Tales of Maj'Eyal

[Lhynn]

ToME has very strong early game, but the endgame is absolute trash. Sad!

The endgame is fine on the first difficulties. The game is clearly not designed with insane in mind tho.

Also i know your sins, just how many villagers did you drown you degenerate?

 

[Nael]

Just go to the console and type "iddqd", and then all your problems go away, just like winning the lottery.

Cute post newfag.

Do tell me more how great design ToME has compared to Nethack. Endgame of 20+ levels of overleveled enemies while you are level capped and can't get any new abilities. Autolooting and autoselling all the loot you get, as very few provide any valuable improvement to the stuff you've had for the past ten hours. Oh yeh, and random one-hit-kills if you are playing melee character.

The demon in my screenshot had 8k HP health and went 2k HP to negative before I could kill him. And it is not like I could use a wand, potion or an item to be creative in dealing with him. Nah, in ToME it is all about slowly cheesing the HP down and hoping you won't be crit to death.

Teleporting, damage immune, self healing bosses that chase you and one-hit you. After you've spent 20 hours to get to that point.

I'm sure you have great arguments to defend that, right?

The "endgame challenge" currently consists of spamming movement/phase/teleport runes/items and racing to the level change tile. Such hardcore, much hard.

And I didn't even get to the funny stuff, like archers getting killed by their own arrows. One-shot, ofc. Yeah, and fearscaped by a boss which has resource regen so you can only get out w. specific item/talent cat skill. Topkek.

I know, my fault for not playing an Archmage.

ToME has very strong early game, but the endgame is absolute trash. Sad!

Dotard Drumpf never gives up, and neither should you.

 

[Haba]

ToME has very strong early game, but the endgame is absolute trash. Sad!

The endgame is fine on the first difficulties. The game is clearly not designed with insane in mind tho.

Also i know your sins, just how many villagers did you drown you degenerate?

Do you even know how I have suffered? I'm literally cursed. All I have is my hate.

 

[you know what time it is]

ToME on insane and beyond is not an enjoyable experience. I only finished it on nightmare HC once and that was shitty enough, had to restart a billion times due to random off-screen oneshots and other such nonsense.

 

[Tito Anic]

I know, my fault for not playing an Archmage.

Not now. It is mediocre class after latest patches. Paradox mage, TW, Archer are new autopilot classes.

ToME on insane and beyond is not an enjoyable experience.

Depends. Higher difficulties give you godlike ego items early on, also you level up realy fast but you need patience to survive difficulty spikes.


This amuses me

 

[MWaser]

ToME on insane and beyond is not an enjoyable experience. I only finished it on nightmare HC once and that was shitty enough, had to restart a billion times due to random off-screen oneshots and other such nonsense.

indeed, game is simply no fun at all at anything beyond Nightmare, and Nightmare itself is already an ass pain just due to the game being absolutely overloaded with massive amounts of damage that ruin you fast (even on normal there's situations that completely fuck you up) and nightmare just makes it worse.

However the game is fair enough of an experience with finding uses to your shittons of skills and overall decent tactical combat, so I'll always defend it as being overall positive.

 

[Kabas]

Also i know your sins, just how many villagers did you drown you degenerate?

My pride does not allow me to stoop so low and you will never caught me alive using such underhanded tricks.

Spoiler

This is probably the reason why i still didn't beat the original campaign on normal

Spoiler

This or my constant attempts to immedeately tackle the crypt after entering it. Or my tendency to get bored after awhile, which causes me to lose attention, which causes my character's death at the hands of a random ant with the guns. I guess the original campaign is just a bit too long for my comfort.

 

[MWaser]

Also i know your sins, just how many villagers did you drown you degenerate?

My pride does not allow me to stoop so low and you will never caught me alive using such underhanded tricks.

Spoiler

This is probably the reason why i still didn't beat the original campaign on normal

There's not really much of a need for drowning villagers on normal, you do it on higher difficulties when they're all unique so that they drop some nice items.

 

[Kabas]

There's not really much of a need for drowning villagers on normal, you do it on higher difficulties when they're all unique so that they drop some nice items.

This means that i just suck then.
Oh well, i do not regret my wasted 200 hours. And i did manage to unlock every class without exploration mode and beat the orcish campaign on roguelike, so i am not hopeless i guess.

 

[Grimnir]

Real men use a murder wand that let's you zap villagers, so you don't have to waste time shoving them into the water.

 

[Bara]

Looks like the next expansion releases May 16th

 

[felipepepe]

Expansion is out now!

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Bros bought the expansion, and started playing the expansion class, writhing one in the morning for barely an hour with Ogre withring One on Nightmare RL.

Then my mom scolded me to go to work and so here is my initial feedback.

The 1st expansion class is a melee / summon focused class.

You start with ur offhand as a tentacle which scales with magic and auto attacks with melee strike for darkness damage. the whole tle5nt tree is tentacle centred allowing you to choke at range among other things, A codexian dream!

Keep a 1h melee weapon in mai hand and offhand free for the tentacle to juice up ur bump attacks

Class resource used is Insanity. The forementioned tentacle and a Cone AoE lick talent ( which diseaases and debuffs) generate insanity on hits.

Easy resource to manage, much like hate.

The powerful talents consume insanity unleashing horrors on ur enemies.

Oh, the more Insanity you have the more your damage and cooldowns fluctuate (roughly 1 percent per 2 insanity points)

So at max insanity sometimes your autoattack (with offhand tentacle lash) will be more powerful than ur 12 turn cooldown talent.

Another class talent tree deals with mobility, passively increasing movement soeed, allowing a goulish leap like distance closer, allowing u to walk thru walls etc.

Another class talent tree gives shielding and general survivability, though the healing talents are there later.

another starting class tree can summon multiple sttaionary horrors to harass and damage enemies.

Didn't play with the two locked class trees. but one of them allows you to summon a worm that walks whom you can equip actual equipment; I assume it has talent trees like the alchemist golem.

There is also another neat locked class talent tree with which u can devour upto an elite enemy, generating insanity every turn while u digest it. The last talent allows for a nice heal and u instantly end digestion.

the writhing one is weak on generics though, and only has combat training, survival and a new chaos generic tree.

Some really powerful passives there in the class tree later talents

the chaos generic tree gives u chaos orbs, which buff ur damage each time u do unpredictable stuff (higher or lower damage/cooldowns) due to ur insanity resource. Can somewhat offset the negative conseuences of ur high insanity and provide a bit of utility too if u invest in it.

Planning to get tinkers and hope the tentacle tree works with ogre weilding a 2h main weapon.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

reached late 40s before restarting- unlocked tinkers from escort, and 3 inscription slots for the writhing one.

i was thinking of getting the worm that walks summon tree or the eating foes (and steal one of their talents while digesting) but the starting class trees are so good that i didn't have much points left so got an extra ctegory point went to get 6th inscription slot (from ogre racial)

Writhing one has amazing synergy with the ogre.
For one offhand tentacle works with ogreweilding.

Second the talent which allows you to walk thru walls also gives damage reduction and increases size category by 2, offsetting lot of the power penalty of ogreweilding.

Combine that with I can carry the world and pain enhancement system prodigies and u have bump attack beast. Ecellent mobility talents and decent survivability along with summon distractions and AoE diseaase/dots (and lots of tenracles to choke, poke etc.)

Very fun playing melee class; not as passive as a cursed; not as bursty as doombringer/arcane blade; definitely not s tanky as bulwark/sun palladin.

but hey melt your face and lick them to disease your foes while buttraping everyone around you with tentacles. what more do want in a sturdy melee class?

why i restarted? there was a bug which prevents u from accessing the archmage town if u start with a demented class. Also the random unique vender absolutely shafted me when i spent all my gold for the equips.

the bug has been fixed as of now (small patch yesterday). starting a drem writhing one and plan to get both the locked class trees this time.

 

[felipepepe]

I unlocked the Drem sub-race, it's REALLY good. I'm enjoying the new content, but so far it still feels very limited next to the previous expansions... I wonder if we'll ever get something like Embers of Rage again.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

yeah the first talent of the drem racial is as good as a prodigy, even with 1 point investment. Same with the last talent. Add to that the 3rd talent with really good mental save/confusion resist and u have a beastly OP race.

oh and the 2nd talent synergizes very well with the shielding talent tree of writhing one.

in spite of ogreweilding; drem is far more suited race for the writhing one class.

 

[felipepepe]

Yup, gotta spam that tentacle porn.

 

[Kabas]

There is a new fun item added, a Fanged collar called.

Spoiler

It gives you a bonus life at the cost of choping your head off and attaching itself in it's place.
It also changes your racial tree into that of a parasite, which gives you some nice stuff like global speed and resistances.
And you also eat escorts now(+1 generic), so beware.

 

[felipepepe]

Spoiler

It will also eat Melinda, which was pure lol

 

[Covenant]

I feel like I'm in a weird place with ToME. I finally beat it on Insane/RL a while back, but it was one hell of a struggle, probably the biggest one I've had in a roguelike (Lich Necromancer, no add-ons or vault). Very stressful - I like a high difficulty challenge but ToME is the sort of game where a single moment's inattention can easily make you lose dozens of hours of progress, to a bigger degree than most other roguelikes. One turn really can be all it takes to go from 'Fine' to 'Doomed'. This makes it seem like all the more of an accomplishment when you beat it, of course.

But now I'm left in this sort of limbo; it's a good game, and I keep finding myself tempted to pick it up and play but I can't bring myself to do it. Playing Normal - and to a lesser degree Nightmare - feels pointless after completing Insane. But Madness is too difficult; to complete it (if I even could, which is unlikely), I'd have to play in such a cautious and tedious manner that I simply couldn't bear it. Not to mention how ridiculous the Madness pathfinding buff is. Playing on Insane again with a different class is a possibility, but I feel like without the draw of achieving that victory for the first time it's just not worth putting myself through the aggravation.

And it feels strange, because it's as if I'm punishing ToME for doing its job well. It challenges you and makes you work for a victory. That's good, right? But... look, even if you climb Everest ten times, it's the first summit that's going to be the best, the most magical moment. After that, you're not treading on any new ground, you're just repeating your earlier feat. Completing ToME may not be as punishing as climbing a mountain, but it's long, complicated, and demands constant attention. I've had Crawl runs (DDSk springs to mind) where after getting through the early hump I can just tab my way through 70% of the content, only needing to look up and pay attention when my health dips below the halfway mark. ToME doesn't allow that, and it's a better game for it. And yet I find myself reluctant to play it.

Anyway, the whole thing is a bit odd to me. In most other roguelikes I've replayed them as different classes and had a good time. Is it just that ToME is too long and too unforgiving, and those things combine to create fatigue? Is it just me, or does anyone else ever feel this way?

To be honest, the more I think about it, the more I think the game's design philosophy is to blame. Things like the Adventurer/Ziguranth parties. If a player is careful in walking around the map, they never need to fight one. But someone casually hurrying their way back to Last Hope for another quick shopping trip could easily run into one - very possibly dying to it, as on higher difficulties they can frequently be significantly stronger than anything the player can be expected to handle. What does that add to the game? It's like those old games where you had to do a 'stealth' section by walking the same route as usual but at a tenth your characters' regular speed. There's no challenge or strategy in it, just added tedium.

Adventurer parties are just a small thing, but I think the game as a whole has lots of things like that. Take rares and randbosses. Particularly with their frequency on higher difficulties, as the game goes on you're likely to have seen most of the 'templates' a bunch of times before. I get hit by an Invoke Darkness from some such enemy and think 'Oh, right, another necromancer', and fight him in what's probably the same way I've fought all the other necromancers for the past ten levels - and, for that matter, in what's probably the same way I've fought the vast majority of other rares/randbosses. But I do it carefully, knowing that one single misstep in the dance can kill me and make all the time so far invested meaningless. And over the course of a typical game I'm probably going to do that dance 500 or so times. Of course that gets wearying.

Reading this back I could practically convince myself I don't even enjoy this game, but I genuinely do. But the thing is that the best parts are the unique ones, things like the Weirdling Beast, Urkis, the Orc Ambush, the last battle. Not the slog in between those parts. ToME has some great systems in terms of its character development, its combat, its equipment, but I find that it suffers from being diluted - or perhaps stretched out is more accurate - over a needlessly long game, particularly for a genre with a strong expectation of dying and replaying significant segments.

I suppose ultimately it boils down to this: ToME is a good game, but it would be much improved by cutting out significant parts of its content.

 

[Kabas]

There is only so many times you can follow the sandworms digging the way until you get sick of it. Even with the big variety of classes.
Embers of rage campaign is far more tightly packed in terms of length compared to the original. There is also an Arena mode which i found fun thanks to the aforementioned combat and character development.

 

[Jezal_k23]

So... is this good or not? I bought it but despite overwhelmingly positive reception to it, whatever I read about it on the internet suggests people kinda begrudgingly like it rather than saying "wow yeah this game is really worth it". This very thread has people saying "welp, it kinda sucks... but somehow I like it. Recommended. Sort of." It's confusing. Anyone want to give a clearer explanation as to whether this is worth playing (I'm trying to avoid spoilers though)?

 

[TripJack]

the meat of the game is experimenting with the various classes and sperging out on skill trees, if that appeals to you you'll enjoy it if not the game doesn't have much else to offer imo it's repetitive overly long has no resource management and has weak monster variety or at least it did the last time i played it

skip normal and play on nightmare unless you are new to roguelikes

 

[Covenant]

So... is this good or not? I bought it but despite overwhelmingly positive reception to it, whatever I read about it on the internet suggests people kinda begrudgingly like it rather than saying "wow yeah this game is really worth it". This very thread has people saying "welp, it kinda sucks... but somehow I like it. Recommended. Sort of." It's confusing. Anyone want to give a clearer explanation as to whether this is worth playing (I'm trying to avoid spoilers though)?

Why wouldn't you try the free version before buying it? It's the same game minus one class and the Donator's Vault (which is cheatsy as fuck anyway).

Anyway, it's got good stuff to offer but it's flawed (like most things) with no sign of those flaws ever being addressed. But most of those flaws aren't the sort of thing that will hit a new player until after they've been playing the game for quite a while, so don't let it put you off giving it a go. So try it, but if after five hours or so you're not enjoying it then you'd probably be best just giving up on it.

I've played it a lot and I don't regret the time spent on it (other than in the general 'My god, I'm wasting my life on games' sense that I imagine many of usl share to some degree) - I'd actually say that Insane/RL Necro win I mentioned above is probably the most hard-won achievement I have in the roguelike genre. At the same time though, I'm not at all tempted to pay any money toward getting any of the expansions.

Not sure I agree with the above advice about skipping Normal, either. Once you're used to the game Normal is too easy, certainly, but a new player won't know to expect the spikes of difficulty that come with certain encounters.

 

[Jezal_k23]

Did nightmare/adventurer and ended up dead for real in an ambush on the open world map that I chose to go toward. Reasonably fun. Boring loot.