ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

How do I turn off his reflective skin buff?

I realize that some classes can shut down skills but take a Cursed, for example… I don't understand how to avoid killing myself against him.

You can use gloves with the dispersion ego, it allows the user to remove magical effects from a target.

They usually come with arcane infused powers, so if you are a ziguranth you can use the Spellhunt remnants. If I remember correctly, they contain an active disperse magic in a cone effect.

The specific answer is you need gloves of dispersion.

The more general answer is that sometimes certain classes are just plain screwed. If it were a physical or mental status instead gloves of dispersion would do jack.

The sustain and effect removal abilities are fairly rare. In certain circumstance they can be incredibly useful or even required. These are generally only cases of things like Ata or playing on Madness.

So for the most part this issue doesn't normally crop up.

I would say that TOME 4 itself would benefit from a Guild Wars 1 type design where all classes have some ways to counter the various categories in some way, but do it different, and may need to make a sacrifice for it. Or each class can do two of the categories or whatever. Some sort of consistent overall design theme regarding these "meta" categories.

Removing mental stuff is super rare. Alchemists are one of the only things that can remove a beneficial mental/physical effect (not a sustain that is different, although dissolving acid does that as well). Yet most people would only seriously take a long hard look at this on Madness difficulty when they become regularly confronted by enemies with huge psi shields or unstoppable. Even a brawler using combo kick can't remove unstoppable, but an alchemist can. Is this fair? Meh whatever there is no such thing as fair. But it can be problematic when a bit of content anyone can try hinges on something only one class can get, as the class design can suddenly mess up content and vice versa.

Thanks for the feedback. That answer is what I feared…

As it stood in that game, I didn't have said gloves. Oh well, that character is dead anyway...