a review from a newcomer - and some suggestions

[ygramul]

I will keep the praise short by saying that this is the BEST roguelike I played so far, arguably even a good match to many modern CRPGs in terms of innovation. This project can succeed on a large scale, far beyond that of an isolated Nethack fandom.

Here are a few suggestions to make the project a broad success:

- remove escort rewards giving talents & trees:
As I see it, it is almost a necessity to get the Celestial/Light tree from the Anorithil and Chant/Save-bonus points from the Sun Paladin. It removes build variety. Let the bonuses be generic rewards: stat or talent points only or a rare item useful to the class.

- iron out the difficulty difference between classes:
I accept that not all classes are equally friendly to the beginner, but look at the list of winners at roguelike-difficulty, some classes are seemingly hopeless to try finishing this game with. I really wanna try out a Temporal Warden; I accept it is multi-ability-dependent and difficult to balance, yet I see NO way whatsoever that a Temporal Warden can finish this game.

- iron out difficulty spikes exploring: being one shotted is no fun, especially in a roguelike. Opening a vault can be a "oh, I must run away if I want to live" affair but not a "I die with no recourse affair". (It was NOT fun to loose my lvl 38 Arcane Blade to those level 80+ dragons in the Vor Vault. If I should have NO chance of living through it, even by escaping, it should not be there.)

- beginners should be warned about entering a very difficult dungeon BEFORE they step in, not after.

- stability: on my MacOS setup the game crashes frequently; certainly this can be improved a bit

- (as a bit of blasphemy and ONLY after this game becomes a commercial success) consider a tablet port: I have been a PC gamer for two decades, but I recognize the upcoming wave of popularity tablets will have. An android version of ToME at a reasonable price *will* sell. I wouldn't mind buying it twice just for that.


Just my thoughts & thanks for the creative work I see here.

[bricks]

I have mixed feeling about the rest of your comments, but re: tablet port, I'm not sure I see it working. I've played a few roguelikes on my Android phone, and routinely found the adaptation lacking. A port would really just compound the issue, especially in a game that is so hotkey-heavy. Something with a very limited input selection, like Grey's Rogue Rage module, would probably work great.

[ygramul]

... and that is the least interesting of my suggestions, I agree (re: tablet).

Would really love to see the classes re-balance & escort quest taming, though. It will make the game much better.

[SageAcrin]

- remove escort rewards giving talents & trees:
As I see it, it is almost a necessity to get the Celestial/Light tree from the Anorithil and Chant/Save-bonus points from the Sun Paladin. It removes build variety. Let the bonuses be generic rewards: stat or talent points only or a rare item useful to the class.

They aren't. Not even close. Celestial/Light is really good for a few builds, and a few more skills are likely to join it(Like the Mobility tree), but they're not required. Highly useful, but races often come with better save skills than an 0.7 Chant of Fortitude(especially on a physical fighter!), and many mage classes have healing or barriers of their own-how many do you need?

There's some exceptions where it can really hurt, god knows Paradox Mages and Arcane Blades love Celestial/Light...but you can clear both without it(as, sadly, I had to with Paradox Mage, no love for my luck there).

It isn't a new complaint, to feel that they're required-a few skills were removed because people felt they were absolutely necessary, though, a few versions ago. People are still clearing fine.

However, something that may help your basic complaint: There will be a way(albiet with sacrifice) to get categories reliably, next version. Not gonna spoil how, but you won't have to worry about Escorts not appearing for something you really want, anymore.

- iron out the difficulty difference between classes:
I accept that not all classes are equally friendly to the beginner, but look at the list of winners at roguelike-difficulty, some classes are seemingly hopeless to try finishing this game with. I really wanna try out a Temporal Warden; I accept it is multi-ability-dependent and difficult to balance, yet I see NO way whatsoever that a Temporal Warden can finish this game.

That's an odd example. Temporal Wardens aren't the most powerful of classes, these days, but I usually don't hear them referred to as underpowered...though, looking at statistics, they haven't won on Adventure since b38? Hum. Maybe they do need a buff.

Regardless, that's being worked on. You should have seen Doomed half a dozen versions ago. >_>

- iron out difficulty spikes exploring: being one shotted is no fun, especially in a roguelike. Opening a vault can be a "oh, I must run away if I want to live" affair but not a "I die with no recourse affair". (It was NOT fun to loose my lvl 38 Arcane Blade to those level 80+ dragons in the Vor Vault. If I should have NO chance of living through it, even by escaping, it should not be there.)

The Room of Death is a special vault. The fact that you got an achievement for opening it should tell you that. It's kinda in a weird spot-it used to be hard to get consistently(which was annoying for challenge seekers), but now it's consistent(which is annoying for people that don't expect it to be extremely dangerous).

Also, many people have in fact lived through the Room of Death; There's actually an achievement for killing all the dragons as well as the one for opening the door.

Maybe it should have a sign in front of it warning people that they really, really should not open that door unless they want to die.

- beginners should be warned about entering a very difficult dungeon BEFORE they step in, not after.

Why? There's not a lot of dungeons that can kill you before you walk back out again. I suppose it's an issue in a few areas(Temporal Rift), but they also warn you that it's a one-way trip.

Not that it'd be bad to change it to that, I guess.

[noxnoctum]

I don't like the idea of having big huge signs warning of a dangerous area personally. Part of the fun of the game is not knowing what's around the corner.

[Azirphaeli]

Yes, I strongly disagree with high level warnings, the fun of exploring the world and going "Oh shi-- " and running back to the stairs is a major part of the RL experience. You learn quickly where you should and should not go initially.

[edge2054]

There was a TW winner since the class saw its last changes. The win was on adventurer but had 0 deaths. That constitutes a Roguelike-Win as being viable.

There's another TW in the vault that's still alive from this most recent beta (I believe). That TW is on Roguelike and cleared the Room of Death. As far as I know tiger eye simply got distracted with other things so didn't finish.

[Grey]

I'm not sure tiger_eye should count in the stats for normal players ;)

[tiger_eye]

I had indeed forgotten about Kelvo (from b41):

http://te4.org/characters/6887/tome/59b ... 361fd106e7

I was doing a mindstar and spell build (Mag, Wil, Con), but I just found the Crystalline set, which doesn't work on mindstars. This isn't a typical build, but TWs are very versatile, so there are a bunch of ways to kill enemies and to survive. Thanks for the reminder, edge2054; I should continue with this character!

[infact]

Learning when and where the game is going to drop the gloves and frickin' try to murder you is part of the fun in learning a roguelike I feel. Once you encounter them, not only do you build a sentiment of hostility towards them, but you also feel like you HAVE to become good enough to beat them. This creates a tremendous sense of achievement when you finally manage to beat these encounters. The fact that most of the ultra-dangerous zones can be avoided once you know of their existence also really helps. Unfair insta-kills that have to be avoided through counter-intuitive play are bad, on that I'll agree, but I don't recall seeing much of them in Tome.

I haven't heard much of TWs lately, but last time I went through the character reports shaloren TW sounded like a T1 combination to me. As far as I know, all classes can finish the game, and having "challenge" classes to play is usually a good idea anyway in roguelikes. The fact that our "challenge" classes are still very fun to play instead of being silly makes it all the sweeter.

[ggian83]

- iron out the difficulty difference between classes:

disagree. i believe there should new classes with even greater discrepancy in difficulty. this is a feature from a lineage of roguelikes that let you challenge yourself if you want, play a wacky new style, or play with an easy character. although perhaps there should be a statement at the creation stage for each class/race that states in general terms: Difficulty: easy, moderate, hard.

- iron out difficulty spikes exploring: being one shotted is no fun, especially in a roguelike.
- beginners should be warned about entering a very difficult dungeon BEFORE they step in, not after.

again, this is what roguelikes are known for. roguelikes are about learning what is easy and what is hard in the game so that you get better in subsequent games. and you are supposed to die. that's why there's a roguelike/hardcore mode and an exploration mode.

- An android version of ToME at a reasonable price *will* sell. I wouldn't mind buying it twice just for that.

agree that android support is a good idea.

[wobbly]

Perhaps celestial & arcane should interfere with each other in some way. Sounds like it is overpowered on mages but about right on warriors.

[SageAcrin]

I find it nigh-useless on pure fighters. You can make a build where it isn't, but it'd have to have other good reasons(which I don't feel really exist yet, but will in b43 with uberskills), and even then Str/Dex/Mag Bulwark, say, is going to remain entirely outlier as a build.

And most mages have their own support net of excellent barriers and healing. Archmage I've considered putting it on, only to eventually ditch the idea-and that was a skeleton, where the status curing mattered much more.

It tends to be a specific mage class(those that do not have defensive safety nets, or that have a lot of Generic to blow) and fighter-mage thing. No big deal, with the change to Antimagic escorts, there will be similar specific fighter things, like Call of the Wild and Mobility, for them, so it'll be balanced that way.

[magelike]

I had indeed forgotten about Kelvo (from b41):

http://te4.org/characters/6887/tome/59b ... 361fd106e7

I was doing a mindstar and spell build (Mag, Wil, Con), but I just found the Crystalline set, which doesn't work on mindstars. This isn't a typical build, but TWs are very versatile, so there are a bunch of ways to kill enemies and to survive. Thanks for the reminder, edge2054; I should continue with this character!

How does this character do damage (especially before you got the Crystalline set)? What kind of numbers do you get?

[tiger_eye]

How does this character do damage (especially before you got the Crystalline set)? What kind of numbers do you get?

If you check out the talents, Slow is the primary AoE damage spell: it does 60 temporal damage for 12 turns (=720 total), and it was even better when I wore the +0.2 amulet of mastery.

Attacking-wise, it didn't take too long to get my bump-attacks to do 200+ damage per turn. I did rely on "damage on hit". For example, Weapon Folding does 22 temporal (44 total), Gleamwish of charged psionic shield does 8 light, 6 fire (28 total), ring of blasting 3 lightning, 7 physical (20 total), Steel Helm of Garkul 5 physical (10 total). Just adding those up give 102 damage per turn. You can't see my secondary weapon set, but I think it's a mindstar set which has good on-hit damage as well as burst damage. Since accuracy is based off of Wil, my attacks virtually always hit, and the base weapon damage--while not a lot by "normal" weapon standards--has high APR so added to the damage total. If I pushed it, I think I could get around 250-300 damage per turn (consisting of a variety of damage types), which is perfectly sufficient. Flurry works great with this arrangement. One of the main advantages of bump-attacking, though, is the paradox recovery from Weapon Folding.

Being a Temporal Warden, however, isn't about mindlessly bump-attacking everything to death, it's about controlling the field of battle (er, time of battle?). Dimensional Step and Temporal Wake let me position myself and kill the most dangerous enemies first. If I get overwhelmed, I can Banish enemies away, run away (multiple options, including Haste), or be clever with Wormhole. Single enemies generally aren't too dangerous and can be bump-attacked to death (even if it takes a few turns). If they are dangerous, then Heroism Infusion, Haste, Slow, Stop, Flurry, etc. generally does the job. Invigorate is great if I need to increase the availability of talents.

On a final note, this character was built to withstand hits and recover quickly. Heh, this actually makes Displace Damage (38% to reflect half the damage received to a nearby enemy) a relatively potent attack!