Shaman Class

[Cathbald]

This addon adds the Shaman as a playable class. Shamans are masters of elemental magic attacks, mindpower based summons, or good old fashioned melee weapons.
The addon can be found here : https://te4.org/games/addons/tome/shaman
And possibly on steam, we'll see if this is working soon

Description
Shamans use both their weapon sets and are encouraged to switch during the battle to adapt to every situation.

They start with the Shaman's Path talent, a passive that gives them bonus adapted to their weapon sets of choice.

6 unique class trees (3 locked) :
- Elemental Magic and High Elemental Magic: Mana based spells with a cold and lightning thematic.
- Natural Warrior and Greater Natural Warrior: Stamina based 2h trees with a nature thematic.
- Spirits and Spirit Master: Equilibrium trees based on 2 permanent summons, a nature one and a cold one.

2 unique generic trees :
- Fetishes : Lasting AoE with animal thematics (blinding hawk, stunning bear, etc...).
- Totems : short duration summons with powerful buff/debuff AoE.

With the exception of 4 talents, Shaman talents can appear on NPC.

Disclaimer
This is my first addon and first coding project, I can promise I tested this addon as best I could, but that does not mean it is without bugs. Please report any bugs you find and I will endeavor to fix them

Credits
Nefigah for loving the Shaman idea and helping me more than a little with the coding.

Chewbacca for testing Shaman maybe more than me.

Micbran for correcting my bad english.

Rexorcorum for the spirits and totems tiles (work in progress so you'll have to suffer my inferior quality ones for now).

Orange because his name is lucky .

http://game-icons.net/ for all the icons.

In advance, whoever tries this out and gives me feedback so I can continue to improve it !

[Mad Twit]

Love the idea but encountered a couple of bugs quite early on.

The major one is that in the two games i started neither of the characters had the Shaman's Path passive.

Second is that the isolate skill from Natural warrior asked me to select a location to move to but didn't display a targeter. Any action just canceled the skill.

Also (not a bug) the fetishes though described as lasting AOE all seem to have rather short durations. I suppose I'm ment to use them back to back to maintain assorted battlefield debuffs?

[Cathbald]

shaman's path is granted at birth and should appear on your hotbar, if it doesn't please press 'm' and check if it's there. If you still don't see it please send the save and i'll check it out, never had an issue with it before it's not a talent you can invest in, and it's not in any trees, so it's normal to not see it in level up screen.

isolate must first select an hostile NPC then select a location (can't go through NPC). the NPC must be in melee and then you can move to a location as far away as the range of the skill allows.

Fetishes do have short duration, they're supposed to be used kinda likes moss from oozemancer. some you want for the first effect, some for the lasting one, and yes, you might want to cycle through them during the battle if your willpower/EQ allows it, or to reduce your EQ if you're using them in melee.

[Mad Twit]

So i've worked out why I wasn't able to get isolate to work. Auto targeting ment that i was trying to chose to monster to isolate while the game is looking for the destination. A rookie error.

About shamans path though i've just made a new character with zero other addons and it doesn't have that passive. I would upload the file but it's too large for the forum and it blocks .teag files. Heres a link to the online charsheet though.

https://te4.org/characters/56707/tome/7 ... 6168bfa7a7

[marshmallowpeep]

I got a Cornac Shaman up to Vor Armory on Nightmare and then exploded upon opening the door to the "room of death." Over all, the class is fun, and the fact that *I* got that far suggests that it's strong because I'm garbage. The only other things I get that far with are the OP addon classes made by Minmay.

So. You probably know that blighted summons doesn't affect your spirits, which I kind of figured would be the case, although they do count for unlocking it so I thought I'd see. It also didn't add my magic to theirs.

The boar fetish describes itself as a cut but doesn't seem to check cut resistance. I like that things aren't immune to it, but I don't know if it's a bug.

Spirits will use cone of cold on enemies far outside its range.

I don't really get why the first and second warrior path talents do unarmed damage instead of weapon damage. It just feels odd, especially without any unarmed mastery, and with the first talent in particular even using it felt like giving up a lot of damage for a stun which Bear Fetish does better anyway.

I wound up focusing mainly on spirits but unlocking the advanced trees for mage and warrior, and using mindstars/two-handed, except I never actually swapped to the two-hander. The fetishes scale with mindpower so it seemed like psiblades would be a good idea and then I didn't want to invest in two masteries.

I like the mage spells in theory and they're probably fine but they didn't feel terribly high impact with my build. My spirits cast those spells much better than I did and with much fewer points invested.

Overall, the three base trees seem but the advanced trees are weird. The capstone talent for the mage tree is an enormous buff to your summons, and the capstone of the melee tree is all about enhancing the effects of your spells.

"Elemental Spirits" at the end of the high elemental magic tree is probably the single most powerful talent in this class and the only thing I was interested in in that tree. Crit shrug off is cool, but probably not worth capping the talent for. Wet retaliation isn't that useful because everything is wet all the time anyway. The dash is useful because it's a dash but the range is low, the secondary effects are minor, the cooldown is high, and I had Rush, Isolate, and Wave of Steel anyway. Stun and pin immunities are nice, but the amounts are low, and the evade doesn't seem worth wearing a staff for.

I prioritized Bark Armor because it's basically a clone of a doomed talent I like. This talent is the main reason I equipped a 2-hander. In retrospect, it may not have been worth it. The second skill in this tree *sounds* like whirlwind and I thought it would be great but the fact that you can't go through enemies with it basically makes it useless. I couldn't use the third talent in this tree effectively either because I couldn't do enough damage in one hit. That's probably fine, and is the one thing that feels like it's really incentivizing me to actually use the 2-hander. The last talent I didn't really get a chance to use, but it's strange how the capstone for the warrior tree is mostly about enhancing spells.

I didn't unlock Spirit Master so I can't really comment on it.

Fetishes seem good overall, but I can't really say I ever felt like Hawk was the right use of that shared cooldown.

I capped Yeti, Sandworm, and Bone totems for the passives but only used them intermittently. The fact that you can't move them or get rid of them yourself is kind of inconvenient, but mostly I just rarely felt like I *needed* to use them. They're probably fine.


I think if you want people to actually be weapon swapping there needs to be free swaps on more than just the level 22 capstones.

[Cathbald]

So i've worked out why I wasn't able to get isolate to work. Auto targeting ment that i was trying to chose to monster to isolate while the game is looking for the destination. A rookie error.

About shamans path though i've just made a new character with zero other addons and it doesn't have that passive. I would upload the file but it's too large for the forum and it blocks .teag files. Heres a link to the online charsheet though.

https://te4.org/characters/56707/tome/7 ... 6168bfa7a7

oops, i see what i did wrong, i had enabled auto-assign point at birth, and you apparently need this for it to work. It's fixed now, thank to arcvasti.

I got a Cornac Shaman up to Vor Armory on Nightmare and then exploded upon opening the door to the "room of death." Over all, the class is fun, and the fact that *I* got that far suggests that it's strong because I'm garbage. The only other things I get that far with are the OP addon classes made by Minmay.

Cool that you went as far as Vor:a so fast!

So. You probably know that blighted summons doesn't affect your spirits

I didn't do anything with blighted summoning because i hate that prod.

The boar fetish describes itself as a cut but doesn't seem to check cut resistance.

I did notice the cut bypass resistances, need to fix it indeed.

Spirits will use cone of cold on enemies far outside its range.

Will check.

I don't really get why the first and second warrior path talents do unarmed damage instead of weapon damage. It just feels odd, especially without any unarmed mastery, and with the first talent in particular even using it felt like giving up a lot of damage for a stun which Bear Fetish does better anyway.

Unarmed damage on first two talent is both for "flavor" (nature's FIST, isolate GRABS the target) and because weapon damage being so much bigger than spell/mind powers i didn't want to give shaman too many weapon strikes. I also just like talents that triggers gloves procs, even if nature's warrior is doing that already ^^
Fist is available at level 1 unlike bear and use physpower so you're more guaranteed that the enemy won't resist it. And it can also inflict other statuses (like if you have gloom on hit, blind on hit, etc...) Bear is ofc very good though :p

I like the mage spells in theory and they're probably fine but they didn't feel terribly high impact with my build.

The spell trees will probably feel poor if you're not using a staff, yes.

Overall, the three base trees seem but the advanced trees are weird. The capstone talent for the mage tree is an enormous buff to your summons, and the capstone of the melee tree is all about enhancing the effects of your spells.

Indeed each advanced tree capstone aim to buff another path. Melee one is still a HUGE instant weapon strike though. Only the spirit one doesn't really give anything for his own path.
I think you're underrating advanced elemental tree, but I'll be on the lookout for more feedback going your way. Stun and Pin immunity go to what, 35 and 50% ? that isn't low !

The second skill in this tree *sounds* like whirlwind and I thought it would be great but the fact that you can't go through enemies with it basically makes it useless.

It's a mix between whirlwind and reckless charge. If i'm not mistaken whirlwind can't attack a target multiple times, so deals less damage, and has 1 less range at 1/5. Rejuvenating strike will work much better with a 2h than mindstars, yes. And focus lightning is a HUGE melee strike as said before

Fetishes seem good overall, but I can't really say I ever felt like Hawk was the right use of that shared cooldown.

Enemies are rarely immune to blind and the saves reduction can help since by trying to stack 2 powers at once you end up with lower ones.

I capped Yeti, Sandworm, and Bone totems for the passives but only used them intermittently. The fact that you can't move them or get rid of them yourself is kind of inconvenient, but mostly I just rarely felt like I *needed* to use them. They're probably fine.

Yeah, i made them so you can't switch place because i felt this would be too powerful as a blocking tool otherwise. If you prepare beforehand it will work just as well :p

I think if you want people to actually be weapon swapping there needs to be free swaps on more than just the level 22 capstones.

This is something i most want to keep an eye on, I think it's worthwhile to switch in combat but not everyone might agree, so again, I'll be on the lookout for more people seeing it your way.


Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, and I hope you'll enjoy shaman some more

[Arcvasti]

I played a Yeek Shaman on Insane. I'm currently level 12 and in Trollmire, so a lot of this stuff is based on reading the talent descriptions instead of actually using the talents.

Feedback:
-Bark Spit shoots two projectiles: One named Bark Spit and one named projectile.
-Nature's Fury's description sounds a lot like Expose Weakness, so it might have the same bug.
-Lightning Rod should probably tell you how much total damage it deals.
-I definitely agree that the unarmed attacks on Isolate/Nature's Fist are weird. Nature's Fury's unarmed attack makes more sense.
-The Fetish abilities don't actually tell you how long the AOE lasts.
-The racial bonuses against snakes/bears are super out of place and weird.
-Hawk is awful and Snake and Boar are about equally good, but Bear just blows them out of the water with a really good stun AOE.
-The Bone Totem is the best Totem by a huge margin. Yeti is insultingly bad and Sandworm/Wyrm are ok but heavily redundant. Whereas Bone Totem gives much needed durability.
-It's also unclear if the Totem path bonuses are passive or only if the Totem is active.
-Shamans are absurdly good at stunning things. They have four stun talents[Five if you count Cone of Cold] and can apply wet, shock and daze to bypass saves and immunity as long as they have decent spellpower. The spellpower path is otherwise pretty weak, so I actually don't mind this.
-Their stamina costs are ludicrously low, especially since most Shamans end up maxing WIL.
-I definitely agree that you should be able to swap more often. My suggestion is that Shaman's Path can be activated for an instant swap every X turns. It'd be nice if pressing q used the instant swap if it wasn't on cooldown, but that sounds like a huge pain to implement.
-The Sandworm Fetish should attempt to Swallow nearby enemies, so people like me can make awful jokes about it.
-I really really like the Spirit tiles. They're awesome.

[Chattius]

My daughter plays the class while she is at hospital without internet access. It plays nice she says.
What could be better:

The chosen path is now displayed, but if you drag another path icon from the m-menu you have two and can't get rid of them?

Characters start with an activated mana-surge rune. My daughter hates it that she has to read the heal rune to make the mana-surge vanish so that she can enter Zigur to buy mindstars and torques. No big problem if you start in normal difficulty, but with the money from higher difficulties visiting Zigur should be an option. Leave the mana-surge deactivated in the inventory at start?

[Chewbacca]

I played a Yeek Shaman on Insane. I'm currently level 12 and in Trollmire, so a lot of this stuff is based on reading the talent descriptions instead of actually using the talents.

Feedback:
[...]

I played the class a good amount and i agree with most of it. A couple things tho:
-Nature's fury is ignoring additional hits, only grants the buff for 3 hits and thankfully isnt expose weakness 2.0.
-Snake and Bear bonuses are mostly for flavour and chosen for things without much game impact.
-Agreed on being good at stunning things. Keep in mind that you most likely wont be able to land the stun from the path you didnt choose tho. Still a very good stunbot, no question.
-While stamina costs are low, you have no regen and will is likely not your first stat to max, but your second (third even as elemental warrior). While fights are short enough lategame that it wont matter (plus will maxed and likely ICCTW) you will feel a lack of stamina in the midgame.
-I dont like the swap mechanic for certain situations (midgame when you need to hold it for cleanse), but really like it for early game. It's really hard to balance, since it goes from "have to hold it for key talents" to "press 1 more button for every talent" really fast. I dont see a good solution for it tbh.
-Hawk is completely useless most of the game, but incredible if you cant beat saves on something. Agreed on the others.
-Yeti freezes on retaliation and is alright as emergency cc, Sandworm is good if you play a caster style (elemental spirit). Nothing touches Bone tho, agreed.


@Chattius: Hopefully your daughter is better soon. Glad she has something to pass the time!

[Cathbald]

So much stuff

-Bark Spit : no idea about projectile naming tbh, will look.

-Nature's Fury : not an expose weakness, i made sure of that !

-Lightning Rod : added total damage to desc.

-Unarmed attack : sad I really like it though so I'll wait until more than two of you say you don't like it :p I'd make isolate a full melee attack before nature's fist, fist is still a stun and a stun doesn't need to deal damage to be good.

-Fetishes : oops, adding duration to desc (it's 4 btw)

-Snake and Bear : come on, it's funny ^^ it's just a little flavor thing that does actually slightly impact the early (snakes!) What annoys me is how it lenghtens descs though, my descs are too long

-Fetishes again : hawk is situational, reducing saves is useful being an hybrid and potentially not having as much power as class with a single power to raise. Blind is an underrated debuff that is rarely resisted. Boar is imo vastly superior to snake, same numbers but better activation and cut atm ignore immunities and reduced heal mod is good. Bear is... yeah. I know, looking for a way to nerf that satisfies me.

-Bone totem best i agree, yeti worst probably but not that bad, melee getting ice blocked when they touch you is good. Not sure about sandworm/wyrm redundancy, between themselves ? One is random debuff the other only one and in AoE. With other talents ? you have no other pins and lack at least one of the wyrm debuff (more if you don't invest in elemental)

-Totem path bonus : fixing that desc, it's always on once talent is 5/5 (desc now reads : "Additionally, at raw talent level 5 this talent passively adds the following bonus to your path :", clear enough for you ?)

-Stuns : yup, bear is on the lookout. Others will probably stay as they are for a while though, i agree there is a lot of them.

-Stamina : costs used to be higher but were lowered because you were constantly out of resources in the T2 even when switching a lot and using 2 resources to their fullest. They do get a bit irrelevant late game or once you get ICCtW but it's hard to avoid that.

-More quickswap : i love that idea and will implement it as soon as I can. I really wanted to add more but didn't want to get rid of any talents in the trees nor let you switch with any talent like TW because this would be too easy and there wouldn't be any thoughts about how to best approach fights. Turning Shaman's Path into an active is the perfect solution and i'm really kicking myself for not seeing it. Cd would be low-ish, probably around 7 or so. Available at the start of combat, short enough to be activated once or twice each combat.

-Sandworm : please no :p

-I really really like the Spirit tiles. They're awesome. : well, they're about to be replaced by the tiles Rexo sent me, which are much more ToME style, but thanks

My daughter plays the class while she is at hospital without internet access. It plays nice she says.
What could be better:

Hope your daughter gets better soon, glad i can lighten her hospital experience at least

- double path icon : you can always drag the icon out of the hotbar.

- manasurge : right, I'll do that, didn't really think of it.


EDIT : ok, update is live !

[nsrr]

The unarmed attack on Nature's Fist is fine with me. It's a stun with a cooldown less than it's duration; I'd use it if it did no damage at all, and glove procs are fun. Isolate could do a weaker unarmed attack and then a weak weapon attack, maybe? Overall the tree does feel like it puts a lot of emphasis on unarmed attacks, which seems odd for the 'weapon' tree.

I can attest to stamina issues in the t2s, even with Willpower as my secondary stat. Perfect Strike and Blinding Speed drain quite a bit, but they are always worth using, so what's a Shaman to do? Some stamina regen somewhere for early on might not hurt. Maybe add some to the equi regen on the fetishes, if that wouldn't be overkill? It's mostly a Warrior issue, so maybe you could regen stamina based on dealing nature damage, in some way? Just tossing out ideas.

[marshmallowpeep]

If the spirits aren't intended to work with blighted summons would it be possible to make it so they don't count for unlocking it?

I got a few more Shaman of different builds to around level 20. I believe the reason my first character was so successful is because the Spirit Warrior level 5 totem bonuses for Yeti and Sandworm make the spirits almost unkillable (at least on nightmare), so you can usually just use the level 12 spirit talent to warp them in and safely wait for them to win the fight. Part of this is probably that the Sandworm is giving them thousands of armor instead of an amount equal to their mindpower. That being said, whether or not they actually warp to the target when you use the warp talent (with mindstars equipped) is inconsistent -- I think it might be based on their line of sight? If this is intended, it would be good that was mentioned in the talent's description.

[Recaiden]

This class is okay. I'm playing an Elemental Spirit, and I don't really like it, but I don't dislike it either. I'll let you know more as I play it more and eventually try out the other paths.
EDIT: It's miserable at first but it gets going around level 15.

Class description has a typo, 'in exchange from' instead of 'in exchange for'.
Nature's Warrior say 'Unarmed attack for x% weapon damage.' Is it unarmed or mainhand weapon?
Is earth spirit's mindstar Call bonus a heal that repeats, or a normal regen effect?

Giving Focus Lightning a 100% chance to break damage shields seems excessive. Most shield-breaking has a scaling chance. I would find it even better if it reduced damage shields by a scaling percentage before inflicting damage instead of plain removing them.

I think Wraithform's random teleport is questionable design and should not be copied into Ethereal Form if possible. It would be better if it could put you in the closest empty space. If 'walking through walls' isn't strong enough on it's own, the ability should be buffed some other way than mixing in an odd psychoport.

Thunder feels like it should be the 1st talent in Elemental Magic. It has a low cooldown and feels much more like a basic attack spell.

Rushing Wave is very awkward since you can't Wave over enemies or even allies. But it leaves a trail behind, apparently only for if you're being chased?

Is Spirit Warrior's Path just weaker than Elemental Warrior? Does enemy resistance penetration play that big of a role?

Can't use Auto-Accept Target on:
Water Vortex

There's so much stunning going on. Wet & shock & permastun & Bear stun & other Bear stun and Bark Spit & more wet & even more wet & sacrifice earth stun

Fetishes
They have a bad targeting mode, that defaults to targeting an enemy, but can't be cast outside their max range.
It disappoints me that there aren't Hawk/Boar enemies to get fetish damage/telepathy for. I recommend finding 4 kinds of animals (canine? squid?) or removing that, although it is extremely fun to have 10% bear resistance.
Hawk Fetish's aura is very visually busy. Please tone down the particle effects there.

Totems
The Yeti totem bump attacks people? Why?
You can't swap places with your totems. Intended?

Trivial:
Why is it in its own Metaclass instead of a Wilder like Stone Warden?
Why is it called Earth spirit when it's all Nature/tree stuff and elsewhere Earth means Physical?
Totems and Fetishes have different descriptions for the cooldown thing they do.
There's a talent that makes someone attract all the thunder, and there's a talent called 'Lightning Rod', and those are DIFFERENT TALENTS?

[Chattius]

I think having shaman in its own metaclass is right. While Wilders won't accepts undeads you can play a ghoul shaman right now. You just can't use all equilibrium based stuff, just a real elemental warrior

[Arcvasti]

I've managed to get to Dreadfell as my Insane Yeek Shaman Elemental Spirit specialist. I'm currently level 32.

Feedback:
-The class doesn't feel overly strong, yet I've been doing super well so far. Not sure if it's because the class is strong or because I got good heroism/regen infusions early on.
-I suspect that the true strength of the Shaman lies in the fact that they're incredibly good at keeping enemies away from them and have a really good life rating for a caster class. Even as a yeek, my health is quite high and very few things even target me in the first place.
-I cannot stress enough just how huge having summons to tank is. And then Shaman has a whole bunch of other defenses on top of that, even if you take only a single advanced tree.
-Elemental Spirits is just too huge of a power spike for one talent. It gives you a swap, a bunch of respen, a really good active buff for your summons and gives your summons an immensely huge passive power boost. At least some of those things should get spread out amongst other High Elemental Magic talents. For example, you could spread out the new spirit talents such that Water Body could grant Water Vortex, Rushing Wave could grant Rushing Wave, Lightning Body could grant Thunder and Elemental Spirits could give Lightning Rod and Cone of Cold.
-That said, Shaman has fairly low damage. I suspect this even applies to the 2H path because of how few good weapon hits they have.
-Thunder's damage curve is all kinds of weird. Notably, going from TL 3 to 4 gives a really tiny damage boost compared to any other level increase since it doesn't give you an extra strike.
-The totems don't tell you how much health they have. I determined via testing that it seems to scale with talent level and character level, but that's never mentioned, despite the fact that it's an important piece of information for using the totems as body blockers.