Tales of Maj'Eyal

[Lhynn]

Got tired of playing sun paladin, that class is shit, and not fun. Now im playing an archmage and holy fuck, that dude is OP, its really fun to play as one, so many options, so many ways to kill, to survive. Really recommend playing as one.

 

[agris]

tl;dr Crawl is still king

Is that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup? Is there a specific game build / tileset you play with?

 

[TripJack]

Is that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup? Is there a specific game build / tileset you play with?

yep anytime someone mentions Crawl nowadays they are referring to Stone Soup, which is a modern & still actively maintained fork of the original game 'Linley's Dungeon Crawl'

when I play I just grab the latest stable graphical tiles version, the default tileset is quite decent and I am actually not sure if there are any alternative tilesets available in any case

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Webtiles iz gud for DCSS too. There's an ever so slight amount of lag, but since it's turn based if that annoys you is just a matter of personal preference. Jack plays locally 'cause he's a professional orb fondler.

 

[TripJack]

profressional orb fondlers also fondle all the runes, i've only fondled 5 runes

im just an amateur orb fondler

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

That's still more than I've fondled. You're in the big leagues to me

 

[palmito]

Got my first win. Summoners are OP.

Here's some thoughts on the game, mostly copypasta from a post I made elsewhere:
+Lots of classes and races to try out. Trying out new classes and race combos is the best thing about the game
+At first I hated the idea of a cooldown system in a roguelike. If I wanted cooldowns I would play shitty WoW am I rite? But after playing the game I've grown to like it. On top of managing your normal ability resource (stamina, mana, equilibrium, whatever) you also have to plan around the fact that your abilities take turns (sometimes a lot of turns) to become available again. Adds depth to the gameplay
+By the midgame you have a good variety of abilities from your talents & items, plenty of options to choose from in combat
+No Nethack-style gotcha deaths, always a plus
+Passable graphics & music for a RL

-Danger level of most enemies is fairly low. Compare to Crawl where enemies are generally less numerous but more dangerous. Too much of the combat in ToME feels like trash combat, even for classes that aren't summoner-level strong... The trashiness is toned down a bit in the lategame, and the occasional enemy-packed vaults throughout the game usually offer a good challenge. Upping the difficulty level could alleviate this issue but doing so would probably exacerbate the next problem
-Randomly generated uniques. Most of my deaths in ToME come from these. Unlike actual Boss enemies, these assholes more often than not are just buffed trash enemies. Sometimes however the RNG decides to dump some absurdly strong unique on your head and you are dead before you even know what happened. Even if you carefully inspect everything, it can be difficult to tell just how dangerous a unique is until you fight them for a few turns.
-The game is too long IMO. The early game is lame. Even if you skip optional zones (which would leave the player underpowered and could make the endgame too difficult for weaker char types) there are still a lot of dungeon floors to clear in ToME... Despite my desire to try more classes and races I won't be replaying ToME anytime soon due to this. The Crawl style of a relatively short core game and a whole optional 'extended' game on top of that for players seeking extra glory is more to my liking. And due to this & the problem of random uber-uniques, I will never, ever, ever be playing ToME on roguelike mode.
-Extension of previous problem - for a game this long the enemy variety is much too low. Enemies you first meet very early in the game will continue to reappear until the very end. I was disappointed to see nothing new even in the end dungeon. More orcs & demons that I've been fighting for half the game, more undead that I have been seeing since level 5, more snakes, more drakes, more bone golems, yay... FFS, give me some ancient liches, some orbs of fire, some killer klowns!
-Wands, scrolls, potions... Although you will have a large number of abilities available to you by the midgame in ToME and I like that darkgod tried to do something new by removing consumables entirely, I find I miss the added variety and resource management aspect that consumables add to Crawl and most other RLs

-/+Unlock system. I'm still not sure if this actually adds to or detracts from the game. It is easy to circumvent for people that really hate it so it's not really an issue either way.
-/+Adding bits of findable lore fluff was a neat idea, but the lore of ToME didn't do much for me. All fairly generic really

It's got problems but I do like ToME. I think it is a great choice for anyone looking to play their first roguelike. Everything in the game is fairly transparent, and game mechanics should be decently familiar to anyone who has played an RPG before...


tl;dr Crawl is still king

I agree with you. I also hate the 'donator' and the DLC system. I'm downloading crawl, thanks:
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/downloads

 

[profreshinal]

I find the regular TOME4 campaign is best when you skip most zones and play on normal. Do the 1-2 starting dungeons, complete 1-2 of the 4 "into the darkness quest" zones then go straight to dreadfell and pretend the game ends when you defeat the master. Around defeating the master character development grinds to a halt anyway. you'll have all the safety nets you'll ever need and more levels won't unlock new skills but just give number bonuses to the old one, there's only hp bloat waiting. Skipping all those optional zones also keeps things dangerous enough to not fall asleep while going through a popcorn level.


I've been playing the infinite dungeon on madness rouguelike and yesterday my best run so far was killed at ID:10 lvl 26. I pretty much cleared the level and was fighting a unique that had both call shadows and summoner talent trees, 2 of the most dangerous trees to deal with. At one point my character gets blindsided by 2 shadows in the same turn, blindside hurts. I'm 20 hp away from death and hit the emergency teleport button, landing a few squares away from a trap, lucky, unluckily the trap was a rotating beam trap and it was just pointing in my direction and it deals the finishing blow.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

holy shit i just started playing this today my god its rather good

rocking a bog standard mage atm

read the wiki about unlockables, and without spoiling too much im going to try and get the archmage class unlocked

have no idea what im doing but im surviving and the UI is reasonably intuitive

having a roaringly good time working things out; just cleared the first area on normal without too much hassle

can i romance my golem; hes very strong and the environments have a definite brokeback mountain vibe about them

 

[TripJack]

well the game already has this

Spoiler

so golem romance is a definite possibility for a future dlc

 

[Lhynn]

That ties into another quest if i remember correctly. i saved her on my first run but wanted the demon slaying achievement for my second one.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

well the game already has this

Spoiler

so golem romance is a definite possibility for a future dlc

woops that saucy tart is having an effect on your equilibrium champ; better throw that fish back overboard methinks

 

[bloodlover]

I've been playing this for the past two days and... I suck. I am even playing the OP summoner class but the randomness keeps fucking me over. Not fun having to randomly fight some elite with 1000 hp after diggin a grave or opening a chest. I am derping around to see how to unlock the Yeek class in order to make myself more OP but no luck so far. Basically I have to learn what dungeons are acceptable and in what order can be made, but again sometimes I face the same randomness where the entire dungeons is full of mobs of my level and suddenly a boss or elite three levels higher pops up. Still a fun game though.

 

[baturinsky]

Timely and orderly fleeing is a fundamental part of ToME4 gameplay.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Or more accurately: The optimal strategy for 99% of difficult fights is to throw a status effect at them, pray it sticks, and if it doesn't or you get hit by a status too, teleport away and come back after cooldowns are ready.

The whole game is built around the lack of consumable resources, so all you've got to work with that enemies don't is superior escape methods that you can use to effectively savescum the RNG into your favour by reseting the fight over and over.

 

[Gwendo]

That doesn't sound as good gameplay.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Optimal strategies rarely are.

If you know the game well enough, you can get by without resorting to shit like that all the time, but holy fuck is ToME4 ever an unfair pile of cocks. You really need to know what every move in the game does (or constantly be reading the descriptions, or both) to avoid getting assraped because you encounter the 1% of enemies in the game that ignore all of your defenses. There are hard counters for everything, and the enemies can have pretty much any combination of skills you can think of.

 

[baturinsky]

Or more accurately: The optimal strategy for 99% of difficult fights is to throw a status effect at them, pray it sticks, and if it doesn't or you get hit by a status too, teleport away and come back after cooldowns are ready.

The whole game is built around the lack of consumable resources, so all you've got to work with that enemies don't is superior escape methods that you can use to effectively savescum the RNG into your favour by reseting the fight over and over.

It's not THAT bad, at least on normal. You have a buffer of heals, shields, summons and condition removals. All of them have cooldown. Once you see most of them are already used up, and enemy is still standing, you retreat. Enemy is already having some of hp removed, and most of mobs don't have strong regeneration. So you return when your defenses (and nukes) are off cooldown and kill him some more, until he drops.

 

[bloodlover]

Or more accurately: The optimal strategy for 99% of difficult fights is to throw a status effect at them, pray it sticks, and if it doesn't or you get hit by a status too, teleport away and come back after cooldowns are ready.

The whole game is built around the lack of consumable resources, so all you've got to work with that enemies don't is superior escape methods that you can use to effectively savescum the RNG into your favour by reseting the fight over and over.

It's not THAT bad, at least on normal. You have a buffer of heals, shields, summons and condition removals. All of them have cooldown. Once you see most of them are already used up, and enemy is still standing, you retreat. Enemy is already having some of hp removed, and most of mobs don't have strong regeneration. So you return when your defenses (and nukes) are off cooldown and kill him some more, until he drops.

This is what I am doing atm. Tried a mage, opened a chest, got surrounded by mobs. Time to fuck off with teleport but since that was random too, I ended up next to a minotaur.

I am still lliking the summoner a lot though, especially since I can scout ahead with my minions.

 

[baturinsky]

Teleport regularly drops you in even worse situation than you were. That's why it's wise to clear level before you open chests and vaults, and use phase door, movement rune etc before resorting to teleport.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, at high levels teleport isn't that random. If you don't have access to the spell, I'd probably recommend the blinding speed infusion instead. 10 tiles in a single turn in exactly the direction you want is generally just as good if not better than teleporting.

 

[Xorazm]

Optimal strategies rarely are.

If you know the game well enough, you can get by without resorting to shit like that all the time, but holy fuck is ToME4 ever an unfair pile of cocks. You really need to know what every move in the game does (or constantly be reading the descriptions, or both) to avoid getting assraped because you encounter the 1% of enemies in the game that ignore all of your defenses. There are hard counters for everything, and the enemies can have pretty much any combination of skills you can think of.

The problem I had with this game - and I don't know if this is endemic to roguelikes - is that it seems to lull you into a false sense of security by throwing wave after wave of trashmobs at you before suddenly ambushing you with an identical looking Deathlord. It seems the only way to really avoid this scenario is to be constantly on the lookout for every enemy you face, which gets tedious given the waves and waves of trashmobs you have to deal with. I had some fun messing around with it and learning the systems, but I just don't feel terribly compelled to continue playing a game where the primary enemy is my slipping attention span rather than a constantly evolving tactical challenge.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I wouldn't call it endemic, but it's definitely the way a lot of them go. I'd say Nethack avoids it the best; there are very few situations involving a horde of enemies, and in those situations they're generally either all the same or the important ones are crystal clear (like a kobold throne room will have a pile of kobolds but only one king and he's bright pink instead of brown.) Crawl is generally pretty decent on this front too; most of the dangerous enemies are uniques or clearly dangerous, although there are exceptions (especially early on) with enemies that simply found awesome weapons or armour. DoomRL is pretty similar in that regard.

ToME4 is by far the worst about it though. Any 'rare' enemy can just randomly be packing 4 different low cooldown stun spells, or high damage nukes, or debuffs that will strip all your defenses, or who knows what else. That's before you even factor in their equipment.

 

[Lhynn]

Always be prepared for anything, always have a way out.

 

[bloodlover]

Time to necro this thread again I guess. Why aren't Codexers playing this game? It's right up our alley.

Anyway, there was some Halloween discount on Steam and I bough both expansions. Started playing the orc campaign and I just faceroll with my dual wielding saws. No idea about the stuff they added in the original campaign yet. The waves of thrash mobs are still in the orc DLC but I am not sure if the game is now easier or this class is just OP so I usually just cut my way through them. Regardless, money well spent imo.