, but 4 of those are never worth unlocking and lots of the talents in the remaining trees are crap (arcane vortex, chain lightning, mudslide, the entire phantasm tree...); that is not a model you want to emulate.

That is why I woe the Archmage too. I would like to be playing a proper stormy AM, or proper cold AM, but sadly that is not the case. My naive thought is to attempt creating something that could be viable however the mind feels like making the build that day. I know that on a single playthrough, more than half the stuff will be untouched, but I hope that those talents will be untouched just because it was not the day for them, not because that they are terribad. Of course, this might be my naivete speaking.

b) You have like 10 different talents for making a melee attack. This is way too many. You have a bunch of spell damage talents too despite this ostensibly being a melee class?

For the second part - it is because I do want it to be melee class which fights totally in spell damage types instead of physical ones (or at least, emulates physical spell damage through magic). Muscle Wizard stereotypically is known as someone who goes right in your face, and then explodes you. That is the flavor of it. As for the first part, I have developed a dislike for melee classes which fight mostly in bumping. While it is a more arduous and strenuous activity, I want to promote active talent usage over bumps. And as AstralInferno suggested, I would tweak cooldowns so that you would actively rotate over skills.

c) Players will just invest in two of the Body talents and ignore the rest, since they are mutually exclusive. This is why even though there are three Chants and three Hymns, their levels are controlled by a single talent, encouraging you to switch between them instead of only using one.
Psionic/Absorption manages to have mutually exclusive sustains where you're still encouraged to invest in all three, but that's because having all three is the only way to cover all damage types and you can swap them instantly...and the swapping is more of an annoying chore than a difficult tactical decision.

At first, my thought was that it is fine, but when you mentioned Chants/Hymns, you suddenly changed my mind and I was thinking: "Lukas, why the heck didn't you think of converting them into generics?" So, I will remove all the Body talents from Class trees and substitute them with something else while I will make a generic tree "Spell / Body Channeling". Of course, the current Bodies, even if split, are not enough to warrant a whole tree, so I will be adding stuff to them to make a full-blown tree.
That is the criticism and feedback I was looking forward and I want to say thank you just for this point.

d) I am not convinced that this class would play significantly differently from grapple-less Brawler, aside from struggling to meet armour requirements (and having no physical power, but I assume that was just an accidental omission). It seems to be trying to do basically the same thing as Primal Chosen (which is itself a failure imo).

Again splitting this into two parts for brevity. First, about the Physical Power omission. Is the wiki wrong and is Physical Power doing more than described here -

Code: Select all

Physical power measures your ability to deal physical damage in combat. When you use Physical power to inflict temporary physical effects on an enemy, every point your opponent's relevant saving throw exceeds your physical power will reduce the duration of the effect by 5%.

As I mentioned before, I don't want this to be bump class or a physical damage class. Therefore, Physical Power is really unnecessary and instead Spell Power should be the one focused, both for CC producing and for the general damage. Unless Physical Power does something more unmentioned, it just won't do anything with the current writeup of the class.

As for the feel of the gameplay, I am not surprised in this line of thought. I myself wrote in the initial thought that people might think of this as your generic Monk, just exchanging Mind/Ki/etc. into Magic. After all, there are only that many classes which are completely unique, and you could even make some allegations between current ToME's classes (Berserker/Doombringer, Archmage/Anorithil). But they are not completely same, hence the idea for making this. Could you describe how you see the Brawler gameplay? This should provide me better insight in what you meant with this. As for Primal Chosen, I tried it, but my memory is shit so I will have to recheck it. Maybe even "borrow" some ideas if AstralInferno is not against it.
Also, r00d /s

e) It is very rare for someone to want to code someone else's ideas for free. You will most likely have to program this class yourself if you want to play it.

Oh no, sorry if you thought that I made this post as a begging request. I know that life does not provide freebies and that most likely I will be the one making this. I just wanted to post this for a) Feedback/Critic b) If someone already had a similar idea but either didn't have it fully fleshed out or were struggling at making their idea a full class, this would be the last bit of inspiration they will need.
After all, people can't read my mind and it would be actually best if I made the addon.

[minmay]

As I mentioned before, I don't want this to be bump class or a physical damage class. Therefore, Physical Power is really unnecessary and instead Spell Power should be the one focused, both for CC producing and for the general damage. Unless Physical Power does something more unmentioned, it just won't do anything with the current writeup of the class.

Weapon damage is (0.3*(physpower+statbonus)*((sqrt(weapon basepower/10)-1)*0.5+1))^1.04. No physical power or stats = no damage, and you've specifically made the class have no stats and no physical power.