ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I just got my Writhing One to 50 on nightmare and I gotta say he's one of the most fun classes added to the game so far.
However, there are a few issues I have with the convenience of the class.

The Worm That Walks Servant
TWTW is a very fun servant to have, and being able to equip him with so much gear makes itemization very interesting, but a few quality of life problems make him sort of annoying to use.

- Resting is obnoxious.
Assuming you don't want to wait 5 to 10 seconds in real life (and let your insanity drain to zero) each time you rest, you have to switch to the servant and use healing/regeneration infusions, then switch back. This extra tedious step really slows things down and makes it very inconvenient to play. Furthermore, that's assuming you even want healing/regen infusions on him. You may want, for instance, heroism/wild instead.
Suggestion: When TWTW is out of combat for a certain amount of turns, he'll heal rapidly.

- "Switch to Which Character?" Menu
Minor convenience issue. If you only have one thing to switch to, it should just always switch to that one thing. I'm aware that I could use F1/F2 to swap but it's convenient to have one key that switches back and forth like TAB.
Suggestion: Make it an option (switch automatically if there's only one thing to switch to).

- Default talent weight should be 10, not 1.
Minor convenience issue. Having everything be 1 by default is very inconvenient.
Suggestion: Make it an option (default talent weight).

Demented - Slow Death Category
I picked up this category early on because I like the idea of stealing abilities and wanted to try it out. However this category seems very weak and unreliable, especially for one that requires a category point, and feels slow to play.

- Digest playstyle is too slow (even for a category called 'Slow Death')
You have to find an appropriate digest target within melee range every single encounter, and that can be quite tedious. Best case scenario there just happens to be a weak target nearby you can eat, but (especially if you're trying for certain talents with Painful Agony) that's not always the best choice. Even if you do find a nice talent to use, your digestion effect ends so quickly that you'll lose it if you decide to rest before continuing.
Suggestion A: Make the Digestion effect last a lot longer so you're not constantly looking for things to eat to benefit from the effects
Suggestion B: The talent temporarily gained with Painful Agony will stay indefinitely until it's replaced by a new one

- The heroism effect from Digest is worthless
Only -257 life (at 5.2 ETL) is nothing more than a tease. Most characters run at least 1, often 2 heroism infusions that are as high as -1000 life until death, with nearly-100% uptime assuming they're used correctly. Digest's heroism effect should either be changed or removed somehow, because it's worthless even in mid-game where you can easily find a heroism infusion that's at least -500 or better.
Suggestion: Replace the heroism effect with something else more useful.

- Painful Agony selection should happen when you use the spell, not after digesting!
Having to select a spell every time I Digest something is very tedious, especially because 95% of the time I will just rest up and continue to the next pack of enemies and by then spell will be gone. However, there ARE situations where the extra phase door/rush/etc. would be super helpful so I take the time to select the spell each time despite the fact that it will rarely come in handy.
Suggestion: Digesting something with at least 1 talent should give you a "Painful Agony" Talent that requires 0% of a turn, and when activated it will open up the spell menu. This will allow you can pick which spell you need, when you need it, rather than having to pick a spell every single time.

- Inner Tentacles is inconsistent and unreliable as a means of survivability
You have to land a critical blow that gives you 3 turns of the effect, and aside from your tentacle's base crit modifier there are no talents on the class that improve critical chance, so you're gonna be relying on gear. During the effect, you only have a 20% chance per hit to gain life, and it has a fairly long cooldown of 7 seconds with a 4-point investment. The chance of this talent just totally flopping during an important fight is way too high considering that it seems like the primary reason to put ANY points into this category. IMO, survivability talents should never be this random.
Suggestion A: Change it to something more offensive-oriented.
Suggestion B: During the buff: normalize the life gain so that it's 100% chance to heal, but with less healing.

- Stolen spells (via Painful Agony) can be rather wonky
Minor complaint here. Stealing Eyal's Wrath, for instance, will treat you as an antimagic character and disable ALL OF YOUR SPELLS. Whether intended or not, it's really annoying and just makes the spell even weaker than expected. A lot of spells do literally nothing or cause lua errors, because they were not meant to be used by a player.
Suggestion: none

Just my 2 cents really. I think the class is good, but could definitely be improved.
If anyone else has any input, feel free to post it here as well, this isn't my personal suggestions thread or anything like that.

I thought I'd chime in. I've made a few runs with WO now. Last win was with a Drem WO on insane roguelike. I'll give my own feedback.
Here is my character: https://te4.org/characters/240783/tome/ ... 55bd792e7d

Here is my WtW pet Char Dump (saved right after a teleport): https://te4.org/characters/240783/tome/ ... 3ffaa5503a

General Feedback: The class plays like a honey badger. You can run around at resist cap easily (you sit at 40% resist all before gear and have multiple ways of gaining additional res all like overgrowth), 110 armor, and crit for 14k, on a character who does screen wide AoEs and opens combat at 10 spaces away. Oh and for fun you can fill the screen with meat shields or clear aggro.

Oh your pet could probably win the game on normal difficulty.

Class is above S tier. It is honey badger tier.

To go into more detail...

Damage: Your damage spells Lash Out, Tongue Lick, Constriction, Defiled Blood, and Tendril Eruption all function as physical attacks that use physical power and deal dark damage based on your tentacle. With crit, crit bonus damage, +dark, and high magic your damage with Arcane Might gets stupid. I did 10k damage in a single round during the final battle...

Also, because with just 2 points terrible sight is debuffing 43 spell/phys defense you are going to apply a -20% res all debuff on everying. I was doing 2.5k with tongue lash and that's a flat 100% tentacle damage.

However, high armor mobs still shut my damage down.

I could go into equal detail on survivability and utility, but I won't.

furtbat wrote:Class is above S tier. It is honey badger tier

No disagreements there! When I said the class could be improved, I meant conceptually. I know he is insanely strong.

One thing that kind of bugged me:

When switching to my WtW, my char would sometimes use stupid CDs. For instance when I was wearing the artifact ring that has flood wave, that would _always_ trigger on control change when possible, even in towns. So you switch to your WtW to level up and suddenly have the whole town out to kill you.

If you can list me stolen spells taht error out, I can fix those

For 1.7 i'll also make Digest stop ticking down outside of combat (but not provide insanity regen either) so that your absorbed talent can be used for the next fight.
Also all party members with a life regen lower than the player will regen at the player's rate after a few turns while resting