Arcanum Class Pack v2.3

[HousePet]

Excellent work at finding bugs!

Uploaded a less fail version: http://www.users.on.net/~curtisnd/tome-arcanum.rar

[marshmallowpeep]

Well, I haven't gotten very far with an enchanter yet, but so far Enchanted Weapon Mastery doesn't seem to do anything (my physical power was 10 with nothing equipped and 10 with an enchanted weapon equipped) and Enchanted Armour Training doesn't allow me to use heavy armor. On a related note, it seems kind of strange for the first talent in that tree to be useless without the second. Maybe you could put the "allows you to wear enchanted heavy armour" bit on Enchant Armour?

[HousePet]

Eh? Enchanted Armour Training worked fine yesterday.

[HousePet]

Anyone found any other bugs, balance issues or suggestions for me to tackle?

[Dracos]

Is Ancient Rune one of yours, Housepet?

If so, props, a random damage range fire beam is kinda neat.

[HousePet]

Yes, and its actually random damage in a random shape with a random resource regen.

[marshmallowpeep]

After dying over and over again in Roguelike I switched to exploration just so I could test some stuff. I have trouble surviving with this class, but I'm not terribly good at this game. It may just be due to the problem with enchanted armour training I mentioned in the last post I made. By the way, I redownloaded the beta and turned off all my other add ons to make sure that bit wasn't an addon compatibility issue. It still wasn't working, so I turned my addons back on for the next run.

I'm not sure what purpose Enchant Weapon serves other than allowing the rest of the tree. The class seems built to use a staff, which doesn't have physical stat requirements, and if you're not using a staff you're probably gonna want to cap strength anyway because it's where your damage comes from. The accuracy is nowhere near enough to make me want to invest points. The values in general in all the enchanted gear trees seem a little low to me, unless they scale with spellpower a lot better than I expect them to.

Shield Guardian says it reduces all damage I take by 159. It doesn't do that (which would be insanely over powered) but I don't know how to tell what it does do. It seems to be reducing all damage I take by 3? It says 3 resist armor when I get hit.

So, when I unlocked enchanted pommel (there's two ms that word) gem, I had four types of T1 gems in my inventory. First, I used an agate, and it gave +10 acid damage and seemed to work fine. I decided I didn't want acid damage, so I disenchanted it, and tried adding an ametrine, which gave me a LUA error. Then I tried adding a Zircon, which also gave a LUA error. Then I successfully added an citrine, for +5 light damage. Then, when I added an agate to a different weapon, it added +10 acid and +5 light. I failed to take a screen shot of those LUA errors, but I got another ametrine and did it again and attached a screenshot of that.

Enchanted Bindings says it gives 1% to various resists depending on what you enchant with it, but it's actually giving 100%.

Spinel also seems to work, adding 5 nature damage.

That's as far as I got tonight. I might get a few more levels and see how the rest of the enchanted trinkets tree works, and higher levels of the disenchant talent.

[HousePet]

There is an addon compatibility issue, I've got bad code in Verdant I forgot to clean up.

I'm bumping up some of the enchantment values and I'm thinking about rearranging Enchanted Weapons and Enchanted Armours to work better.

Have corrected other issues.

[marshmallowpeep]

I've discovered the (perhaps obvious in retrospect) use of the physical requirement reduction on enchant weapon: ritual blades, and other magic based daggers, with a short staff in the main hand. On the other hand, maybe investing in some way to get high dex is smart anyway, because of crafty hands. Having gems imbedded in six items sounds nifty.

My single target damage has gotten pretty high. I killed Urkis at 17 in one round with a ~1000 damage arcane smite. My AoE, on the other hand, is pretty terrible. Staff Blast and Blade Storm are super expensive. Glowing orb seems to be my best bet.

A pretty large percent of my damage actually comes from the added physical damage from technique/staff combat's staff mastery. I can't imagine playing this class without it. With arcane smite (at talent level 1), it's adding ~260 damage, out of ~450 total. The tooltip only says 70, but on a normal hit it's hitting for ~150. This might just be a result of the staff accuracy bonus stacking multiplicatively with the 40% physical damage bonus I have. I'm not sure about the details of this game's math, but it seems worth mentioning.

Bear in mind that any balance comments I make are going to be influenced by the fact that I'm choosing skills based on testing things rather than optimum performance, and the fact that I'm playing on exploration mode at the moment.

If you animate a bow with animate weapon, it generates ammo for it to shoot. When the weapon runs out, that ammo then drops to the ground along with the bow and you can pick it up. That seems exploitable for free money.

My shield guardian shield seems to unequip itself more or less at random. Often, but not always, when I enter a new area. Don't know what's going on with that. The effective resist armour seems to be about 35, and, strangely, is still there even when shield guardian gets deactivated from running out of mana (which happens a lot, this class is kind of mana hungry). In fact it seems to just be passive, and unrelated to actual use of the sustain, although if it's coming from something else I can't imagine what.

I got disenchant to level 5, and used standard disenchant on an item with an aquamarine in it. I had four aquamarines in my inventory already. Instead of returning me the single aquamarine I used to enchant the item, it gave me another stack of four, so I then had eight. Happens the same way if you chose to recover the gem but destroy the item. Choosing the "Scrub all properties" option doesn't seem to actually do anything. I didn't try the function that says it isn't coded yet.

Still haven't gotten to 22 to test the last skill in enchanted trinkets, or how disenchant will handle taking a rune off a staff. I'll probably do that later tonight.

[HousePet]

New beta version.

Nerfed Arcane Smite.
Altered a load of mana costs.
Nerfed Staff Mastery.
Buffed a few other damages.
Improved enchanting bonuses.
Tweaked Enchanted Armour arrangement.
Hopefully fixed Pommel Gem.
Added a new staff ego.
Fixed Animate Weapon.
Added some purple puffs to Disenchantment.
Shield Guardian probably still broken.
Disenchant Item on enemies now possible.

http://www.users.on.net/~curtisnd/tome-arcanum.rar

Thanks to marshmallowpeep for testing.

[marshmallowpeep]

Man, you weren't kidding about nerfing staff combat. Oh well, it probably needed it.

I think my problem with shield guardian shield unequipping itself may have been caused by me putting points in the skill, since I think sustains restart themselves to update when you do that. Oops. It seems what's going on with the damage reduction on it is that it's just not turning off when you take off the shield, so it keeps stacking with itself. Tooltip says 3, and the amount I'm resisting seems to go up by 3 each time I take the shield off and put it back on.

Enchanted gem pommel says it gives an effect from the gem similar to the effect of using that gem as an alchemist bomb but by default I have no way of knowing what those effects might be and I have no idea if they're actually happening or not, which is a little frustrating. I guess Agate adds ten damage while the other tier 1s add 5 because agate increases the damage when used for bombs? I assume the 10 "lite damage" burst that ametrine is adding (in addition to 5 light damage on hit) is lighting up tiles? Because it's not doing damage. I have no idea what kind of special effect citrine is meant to have.

Ametrine works now, which I think was the error message I posted before, but still getting an error message when I try to use enchanted gem pommel with a zircon, which I have attached.

I'll probably test some more tomorrow.

[HousePet]

I had guessed what the issue with Shield Guardian was, but I haven't got around to fixing it.

Not sure how to communicate the different Pommel Gem effects. I copied most of the effects directly, with Ametrine being that it lights up tiles, so that isn't very useful.
Citrine was increased range, but that isn't applicable, so I changed it to increased crit chance.

[marshmallowpeep]

Is it not possible to have the gems say what they do with enchanted pommel gem if you have that skill in the same way gems show you what they do when used for alchemist bombs if you have extract gem and/or create alchemist gem? Or a simpler but less precise way to help at least somewhat might be to make enchanted pommel gem just reveal the bomb use description, since the talent does say most of them do the same thing as the bomb. As it currently is I feel compelled to use a category and generic point to get extract gem just so I can have some kind of guess about what the gems do, and even then there's no way to tell what, say, citrine does short of asking you. You said it increases crit chance but that doesn't show up on the item or my character sheet. Is it increased crit chance for the +5 light damage specifically?

Runestaff being mutually exclusive with enchant weapon makes me wonder if anyone will actually use it. I don't really get having the capstone talent in an advanced tree conflict with one of the core basic trees. You'd have to literally build around this level 22 talent from the start, either playing Cornac so you can unlock staff combat or managing without a mastery until level 10 or 500 gold, which would be really difficult on this class, which I already find to have a somewhat difficult start. As a reward for all that hassle, and spending that extra category point on a new mastery (or equivalent in the form of an angolwen token) you get what amounts to an extra category point in the form a rune slot for your staff, and a very small amount of spellpower. Of course, it's one extra inscription over the usual max amount allowed, and I think it could get full on broken with swift hands, since that prodigy makes it essentially infinite inscription slots, but it's still pretty narrow.

On a related note, now that the crazy OP extra damage is gone from technique/staff combat I don't really understand the point of a strength based staff tree. You need to pump magic anyway for staves to be any good. I suppose it saves you a single point from channel staff and there is one unique talent compared to spell/staff combat, but at the cost of a quite a lot of stat points. Perhaps it should convert the "uses stat: 80% magic" to "uses stat:82, 84, 86, 88, 90% strength (based on talent level)" both to make staves as a 2-hander for strength based classes more appealing, and to provide a bit of a bonus incentive for magic based characters to invest in the extra stat? Or maybe it could get the small bonus to the amount of stat added, and use the higher of strength or magic?

Is "dual" the new staff ego? I hadn't seen it before this run anyway. It seems to be working fine.

Error when I mouseover a Chronolith twin shadow image thing. Screenshot attached.

Being able to enchant ranged weapons so that they add damage on melee hit is a little strange.

Some of the bugs I previously reported are still there, but you didn't say you fixed them so I imagine you know that. You did say you fixed animate weapon. I'm not sure what you fixed about it, but it's still giving me free ammo when it's duration expires if I use it with a bow.

Are there any pommel gems you suspect might be buggy that I should look for to test? The only enchanter things I've not tried (and hopefully reported any bugs with) are T4 and T5 gems with enchanted pommel gem, and of course compatibility with other addons. Is this likely to work with the extra gems addon? I imagine not.

Otherwise, I've tried every enchanter skill and hopefully remembered to report all the bugs I've found. This latest run was not only with no other addons enabled (outside of stone warden and item vault), but with a fresh install of ToME.

[HousePet]

I should be able to get the game to add extra information onto gems if you have the Pommel Gem talent. The increased critical chance from Citrine should get added on to the weapon crit value.

I don't expect anyone to use both Enchanted Weapons and Runestaff. They are for opposite ends of the melee/caster hybrid range.

Technique / Staff Combat is actually from my Druid class. Due to the way physical power interacts with weapon damage, nobody will ever not build strength when using weapon attacks. To get the best damage from staff whacking you will be building magic and strength regardless of this category.

Yep, Dual is the new ego. I'll need to adjust it so that you can't set both elements the same.

Whoops, forgot ranged weapons.

Animate Weapon was fixed to work when there was an adjacent enemy. The free ammo should also have been fixed. :/

Every artifact gem will be buggy as a Pommel Gem. I'll need to add custom effects to them.

Are your aoe damage options better?

[marshmallowpeep]

AoE damage is fine now. Staff blast is great for that so long as you set the right element (a lot of them are very situational; I always just use physical). The cost reduction helped a lot. Glowing orb is also nice.

If the crit chance from citrine should be showing up on the weapon or the character sheet then it's not functioning.

Obviously runestaff and enchanted weapons weren't meant to be used together. you made them mutually exclusive. The point I'm making is that you'd be stupid to use runestaff as it currently stands. This class can't be an effective pure caster. What talents do you have that don't require mastery to do optimal damage? I'm seeing force punch, blade storm, rebound, and glowing orb. Without some kind of weapon mastery this class can't do damage, so if you want to use runestaff, a level 22 skill, you have to build around it from level 1, by avoid an entire, powerful, unlocked tree with a weapon mastery in it, and instead spending a category point just for another weapon mastery talent. If you're not a cornac, you need to wait until level 10 or 500 gold to unlock that category point, meaning you're stuck with pretty awful damage until then. All that effort for a talent that's roughly equivalent to the category point you were forced to spend to make the class work without enchanted weapons? Ignoring the possibility of using swift hands shenannegans to use every single rune you find, I can't imagine it being worth it. The simplest solution here would be to just make staff combat start unlocked.

If you're expecting users of this class to build strength anyway, then what in the world is the purpose of all that strength requirement reduction that's available? It's not like this class would be stretched for stats without it. That said, I'm not having trouble doing enough damage while mostly ignoring strength.

My suggestion was to try and enable a magic-less (or low magic) staff build by making the strength requirement staff category change staffs to use strength for damage so I'm not sure why you brought up that weapon damage require strength anyway. It just seems silly to me to have this new, separate category that is essentially a nerfed version of a category already in the game with 3/4 of the same skills. If it fundamentally changes how staves work then it at least allows for different build priorities. Seems like it would still be weaker than normal two handers that way.