Class Idea: Wild Mage

[itastelikelove]

I thought this was a really great idea when I came up with it yesterday, but after fleshing it out a little, I think it seems maybe a little too much like a Thaumaturgist (not sure if there are plans to implement those in ToME4), but with more variety in exchange for less reliability.

But I already wrote it up, so it's getting posted anyway.

Wilder: Wild Mage (or should this be with the Mages? not really sure)

Wild Mages are born with the ability to see the threads of magic that bind the world together, and recognize magic and nature as two parts of the same universal whole. Unfortunately, they were also born with an extraordinary sense of curiosity, and are prone to recklessly plucking at the threads of magic, sometimes working miracles, and sometimes reducing themselves to piles of smoldering ash.

Every spell you cast increases your Equilibrium by 1 point per tier level of the spell. Wild Gifts add their usual amount of Equilibrium. All of your spells and Wild Gifts are subject to failure due to Equilibrium, but any time a talent fails, the excess energy is released in an unpredictable Surge. The Surge takes the form of a randomly selected spell or Wild Gift, although it is often stronger than if you had used the ability deliberately. As you grow stronger, you can learn to control your Surges, and make them safer and more reliable.

50% of the time, Surges are beneficial (offensive spells targeted on enemies, defensive spells targeted on you, etc.), 25% of the time they are negative (the opposite), and 25% of the time they have a null result (effectively a failure). (Note: characters should start with one point in Serendipity, so the percentages are really 55, 20, 25)

Surges reduce your Equilibrium by an amount equal to the ability's Equilibrium cost, or half of it's mana cost. Abilities that cost more than you have available are not used. Spells or Wild Gifts used have a 50% chance to be the same type (Offensive, Defensive, Utility) as the failed ability.

Unique Class Talent: Force Surge (Cooldown: 15)– Voluntarily create a Surge. (If there are no enemies in LoS, it should only choose beneficial Defensive/utility abilities, or negative Offensive abilities)

Trees (I would consider adding some of the existing Wild Gifts, but they all seem too class-specific. I want them to have a good selection of spells, but they shouldn't be as powerful as an Archmage, and probably should have to unlock trees that involve actual learning and/or study.)

Technique/Combat Training (1.00)
Cunning/Survival (0.90) unknown
Spell/Staff Combat (1.00)
Spell/Arcane (1.00)
Spell/Air (1.00)
Spell/Conveyance (0.90)
Spell/Divination (0.90) unknown
Spell/Earth (1.00)
Spell/Fire (1.00)
Spell/Nature (1.00)
Spell/Phantasm (0.90)
Spell/Temporal (0.90) unknown
Spell/Water (1.00)

New Trees

Wild Gift/Surge Control (1.30)
Serendipity – Passive. Increases the chance of a beneficial result from Surges. Negative result chance is reduced by 5-25%, and beneficial result chance is increased by the same.
Surge Protection – Passive. You take 15-75% less damage from all Surges.
Meta – Passive. If effect is beneficial, 20-100% chance to use Shape Spell (as the Meta Talent). At level 4/5, 60/90% chance to choose target of beneficial spells.
Creative Surges – Passive. Null Surges have 50-100% chance to create an item.

Wild Gift/Surge Release (1.30) (I'm considering replacing these with sustained Talents that affect the outcome of your basic Force Surge ability - activate whichever you think you need, and most of your surges will be of that type.)
Offensive Surge – Active. Voluntarily create a weak beneficial offensive Surge that deals 60-80% damage
Healing Surge – Active. Voluntarily create a weak beneficial healing Surge that heals 60-80% damage
Utility Surge – Active. Voluntarily create a weak beneficial utility Surge (level equal to ranks in this talent)
Overchannel – Sustained. Surges use 15-75% more Eq to increase effect by same. Extra points are taken from health instead.

Wild Gift/Surge Building (1.30)
Amplification – Passive. Level determines level of all abilities used by a Surge.
Tension – Sustained. Every hit taken has 10-50% chance to add 2 Eq
Conservation – Passive. Surges use 10-50% less Eq
Growth – Sustained. All stats are 5-25 points higher for determining Surge effects

Wild Gift/Surge Utility (1.30)
Mirror – Passive. Surges have base 50%+10-50% chance to be same type as spell cast
Feedback Shield – Sustained. 10-18% chance to Surge after taking damage
Interference Pattern – Activated. All spells and Wild Gifts used within a radius of 10-18 have same chance to Surge as yours for 6-10 rounds
Karmic Feedback – Sustained. If you would be killed by damage from a spell or Wild Gift while using this ability, you use all of your Eq to create an extremely powerful Surge that leaves you alive with one health, and casts your attacker's spell/Wild Gift back at them. At level 4, you take no damage from the original spell. Very high cost, long cooldown.



Obviously needs some balancing, and I'm not sure if it would really work at all. There would probably be a lot of first level deaths, before people could get their Surge Control talents up to speed. I don't mind dying at level 1 nearly as much as dying at level 20, though, so I wouldn't be too turned off by that.

Actually, even without this class, the Surge idea might be a way to "fix" Equilibrium - you still fail to do what you meant just as often, but half that time, you get something good anyway (itastelikelove failed to summon fire imp due to Equilibrium. Itastelikelove casts Inferno.). And then one or two of those talent trees might be available for all Wilder classes, so they can make builds based around getting good results from their "failed" spells.

[yufra]

I think the new setting is having Wilder opposing Arcane, so a hybrid of the two wouldn't make sense. I defer to DG of course.

[darkgod]

Even in the current setting it does

Yet I always wanted to add a wild mage class, maybe this could be refitted to not use equilibrium see how it goes ?

[Burb Lulls]

My old, obsolete, poorly-conceived idea for a wild mage-type class is over here, http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=22460, although in my case I meant wild more as 'irresponsible jerk' rather than 'wilder'.

[itastelikelove]

Huh. I guess I didn't really notice that magic and wilder powers were supposed to be opposed. Oh well. There's no real reason for the class to be a Wilder, or use Equilibrium - I just thought it would be easier to build it off an existing mechanic. And, of course, I got the idea from the Equilibrium system in the first place.

[yufra]

Huh. I guess I didn't really notice that magic and wilder powers were supposed to be opposed. Oh well. [\quote]
Heh, don't worry... the only reason I knew is because of conversations with DG. I think the theme will be made more obvious in the future, though.

There's no real reason for the class to be a Wilder, or use Equilibrium - I just thought it would be easier to build it off an existing mechanic. And, of course, I got the idea from the Equilibrium system in the first place.

If you want to use something another resource already in the game then you could probably use Paradox. Like Equilibrium this is a limitless resource that starts low and increases, and will be used for the chronomancy classes. I am not the lead on their development and cannot say if it would be a good fit otherwise, but there are some excellent threads outlining Chronomancy on the forum. Look for edge2054 as the main contributing author.

And don't give up! I too think a wild mage would be fun. Maybe you could go ahead and use Equilibrium but do so in a completely invisible fashion to add to the unpredictability of the class.

[darkgod]

I think wild mages should use mana, but have some, well, random effects tacked on

[itastelikelove]

I think wild mages should use mana, but have some, well, random effects tacked on

Right, but i feel like the chances of random things happening should increase the longer you go without something random happening - the risk just keeps building, until the uncontrolled magic bursts out and does its thing. Then you can add talents that manipulate that probability, and take advantage of it. And if it works that way, it would be nice for the player to be able to see what his chances look like. I was just using Equilibrium as a way to keep track of the ups and downs of the probability of a wild magic surge.

I guess you could just give each spell a flat chance of breaking down, but I think that would just play like an archmage with a little bonus ability.

[Sirrocco]

I do like the idea of a two-sided magical thing. As you cast controlled spells (ie, the spells normal people get) your level of chaos grows, making it harder to cast controlled spells, and sometimes making them flare with unexpected effects (targeting errors, increases or decreases in strength, erratically changing damage types and so forth - often making them cost more mana.) Casting chaos spells (which are sometimes cast *for* you when you try to cast other spells, but cost mana regardless) makes random, powerful, generally good things happen (becoming more powerful with high chaos, and more likely to be good with high skill and low chaos - thus giving young wild mages a way to avoid splattering themselves) and your chaos goes down. Wild mages might build themselves to be somewhat balanced, with a moderate degree of control, casting both standard and chaos spells evenly, or they could go completely nuts on the chaos, taking primarily chaos spells with some extra chaos-producing sustains, and only cast standard spells from time to time as a way to keep themselves juiced on the chaos. It seems like you could definitely run that off of a mana/paradox setup - especially if we throw in the idea that Chronomancer powers involve taking control of the world in a very ordered way, with Paradox being the backlash from it. Traditional Chronomancers cast until their paradox levels are high enough that it's time to cool off a bit, while wild mages actually ride the wave of an angry, thrashing reality back down.

[sarc]I'm sure they get along *splendedly*.[/sarc]

The basic idea is that the Chronomancers are the ones who have come to understand this new power and are harnessing it with some degree of care and study. The Wild mages stumbled across it while learning to be mages of some other sort, and figured out how to get a few crude, brutally effective tricks out of it by abusing it. This works particularly well with the whole "high paradox backlash" effects from the Chronomancy tree. The wild mage, incidentally, is using standard archmage spells for his mana side - it's just that he has some sort of a first-level passive or sustain that causes him to accumulate paradox while he does (probably adding spellpower or some such) as he's *deliberately* and *unnecessarily* abusing reality with his standard spells

...and hey - if you did it this way, you ould even put in another character type - a Balance mage that only used Paradox and didn't have the paradox-restoring abilities of the base Chronomancer - who instead wandered up and down the paradox bar with Wild Magic and Chronomancy powers. On the one side, you wouldn't generally have to worry about running out of power, since you'd always have enough for one side of the tree or the other. On the other side, you couldn't afford to rack up as much paradox as a base Wild Mage because your control over your wild magic surges wouldn't be as good, and your access to the Chronomancer side of the spellbook would be limited to the point that you'd pretty much depend on wild magic for your damage-dealing. As an added benefit, this class wouldn't require any new skills at all - just grab some from the one side, and some from the other, and have the two radically different ways they treat the same resource create a fascinating new playstyle in the middle. Admittedly, it might be made better by about a tree's worth of passives, sustains, and appropriate utilities, but they'd be relatively simple stuff thrown in to make the system function as opposed to anything that required a huge amount of coding.

In a completely different note, I think that putting in a way to sit and spin and safely generate items without encountering new monsters or entering new areas is a mistake.