ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Scenario: I am running dual-wielding Cursed, mace and dagger. My Physical Power says 44.

I have two generic points.

I place one point in weapons master and PP goes up to 49 or thereabouts.

I place on point in dagger master and PP stays at 44.

But if I change my equipment to dagger and dagger, and then do the same, PP goes up when I put the dagger mastery point in, but not the weapon mastery.

That is, the game seems to have two lots of PP (four in fact, as it has an archery one and a bow one.)

This can be confirmed by looking at damage under character sheet Attack. The dagger point increases damage only for the dagger, and vice versa.

This is very confusing and doesn't seem right. The Talent descriptions all say, "This increases your Physical Power by X", and yet, it clearly doesn't. So at the least, the descriptions should say "This increases PP for weapons/bows/slings/daggers etc by X" as appropriate.

Moreover, the tool tip display is now not uniform, as every stat in that box (armour, hardiness, stats, etc) refer to a *single* internal variable, that is. But now, it is clear that PP refers to one of several PP variables, depending on your main weapon. This is opaque to say the least.

I doubt a new player would ever come to realise this and it has taken me 50+ builds in b42 for me to realise fully what is going on.

I think this needs to be thought through and reworked. In previous betas, all PP talents increased a single universal PP, which affected all damage of all weapons.

So unless I have misunderstood something, I think the current arrangement is confusing, misleading, and unnecessarily complex.

It was an intentional change. The talent desc on the items could probably stand an update to specify it only boosts the particular weapon if it doesn't already. Some clarity on how it effects things when you're dual-wielding would probably be good, too, yeah.

Big thing this was changed in order to prevent was silliness like alchemists maxing weapon and dagger mastery to get ridiculous physpower for channel staff, archers doing the same and sling and bow as well, etc., so forth, so on. Also to help prevent ridiculous cheese from classed enemies that had access to multiple mastery talents -- it was incredibly common to start running into npcs with ** in physpower at like level 20 or ridiculous crap like that. Needless to say, those freaks could just flat out melt you if they got a chance, even worse than the ones in the current beta can.

Making it so individual mastery talents only apply to the weapon(s) they're intended for was the fix to that.

Ok, then change the descriptions at the least