ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

My Arcane Blade was just one-shotted by Ak'Gishil and his friend the Distorted Sword. The last time I encountered AG, he was alone but this time another unique called "Distorted Sword" or something similar was around as well.
This sword "increased the local entropy" which stunned me for over 10 turns and put all my talents on a ~40 cooldown.

I ran away (seeing two uniques and at least 10 animated swords was a bit too much, not to mention the ~50 turns waiting for my talents to cool down) and hid behind a corner. One of those swords followed me, I attacked it and next round I'm dead, surrounded by what looks like half of the enemies present in the level.



According to the log, Ak'Gishil used Psionic Pull which must have caused this massive clusterfuck of mobs, although I'm not familiar with this talent. Maybe it was a temporal anomaly that placed everybody right next to me. I'm not sure if this is a bug but the whole thing seems a bit off to me so I thought I'd post this here rather than in character reports. I guess that's what I get for playing on Roguelike

Edit: re-checking the log I saw my life at -1999/713. Now I'm pretty sure this is not intended

I'm not sure what could have caused such a massive spike. Maybe too many temporal anomolies? I made the distorted sword have a ton of latent paradox, may have to cut that back.

Psionic Pull was probably not the cause, by the way.

Why doesn't the log show the attack(s) that kill you?

I'm not sure, the log on the website cuts off early for some reason. This is pretty common, at least from my experience. I just found out that a much more detailed log can be accessed from the tome-folder. Next time, I'm going to use that one to post any weird deaths.

PureQuestion wrote:I'm not sure what could have caused such a massive spike. Maybe too many temporal anomolies? I made the distorted sword have a ton of latent paradox, may have to cut that back.

Ah, yes. Weird stuff happens when too much paradox is involved. I remember pulling 2 overpowered multi hued wyrms out of the room of death with my TW, so I wouldn't be surprised if that sword just screwed up reality to kill my character. As much as it pains me to say, maybe NPCs should get a cap for paradox, seeing as even gravity worms tend to screw with every monster on any given map.

It looks like anomalies need to be nerfed/capped when triggered by enemies. Paradox Mages will keep their paradox under control to avoid getting killed by their own backfires, but the AI has no such discipline and can unleash extremely unfair anomalies at the player:

- Put all skills on cooldown (for 40+ turns, apparently)
- Stun the player for a huge number of turns
- Slow the player by an arbitrarily large amount (probably instant death)
- Summon all mobs on the map to the enemy (and player)'s location

Even one of these is enough to kill the player, and multiple can and probably will trigger on consecutive turns if paradox is high enough.

Well, what I did to make the Distorted Sword interesting in this latest version was have its paradox increase by 100 every turn.

This may have been a bit much.