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talents

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Talents are all of the skills and spells your character can learn. Most are available based on your class, although some can be learned from escort quests or other quests.

There are three basic types of talents: Passive, Active and Sustained. Passive talents are always in effect once you know them; you don't have to do anything to make them work, and they cannot be deactivated by enemies. An example of a passive talent is Combat Accuracy.

Active talents have to be triggered, either by pressing a hotkey or clicking an icon on the talent/hotkey bar at the bottom of the screen. There is often (but not always) a resource cost to activate the talent, and a cooldown period before the talent can be used again.

Most active talents cost 1 turn to activate, but some are instantaneous (notably, wild wild infusions and shielding runes and most of the basic racial talents). Some active talents affect only the character using them (e.g. healing, teleport, shielding, ...), while others are targeted at a single opponent (Dirty Fighting, Assault), or a selectable area of the map (Fire Breath), or the tiles around the character (Death Dance), etc. Some of them produce effects that linger for a while (on the map, or on characters); others are resolved immediately. Each talent is different.

Sustained talents are triggered like active talents, but they remain in effect until deactivated. Most of them produce an effect that benefits the character using them; for example, Icy Skin gives Armour and cold retaliation damage. Most sustained talents have a resource cost associated with them, which decreases the total available pool of that resource for as long as the talent is in effect. For example, Blur Sight is a sustained talent with a Mana cost of 30. If your character has a pool of 200 Mana, activating Blur Sight will decrease your Mana pool to 170. Stamina-using sustained talents work similarly.

Sustained talents that use Equilibrium or Paradox work a little bit differently, since those resources operate in reverse. Icy Skin has a sustained Equilibrium cost of 30. Normally, your Equilibrium level will drop toward 0 when Meditating or walking on the world map. When Icy Skin is in effect, your Equilibrium level will not drop below 30. Likewise, Weapon Folding has a sustained Paradox cost of 75. When it's in effect, your Paradox level cannot drop below 75.

Sustained talents, and effects obtained from active talents, can sometimes be deactivated by enemies. Be careful out there!

Formulas

Documenting the effects of the talents is quite difficult because the code is not only complicated, but also changing. Many of the wiki pages have incorrect or incomplete numbers, or are just plain missing whole sections. This is all a work in progress.

Here are some notes on reading the source code, which is the only way we can get this documentation back into shape.

Talent Damage

Many talents use one of the functions combatTalentPhysicalDamage(t, base, max) or combatTalentMindDamage(t, base, max) or combatTalentSpellDamage(t, base, max). (These aren't just used to calculate damages, either -- they are used for all kinds of numeric outputs.) Explaining these functions requires several steps.

The first thing to understand is that each of these functions has another hidden input. For combatTalentPhysicalDamage, your Physical Power is also used. For combatTalentMindDamage your Mindpower is used, and for combatTalentSpellDamage your Spellpower is used.

Next, max is used to fix a sort of upper bound on the function's output. max is the value that the function should produce (before the final rescaling step) if your Power (physical, mind or spell) level is 100 and your effective talent level is 5. A modifier is calculated using this formula:

 mod = max / [(base + 100) * ((sqrt[5] - 1) * 0.8 + 1)]

Then the formula is reused, only this time with your Power level instead of 100, and your effective talent level instead of 5, and is scaled using the modifier:

 raw_dmg = [(base + power) * ((sqrt[talent] - 1) * 0.8 + 1)] * mod

Finally, the damage is rescaled:

 dmg = raw_dmg ^ 1.04

Let's try an example: Resolve (Wild-gift/Antimagic) gives, among other things, an effect which confers combatTalentMindDamage(t, 10, 40) percent elemental resistance. What does this mean for us?

Well, we know that if we had 100 Mindpower and an effective talent level of 5 in Resolve, it would give (40 ^ 1.04)% resistance (or 46.36%), because the third argument (max) is 40. From max, we can calculate the internal mod variable:

 mod = 40 / [(10 + 100) * ((sqrt[5] - 1) * 0.8 + 1)]
     = 0.1828

Now, given a talent level and a Mindpower level, we can calculate how much "damage" (resistance) it gives. With two inputs and one output, we'd need a three-dimensional plot to show the results graphically, and it would be hard to read. It might be more helpful (and it's certainly easier) to take a few arbitrary input pairs and calculate the result:

 Talent  Mindpower  Resistance
  1.00      20         5.87%
  2.00      30        10.66%
  4.00      45        20.32%
  5.00     100        46.35%

mindDamage

Someone made up the shorthand notation mindDamage(x, y). This is equivalent to combatTalentMindDamage(t, x, y) from the previous section.

Talent Modifier

Talent Modifier (which is used in the Talent Damage calculation, above) is calculated as:

 (sqrt[talent] -1) * 0.8 + 1

Here's a table of values for common talent levels.

effective talent level -> talent modifier
0.0 -> 0.20
0.7 -> 0.87
1.0 -> 1.00
1.3 -> 1.11
2.0 -> 1.33
2.6 -> 1.49
3.0 -> 1.58
3.9 -> 1.78
4.0 -> 1.80
5.0 -> 1.99
5.2 -> 2.02
6.5 -> 2.24

Stat[num] or getStat(num)

Those simply mean (Stat * (num / 100)).
Sometimes there are up to 2 boolean values after the number. If the first one (or the only one) is false, the value will be rounded down. If the second one is true, only raw stat values are used (no racial, item, talent or effect changes).