ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

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should be
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Bleeding Edge is missing the requires_target = true, flag

If more turn up I'll add them. (Doing a bit of ID exploring)

Thanks to tiger_eye for pointing these out.

I think Marauders, as is, will have a slow, tedious, dangerous, and boring beginning of the game. Unlike every other class that relies on weapon attack damage to kill enemies at the start, Marauders begin with neither Combat Accuracy nor a weapon mastery. Cursed, temporal warden, reaver, warrior, zerker, archer, arcane blade, and wyrmic all begin with a point in Combat Accuracy. Cursed, archers, and wyrmics even begin with a point in a weapon mastery.

Rogues and Shadowblades may be seen as the exception, but they are not. Rogues begin with Explosion Trap, which can do 10-15 times more damage than hitting with both daggers (and even more if you invest a class point in it at the beginning). Shadowblades begin with Shadow Combat, which over triples the damage of melee attacks. Even with those advantages, few players will claim that rogues and shadowblades have an easy start. Marauders will be even worse.

For example, Marauders will most likely use their first generic point in Combat Accuracy, because this will let them have more success with Dual Strikes, Dirty Fighting, and Skull Cracker (all talents they begin with). This means that even if they hit an enemy that has 0 armour with both daggers, they will only do 4 damage! It takes a long time to kill enemies 2 and 4 damage at time . Furthermore, one cannot rely on the three aforementioned debuffing talents for even marginally prolonged battles (of which there will be many), because stamina will quickly be drained.

So... please consider giving them Combat Accuracy and maybe even Knife Master at the beginning please

The four damage is a little off, tiger. The ghoul marauder I was giving the class a shot with was doing between eleven and fifteen damage without mastery when both daggers landed, with around 6-8 for a single hit. To even be doing four, you'd somehow have to be getting a negative multiplier on your damage, I think. Daggers have a base weapon power of 4, which is improved by stat scaling, and further boosted a bit by the damage range. Armor might cut that down a little, but not by much in the early game.

Anyway, game test had them doing about as much damage per round as a starting fighter or cursed of the same race, without weapon mastery. Maybe a point or two less, but you're still looking at killing most starting zone enemies between two and five rounds, or thereabouts, from what I was experiencing. Naturally, stuff like skeleton warriors, trolls, and bears are going to take a bit longer, but...

Deception cloak might be throwing that off a bit, though, now that I think about it. Lemme see what a non-undead pulls off.

EDIT: Cornac I just rolled up smacked a 1 armor wolf for between 8-11 damage with regularity. Main hand was varied between 6-8 damage, off hand 3-4. This isn't too far off from a starting fighter or cursed. Lemme test with knife mastery...

Knife mastery brought the range to 7-10, 4-5 vs a 4 armor troll, with a total damage range of 11-14.5, barring crits. Not terribly much of a difference.

E2: For comparison, a cornac fighter with weapon mastery and 2/1 str dex had a range of 11-14 vs 1 armor wolf. Cursed hit a fair bit harder, at 16-22 with mastery vs 1 armor wolf, but also has almost double the starting weapon power of either fighter or marauder with its starting 2hander and more focused stats/higher stat multiplier.

I think the point about Combat Accuracy is a serious one. In fact, I think it's a wide-ranging problem, since a character can start with accuracy as low as 2, which is impractical for anyone. Whilst we could fix this individual case by giving Marauder Combat Acc instead of Dual Strikes, I think in general every character's base accuracy should be improved by about 5 to be in the least bit practical.

Another point that has been raised is that Skullcracker does less damage than Dirty Fighting at level 1, in spite of costing much more stamina and having a longer cooldown. The confusion is still nice of course, but it could do with having its base damage increased to higher than Dirty Fighting levels.

Grey wrote:I think the point about Combat Accuracy is a serious one. In fact, I think it's a wide-ranging problem, since a character can start with accuracy as low as 2, which is impractical for anyone. Whilst we could fix this individual case by giving Marauder Combat Acc instead of Dual Strikes, I think in general every character's base accuracy should be improved by about 5 to be in the least bit practical.

Base accuracy is now 4 in the svn.