Interesting note about Blood Feed: Infusion and Rune Saturation both count as detrimental effects. Because of this, vim restoration is actually not a problem outside of long, drawn-out battles; one point is enough for this purpose, while extra points make it more practical to use when you're fighting something. Decayed Harvest at max level works pretty well now, 12% of damage you take is now converted to vim. Unless I can't kill something fast enough, I usually don't have vim problems at all.

Poison Cloud is great in the early game, assuming your starting dungeon doesn't have creatures with poison immunity, because it's AOE for only 5 vim and it's spammable with only 3 turn cooldown. For anything that resists poison, you need to invest in one of the other damage types (physical, acid, temporal, or blight). It's decent for a tier 1 skill.

Keep in mind that Epidemic ignores disease resistance/immunity, and actually further weakens any disease resistance they had. You're opening with Epidemic, then either spreading it with Cyst Burst or any other blight damage you have. The Plague tree starts off weak, but becomes powerful later on, especially when combined with Eternal Suffering (stuns that last for ages! double the burst damage from Catalepsy!).

Have you unlocked Toxins yet? It's probably their best tree because of Biohazard. Healing from diseases and poisons for free AND getting all that spellpower from your passive <3

Swarm is also pretty great. You get a mobility skill and powerful direct damage that eventually heals you <3

The concept is something I've been wanting for a long while - it really speaks to my inner basterd who just wants to cackle madly as his foes melt down into puddles of goo... (Waddayamean, it's just me ? :p )

I'm trying different builds right now to see if it is balanced. Some remarks, since there's no forum thread for this yet (take with a grain of salt, those only imply my personal opinion) :

- Poison Cloud scales pretty poorly for such an iconic power, AFAIC. Even with the stacking effect, it just FEELS much weaker than a Oozer's Poison Spores. Granted, we get it at level 0 instead of 4, but still. Maybe give it the ability of applying different poison types with additional levels (say deadly at level 1, numbing at level 3, and Insidious at level 5+, to keep it from being too powerful), or the same kind of crit bonus PS has ? Considering how many things are poison and/or diseaase resistant/immune in this game, it really needs to pack a bit more punch to justify investing in it.

- I have no idea why the class description emphasizes Willpower. Not a single one of the trees relies on it, it doesn't directly benefit the vim pool in any way, and the kill bounty bonus is too laughable to justify the investment (1 extra vim per TWENTY will ? Shia right...) I'd probably switch it to Cun - with DoTs, crit bonii can stack pretty damn fast.

- I get the feeling that Blood Feed is meant to be the main on-demand Vim source for the class (correct me if I'm wrong) since we lack both blood casting and drain. The idea is neat, but impractical : being stunned, dazed, silenced or confused has a good chance of preventing the use of the spell, yet it DEMANDS that we suffer some kind of impairment to work at all. So it's a toss-up between hoping it'll be useable, or finding it blocked, and clearing the status with an infusion... just to see it become ineffective.
I like the idea, really I do, but I've found myself short on vim AND unable to use this one too many time to buy into it. Same thing with Decayed Harvest - it's neat, except that when you've been manaclashed to zero Vim, it's kinda hard to find ways to disable AND kill a critter to recoup. Chances are, they'll disable and kill US first. A Defiler caster class really needs an at least semi-reliable way to regain some Vim.
I'd suggest maybe changing Blood Feed to draining our life into vim based on the number of impaired (or hurt) enemies in a certain radius - a kind of gamble : if you're neck-deep in critters, you could regain a LOT of vim... Assuming they're under status effects (or hurt), and you got enough life to take it. Or, heck, since it's supposed to "feed on our own suffering", just make it so it'll give us Vim based on the damage we take ? I dunno, just a thought. But as it is right now, I'm not sure it's really useable.

- Blinding Spray and Scythe Beetle starting at a radius of 2 means that some moderate to heavy point investment is needed to make those spells practical. I don't think upping the starting radius to 3 would be too crazy a power boost, frankly.

- EDIT : I just noticed that Vapour Form actually poison me, whereas Poison Cloud doesn't - which is weird since it's a Point-Blank, defensive spell that's supposed to protect me... All the more since there's no way to escape the effect, and a stacking 5-turns poisoning on a low-HP class is plain murder.

- Second EDIT : Poisoner's curse causes a LUA error. Where should I send it so HousePet can see it ? I feel I should specify that it WORKS, it just causes an error pop-up to appear.

Again, those are just my opinions, and I want to reiterate the fact that I really, REALLY love this class. So thanks, HousePet. :-p

I love this class! Great flavor, lots of fun skill trees (Swarm is just <3).

Did something happen today? I've been online most of the day after seeing a message telling us to play today. Did anything happen?

There are icons, but they're not showing up.
I'm sure HP will fix this as soon as they can, but here's a quick and dirty solution:
Extract all the files from the teaa. Put them in a folder named tome-witherer, and put the folder in the addon folder. Put the teaa somewhere else, or delete it - doesn't matter. When in a folder form, the icons will show up. This should not stop the character counting as legit.

Still the plan; thought nothing is ever certain until I announce a release date :)

is the release of the orcs campaign occurring this year still feasible?

Glad to see an update and a reference from a fantastic series!

Can't wait to hear more about the orc campaign and that new UI skin, and I'm glad to see more news being posted :D

This says it's a pack of subraces but I'm only seeing the Elkosh added. Should I be seeing more races or are they the only one implemented yet?

Every time I'll try to move talents on hotbar by mouse, or rightclick on empty space in hotbar, ToME drops lua error. Talent also often dissapears from hotbar when moved, so I need to use m menu to modify or move them.

Error for rightclick in empty space:

Lua Error: /mod/class/uiset/Minimalist.lua:1955: attempt to index local 'hk' (a nil value)
At [C]:-1 __index
At /mod/class/uiset/Minimalist.lua:1955 on_click
At ... custom_auto_use/superload/engine/HotkeysIconsDisplay.lua:50 onMouse
At /mod/class/uiset/Minimalist.lua:1942 fct
At /engine/Mouse.lua:56

Error for moving talent to other place on hotbar:

...custom_auto_use/superload/engine/HotkeysIconsDisplay.lua:56 attempt to index nil value
At [C]:-1 __index
At ...custom_auto_use/superload/engine/HotkeysIconsDisplay.lua:56 onMouse
At /engine/Mouse.lua:76

I use ToME 1.3.1 with ZOmnibus addon pack.

Trying it out so far. I agree, it's definitely evident you've spent time on the new zone, and the twist in the end is fun. I disagree with previous commentor about having to unlock the class, though; I like that you have to unlock it, myself. It's fun and cool.

A couple things that could make the zone better, IMO: (1) No auto-explore is tedious and irritating in this game. The graphics style is just too indistinct, and how the UI obscures the view when you're exploring the edge of a map just makes it painful. Enabling auto-explore would be nice!

(2) The lore and descriptive texts need some polishing. I'd be happy to do it, if you wanted.

Other than that, again, I like it and enjoyed the zone.

Thanks for reading and for making the mod!