ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Well! This has been a fun ride for sure. I've fiddled with mods on ToME before, but this is my first foray into actually building something that's release-worthy!

The idea here is (relatively) simple: cut down on the Archmage's options slightly by creating a new subclass focused on the (Star) staff elements. Archmage keeps Fire, Air, Water, and Arcane. The new Wizard class gets Temporal, Nightfall, Phantasm, and Earth. A few changes have been made to Phantasm and Temporal to make them stand-alone spell options, notable with the addition of the Lightburst and Chronobolt spells. Earth got a few buffs and Nightfall gained some interactivity with the advanced Void tree. I altered Glacial Vapor and Ice Shards a bit to, again, let Water stand on its own, since one of the goals of this mod is to make a pure-class Wizard or Archmage work smoothly. I figure with Archmage losing three trees, most notably Temporal, it can afford to have Water compete with Fire and Arcane.

I know Housepet's amazing Arcanum mod set out with a similar goal with its Arcanist class, but I really wanted to go in a different direction. Since both mods have a spell tree named 'Void' they probably won't place nice with each other.

Since this is my first real mod, I would love to get some feedback from people who decide to try it out. Feedback on the tuning of ability strength is greatly appreciated. I mostly used vanilla skills as references, so I'm hoping everything is more or less reasonable.

I hope players will find the Wizard a fun and engaging class to get folded out of existence by rare hornets with.

Changelog!

1.0.1: Glorious bugfixes
1.1.0: Replaced Nightfall with Darkmatter. Updates to Phantasmal Shield, Shivvy form, and Ice Shards
1.1.1: Darkmatter Bolt no longer fires infinitely if it can't summon any darkmatter zones.
1.1.2: Finally figured out how to fix that Crystallize Time targeting error.
1.1.3: Fixed some loop bugs on the new Phantasmal Shield, including a very annoying error that poison bramble traps kept spitting. Also added +30% healing factor to level 5 Arcane Shielding just because its one-point-wonder status always annoyed me. I figure with the power dip Wizard/Archmage took compared to vanilla Archmage they can afford it.
1.1.4: A few minor bug-fixes and typo corrections. I added a level-5 feature to Lightburst. At level 5 or higher the bolt speed will improve considerably.
1.1.5: Still squashing Phantasmal Shield loop bugs. Hopefully I've gotten them all.
1.1.6: Nope, apparently not.
1.2.0: After some consideration I've decided to rebuild the new Phantasmal Shield. I cleaned up the code a bit and made some important changes. First? It has a 100% blind chance and ignores Blind immunity completely. It still won't hit Blinded creatures, but I stuck the blind in front of the damage to prevent loops (which is working nicely!) Second, I reduced the sustain mana cost back down to 20. However, it now drains 10 mana each time it triggers. I MAY reduce that to five. I would like to get some more input on the changes.
1.2.1: Some tweaks to Archmage balance due to the loss of magic schools. Fixed a few typos. Added a new Chronobolt image to match with the tree's color theme.
Also, I removed the line of sight requirements on Warp Step, allowing it to zip through walls and, more importantly, sight blocking effects. This allows Warp to play nicely with Darkmatter's LoS blockers.

I took a brief peek at the Archmage changes and did a quick starter run on a Wizard.

So quick first impressions and thoughts:

Archmage hasn't changed much, except to have it's focus narrowed a bit. Loss of Temporal for Time Shield and speed is a bit of nerf, as is the loss of Stone Wall, but outside of Insane+ it probably won't make much difference. Can probably still get by in Insane if you get Light from an escort. Could maybe tweak Water / Ice a bit to make them more defense oriented, or at least a bit better a freezing enemies.

Wizard has more new trees, of course, but is still very similar to Archmage. Damage spells have a slightly different flavor, but don't do a lot of different things. The notable exception is Lucent, which has a unique gimmick in super range and increased sight range. This has the potential to be very strong, giving you the option to nuke things before they even see you. Style points for Higher synergy. Warp is ok, but Void is a bit... eh. You have blind already in your base trees in Illuminate and Circel of Death, so having more blind in the advanced Dark tree is a little lackluster. On the topic of the Dark trees, having Nightfall is a bit out of place. I know it's a Darkness spell trees but it's heavily Necro themed. I appreciate that you've done a lot of work creating new trees already, but I would suggest creating a replacement low level darkness tree. With that in mind, I should bring up the nerf to survivability again. Wizard suffers maybe a bit more than Archmage. It has Time Shield, but it loses Disruption Shield, which is arguably a harder hit. A few ideas to compensate. Buff Phantadmal Shield. At the very least you could merge the lost defense from Blur Sight. Better might be to replace defense with evasion or negate damage chance. Could replace the blind in Void with numbing darkness (reduces damage enemies deal) as another defensive tweak, or maybe have the potential new darkness base tree have numbing darkness and give the advanced trees a chance to inflict bane of confusion. Confusion also locks enemies down pretty well and is another sort of defense.

Overall I like the idea of splitting up Archmage, and splitting into elemental and astral seems like a good divide. Could maybe make a couple more tweaks to solidify that even more; it think there are talents in cold and temporal trees each that deal a bit of physical damage as well which could probably just be consolidated into the primary element.

I have encountered zero bugs so far, and your icons are really nice; more than I might expect for a first time mod. Good job!

Regarding Void and compatibility, it would be a very easy fix to rename your Void to something unique while still keeping 'Void' as the displayed name. Just replace "spell/void" in the type definition with something like "spell/voids" or "spell/voided" or even "spell/bananomancy"; as long as the talents are defined with the same name and you don't change the displayed name ('name' field in the talent type definition) then no one would know the difference on the user side.

tl;dr
Great mod, could benefit from a few tweaks imo, but keep up the nice work!

nsrr wrote:I took a brief peek at the Archmage changes and did a quick starter run on a Wizard.

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.

So quick first impressions and thoughts:

Archmage hasn't changed much, except to have it's focus narrowed a bit. Loss of Temporal for Time Shield and speed is a bit of nerf, as is the loss of Stone Wall, but outside of Insane+ it probably won't make much difference. Can probably still get by in Insane if you get Light from an escort. Could maybe tweak Water / Ice a bit to make them more defense oriented, or at least a bit better a freezing enemies.

's true. I set out with the goal of making both the trimmed down Archmage and the new Wizard a bit weaker than vanilla Archmage, so that's certainly a feature rather than a bug. Water/Ice does have a bit more oomph with the changes to Ice Shards and Glacial Vapor, but you're thinking better access to freeze would help? I'm considering the possibility of making either Ice Shards or Glacial Vapor (maybe both!) apply the Wet effect. Of the two, I'm thinking Ice Shards would be the better pick. First hit doesn't get the damage amp, but follow-up attacks (and Glacial Vapor) does.

Wizard has more new trees, of course, but is still very similar to Archmage. Damage spells have a slightly different flavor, but don't do a lot of different things. The notable exception is Lucent, which has a unique gimmick in super range and increased sight range. This has the potential to be very strong, giving you the option to nuke things before they even see you. Style points for Higher synergy.

Lucent was probably the easiest of the trees to design, since the idea more or less carried itself. Super long range lasers feel like a pretty obvious idea for an advanced light tree. It doesn't do much else in terms of secondary effects, but my thought was that being able to nuke enemies down from 15+ range easily and consistently is a really powerful gimmick.

Warp is ok,

The idea with Warp was two fold. First? Using Warp Step to juggle as many Chronobolts as possible at once. Being able to double or even triple up on hits racks up damage pretty fast. The second was single target lockdown. Timewarp into Crystallize Time puts a threat out of play for quite a while. The secondary effect on Warp Core also adds an extra bit of durability in the form of ongethit health recovery.

As far as I know, aside from the Rush upgrade Prodigy, there aren't many other sources of mobility quite like what Warp Step offers. As you might imagine, I was really leery about packing too much power into a tree that has such a potent teleport/aoe damage talent.

but Void is a bit... eh. You have blind already in your base trees in Illuminate and Circel of Death, so having more blind in the advanced Dark tree is a little lackluster.

Okay, yeah, I can see that. Different effect, maybe?

The Void tree's thing was meant to be overwhelming (and dangerous) area of effect damage. Sort of like the Wizard's version of the Wildfire tree. Just without a built-in way of protecting you from your own damage. The blind effect is mostly there as a little ribbon to tie on top of the damage that Ruination deals, since I based the ability on Hurricane and wanted it to trigger on a status.

On the topic of the Dark trees, having Nightfall is a bit out of place. I know it's a Darkness spell trees but it's heavily Necro themed. I appreciate that you've done a lot of work creating new trees already, but I would suggest creating a replacement low level darkness tree.

I'll admit, I considered doing exactly that. Nightfall has a pretty reasonable theme as is, damage with a side of rider effects. Blind/confusion, slow, and repulse. I could bend the element a bit more toward stellar darkness, certainly. Or maybe throw in a more defensively oriented darkness ability? It's something to consider.

With that in mind, I should bring up the nerf to survivability again. Wizard suffers maybe a bit more than Archmage. It has Time Shield, but it loses Disruption Shield, which is arguably a harder hit. A few ideas to compensate. Buff Phantadmal Shield. At the very least you could merge the lost defense from Blur Sight. Better might be to replace defense with evasion or negate damage chance. Could replace the blind in Void with numbing darkness (reduces damage enemies deal) as another defensive tweak, or maybe have the potential new darkness base tree have numbing darkness and give the advanced trees a chance to inflict bane of confusion. Confusion also locks enemies down pretty well and is another sort of defense.

If I did build a new darkness tree I would probably be rearranging things a fair bit. Maybe leave Blind mostly for the Phantasm tree? I could rearrange Phantasmal Shield to work more like the Feedback/Backlash ability. Retaliate to damage with a Blinding Light attack. I do want to point out that I made some buffs to the Stone tree, most notably Body of Stone gives a decent chunk of Resist All rather than fire/lightning/acid.

So as far as defense goes, the Wizard still has Time Shield, Body of Stone, Conveyance, and Aegis for direct defense. In addition to the indirect defense of extreme range (Lucent), extreme mobility (Warp), and Void Rupture being able to wall off enemies. Do you think Warp Core would be better off as damage reduction vs destabilized enemies rather than healing? I had chosen healing since it wouldn't directly buff the raw power of Time Shield, instead supplementing it during the healing phase.

Hmmm...

Maybe do something gravity themed for a new basic Darkness tree? Dark Matter, maybe?

Overall I like the idea of splitting up Archmage, and splitting into elemental and astral seems like a good divide. Could maybe make a couple more tweaks to solidify that even more; it think there are talents in cold and temporal trees each that deal a bit of physical damage as well which could probably just be consolidated into the primary element.

Tidal Wave does half physical damage. That's a good point, I think I'll alter that while I'm at it.

I have encountered zero bugs so far, and your icons are really nice; more than I might expect for a first time mod. Good job!

Regarding Void and compatibility, it would be a very easy fix to rename your Void to something unique while still keeping 'Void' as the displayed name. Just replace "spell/void" in the type definition with something like "spell/voids" or "spell/voided" or even "spell/bananomancy"; as long as the talents are defined with the same name and you don't change the displayed name ('name' field in the talent type definition) then no one would know the difference on the user side.

tl;dr
Great mod, could benefit from a few tweaks imo, but keep up the nice work!

Thanks! I've got one bug that I'm aware of at the moment that I'm puzzling through (Crystalize Time is spitting errors when targeting nothing or a Stone-immune target, which is weird since the if/then for stun-immune and non-destabalized is all in the same function and those variables are both working fine), but to my knowledge there isn't anything at the moment that will cause a crash or actual gameplay disruption.

I'll make those buffs to Water and Ice for sure. I think I'll add the Wet condition to Ice Shards. Thanks for the feedback! If you have any more suggestions after spending some more time with the Wizard, let me know. I may have left a few abilities intentionally under-tuned since I didn't want things to get too out of control.

Warp and Void do seem a bit more interesting now that I know more about how they work. I hadn't considered the warp step and chronobolt interaction, for instance. I didn't realize void could wall off enemies, either. I went for Lucent and was just going by the descriptions on the others. Needless to say, it can be hard to get a good feel for things without playing them out.

I do like the idea of the healing from warp core. Encourages you to stack heal mod to improve a kind of damage mitigation, which is a bit different. Again, I don't know yet how it will work in practice, but I do want to try it out.

Working Phantasmal Shield into something that can react to any damage with a blinding light attack would be a nice improvement, and I like the idea of having light being the blinding element.

If you do make a new Darkness tree, giving it some kind of astral theme would fit in with warp and void. I agree that consolidating blind into the light tree and having void do something else is a good idea. Of course, if you do make a new Darkness base tree you could work in some other effects or interactions, too.

I overlooked some of the changes to the base trees. All Res on Body of Stone is nice and the buffs to Vapors and Shards look good, too. Regarding water/ice, having another way to apply Wet to facilitate freeze is exactly what I was thinking for a bit of a buff. Vapors and Shards both seem like good candidates. With vapors I would probably make it only a chance to apply or something, since it's an aoe dot (that now has 100% up time if I'm remembering the change correctly). Or maybe just put it on Ice Shards. I probably wouldn't do both.

I won't have much time to try them out more until the weekend, and there are a lot of options between the two to play around. Once I actually get to play around with some of the new or altered trees I'll try to give you some more feedback on the ones I end up using.

Oookay. So I've got the modified Phantasmal Shield working. It really messes up monsters (or players) who are stacking OnHit effects. I might end up trying to figure out how to give it some kind of decaying retribution damage like Antimagic Shield, but for now I'll leave it be. I also discovered that it creates an infinite damage loop that crashes the game if you hit another creature that ALSO has Phantasmal Shield sustained. That was pretty easy to fix, I just made it so Phantasmal Shield doesn't trigger if both creatures are sustaining it.

I ended up putting the Wet effect onto Ice Shards and discovered something interesting in the process. Despite the tooltip for Ice Shards saying that it does increased damage against Wet enemies along with a doubled Freeze chance, it actually doesn't. The Ice damage type doesn't interact with Wet at all where as the Ice Storm damage type does in exactly the way the tooltip describes. I ended up upgrading Ice Shards to its alleged Wet version while still having no Wet interaction. You can now hit yourself with Ice Shards (though it only applies Wet to enemies) and Shivvy form boosts cold damage cap to help mitigate Uttercold's resistance penetration.

I'll be working on the new base darkness tree (Darkmatter) next. Once I'm comfortable with how it's working I'll go ahead and release 1.1.0!

By the by, does anyone know which directory the Voidstar item is listed in? I was considering adding physical/light/darkness/temporal to its list of damage-type upgrades so the Wizard doesn't feel quite so sad after finishing the Expanse.

Yes, I should slowly convert my categories into non-clashing names...

If you copied the code from one of my addons, the clashing categories at least won't crash the game.

Rebonack wrote:By the by, does anyone know which directory the Voidstar item is listed in? I was considering adding physical/light/darkness/temporal to its list of damage-type upgrades so the Wizard doesn't feel quite so sad after finishing the Expanse.

Data/Zones/Abashed-Expanse/Objects

Yippy skippy, the new Darkmatter tree has been added! Featuring such fun spells as:

Darkmatter Bolt: moderate cooldown high damage beam that leaves a shroud of vision blocking darkmatter! Disorients (lose target) foes at level 6.

Darkmatter Shroud: bread and butter damage spell creates a wall of traversable darkmatter that blocks sight and damages anything passing through it. Careful of friendly fire!

Darkmatter Blast: solid damage AoE burst that pulls targets toward the center. Good for yanking baddies back into your dot-tubs if they manage to stagger out.

Deflection Shield: totally not a reskinned version of Deflection that interacts with Shielding.


I've also made some more changes to the Water, Ice, and Phantasm trees. Shivvy form now gives increased cold damage cap while Ice Shards has improved damage, freeze chance, and applies the Wet condition. Phantasmal Shield has been complete remade. It now reacts to any damage with a bap of 50% blinding light that can also apply the new Dazzled condition (reduced Blind immunity). However, if a creature is Blinded then Phantasmal Shield won't deal any damage to them to cleanly prevent infinite damage loops. Can't get blasted in the eyes with light if you can't see, right?

Thanks for the feedback so far everyone. I'm feeling pretty good about the addon barring balance tweaks.

Also: Why isn't the Voidstar in the items directory =I

Hmm, I tried editing the Voidstar to add in the Star damage types, but superloading doesn't appear to be the way to go. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

If it's defined in the Zone, you might be able to edit it with a hook on zoneLoad. My use of that hook has mostly been to affect changes on the player, but I would imagine you could also use it to edit objects being loaded into the zone. If you do it that way, you could probably also check the player's class and only edit it for Wizards, even going as far as to remove the original dam type bonuses, if you wanted to.

Just guessing at that, though. Not at home so I can't actually dig into anything enough to say for certain.

Darkmatter looks fun

Regarding Phantasmal shield, there are a couple of options you could consider to prevent loops. One would be to set a temporary value on the caster just before the damage is projected and also check if the target has that temporary value. Then just remove the value immediately after the damage projection. That way if the target also has Phantasmal Shield then the caster would not take damage from the shield of the target and the loop is short circuted. You could also use a turn_proc limit, either instead of a temporary value, or in addition to it. I'd suggest that may be a good idea since it can react to every instance of damage, and I would probably do both, otherwise you'll always loop to the maximum number of procs whenever you have a Phantasmal Shield vs Phantasmal Shield situation. Just checking Blind may work out alright, but there are enemies immune to blind and ways to instantly cure/prevent afflictions, etc, etc. I also happen to know that 1.6 will (likely) have a reworked fixedart which allows you to apply a non-standard blind to yourself which also prevents all other blinds (it also reduces damage from unseen enemies, hence the incentive to blind yourself).

I actually made a new effect called Dazzled that cuts a resisting creature's blindness immunity in half. That should allow loop breaking blindness to still kick in.

Though I may end up making a single proc turn limit. I'll need to fiddle with Phantasmal Shield a bit more and get some feedback before I decide.

You won't see Voidstar in the items list unless you are in the Abashed Expanse.

Y'know, it occurred to me that with the changes I've made to Temporal and Phantasm, a mage-focused Shadowblade would actually be possible. I might have to try that out just for giggles.

In other news, I believe aside from balance tweaks the addon should be mostly finished? Though I was considering the idea of adding a super-advanced tree to both Wizard and Archmage that can be unlocked at level 36. Eldritch Fusion and Astral Fusion. A collection of long cooldown, high power damage spells with mixed elements. HousePet's mod may have granted at least a little bit of inspiration.

Got this error when casting Darkmatter Blast, but not all the time. Played around a bit more and it seems it's not Darkmatter Blast, but Phantasmal Shield, and it happened with Darkmatter Blast because I was in the AoE. Turns out any damage to yourself while sustaining Phantasmal Shield will cause a stack overflow.

Good catch. I recently added-

src ~= self

-to the list of triggering conditions on Phantasmal Shield. This most recent version today has mostly been dedicated to stamping out various errors with Phantasmal Shield. It SHOULD be good now.