Tales of Maj'Eyal

[vazha]

Not melee, but I did complete the main campaign with an archer, without using magic if that counts?

 

[Lacrymas]

All classes can finish the main quest, some just have an easier time than others. A Bulwark (a melee class) for example is one if the most op classes, being able to go through the game on the highest difficulty (which is a troll difficulty not intended to actually be completed). It also depends on what kind of drops you get.

RE: It's linear - quite the contrary, you aren't forced to finish anything other than Dreadfell and the dungeon that leads to the portal to the East on the starting continent. What grinds the game to a halt, however, are the 4 prides in the East. I'm not sure if you HAVE to go through them all, but I suspect you must get the 4 orbs from the chieftains to unlock the last zone. There is also an abundance of optional harder content, which unlocks classes, races, item transfer and the library, along with giving you more chances at powerful items.

 

[felipepepe]

RE: It's linear - quite the contrary, you aren't forced to finish anything other than Dreadfell and the dungeon that leads to the portal to the East on the starting continent.

You aren't forced to do them but Dreadfell is a level check, how will you get the XP otherwise? You have to do most of them anyway. Same thing with the east, you COULD just arrive in the east and go to the prides, but that's certain death.

Not sure how to fix that, maybe more optional content locked by quest choices or race/class, like attacking Zigur.

 

[Lacrymas]

You don't need to finish all T2 dungeons, you can skip at least one. You can finish any T1 dungeon you want to get the wand of teleportation, so that's non-linearity right there. Really, though, it depends on what you mean by non-linear. You do need the levels, not needing them means level-scaling and no-one wants that.

 

[Archibald]

Yeah, I think that "level gated" or something like that is better description than linear because most people assume in that case that you need to do things in specific order.

 

[Kruno]

New Beta is out and holly mother of cucks. Necromancer has a ton of synergistic skills and everything is overhauled. I have been playing it for a while. Came close to death (not really, I have Blurred Mortality) many times, but managed to not die.

Ghouls are amazing, and I maxed those guys out instantly. There are a bunch of cool debuffs/buffs that can be applied via summoning.

It feels really good playing Necro! Dark God made Necro great again!

There is too much to mention, go play it!

EDIT:
Alright I want to emphasis that I am playing a Hexomancer. Summons and hexes, but no damage! Ghouls will be summoned on their own without you doing anything, this has saved my ass many times as I end up with too little souls to summon skeletons, but with ghouls you auto summon, without cost, can hit enemies and give you souls to summon skeletons. In emergencies (tough enemies) I use the summon ghouls (it is both a passive and active skill) to summon like 15 OP ghouls.

I do not summon skeletons unless I need them now!

EDIT 2:
Dark God: "I never balance, nor frankly care"
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=50501

Sawyer's reaction:

 

[Lacrymas]

He never balances, yet the game is surprisingly balanced. Yeah, some classes are more op than others but I'd say that's pretty rare all things considered. I think all classes can beat at least nightmare. Madness and Insane are different beasts that I haven't had the pleasure of playing yet.

 

[Haba]

It is a question of
Nerfing things because people are having too much fun with them.
v.s.
Buffing things that people are not enjoying.

Which is better and why?!??

And the whole idea of things being "OP" is silly in a game where you can get one-shot from full HP by unlucky RNG.

 

[Kruno]

Let me emphasis what he said:

Before I address some of those specific issues; I wanna note a few things

- There are cases where I cannot win;/ I'll explain: For some things like say Awesome Toss, I'm damned if I let it as it was because I get people complaining that this thing can be so broken that it's far superior to anything else and thus they feel *FORCED* to use it. If I fix it they other people complain about me removing one of their liked strategy. And I can understand and sympathize with both sides, so what can I do ? :/ This happens a lot. It usual comes down to people *feeling forced* to use/abuse some unfun but kinda broken synergy/system/whatever, but if I fix that hole, people that did enjoy it complain; if you have ideas how to resolve such cases and make everybody happy by all means, I'll gladly listen

- Intentions/mindset: It's never about "ruining fun", why would I want that, I mean a game is supposed to be fun (even if torturous

). Does that sometimes happen? Sure most likely, I mean tome is an incredibly huge game with tons of intersecting systems, it's bound to happen. But it's never a goal and if possible it should be fixed. Like say, 1.6.5 weapon changes trying to alleviate the fact that weapon tiers were nearly meaningless, which wasnt a fun thing

- I never balance, nor frankly care, about adventurers yes, that quote of me still stands

It's likely very possible to break the game with them, or hell even to make it explode

When I see stuff like that I just smile


Now, let's address a few specific points

- "initial release of 1.6 there has been very little interest of resolving any of these issues that keep coming up constantly" how so? Each patch has fixed things and even some hum .. hostile people .. managed to admit it was for the better. Why do you feel I don't want to make the game fun for *all* ? :/

- The oneshot thing: I'm certainly not dismissing your reports; but to the majority of reports they are rare; so it is even more important that I understand yours. But to do that I need specifically a description of exactly what killed you, this is vital to fixing the issue

You raise the point of high talent levels, but they have always been so and the inherent scaling to them makes high TL not mean that much of a damage increase. It may one some talents, but it's considered a bug in this case and if you report too high scaling talents I'll gladly take a look (I've re-nerfed Freeze a bit a few minutes ago for example)

To sum it up, fun the is goal, if something is broken (and I'm not saying it's not) I'd be happy to work with you all to find what it is and kill it 'til it's dead

Thanks!

 

[Lacrymas]

He says he never balances adventurers. That's a specific class that has access to all other trees.

 

[felipepepe]

Happy for this, but I'm really excited for the 4th expansion... new races, classes and a completely new first half of the game to explore.

it's been 16 months since it was announced, should be the next thing after 1.7. I wonder if we'll see it this year still.

 

[Bara]

The necromancer rework might tie into the work going into the 4th expansion as I remember there being death powered stuff in there.

 

[rado907]

This game is great... Most enjoyable roguelike I've played.

Beat it once a few years back with a Dwarven Bulwark. Defense is the best offense! Was invulnerable after the mid-game. Still managed to die a few times.

Now trying to beat it again. One attractive character is the Dwarven Gunslinger. Sit in place and shoot everything. Keep dying tho. Game punishes greed and lack of attention hard.

Recommended 10/10.

 

[Lacrymas]

You can very easily make a character which essentially can't die, namely teleport which is the most overpowered ability, and that's probably my biggest criticism outside the East dragging so much with the prides. Any kind of movement increase works too, but it's not as reliable.

 

[Bara]

1.7 Beta is out with notes. The arch-mage one I'm particularly happy about.

Archmage's Wildfire, Storm, Ice and Stone trees are now available without an unlock (they still require a category point)

Just never got around to doing enough Ice damage to unlock that tree in all my cumulative runs so far. I just... never really used it oddly enough.

Spoiler

My minions,

The day of the Necromancer is drawing near! While 1.7 is not yet released .. its first beta is!
You'll find all the downloads on https://te4.org/beta-test

Please, try to keep all bug reportings on ToME's official forums at http://forums.te4.org/ as it is hardly feasible for me to survey 10 different location for bugs.

Of particular interrest is, obviously, the full rewrite of the Necromancer (you can find some more details on them there: https://te4.org/blogs/darkgod/2020/05/necromancer/patch-17-big-feature-preview-new-necromancers) but also the localization support.
The current beta ships with a partial Simplified Chinese translation that should be complete once 1.7 is fully released.
Also thanks to this framework it is now possible for addons to provide new translations for new languages easily without having to override 95% of the game's code!

One last thing for those new to betas; characters will NEVER validate in beta; that's normal and as usual importing characters across major releases is bound to not work all too well.

Changelog in no particular order:

• Block has no effect against self inflicted effects to prevent some problems for Demonologists
• Focused Wrath now also resets the cooldown of Mind Storm at talent level 5
• Fixed Demon Seed spell of Ashes of'Urhrok from taking two turns when it auto-attaches a seed to your inventory
• New minor demon, the onilug
• Switch chat channel is now unbound by default, as it's not used much and people ended up on different channels by mistake
• Reduce the size of Reknor
• Fix Marauder, Archer, and Skirmisher not being taught poisons when siding with assassin lord for the first time to unlock the category on an account
• Fix weaver queen's portal being destroyed by temporary terrain
• Fix temporary terrain destroying the portal to return to Maj'Eyal in the Fearscape
• Fix mastery and perfection egos overwriting each other
• Fix save/reload bug in Hammer Toss
• Burb now has his own tile! All hail Burb the snow giant champion!
• Change how rares and randbosses are generated to be tree based instead of individual talent based thus making them focus on trees more and increasing chance to see tier 3 and 4 talents while also making rares easier to evaluate at a glance
• Fix Shadow Feed mana regen at very high talent level
• Tune down Grand Arrival a little
• Altered Essence of Speed formula to be less punishing on high level NPCs and reduced its mana cost
• Give Spell Shield, Blinding Speed, Corrupted Negation, Unstoppable, Disperse Magic and Shadow Simulacrum a lower change to appear on ranbosses
• Marked for Death, Chromatic Fury, Haymaker and Bombardment can't be used by NPCs
• Prevent Weapon of Wrath from showing on randbosses
• Melinda has a new haircut (also available to players after unlocking redhair)
• Malevolent Dimensional Jelly finally got its own tile! It is now MORE malevolent!
• Full and total rewrite of the Necromancer class, I can't really give a list of change as 95% of it is new or altered a lot
• Lich is now a race evolution for Necromancers, with it's own racial talent tree
• Archmage's Wildfire, Storm, Ice and Stone trees are now available without an unlock (they still require a category point)
• Cleansing Flames is now an active that sets yourself on fire to activate the cleansing flames efefcts for yourself and all burning wake/inferno damage as before. This makes it work with Spellcraft
• Reduced cooldown and mana cost of Inferno
• Merged Quicken Spells and Spellcraft
• Added Energy Alteration in the newly freed Meta tree that allows to change damage spells types dynamically, hopefully enabling some fun multi-elements builds
• At level 6 Metaflow now increases the talent level of all spells by 1 when casting them
• Rework of the Phantasm tree, Illuminate is more useful, Phantasmal Shield remade, Invisibility is not a sustain anymore and has no damage penalty and a new Mirror Image spell
• Enabled "WASD" movement (with an option to turn it off, and keybinds anyway). The big difference to normal movement is that it responds to key *release* and can combine directions. So you can do diagonal movement with just 4 keys by pressing two at the same time
• Bone grab will correctly fail if not hitting target.
• Fix Shattering Shout bug
• Fix Sentinel not putting initial talent on cooldown
• Fix Poltergeist duplicate uniques in the living weapon vault
• Fixed an infinite loop between Flexible Combat and weapons with multi-attacks
• Grapple will check if target can be silence/slowed
• Stalked will not prevent entering worldmap
• Eyal's Wrath have correct duration
• Make using item that can use talents respect the talent's usage conditions
• Fixed negative fortress energy
• Fix Rune: Blink description and line of sight bug
• Solipsism threshold fixes
• Fix Disruption Shield bug
• Shield wand and Healing totem now work with Through The Crowd
• Fix skip learning a trap break player.restCheck
• The damDesc talents function can now take a list of damage types and aggregate damage types can themselves define this list too
• Nerf Grand Arrival resistance reduction andd buff poison AOE damage
• Fix Hold the Ground description
• Intimidated no longer prevents entering the worldmap
• Remove negative resists from of madness ego
• Remove negative resists from werebeast's ego
• Remove negative stats from battlemaster's ego
• Reduce freeze iceblock life
• Nerf nature slow proc on egos
• Fix accuracy bonuses matching their effects
• Remove selffire from Corrupted Negation
• Fix callBackOnHit damage going through Unstoppable
• Blast can no longer randomly multihit
• Blast damage now actually reduced by distance (up to 50% at max range)
• Random knockback VFX direction now matches effect
• Fix Unseen Force to actually use getTalentRange so it works with RAD, fixed tooltip inconsistency
• Allow cancelling Temporal Form's anomaly talents
• Fix Advanced Shadowmancy crits
• Fix Vargh Redemption AI
• Update shattering shout to modern scaling formula and cap radius
• Move Blood Spray damage to after applying disease to avoids Virulent Disease being triggered and then immediately overriden by a weaker disease
• Fix Advanced Shadowmancy tooltip damage
• Remove Heighten Fear antisynergy with Darkness and Predator
• Make hasLOS properly respect Dark Vision
• Increase minimum level for merchant tunnels event to 18, saving new players left and right!
• Fox Hold The Ground tooltip
• Pride stair guardians are now rank rare instead of elite, which they already were in all but name
• Fix Dreamscape/Fearscape fizzling on summoners instead of summons
• Update Dream Hammer mastery to 1.6 scaling
• Turned diggable walls into doors in some vaults
• Fix Scattershot-type talents multi-hitting the player/breaking targeting
• Fix Blood Vengeance
• Fix Endless Woes tooltip
• Fixed radius and target attributes for Vargh Redemption
• Reduce damage taken requirements for prodigies that require those
• Remove blighted summoning from gorbat, replace with grand arrival and rage
• Add cost to crude iron battle axe of kroll, rungof's fang, mummified egg sac and razorblade
• Adjust formula for Dominate resistance penetration and change cap to 70%
• Nerf Rampage speeds
• Reduce spawn rate of living weapons vault in halfling ruins
• Prevent randbosses with a fixed class from rolling that class a second time
• Remove the burglar's ego
• Modify collapsed tower vault to make it more interesting
• Give grushnak pride orcs -30% damage when randbosses
• Add worms vault to dry lake of nur
• Somewhat reduce number of vaults in prides and add new unique vaults for them
• Make forest ruined building 2 vault more interesting
• Make worms vault a bit more reasonable
• Add language localization support.
• New hooks "Game:changeLevel" and "PartyIngredients:collectIngredient", "Zone:InfiniteDungeon:loadNPCs", "Combat:attackTargetWith:beforeArmor"
• Updated the way escorts are coded to make them easier to mod. To avoid stuff exploding too much in addons, the old hooks are disabled and now two new ones took their place "EscortRewards:givers" and "EscortRewards:rewards"
• Added a framework to know how a talent got activated (by action, forceuse, callback, ...) along with passing this into to the damage projectors
• New callback "callbackOnSummonHit"
• New Map:removeEffect() method

A huge thanks to all those that contributed to help make this release!
And a special mention to Otowakotori for his (and his fellow teammates) amazing work on the translation framework.

Now go test and have fun!

 

[anvi]

You can very easily make a character which essentially can't die, namely teleport which is the most overpowered ability, and that's probably my biggest criticism outside the East dragging so much with the prides. Any kind of movement increase works too, but it's not as reliable.

How do you know when to teleport? Isn't it like you try to take a shot at something and they 1 shot you dead, then there would be no time to teleport?

 

[felipepepe]

Yup, my problem is rarely the enemy right in front of me, is the goddamn ritch flamespitters, snow giant boulder throwers or orc spellcaster that send nuclear bombs from across the map.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Just never got around to doing enough Ice damage to unlock that tree in all my cumulative runs so far. I just... never really used it oddly enough.

The elemental damage unlocks are easy to deal with, either you use a mod to bypass them or cheat engine it, the achievement page showing the actual total damage by element, i did it with for the fire unlock with an alchemist in a previous version.

The combat isn't good enough you'd enjoy playing through the game multiple times, actually, i never completed any campaign.

It's good enough for a rogue-like but there is a billion of trash encounters and even with their cool-down dogshit, you end up using the same skill sequence over and over again (protection X, protection Y, nuke, nuke, regen, heal, mega nuke, rinse and repeat)

A shame the combat is so boring so fast, i like the quest design and open world, it's quite good (for a rogue-like).

 

[Rafidur]

Tried new necromancer:
- Bugged to shit (hey, beta!). The soul capacity talent just completely stopped working after one floor, for example. And I get a crash report after every ghost walk.
- Soul management for ghouls is super clunky. The only way early game to regenerate the souls you need for them is to kill them with the disease cloud, which feels really off. The disease cloud in question also fucking murders your other minions. I hope that's a bug and not intended because it feels awful to play.

 

[TwoEdge]

You can very easily make a character which essentially can't die, namely teleport which is the most overpowered ability, and that's probably my biggest criticism outside the East dragging so much with the prides. Any kind of movement increase works too, but it's not as reliable.

How do you know when to teleport? Isn't it like you try to take a shot at something and they 1 shot you dead, then there would be no time to teleport?

Well, teleports are one tool in your arsenal, but they'll obviously not save you from instakills (and they'll leave you in worse predicaments sometimes, depending on their accuracy). You should always examine elites and randbosses for potentially lethal skill combinations and I can't stress enough that the mode you should play on is adventure, because ToME can generate very nasty foes and the small dev team won't catch all exceptions, so the extra lives are a must. The chance of an enemy being generated that could outright kill you is low and changes from patch to patch.

In the end, it's really much more about knowing the encounters, building your character properly and avoiding zones that outlevel you by much or that specifically counter your build/class until you outlevel them. Escaping is more for restrategizing when things aren't going your way (war of attrition going badly, lack of resources, nasty debuffs, extra enemies appearing, important sustain disabled etc.).

If you manage to build a character that's immune to one shots and has a reliable escape mechanism, then yes, you're set.

 

[rado907]

^^^ Beat the game with my Dwarven Gunslinger, and yeah, it's exactly as TwoEdge said: I put a lot of points in Con and wore heavy armor, and toward the end became very tanky. Had multiple escapes including the strong natural Gunslinger jump, blink rune & teleport rune. My deaths could have been averted with better resists, avoiding tough bosses, and avoiding tough zones. Had good damage and range 10 for much of the game. Endgame was a breeze.

Gunslinger feels strong - ranged, fast (has a move speed sustain), tanky, durable (has a strong automatic heal), mobile, and even has an invis.

Great game... Next I want to try Dwarf Stone Warden - dual wields shields!

 

[stony3k]

I've beaten the game with a Stone Warden twice, but you really need items of speed if you plan to use Earthen Vines. They are great but the 50% speed reduction is dangerous. It's a fun build

 

[TwoEdge]

I've beaten the game with a Stone Warden twice, but you really need items of speed if you plan to use Earthen Vines. They are great but the 50% speed reduction is dangerous. It's a fun build

The speed penalty was removed in 1.6.

 

[Lacrymas]

If you ignore optional areas, the game is fairly easy to beat on normal once you get to the east because the enemies' stats start capping out. The optional areas, however, especially those that came with Forgotten Cults, are quite the ride.

 

[stony3k]

I've beaten the game with a Stone Warden twice, but you really need items of speed if you plan to use Earthen Vines. They are great but the 50% speed reduction is dangerous. It's a fun build

The speed penalty was removed in 1.6.

Lol! That makes this class even better then