Getting tired of cheap deaths...

[Grakor456]

7. Talent concentration - except for a few rare cases, most characters benefit from maxxing a few talents rather than spreading. So a great way to learn tome is to pick a class, and one or at most two trees. And dump everything into them. your stat points into its stat, every class point, everything you can. you will probably die, but you will also start to understand how talents really work. the trick to tome is that talents can be very very different at high levels. some become less and less useful (e.g. ones that boos defence imo) and others that seem mediocre can become hugely powerful.

I'm actually curious how true this is, because it seems like this would come with a lot of caveats due to the diminishing returns that occur when a talent is leveled up.

There are some particular abilities that get significantly more powerful due to either secondary affects (Distortion Bolt allowing distortion effects to ignore allies at level 5) or due to their particular method of scaling (if you're getting Bone Shield, sink all five points into it) but those seem to be the minority. As a counter-example, a corruptor will do more overall damage with 3 Soul Rot, 3 Drain, and 3 Blood Grasp than, say, 5 Soul Rot, 4 Drain; or 5 Soul Rot, 3 Drain, and 1 Blood Grasp, since each point that you put into a talent yields less overall value than the point that came before it.

It just seems like saying "Only stick to two trees, concentrate" is poor advice in most cases.

[rod]

I'm starting to see things Jenx's way... or at least I'm starting to understand where he's coming from.

If I understand his mentality correctly, he's advocating that battles should be extremely short, violent, and decisive affairs. Thus, concentrating your resources into rapid ultra-violence is preferred over spreading things out so you stack your damage out over more rounds. In that vein, you need just a few talents with maximum power, rather than a collection of moderately powered skills.

Something else that's becoming apparent is that many trees have talents that synergize off each other, and what initially appears to be diminishing returns is actually just keeping certain things in check, else the multiplicative nature of some synergies getting wildly over powered. Often times, these synergies aren't really noticed when you're reading the skills and looking at those light green numbers, but if you play with them, you do notice the difference.

For now I'm focusing on berserker, because, well, it's still fun. My most recent one got to L26 and was ripping through things until the Grand Corruptor decided to take him for a dance in FearScape... After rush was spent outside of Fearscape, so most of my health was gone just closing the gap. (that's really a pain, btw, having to close the gap twice...) Gonna try starting again, making some different optimizations as I go.

[Mewtarthio]

7. Talent concentration - except for a few rare cases, most characters benefit from maxxing a few talents rather than spreading. So a great way to learn tome is to pick a class, and one or at most two trees. And dump everything into them. your stat points into its stat, every class point, everything you can. you will probably die, but you will also start to understand how talents really work. the trick to tome is that talents can be very very different at high levels. some become less and less useful (e.g. ones that boos defence imo) and others that seem mediocre can become hugely powerful.

I'm actually curious how true this is, because it seems like this would come with a lot of caveats due to the diminishing returns that occur when a talent is leveled up.

There are some particular abilities that get significantly more powerful due to either secondary affects (Distortion Bolt allowing distortion effects to ignore allies at level 5) or due to their particular method of scaling (if you're getting Bone Shield, sink all five points into it) but those seem to be the minority. As a counter-example, a corruptor will do more overall damage with 3 Soul Rot, 3 Drain, and 3 Blood Grasp than, say, 5 Soul Rot, 4 Drain; or 5 Soul Rot, 3 Drain, and 1 Blood Grasp, since each point that you put into a talent yields less overall value than the point that came before it.

It just seems like saying "Only stick to two trees, concentrate" is poor advice in most cases.

As he says, you will probably die if you're as hyper-focused as all that. The point isn't to make an optimal character: It's to explore those talents in depth so you know exactly what you can do with them.

[Grakor456]

As he says, you will probably die if you're as hyper-focused as all that. The point isn't to make an optimal character: It's to explore those talents in depth so you know exactly what you can do with them.

I see what you're saying. The wording just threw me.

[Robsoie]

The problem with the diminishing return is that it's really not balanced to make all the skills interesting, on some skill it's even so completely awful that they're a complete waste of upgrade.

If you play an oozemancer by example, the Living Mucus that allow you to have randomly spawning ooze each turn on your mucus has roughly 25% to start with, so you add a skill point and it will give ... 26% , yeah as if that was making a real difference in battle, let's put one more point and you have ... 27% !
etc...
Meaning that maxing this skill to get ridiculous +5% is a complete waste of point, it's much to better increase your mindpower that will increase a bit the % too and only put point there when you have already maxed the skills you really find usefull to upgrade.

Now for the same Oozemancer, you have the Slime Spit, each point added give an acceptable increase in damage, and each points give additionally an additional target on which the slime spit will jump on, so it's a skill that is totally worth it to increase and max as soon as possible.

There are many similar cases for all classes, in which maxing some skills is a real waste of points, while some other skills really benefit from the maxing.

[jenx]

As he says, you will probably die if you're as hyper-focused as all that. The point isn't to make an optimal character: It's to explore those talents in depth so you know exactly what you can do with them.

I see what you're saying. The wording just threw me.

Yes, I meant doing this purely for experimental purposes.

I forgot to mention that the arena is extremely helpful in this regard, but also extremely misleading. It is helpful in that you can lvl up quickly and get a feel for a character. It is misleading in that in the game you almost never encounter conditions like the arena, you can't get ingame unlocks, your gear sucks, etc.

But if you want to see how minions work, or oozes, or practice brawlers skills, it is excellent.

[ohioastro]

Harder settings tend to favor much more conservative play. I can relax a bit playing TOME if I have some freedom to mess around, which you lose on roguelike. Can I try this? is the sort of experimentation that I like; and lots of deaths means in practice that you get to run the starter dungeons a lot more than the advanced ones.

For talents, the broad vs. narrow investment strategy depends completely on the class and the skills. If a skill gets only incremental benefits than it stays at 1 point until there is nothing better to do. But some skills benefit along multiple dimension:

e.g. adding skill points to the Corruptor skill Blood Spray increases radius, damage, and the odds of inflicting a disease. Adding skill points to the Archer ability Scatter Shot increases radius, damage, and the duration of the Stun that's inflicted. Adding skill points to Flare...increases damage a bit, and adds blind (for a fixed short duration) at level 3. It scales much worse and the gain from adding points to the latter is much worse than that for the former.

A good general guide is to max, early, a handful of key abilities that you'll use. Pair this with staking out the 1-point wonders that are useful and those on the path to developing your key late skills. Follow up by specializing and nurturing key styles.

For the anorithil, for instance, the first stage is maxxing the Moonlight Ray skill - short cooldown, beam, big damage. Then get the key abilities you need, adding a few points to some of the useful status ones (blind = Sun Flare, stun = Starfall, confuse = Mind Blast) until they hit diminishing returns (around level 3). Then invest in spell criticals and the class-defining Corona tree; and then polish it off with boosting the damage-dealing skills and possibly other trees, like Harmony, Stone Alchemy, etc. that you pick up with escorts.

The early levels go much, much better if you make the button that you push over and over again as strong as you can as quickly as you can. I also like to default to 1 con / level unless its a class that really needs to develop the secondary stat. Otherwise 2 primary / 1 con until the primary is maxxed, then 1 primary / 1 con / 1 secondary is a good path that really helps on the health pool. This is mandatory for class / race combos with weak hit points (hello yeeks...)