Gloom and Stalk -- should you just ALWAYS leave these on?

[jpwrunyan]

I checked the wiki but there was no useful information regarding these two sustainable skills.
But as far as I can tell, there is no cost for leaving these on all the time.
Is that right?
Does it not even affect infusion saturation?
If so, then what is the point in them being sustainable? It looks to me like they are defacto passive abilities.
Could someone please enlighten me...?

[laru]

If so, then what is the point in them being sustainable? It looks to me like they are defacto passive abilities.
Could someone please enlighten me...?

Sustains can be dispelled by some enemies. And there are things in the dark that even feed on them..

[nate]

With zero energy, zero cooldown sustains like this, dispel is a threat proportional only to one's obliviousness.

I think that these are sustains just as a legacy of development. (I believe Gloom once affected friendly NPCs, making activation/deactivation meaningful.)

[Zonk]

Shouldn't Gloom REALLY be a passive though it no longer harms allies though? It sounds pretty iconic to the class to me...

[phantomglider]

Stalk, at least, gets some benefit out of being a sustain rather than a passive. More than once I've been in a corridor, landed Stalk on an enemy, and then had the boss swap places with it to get next to me, which kept me both from killing my current Stalk target and stalking the boss. Sustainable Stalk lets you avoid stalking low-priority targets.

[nate]

Stalk, at least, gets some benefit out of being a sustain rather than a passive. More than once I've been in a corridor, landed Stalk on an enemy, and then had the boss swap places with it to get next to me, which kept me both from killing my current Stalk target and stalking the boss. Sustainable Stalk lets you avoid stalking low-priority targets.

For next time: you can just leave Stalk on, and cancel the stalk effect (right click I think?). Not sure if that's intended, but it's currently simple to retarget with it.

[jpwrunyan]

Thanks everyone for the replies. I want to update the wiki to have this information. I still find everything about this game esoteric.

I don't have an opinion really about whether it should be passive or sustained. But I wanted to understand what the nuance was. I assume most people leave these abilities on all the time except for some edge cases that become apparent with experience.

[Sirrocco]

I'm not sure that this is still the case, but I suspect that at least at one point, somehow tied into the coding, there were some things that you could not do with passives that you could do with sustains, and area effect autoattacks would be on that list.

Also, I believe that it's technically possible for some mindlock/stun type effects to put powers on cooldown even if they have a 0 cooldown naturally.

[Kobogartimer]

Not too long ago, fighting an enemy that had Spin Fate when you had Gloom active would make them very hard to kill for a cursed! Now there probably isn't a good reason for it though.

[Rutee]

Isn't Gloom a sustain so that it has a graphical effect?

[nate]

You don't need to be a sustain to have a graphical effect. If actor:knowTalent(T_PASSIVE_TALENT) then MyGraphics(actor.x, actor.y) end. Whatever MyGraphics() entails-- which always ultimately means drawing textures or quads to the screen, things I know can be done in add-ons. Put it in a display callback, put it in game:display(), wrap it in for _, entity in pairs(entityList), whatever works for what you're doing.

A lot of authors/coders/whatever have trouble with getting passives to behave how they'd like, but almost all of the game's code is in accessible Lua. With effort, you can make things behave in almost any way you'd like. That's why it's so much more fun to make add-ons for ToME than for any game since Quake.

For many authors, turning passives into sustains is the easiest way that they can find to get something done reasonably close to how they want to do it. When one is making an entire subclass (or superclass!), the speed and ease with which one can get something done is a big concern. But that doesn't mean that doing it another way-- the "right way", if you'd like-- is impossible; it's just harder. Generally, harder because it requires more research, more time spent tracing ToME code.

[Winddbourne]

Another thing to remember is that you can put both stalk and gloom onto auto use and since they don't take any time whenever something turns them off the game will automatically turn them back on for you, this means you aren't going to risk failing to notice that they were dispelled or be too "busy" to immediately turn them back on.

[Atarlost]

When gloom and stalk were first written gloom effected allies and stalk targets couldn't be canceled except by turning the sustain off. They weren't made passives when those were changed because the former was a quick fix and the latter was the side effect of a change motivated by issues with the fungus and aegis trees procing nonstackable effects off of minor heals.

Also, I've heard that you can't right click to cancel beneficial effects in one of the UIs. I think it was simplified or some such so making stalk stop being a sustain might cause tablet issues.