Cursed

[benli]

I've been enjoying tome 4 for a while and I decided to have some fun playing around with the scripting. These days, I don't have time to write my own games, but I figured I could tinker with some of the code and that would be a great way to learn lua.

I was thinking about what I might want to do. One of the ideas that I had was curses (and boons). "Gift" a player with a free point in one talent. For a curse, the talent would give the player a penalty, but might let the player spend talent points to reduce the penalty and even start to get some bonuses. A boon might be a something like: Kill Bill and get a point in a "+5% damage against giant creatures" talent.

I think curses and boons is still a good idea, but I wanted something I could play around with, so I just created a class based on that idea. The class is called "Cursed" and is inspired by all of the cursed characters in LOTR (smeagol, the ringwraiths, etc). The class is primarily a melee character. Here's the description and some of the more interesting qualities:

"Through ignorance, greed or folly the cursed served some dark design and are now doomed to pay for their sins. Their only master now is the hatred they carry for every living thing. Drawing strength from the death of all they encounter, the cursed become terrifying combatants. Worse, any who approach the cursed can be driven mad by their terrible aura. Their most important stats are: Strength and Willpower"

Some features:
- A mana pool called 'Hate'. You get 1 hate when you kill something and it slowly goes down over time and with use. The effectiveness of many of your talents is based on how much hate you have (hate divided by max_hate). Essentually you grow weaker unless you kill things. This creates a very different class than the other stamina based fighters. You basically have to continually hunt to keep your hate high enough to survive. Resting costs a lot of hate, so you usually just have to push on without any rest.
- A talent category called 'Gloom'. Gloom is a permanent aura that surrounds your character. It activatable, has no cost and a range of 3. Anything that wanders into your gloom can be affected if they fail a save vs will. You have several talents to enhance you gloom allowing you to weaken, stun or damage foes.
- 2 curse talents that weaken you. Spend points on them to reduce the curse and gain some benefits.
- The class deliberatly has no stun attack. I wanted combat to be messy and personal. It's been a real challenge to design a survivable melee class that doesn't have a reliable stun. Gloom helps, but its not the same.

Here are the talent descriptions:

Cursed Form: You are wracked with the dark energies of the curse.
- Cursed Body: (penalties decrease, benefits increase with level; life regen is important because resting is costly)
The curse has twisted your body into an unnatural form.
(-x fire resistance, -x physical save, +x life regeneration)
- Cursed Spirit: (penalties decrease, benefits increase with level)
The curse wracks your spirit. Only through determination can you master it.
(-x light resistance, -x spell save, +x stun immunity).
- Hunt: (cheap and decent duration telepathy; every kill counts)
Your preternatural senses aid you in your hunt for the next victim.
You sense foes in a radius of %d for %d turns.
- Enrage: (helps if you haven't seen a monster for a while, very long cooldown)
Release your rage, gaining %d hate at the cost of %d life.

Rage: Hatred of the living drives your attacks.
- Lash: (rage-based damage is based on your % of rage / max rage)
Lashes wildly at your target, causing a cut that bleeds for %d to %d rage-based damage for 3 turns.
Damage increases with strength and willpower.
- Uncontrolled Fury:
Assault nearby foes with 4 fast attacks for %d%% to %d%% rage-based damage each.
- Blindside: (A short range phase door attack. You can't control which side of the target you appear.)
With blinding speed you suddenly appear next to a target up to %d spaces away and attack for %d to %d rage-based damage.
- Spite: (high damage, high hate cost)
Focusing your hate you blast your target for %d blight damage. Damage increases with willpower.

Gloom: All those in your sight must share your despair.
- Gloom:
A terrible gloom surrounds you affecting all those who approach you.
This ability is innate and carries no cost to activate or deactivate.
The strength of your assualt is based on %d%% of your willpower.
- Terror
The gloom that surrounds you drives the weak-minded mad with fear. %d%% chance the weak-minded may suffer from slow, stun or confusion.
- Weakness
The weak-minded who enter your gloom are crippled by fear for %d turns. (-%d%% attack, -%d%% damage).
- Torment
Torments all who enter your gloom. %d to %d hate-based blight damage to the weak minded for 5 turns.

I'm still play-testing the class and the special effects could use a little more work. So far, the class is a challenge to run. Hate gives him an "iron man" kind of feel where you can't take your time. It's not easy being Cursed. I like that it's nerfed enough that some of the talents and abilities can be overpowered to compensate. This class is designed as an integrated package rather than a set of individual talents. Many of the talents are there to compensate for inherent weaknesses.

DG: I can give you the source code if you're interested in it; or if you like any of these ideas, feel free to use them. Either way, I've had fun making the class and I'm starting to get a feel for Lua as well.

Looking around I saw a post about "curses" and such. I think this class is enough of a departure from the ideas in that post that I decided to do a separate post. It does seem related though. BTW, I also saw a post about concerns about fighers, defense and armor. Having built a fighter, I think one of the problems might be checkHit. I think its the reason lvl 1 fighters almost always miss and lvl 2 fighters almost always hit. It might need some love, but its so integral to everything I'm not sure if changing it would be a balance problem. I ended up using some different logic for the save vs will that gloom does to get a little more variability and better level scaling. As that post states, armor doesn't scale well either; maybe use the highest of armor as amount and armor as percentage of damage so it will scale beyond the first levels.

[Taxorgian]

A set of advanced talents?

Ancient Curses

Smeagol's Tremors: You lose DEX and WIL to gain CON and resistance (at 5/5 immunity) to blight.

Denethor's Gaze: You concentrate your wrath on producing a terrible fireball that does [] damage (dependent on WIL) to all creatures within 2 squares of you... including yourself. Carried objects are immune to the effect(?)

Turin's Blade: You can do enormous damage with your weapon, but enter a suicidal stupor afterwards (stun for 15 turns after the victory).

Oath of Feanor: You suffer periodic losses to HP (temporary) as you crave the Silmarils. But if you do manage to defeat Maglor so he drops the Water Silmaril you get a multiplier of its stat effects (and the luck effect...) even though, of course, you cannot pick it up....

[darkgod]

Well sounds interresting, if you have already coded it I'd be happy to at least take a look around

[benli]

I got a chance to play it a bit yesterday. The code works well and its interesting to play, but I can't seem to get one past the out of depth monsters. I can get to lvl 10 or so (and only a few levels into the old forest) before getting clobbered by an orc or something. It definitely needs something more to survive against difficult monsters.

Most of the talents are only interesting in terms of how the hate pool works, but gloom would be portable to other classes. Its a little like adding luck to your character. Like watching an approaching troll slip on a slippery rock.

If you'd like the code, how would you like it sent? Most of the interesting stuff is in a few new talent files, but there is a bit of stuff like mana pools and timed effects that are scattered around.

[darkgod]

Do you know how to do a diff ?
In a command line (like cygwin on windows) you can do:
diff -u -r folder_before_changes/ folder_after_changes/

Or just send me the whole thing zipped at my email

[darkgod]

I got the diff, played a bit with it (but I had to go to work so I did not get much a feel of balance or not).

I really like the idea, gloom is quite fun IMO.

The two curse talents are a bit weak IMO, I like the concept but spending 5 talent poitns for 40% stun resist is a bit extreme (1.2 life regen works better in this case I think). Actually this whole tree strikes me as able to be a generic tree.

This leaves 2 trees as class: Gloom and Rage.
It seems gloom by itself does nothing, this is a tad misleading it should have an effect IMO.
The requirements for each talents seem to vary a bit weirdly, I am kinda attached to a more predictable requirement curve as I have in the other trees.

I am not sure it needs its own meta category this could fit very well in the planned corruption talents, there is no reason corruptions cant have both Vim and hate as ressources. There would be fully vim powered classes, fully hate powered ones (like this one) and maybe some mixed ones.

Obviously as you said this class still requires work, at least 2 more class talent trees ( 3 would be better I think), but this has real potential for fun, and it comes with working code, which is a net plus when it comes to chances of fast inclusion in T4

Let's summon edge in this thread, he could have ideas

[edge2054]

Let's summon edge in this thread, he could have ideas

Haha... I've glanced over this but haven't looked at it in depth yet. I'll take a look after work

[benli]

Gloom is fun. I played with some particle systems and its a lot better when you can see the effects. And you're right, the first talent should have an effect. The "Gloom" talent exists to allow activation/deactivation but could do something as well. I think thats how I originally had it. It's a challenge thinking of free radius 3 effects that aren't too powerful or too weak.

The point requirements can be changed to the standard if the first gloom talent has an effect and curse tree is removed or reworked.

Playing a little more with the class, I think adding more attack damage balances it better. Maybe higher health, higher rage-based health regeneration and additional damage. That would keep the class fast-paced and violent.

I'll think on some other talents and take a closer look at the vim trees. I think of this class as "a guy with a battleaxe and poor impulse control", so maybe a 2-handed axe tree.

[darkgod]

Yeah I cant imagine him with a sword & shield

[edge2054]

I really like this concept but have yet to comment on this thread because it seemed close to complete (i.e. not needing my input) and because the OP leaves me with a lot of questions about the core mechanics. Also I don't really understand the scaling formulas for the talents. I caught the percent part but what's the d?

Anyway, if you'll be so kind as to educate me Benli here's my questions.

Is the Hate pool capped or does it increase as you level?

Do all rage abilities cost Hate or just Spite?

Do you picture the class using Stamina at all or do you want to avoid the stamina based trees already in the game?

And some more general questions/comments.

Why willpower? It doesn't seem to fit conceptually with the class. Changing this to Con might work just as well and give the class more hit points. Changing it to Magic might give us a true hybrid and may make the class feel more like a Ringwrath (Gloom could scale off Magic and we could probably do a lot of sick magic fueled melee attacks with the core effects of hate and gloom.)

My initial impression tells me the current means of Hate generation is going to hit a serious roadblock on high hit point bosses. Suggestion: You gain one Hate every time you deal damage or you gain one Hate every time you receive damage and one bonus hate when you kill another actor.

Would I need a compiler to playtest it? If not and you guys want me to take a look at it I can PM you my email address Benli and I'll let you know what I think and put some thought into expanding the talent trees (the later I'll probably do anyhow once I get a better grasp of how everything works).

[edge2054]

I can't sleep so here's some ideas. Keep in mind that I'm going off what I know and inventing some stuff I don't. I'm also basing some of these ideas off the Magic instead of Willpower idea I presented in that last post. Tweak it as needed.

Balancing Hate Gain
If damage received >= character level*2 + 1 Hate
If actor slain level >= character level +1 Hate

A couple of tree ideas

Hunter (Sorry it's late, can't think of a better name. Powers scale off magic)
- Predatory Instincts (Passive): You gain Heightened Senses upon dealing damage to an enemy. You lose your heightened senses once all enemies are slain (Heightened Senses power based on magic, talent level, and hate)
- Exterminate (Would take the place of Hunt - Passive): Gain (creature type) telepathy radius X for Y turns whenever you kill (creature type). (Basically if you kill a snake you can sense snakes for the next Y turns, if you kill a worm in that time you can then sense worms and snakes, etc. etc.) (X and Y scale off Magic, Hate, and Talent Level).
- Genocide (Passive): Gain X damage for each successive creature you kill of the same creature type. Killing a creature of another type resets the bonus from Genocide to zero. (X scales of magic, hate, and talent level).
- Undying Persuit (Active): You mark an enemy and gain combat bonuses while engaging it. As long as you remain within a radius of 2 of your marked target you generate 1 Hate (per talent level) per turn. However if you're outside of this radius you lose 10% of your maximum hit points every turn. Undying Persuit ends when the marked enemy is slain (or when the character dies )

Note I stole Blindside so this tree either needs another talent or rage does
Nether: All powers scale off Magic and cost 1 (or more) Hate to use.
- Blindside: With blinding speed you suddenly appear next to a target up to %d spaces away and attack for %d to %d rage-based damage. (Scale distance off hate and magic, damage off weapon damage, strenght, and hate)
- Fading (Passive): Your physical form has faded partially into the Nether granting you X Defense and Y Physical Damage Resistance (X and Y should both scale with Magic).
- Black Blade: Your weapon exists in both worlds at once for the next X turns. While Black Blade is active your weapon gains + B Armour Penetration and deals Y darkness based bonus damage (B and Y should scale based off talent level, magic, and hate level).
- Netherwalk: You slip fully into the Nether, gaining invisibility (power based on magic, talent level, and hate). Attacking while Netherwalk is active results in a Netherstrike. A Netherstrike autocrits and converts all physical weapon damage into darkness damage + Y bonus darkness damage (Y scaling off talent level, magic, and hate level). Netherwalk ends upon attacking or running out of hate.

Sorry the names are all generic. Again it's late.

[benli]

Also I don't really understand the scaling formulas for the talents. I caught the percent part but what's the d?

In game it will say something like 120% to 186% damage. At hate = 0/10 you will do 120% damage and at hate=10/10 you will do 186% damage.

Is the Hate pool capped or does it increase as you level?

You start with 10 hate and gain 1 point every two levels. Hate goes down at a rate of 0.04 per turn (25 turns per point). You gain 1 hate with each kill. In practice hate goes down quickly and comes back quickly. It creates a sense of urgency and purpose that is probably the most interesting thing about playing the class. The biggest issues are resting (which can cost a lot of hate) and wandering about (exploring, going to town, etc). Resting can be overcome with high regeneration (and resting takes less time too). High regen suits a fast paced style for the class as well. For periods without kills I added a talent that gives you an infusion of rage but has a 300 turn cooldown (30% +10%/level rage at a cost of 25% health).

Do all rage abilities cost Hate or just Spite?

The activatable abilities have a cost of 0.1 rage. They are pretty close to free but stop working when rage hits 0. I wanted the class to be able to move at full speed without waiting on resources like other classes. Hitting 0 means you have to sulk off and find some easy prey (or use the talent above if you have it)

Do you picture the class using Stamina at all or do you want to avoid the stamina based trees already in the game?

I wanted the class to be forced to deal with hate. Its probably the biggest "curse" on the class. I think another mana pool would be ok if it was kept secondary. Most mana pools are designed to be the primary pool though so I'm not sure how sharable they are.

Why willpower? It doesn't seem to fit conceptually with the class. Changing this to Con might work just as well and give the class more hit points. Changing it to Magic might give us a true hybrid and may make the class feel more like a Ringwrath (Gloom could scale off Magic and we could probably do a lot of sick magic fueled melee attacks with the core effects of hate and gloom.)

I chose willpower for two reasons. First as a concept, I saw the class as being acted upon by evil (like the One Ring acts on people). They have an easy and tempting path to power; the real challenge is controlling it rather than being controlled. Second I chose it because gloom is about overpowering others with your will. The save is a mental save not a magic save. If gloom/cursed gets combined with Vim or magic it may make sense to change willpower to magic or something. I just think willpower seems cooler.

My initial impression tells me the current means of Hate generation is going to hit a serious roadblock on high hit point bosses. Suggestion: You gain one Hate every time you deal damage or you gain one Hate every time you receive damage and one bonus hate when you kill another actor.

I think you could add hate on hit or create a hate "leaching" talent. I don't think it will change things though. The problem is having high enough hate at the start of the battle. In general Tome has lots of monsters, even near bosses, so the only problem would be special places that only have a boss. The talent I mentioned above would help or maybe a new talent to bring in some hate like "Summon Bunnies". Every class has its obstacles. It's not easy being cursed.

Would I need a compiler to playtest it? If not and you guys want me to take a look at it I can PM you my email address Benli and I'll let you know what I think and put some thought into expanding the talent trees (the later I'll probably do anyhow once I get a better grasp of how everything works).

You don't need a compiler. The game compiles every time you run and the script files are plain text. I sent DG a diff of the changes, but I could zip the whole game for you. Hate is a strange mechanic so it helps to play.

[edge2054]

After goofing around with this here's my thoughts and impressions.

Really fun class to play, the sense of urgency you're going for is definitely there and it's fun to play a class that doesn't press R after every fight. It does need a lot of balancing still though imo.

The combination of no stun and not wanting to rest makes for a class that takes a lot of damage and then loses damage when it heals that damage back. Meaning you start most fights either without full health or without full damage potential. This makes for a slippery slope (along a long enough time line, fighting the same challenge level encounters repeatedly, the character's damage or hit points should continue to degrade, eventually leading to death).

Also the class is very vulnerable to stuns itself because of Cursed Body and Cursed Spirit. I think both of these talents could have the bonuses start at level 1 and I think Cursed Body could work well as a % of max life regen each turn. Cursed Spirit should probably do more then just stun resistance as DG already mentioned. Finally I think both of these should be split into their own talent trees and made generic for the sake of consistency with other trees/classes. I'd also spread the penalties out across the talents but that's just me.

Something like.
Cursed/Afflicted Form (generic/mastery)
Cursed Body
Blighted Eyes (Details here alter it so it works as a talent, would need scaling)
Twisted Visage (passive chance to cause fear but shopkeepers buy your items for less and sell their items for more)
Rotting Flesh (passive chance to daze monsters but gives away your position)

Cursed/Afflicted Spirit (generic/mastery)
Cursed Spirit
Hunt (Personally I'd use the Taste for Blood version outlined in the Predation tree but that's just me)
Fading (From the Nether Tree outlined earlier)
Enrage (I'd alter this a bit though, instead of a straight health for hate trade off you could do a take more damage for X turns to gain X hate trade off, make it only usable in sight of an enemy.)

The first character I tested was a ghoul, because I thought it fit the concept well but the first time I rested I went from 9 Hate to 4 or so... after the ghoul died I realized this class was built for Dunadans rather intentionally or unintentionally. King's Gift scales off Willpower and being able to 'rest' without losing all your Hate once every 50 turns far outweighs any other racial.

Hunt has a range of 4 but always effects the character (minor thing), Blindside seems to be the same. The tooltip on Weakness implies that it does what Gloom does but again?

Anyway, that's my initial thoughts. I intend to keep playing with it until I either get frustrated or get a character up high enough I can check out all the talents.

Another random thought is to base the class on Magic and Willpower and then create a class talent that lets it increase it's strength by a percentage of it's magic. Kinda a reverse Arcane Blade or Shadowblade, lots of blasts and magic based melee attacks combined with Gloom. Magic directly increases strength so you can wield big two handed weapons. Could be fun.

I'll post more once I get a chance to get one past level 3

*edit* Just as an FYI Benli. Don't feel pressured by any of my ideas. If you want to use them cool if they don't fit your vision for the class then I understand. If you decide not to use them I may flesh them out and do that Magic based melee class I mentioned in my second to last paragraph.

[benli]

I was still thinking of keeping the class as more of a crazy guy with an ax and some special powers rather than the more magical demonic figure of the vim classes. I think it fits the hate mechanics better. I guess that depends on how this class would get integrated with the vim classes. Conceptually they seem related, but they work very differently.

I was also thinking of altering hate to have a calculation "max" of 10 but an actual max that can go higher with levels and talents. So if you have 12/10 hate, you have 2 points where your talents are 100% effective.

Here is a potential build I was thinking about creating/testing. I've incorporated some of your ideas (either directly or through some adjustments). The numbers are just rough guesses.

Cursed Form
- Cursed Body
Some penalties (-fire, -light), +Max of (0.3, 0.3%) Life Regen/Level, +15 Life
- Suffering
% damage is converted to hate
- Enrage
Gain about 20 - 45% level-based maximum life (with hit points) for 5 + 1/level turns. All life gained is lost after the time exires (possibly killing you).
- Relentless
15% / level fear, stun, confusion and knockback immunity

Slaughter (talents require an axe)
- Slash
(Lash) Bonus damage and 3 turn hate-based cut
- Frenzy
4 weak hate-based hits
- Reckless Charge
Move to a nearby location attacking anything adjacent to the path. Small/Med/Large opponents will be pushed out of the way to a random square and possibly another hit (# and size of knockbacks based on skill) . Opponents will get a reduced chance to attack back. If they hit it will stop the charge.
- Growing Rage
Consecutive hits (by turn, against any opponent) build up bonus damage. 0.5, 1.0, 1.5 * Strength * Level damage

Endless Hunt
- Dominate
Attacks opponent; a save vs will failure gives +200% damage and creatures less than 3 levels beneath you die instantly
- Blindside
Phase door attack on nearby target from a random position
- Preturnatural Senses
Always on sense with 4-8 + 2/level hate-based range
- Stalk
(From Netherwalk) Stealth for 2 + 1/level turns; Attacks receive bonus damage

Gloom- Gloom
Save vs will or chance of 2 turn slow, confuse or stun
- Weakness
Save vs will or reduced attack and damage
- Torment
Anger builds for 12 - 1/level turns; Once charged it will hit the first target that enters the gloom for some blight damage
- Absorb Life
Transfers a small amount of the life of all opponents in your gloom to you

[edge2054]

Last I spoke to DG about this he wanted to keep Hate and Vim separate for similar reasons to those you just cited.

I managed to get a skeleton up to level 5 before my game started locking up when I tried to load and had a lot of fun with him.

The bleed on Lash seems pretty powerful even at low Hate. Maybe the base damage should be lowered and the stat (not hate) scaling adjusted upwards to compensate.

Also that slippery slope I mentioned kicked in pretty hard for the non-regener. After visiting town to sell some stuff I lost all my Hate and was stuck doing less damage (and thus taking more damage since creatures lived longer). After each fight I was forced to rest to keep my hp up and thus lost my Hate.

Enrage probably helps (I didn't get a chance to test it before I lost the save file). Maybe Hate shouldn't degenerate on the world map though? I know thematically it doesn't make much sense but going to town really hurts.