ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I've encountered a number of issues trying out the Doomed class on 1.0.

• The Gesture of Pain description doesn't seem to match the code: when dual-wielding (eg) a mace and a mindstar, Gesture of Pain is not allowed.
• The vision part of Dark Vision seems to have no effect: I still can't see through my own Creeping Darkness. The description isn't quite clear to me how it's supposed to work, but no interpretation seems to match the actual behaviour.
• The Deflection talent always shows up as "Deflection(0)" for me. I think that "0" is supposed to be the number of points of damage that can be deflected? The behaviour seems correct (as far as I can tell), it's just the display that always reads as 0. (As discussed in another thread, having a meter would be yet more helpful.)
• Which direction does the knockback from Blast happen? In particular, which direction is the center knocked? Is it random? I find it confusing; perhaps the knockback should increase as you go out from the center?
• More generally, the class in general seems pretty underpowered. It's hard to do much damage, at least early on; and considering that almost all the talents are very short-range, that's a problem. Deflection doesn't deflect very much damage for the limited way it can be used, either.

1. Gesture of Pain requires your mainhand to be empty or have a mindstar. This could use a better description.

2. Dark Vision allows you to see past your darkness out to the range specified by Vision; if DV gives you a vision range of 4, and there's a patch of shadow 3 tiles out, you can only see one tile past that.

5. Early game you can kite with Willful Strike knockback, and don't need that much damage. Deflection recharges 1/35 of its power every turn, it's basically +that much max HP and +2-5 HP regen. Later, Blast and Hateful Whisper do very good damage, especially in big groups, and Agony is potent on single targets as long as you don't overwrite it. You can get fairly frequent mindcrits between pumping Cun and Gesture of Power, which with the crit multiplier boost from Force of Will tree become quite powerful. Much later you get to go insane with Madness + Mental Tyranny and huge mental crit rates and asshole unkillable shadow murder squads. You also have Gesture of Warding, Feed Power, and darkness spam reducing the damage you take.

Huh. Does the damage reduction aspect of feed power actually work? Everything I was seeing when I was checking on it was pointing pretty heavily to "no".

Thanks, phantomglider, that's helpful. Another way of thinking of that +1/35 power per turn is as a recharge period that long (which is pretty hefty), but I guess it's better than that, since it doesn't take a turn and gets partially reapplied.

The Gesture of Power crit bonus seemed pretty small compared to some other talents in the game (eg, the Celestial talent Blood Red Moon), especially since it doesn't apply to many of the Doomed attacks. But I haven't gotten terribly far; maybe it's better than I think.

Crit chance can be thought of as essentially +damage% that's spikier than normal. Because of the 150% crit multiplier, this is typically (crit chance/2). So, for example, if you ignore Corona then Blood Red Moon is +7.5% spell damage. Gesture of Power is something like +7 or 8% crit chance, but because of the crit multiplier bonus from Force of Will this ends up being about +7 or 8% damage. BRM has the advantage of making Corona trigger more often, but GoP gives a mindpower boost. Overall, I'd say BRM is a bit better in context, but not by all that much.

You also don't have much else you especially want to do with your generic points. Relentless is nearly mandatory, but the other skills in that tree are pretty mediocre. You can win the game with 1/5 Feed, and the other skills in that tree scale pretty poorly. Curses can be skipped easily. So your main competition comes from the rest of the Gestures tree, your racial tree, Thick Skin, and antimagic.

Calabria wrote: [*]The vision part of Dark Vision seems to have no effect: I still can't see through my own Creeping Darkness. The description isn't quite clear to me how it's supposed to work, but no interpretation seems to match the actual behaviour.

Seems a little wonky to me as well. It doesn't seem to be "see through five squares of darkness" but "have five squares sight range if seeing through darkness". And I have the feeling enemies with high infravision, notably skellie archers, can see through it no problem. Generally I've found the darkness tree to be something best only invested in once you've got your main setup working - Madness and the Force of Will cap skill maxed.

Calabria wrote: [*]Which direction does the knockback from Blast happen? In particular, which direction is the center knocked? Is it random? I find it confusing; perhaps the knockback should increase as you go out from the center?

Eh, dunno really. I do think stuff isn't knocked in your direction, but to the sides and away.

Calabria wrote: [*]More generally, the class in general seems pretty underpowered. It's hard to do much damage, at least early on; and considering that almost all the talents are very short-range, that's a problem. Deflection doesn't deflect very much damage for the limited way it can be used, either.[/list]

It has a slow start. But post-dreadfell at the latestest you're a juggernaut of death and despair, especially with Mental Tyranny, but even without. You'll be looking at 100% or more bonus damage to mind, with a mindcrit rate of over 50%, and doing over 200% damage on crits. You'll also have excellent resistance penetration, and will totally wreck resistance with Madness + Feed + Gestures. At that point, hubris is the killer.