ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The patch notes say that Haste no longer affects casting speed, but Epoch didn't display any casting speed penalty after casting Haste. I'm not sure if the patch is broken, Epoch is broken, or Epoch uses a different Haste than TW/Chronomancer do.

As an aside, the 'duplicates' that the new Haste produces seem problematic. The ones that Epoch left behind looked like they blocked movement - if they do, this is bad, and if they don't, this needs to be clear to the player.

Haste was giving a buff to both global and casting speed. Which was a double dip but I felt it a fair separation from other speed buffs considering chronomancers are the 'masters of space and time'. In retrospect I decided it was to easy to abuse and really not that interesting. In other words, his global speed is still buffed appropriately and if he wants to cast with it it's fine. He's not getting a casting speed penalty to compensate for the haste bonus he's just no longer getting a casting speed bonus on top of the haste bonus.

As to the images, yes they block movement. That's intended and I'm not sure of another good way to do it. Maybe the actor trying to move into their square could make a saving throw or something to not believe that they're real but it's meant to be more then just a pretty spell effect. In D and D terms think of mirror images.

Honestly when I wrote it I was thinking more from a PC to NPC perspective. With the PC on the receiving side of it there's probably a better way to pull it off but I don't want to give the player a free pass just because it's the player. I'll have to think on it. It's late and I don't have any great ideas right now on how to improve it in that regard.

Thanks, that makes a lot more sense.

Mirror Image is actually a bad example as the duplicates don't take up squares. Perhaps the spell could work more like it, though. If the creature has moved, create a 'shimmer' effect by copying its tile image, filtering it to a transparent blueish color, and pasting it several times randomly offset from the actual location (but still partially within the actual square). Then the miss chance would just mean that effects aimed at that creature might hit an adjacent square (since it's moving so fast it 'could' be in one of those).

haha... I know it's not a perfect example, I was aiming to give you an idea of how the spell should behave though.

What was the issue with the current implementation? How many after images was Epoch creating at a time with his haste? I'm assuming this was on insane so his speed boost from Haste could have been pretty high (letting him move more times relative to you, thus creating more images).

Maybe the summon duration could simply be reduced (right now it's 2 but maybe 1 is enough).

I just noticed it in the Epoch fight - it probably wouldn't make much of a difference there, except if the images block your ranged attacks. But if anything else eventually uses Haste in a corridor-ish layout it could be an issue.