Thick Skin hits low-HP race/classes too hard

[martinuzz]

For a level 20-ish mage type, 40 HP, as the Health talent used to give, would be about 10% of it's total HP.
It's replaced with 3% resist all. Quite a nerf.

For a level 20-ish fighter type, there's no significant difference between the old and the new talent.

[edge2054]

For a mage I can't see this.

Shields take into account resists too. So while a mage's actual hit points may be low their effective hit points can still be quite high. Resist all might even be better for a mage then the hit point bonus was depending on what kinda shields they're running.

I'm not saying that there isn't some truth in what you're saying, but of the squishy classes mages aren't hit as hard by this as it may first appear and certainly aren't as affected as a paradox mage (which is the only other class I know of with a -4 life rating penalty). If paradox mages are to squishy because of the health talent being removed I'll ponder some better defensive options for them (though I think their plethora of crowd control options probably makes up for the lack of access to the aegis tree).

[Sradac]

keep em squishy, glass cannons are awesome!

[bricks]

I think it's better to insure that the classes that are designed around avoiding damage aren't routinely screwed over (archers and anything with Rush come to mind). Right now, I'm considering decking out all of my characters in heavy armor.

[Hedrachi]

keep em squishy, glass cannons are awesome!

I'll admit being able to kill Urkis without dying was fun, but being used as a pincushion in the halfling complex to regular skeleton archers (and eventually dying to a master archer that got lucky with my power 7 invisibility being just power 7) isn't exactly fun. Had to focus on DEX and CUN almost exclusively just to get venomous strikes 5/5, and dual weapon training at the start. Maybe if boulder throwers threw projectiles or were otherwise subject to ranged defence (or if ranged defence did more) it wouldn't be so bad, but as it stands, 334 max hp at level 20 is... interesting. Damage is a constant, good gear means mass sacrifices to the RNG Gods. *hides his unegoed gloves*

[priestsofsyrinx]

The thing I've noticed is how much more I'm sticking to +maxHP gear over other options.

[Aquillion]

keep em squishy, glass cannons are awesome!

How is it awesome to randomly die from an enemy outside your sight purely due to bad luck?

"Glass cannon" is a concept meant for multi-player games, where you have your wizard covered by the warrior and so on. It doesn't really have as much place in a single-player roguelike.

[Dwarf_Hammer]

I like the change. I always thought it was weird that squishy wizards would have nearly as much health as fighters. Besides, there are plenty of items that boost your con/max HP in the game.

keep em squishy, glass cannons are awesome!

How is it awesome to randomly die from an enemy outside your sight purely due to bad luck?

"Glass cannon" is a concept meant for multi-player games, where you have your wizard covered by the warrior and so on. It doesn't really have as much place in a single-player roguelike.

Glass cannons are common in roguelikes, such as NetHack and Crawl.

[greycat]

No sane person builds a glass cannon character in nethack. If you don't have the Orb of Fate, or some other "take half damage" artifact, then you boost AC and HP. There are numerous ways to do this (pudding farming always works to generate as much inventory as you could possibly need, and then you can reverse-genocide nurses for HP, use the magic markers to write scrolls of enchant armor, etc.). Even with the OoF you still want at least some reasonable AC.

ToME 4 is actually quite unique among roguelikes in that it is close to being a finite resource game. In most roguelikes, if you aren't ready to dive to dungeon level N, you just keep doing dungeon level N-1 until you are. But in ToME 4, the dungeons run out of monsters. The only things you can farm are adventurer parties, and those scale to your level and outnumber you 2 or 3 to 1, so, um, good luck.

[bricks]

I don't really see the canonical wizards (Archmage, Paradox Mage, Doomed, Anorithil; have yet to get into Corrupter) as "glass cannons." They have lots of damage mitigation options, and they generally only have two stats to invest into, so Con remains an option. It's the hybrid classes that get spread really thin; they pretty much all have some class-based means of getting their stats up, though, so careful building will mitigate this. In my experience, the truest glass cannon is Rogue. Sure, you can build Con and neglect another stat, but then your damage starts to scale horrifically and you die simply because you can't kill anything fast enough. I think my next rogue will be a race with a significant life rating.

[edge2054]

The biggest issue with the health talent was that it was practically mandatory for everyone. That's not a good thing.

[shooth]

In addition to Tome having "finite" resources (outside adventure parties and wandering bears/canines) available for players, because items disappear if you leave a map... running away from a fight you are not prepared for means the loss of a potentially critical item. And this is especially punishing for players who are unsure what the general difficulty is of the area they are stepping into (like new players, and old players with no long term memory like me).

I won't complain so much about the loss of money from selling said items, because all you can do is spend it in stores with items that you would never generally buy anyway. I think stores could change inventories a few times without breaking anything... I seriously don't think I bought more than one item in the last six or ten characters.

I have noticed that my necromancers seem especially squishy for mages, but thats life and death in Tomeville.

[edge2054]

Necromancers probably have it the easiest. Blurred Mortality is in a lot of ways the old health talent, except it's a bit better (50 instead of 40 hit points per talent point).

[darkgod]

Item decay wont deprive you of "critical" items. Those in monster drops dont despawn until you kill said NPC; thos on the floor do, but only not in vaults and not arts. Each level has at most 6 floor items. You will never make me believe this makes you misss critical items

[Aquillion]

Item decay wont deprive you of "critical" items. Those in monster drops dont despawn until you kill said NPC; thos on the floor do, but only not in vaults and not arts. Each level has at most 6 floor items. You will never make me believe this makes you misss critical items

My problem with it is more conceptual. It forces the player to sometimes act in an odd, unintuitive fashion, which many players will only know to do if they happen to know the game mechanics. Darting into and out of dungeons used to be an extremely common strategy for me, especially early on when I wanted to sell things in shops; it's also something that new players are likely to do (especially since you need to enter a dungeon to see its threat warning.)

It's bizarre that doing that can cost you items. Even if they aren't essential items, it's not something that it makes any sense to penalize the player for, and encouraging players to clear entire floors at once without leaving the area (even if it's only a mild encouragement) is a weird thing to encourage.

The game should encourage the player to do fun things and to behave in logical ways. Item decay, even if it's not critical, encourages the player to sometimes do unfun things (like stay in an area they'd rather leave) and behave in illogical ways. And it doesn't really add anything to the game worth this -- it's relatively easy to get item storage in ToME, and you're unlikely to find a huge amount of vital stuff before you do.

Having item decay continue even after you've found your house (which is most of the game) just feels absurd. At that point it serves no purpose whatsoever.