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Author Topic: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal  (Read 464578 times)

Frumple

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2025 on: November 21, 2014, 07:20:22 pm »

Re: Shaky screen... you do know you can turn that stuff off in the graphics/video options, right?
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Robsoie

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2026 on: November 21, 2014, 07:58:39 pm »

Hand of the World-Shaper is a most amazing piece of gauntlet for classes that punch people like Brawlers.
I got it on my winner and i felt pity for the foolish bosses.
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Dr Feelgood

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2027 on: November 21, 2014, 09:45:22 pm »

Finished the backup guardians. The boss at Daikara was a major pain to kill. I had to kite him, while my focus weapon slowly whittled away his HP.

I picked the naloren legacy as my 2nd prodigy, since I heard tridents are great weapons for mindslayers. I don't think I'll be able to max out exotic mastery, since my mindslayer only has 2 levels left.

I was thinking of trying to make a sort of Super-Berzerker, kind of like Cursed Squared, but going through the East always drains my will to Tome for quite a while. God damn is the East boring. At least I had the stupid eye-cap so I could at least see the boring stuff, rather than a black screen. Status effect resistances are shooting rapidly to my "Prioritize on Items" list since a blurry shaky screen might work for Crank:High Voltage but it just makes my head hurt when I'm playing.

There's an addon that shortens the dungeons in the east. That should make the 2nd half of the game less boring.

http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/shorterdungeons
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Robsoie

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2028 on: November 21, 2014, 10:23:41 pm »

if i remember well, level 50 gives you some bonus points to distribute when you reach that level , not just the +1 of regular leveling.
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TripJack

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2029 on: November 23, 2014, 12:20:33 am »

Welp, got my first ToME win. Despite 2 deaths I kinda wish I had played on Nightmare instead. Summoners are too strong for normal.

Some thoughts on the game:
+Lots of classes and races to try out. This is the best aspect of the game IMO - trying out new classes and race combinations
+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 time to become available again. Sometimes you will get support abilities that can reset or reduce the cooldowns of other abilities. Having to manage cooldowns adds much appreciated 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... 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. Yeah I know, inspect everything you see. Except as the game goes on and enemies are loaded down with more and more talents it can be difficult to tell how dangerous an enemy really is just from glancing at the stat pages. Random uniques are ToME's 'gotcha' deaths.
-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 uber-uniques, I will never, ever, ever be playing ToME on roguelike mode  :P
-Extension of previous problem - for a game this long the enemy variety is 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, on the one hand it gives players goals to work towards, but on the other hand having unlockable shit in a roguelike seems like borderline blasphemy to me

It's not a bad roguelike. In fact I think ToME is a great choice for any poor soul that is looking to play his or her first roguelike. I will be giving it another spin someday. For me though, Crawl is still the king.


Also if I hadn't seen someone outside the game mention it, I would have had no idea that you can
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Is there no message or hint in game that informs you of this? Or did I just miss it?
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beorn080

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2030 on: November 23, 2014, 03:21:45 am »

Welp, got my first ToME win. Despite 2 deaths I kinda wish I had played on Nightmare instead. Summoners are too strong for normal.

Some thoughts on the game:
+Lots of classes and races to try out. This is the best aspect of the game IMO - trying out new classes and race combinations
+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 time to become available again. Sometimes you will get support abilities that can reset or reduce the cooldowns of other abilities. Having to manage cooldowns adds much appreciated 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... 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. Yeah I know, inspect everything you see. Except as the game goes on and enemies are loaded down with more and more talents it can be difficult to tell how dangerous an enemy really is just from glancing at the stat pages. Random uniques are ToME's 'gotcha' deaths.
-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 uber-uniques, I will never, ever, ever be playing ToME on roguelike mode  :P
-Extension of previous problem - for a game this long the enemy variety is 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, on the one hand it gives players goals to work towards, but on the other hand having unlockable shit in a roguelike seems like borderline blasphemy to me

It's not a bad roguelike. In fact I think ToME is a great choice for any poor soul that is looking to play his or her first roguelike. I will be giving it another spin someday. For me though, Crawl is still the king.


Also if I hadn't seen someone outside the game mention it, I would have had no idea that you can
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Is there no message or hint in game that informs you of this? Or did I just miss it?
For the last point, there are fairly simple ways to unlock everything all at once. It gets quoted every once in a while in the thread, and I forget the exact method, but I saw it a few pages back.

As for your other negatives, I tend to agree on a lot of them. Recently I've been using the Everythings a Boss mod, exact name slips my mind as well, which basically turns everything into the super uniques you complained about. This is, nominally, a Bad Idea, except you get an ungodly amount of loot, such that its not unusual to finish the second dungeon and be entirely decked out in artifacts, barring a few of the harder slots to fill.

Honestly. My biggest issue with the game is the stats and the stat screen. Talents are fairly easy to figure out, but, how much spell power you need vs enemies saves, and at what point is a save good enough. These things feel like they are hidden away, and it would be nice if it was a little more transparent. But maybe I just have no idea where to look.
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Dr Feelgood

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2031 on: November 23, 2014, 09:50:30 am »

@TripJack

Congrats on you 1st win. Agreed with everything you said. There's an addon that unlocks everything, and an addon that shortens several overly-long dungeons. Oh, and the game is more fun on roguelike. ;)

Quote from: Robsoie
if i remember well, level 50 gives you some bonus points to distribute when you reach that level , not just the +1 of regular leveling.

Still not enough points, sadly. It's my fault for changing my build halfway through. That being said, my artifact tridents deal way more damage than everything else.

Quote from: beorn080
Honestly. My biggest issue with the game is the stats and the stat screen. Talents are fairly easy to figure out, but, how much spell power you need vs enemies saves, and at what point is a save good enough. These things feel like they are hidden away, and it would be nice if it was a little more transparent. But maybe I just have no idea where to look.

You have to build around saves for it to be useful. Saves are a decent substitute for immunities on normal/nightmare, but worthless on insane. I usually aim for power in the 70s-80s, so endgame bosses don't shrug off all your status effects.
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Robsoie

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2032 on: November 23, 2014, 09:58:17 am »

I agree on the game being too long, when i get a winner or lose a character at +/- level 25, i feel i have played so much repetitively that i just cease to play for a month or two.

The addon previously mentionned may help, but to be honest every of those very repetitive dungeons should be shortened by default (and of course the XP ramp rebalanced to adjust for the loss of floors/XP to clear).

It had already happened lots of version ago in which every dungeons were even longer and some were insanely boring (remember old Maze , 5 levels of that giant labyrinth instead of 1 like now, and at the time there wasn't even auto-explore ! )
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Uristides

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2033 on: November 23, 2014, 10:07:26 am »

Long post
My way of dissolving those problems: treat ToME not as a roguelike but as a turn-based ARPG(i.e.: the inbred monstruosity resulting of an affair between father and child). Under that framework it still has some flaws, but most of them are genetic defects rather than outright bad design  :P
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Dr Feelgood

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2034 on: November 23, 2014, 07:00:27 pm »

My level 50 ghoul mindslayer got 1-turn killed by a worm that walks. It used dark surprise and drain before I could react.

That was the farthest I've gotten on insane roguelike. Pretty disappointing outcome, since I only had a few dungeons left.
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debvon

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2035 on: November 28, 2014, 11:11:55 am »

Should brawlers use shields or nah?
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Oneir

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2036 on: November 28, 2014, 02:25:27 pm »

Should brawlers use shields or nah?

Check if wielding one turns off your brawler skills. If so, probably nah.
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Frumple

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2037 on: November 28, 2014, 02:36:10 pm »

It does, yes. I guess conceptually they could, but it would disable their basically everything.
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Oneir

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2038 on: November 28, 2014, 03:03:10 pm »

It does, yes. I guess conceptually they could, but it would disable their basically everything.
That does make me wonder how hideously broken a brawler/stone warden would be. Obviously there would need to be some slightly complicated modding involved to allow shieldpunching.
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Frumple

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Re: Tome 4: Tales of Maj'Eyal
« Reply #2039 on: November 28, 2014, 03:52:58 pm »

... probably not very broken, I don't think. It'd be more defense and probably triple-hitting, but it's not like you can't already do that in-game via adventurer stuff. Usual synergy with AB things, I guess...

I don't think it'd be very hard to code, though -- just turn off whatever part of the brawler code disables unarmed talents on wearing shields and you'd be good to go, I think. Or go in the other direction and crib the stoneshield code. Very slightly complicated, I suppose...

If you know how to code, anyway. Supposedly T4's LUA is pretty easy to work with (and it's definitely relatively easy to read, as code goes), but it gives me a headache trying so :V
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