Looks good so far. I want to try out this Sun Paladin business.

One bug I noticed, and I'm not sure if it's new to this version, is that if I'm wearing equipment that increases my attributes, I can use those attribute boosts to learn skills that are above my actual attribute levels. For instance, with a constitution of 15, and 2 rings of +5 constitution, I was able to get level 2 of the health skill, despite the fact that the constitution requirement for it is 20.

Also, the sense spell is sensing traps for me at level 4, but it says that it finds traps at level 5.

Okay, so I was in the cave after Moria to unlock Sun Paladins, right? But my game crashed. So I reloaded my last save, and it was before Moria, but hey, no big deal, I'll just curbstomp those guys again and be on with it.

When I got to the boss room though, the boss wasn't there, and I didn't have the orb, so I had no way of moving forward. Anything I can be do about that, or will I just have to wait until next time?

I thought that Moria and the Spider Cave were better than previous dungeons. They had more of a consistent theme going. Both were pretty easy though (but I didn't get to finish the spider dungeon, so I can't say how the later parts of it are).

Sense uses the spell level after mastery (so spell level * 1.3) consider it a little gifft ;)

You already got to the spider cave ???
Without cheating ?
What kind of character ? on what difficulty ?

PS: the crash is probably found now, should be fixed for next beta

I'm confused, why is the spell level multiplied by 1.3?

Anyway, yeah, no cheating, but only on normal difficulty.

The character was is a Dunadan Mage with maxed manathrust and flame spells, like 500 hp, and heavy armor. Level 16. He was wrecking people left and right.

By the way, what happens if you use the "Teleport to Angolwen" ability after you've gotten to the second continent? I didn't dare try it in case it would get me stuck.

It works, you get to angolwen and get back afterwards.

Interresting build, you learnt combat training and pumped the armor & health talents ?

How much damage did you manathrust & flame did ? With what kind of equipment ?

Yeah, I put one point in each armor talent, and I maxed out the health talent. Right now I don't think fighters can keep up with mages for damage, and they're also limited by range. Once a mage gets the same armor a fighter can have, they're stronger, harder to kill, *and* more versatile.

Most of my attacks were in the 150-250 range, if I remember correctly. I was using a staff of power for +31 to spell power (the Staff of Destruction is trash compared with some of the stuff you find lying around or in Angolwen's shop).

Humm
I'd probably help if I reduced the cooldown on Rush and gave it earlier to warriors ?

And if fatigue penality was higer for mana ?

I haven't gotten Rush yet, but I'll try playing fighters for a while and check it out. Really though, I don't think one talent is going to close the gap between fighters and magic users.

Offensively, mages are quite a bit more powerful than fighters. Maybe artifact weapons alleviate this, I don't know. I think one of the biggest problems is how often you miss in hand to hand combat as a fighter, but your spells don't miss.

Another point of weakness for fighters are their talents though. Compare a sustained spell to a sustained fighter skill. Most spells (like telepathy or stone skin) give the player a power up at the cost of some of their magic, with no other downside. Almost all of the sustained fighter abilities cost stamina *and* carry a weakness (for example, shield wall lowers your attack). I happen to agree with this, as it makes the player have to think about which ability to use, rather than leaving it on forever. However, I think the penalties are often too extreme. I don't think it's necessary to add penalties to magic users, since mana is generally more important than stamina.

My talent recommendations are as follows:

Cut the penalty for using Shield Wall in half, or make it so the penalty goes down as the player adds ranks to it.

Keep the penalty for the Berserker talent at a constant -5 instead of having it get worse as the player adds ranks to it.

Make Precise Strikes a passive skill with no downside. Maybe the added accuracy and more frequent critical hits will help fighters keep up with mage damage better.

It might also be worth turning the damage down a bit on a few of the mage spells out there. Don't get me wrong, I like the mage having a lot of offensive power. It's a lot of fun, but when you can steamroll bosses in two or three rounds before they can even get a hit off, something's wrong.

I don't know if the spells themselves are too powerful, or if the magic stat improves damage by too much, or if mage staffs of power add too much damage, but one of those should probably be weakened. Maybe a simple solution would be to make it so you don't find crazy powerful staffs of +30 to arcane power as often or as early.

Maybe it would be a good idea to make it so the Arcane Power talent had 10 ranks like Weapon Combat does, and then decrease the power of each rank so a mage with 10 points in Arcane Power would be as strong as a mage with 5 points in it currently is.

Defensively the biggest advantages a mage has are the ability to attack from range, the sense spells, and the teleport spells. One idea you might like would be to make staffs require both hands, so a mage character can't use a shield unless they're willing to give up some of their attack power.

I also think it would be nice to improve the light radius of all light sources by 1 or 2, because warriors are severely limited by a small circle of vision, but a mage can just cast sense or telepathy and get by just fine.

Unrelated, but it would be nice to have a suicide command if the player decides they're done with a character, or they get stuck and want to delete their save file, or something like that.

Is there any particular advantage to dual wielding daggers instead of any other type of weapon? The game seems to advocate doing that on a rogue, but I'd just as soon use a longsword or something in my dominant hand.

What does the fatigue penalty do? My assumption was that it caused slower energy regeneration, but I don't know.

Well Rush allows melee types to close the distance to ranged attackers.

I agree with the penalities they may be too much.
I have already reduced Flame damage in beta3 :/
But yes the problem might lie in the convertion from magic to spellpower or the stuff additing to it.
Maybe I could add a "heightened senses" talent to melee classes that would work kinda like infravision, detecting stuff out of light but in LOS. It kinda makes sense, a battle hardened warrior is always aware of his surroundings, noticing things others do not.

Dual wielding should not work well with swords I need to fix it :/

My biggest problem with dual wielding right now is that you need strength if you want good armor (and you always want that, no matter what character you're playing), but daggers get their damage from cunning instead.

The ability to teleport to Angolwen and the access to its shops are other nice advantages of being a mage I forgot to mention. What do you think of a recall ability or item of some kind for other classes? What about a ring/amulet shop in the regular town?

Heightened senses is a good idea. I'd put points in that.

If you don't mind my asking, why did you make it so you have a mastery of 1.3 in all of your class skills instead of just 1.0? I find it to be pretty unintuitive, and it makes it so putting 5 points in some skills is pointless, because after 4 you have that skill at level 5.2 (I don't know if it just rounds that to 5) so you get every benefit already. Personally I would just make it so you either have 1 point of mastery or 0 with nothing in between or outside of those.

I don't know how married you are to the idea or what you plan to do with it though.

Sorry to double post again, but I just thought of this as I posted that last comment:

What if heightened awareness (or another passive skill in the same skill tree) also made the player recover from stuns more quickly? One of the biggest threats as a close range fighter is being stunlocked to death, and since a mage's job is to never let enemies get up close in the first place, it's okay if they're more vulnerable to that.

I just fought an anaconda, and after I killed it I was still constricted. I used a scroll of phase door before I ran out of air, and on the same turn as I did that, the constriction status wore off. I don't know if it lasts for a few turns after the kill or if teleporting is what made it wear off, but in either case, I think it should probably be removed right away when you get the kill.

While on the topic of air, do you immediately die from running out of air, or do you start taking hp damage once you're out? I've always thought the being trapped in the sandworm lair makes you run out a little too quickly.

The Ring of Ulmo isn't working for me. I try to use it for its tidal wave effect, and nothing happens.

I'm playing a rogue, and it seems to me that fighters become much more viable once they have decent armor. I'm wondering if the effect of armor isn't maybe a bit too strong. I imagine that a fighter (the class, not the archetype) with good armor, a good shield, and defensive skills active could become more or less invincible to physical damage.

Item destruction is out of hand. For a wizard it's okay if all your scrolls burn up, you have spells to make up for that, but if you can't cast teleport, it's pretty irritating to have everything burn up after two traps.

It would be useful if the display for stamina and mana and all that always rounded down. The issue I have with it is that I want to use a skill that costs 15 stamina, and the game says I have 15 stamina, but I can't use it because I really have 14.8 and it just rounded up.

Is this an appropriate place for me to be talking about all of this stuff? Would it be better for me to send an email instead?

Alright, well that rogue died off. I'm trying a fighter now, and it's going a lot better. I don't think they're as powerful as mages, but they're definitely viable. The key seems to be to build your character for equipment first and talents second, and to pretty much not bother putting points in attributes just for the benefit of that attribute alone. Fighters don't needs as much in the way of buffs as I thought.

The rogue has more serious problems. Since his dagger damage will come from cunning instead of strength, he'll either have to split points between strength and cunning to get good armor, or farm until he gets a good suit of light armor. Additionally, he can't really use shields and even with two of them, dagger damage isn't very impressive. Maybe I'm just playing them wrong.

I came across another bug related to anacondas. If you push one away while it's choking you, it *keeps choking you,* and you can't move to chase it and kill it because you're being strangled, so if you don't have a means of teleportation, you're a goner.

Yeah the forums: http://forum.t-o-m-e.net/ :)

Rogues are supposed to be evasive stealthy characters, doesnt work currently to well I admit :/
But still they should get two weapon defence and evasion, which should help quite a lot (specially Evasion which could make you avoid a good part of attacks)

I should probably take damage in account when trying to destroy stuff yes ..
I'll fix the anaconda bugs :)

I do not think stats round *up* it's weird.

There is something off with mages, rogues and everyone else wearing massive armor.

A dodge or evasion should be a practical alternative for agile characters instead, allowing them to survive just as well as heavy armor users, just using attributes they actually use. 4E for instace allows you to add the highest of your dex or int modifier to your AC if you have light armor, which tends to balance alright with the higher AC provided by heavier armor.

Its easy to discourage this behavior by making heavy armor give you disadvantages to stealth and magic, but I would prefer if this was encouraged instead by giving advantages to lighter armor or cloth.

I like how your class doesn't limit you on your equipment options. If you're just as strong as a warrior, why shouldn't you be able to use a warrior's weapon? Just because you're "supposed" to wear light armor because that's what wizards do?

It doesn't come for free. Those points in strength could have been points in magic to increase your attack power. The only problem is that even without those points a wizard has plenty of attack power to spare.

I haven't actually unlocked mages yet, so maybe I shouldn't be commenting on this issue, but it seems that perhaps the stat points gained per level should be decreased as a possible fix for the "mages wearing heavy armor" issue... that way, if you are a mage and you WANT to wear heavy armor, you can still invest a lot in strength, but you can't do so in just one or two character levels!
Maybe stats should have "aptitudes" like the talents do, too - instead of mages getting +5 to magic or whatever at the start of the game, they could get a x1.5 multiplier, so if you put 2 points into magic, you get 3 points worth! I think the same would apply to racial bonuses as well - a giant who trains in strength should find it easier to gain strength than a human, regardless of the actual strength score of either!

Oh, yeah, a bug I noticed... You can see "+poison" or "+fire" pop up when there status effects are applied to monsters outside your range of sight!

Oh yes need to fix that :)