This is about the skill Tenebrium.

I think this skill may require some looking at?

The premise is that in the end game weaponry is dependent on the Tenebrium (the mineral) upgrade, since even the enemies have Tenebrium weapons. (Of course it's not a mandatory upgrade, so the premise is open for discussion.)

Currently, Tenebrium weapons are modified exclusively by the Tenebrium weapon skill, regardless of weapon type, so bow users, crossbow users, 1 handed users and 2 handed users all receive bonuses to damage from the one weapon skill.

So long as your weapon has some minute amount of Tenebrium damage, the Tenebrium weapon bonus is applied. This bonus is based on the base damage of the weapon, not just the Tenebrium damage portion. Also, your Tenebrium weapons now no longer receive bonuses from your original weapon skills.

I.e. you've used daggers from the start so you've sunk 15 points into 1-handed. You find a Tenebrium dagger and you have 1 point in Tenebrium. The Tenebrium dagger receives no bonus from the 1-handed weapon branch but receives its damage bonus from the Tenebrium branch.

Issues with the current system:

- using the above example, your characters is as proficient with a Tenebrium dagger as s/he is with a Tenebrium crossbow or spear

- proficiency with a regular dagger has no bearing what so ever on a Tenebrium dagger

Suggestion:

Maybe Tenebrium skill should only modify the Tenebrium damage portion of the weapon? The original weapon skill will still modify the default weapon damage (i.e. crushing, slashing, piercing).


Any thoughts on this?

That idea works. I'd go as far as to suggest some internal consistency; the various Elemental skills also enhance elemental damage on weapons.

I like that idea

Is everyone else Ok with how the current Tenebrium skill works then?

I admit, for marksmanship or marksmanship/scoundrel this skill is great, why choose between bows, crossbows or 1 handed when you can just choose Tenebrium.

And for man-at-arms chars this is great too, you no longer need to choose between 1-handed or 2-handed. You can have both.

Just don't waste any points in the original weapon proficiencies and you don't even need to respec

My only problem is that makes the Tenebrium skill mostly pointless beyond 1 point. Why would you ever sink points into a skill that gives maybe +5 tenebrium damage per rank.

The elemental skills give bonus to weapon elemental damage? Cool, but they also allow you to cast a lot of powerful spells. Tenebrium doesn't, so if it did nothing but boost the tenebrium damage of weapons, they'd have to significantly increase the % at which it does. And at that point you're in a world of pain balance-wise because someone with total 10 points in weapon and tenebrium will do insane amounts of damage.

There's really no good way of doing it. I think they should make Tenebrium Handling a talent that can only be learned from whatever options there are now of unlocking the skill. If you want, add a second talent to boost tenebrium damage by +50% or something.

That way you're not dealing with the issue of one skill making others obsolete, you don't have to deal with balance issues regarding how much benefit you can get per skill rank, and just generally it's not something people need to be worrying about. You've learned how to handle Tenebrium, good for you, now continue on like nothing changed, because really, nothing has (other than unlocking a new material of weapons) (You would need to make it a talent that can't be unlearned via respec, I guess)

Tenebium staves

Well Tenebrium (skill) is actually a requirement for some Tenebrium weapons, so you need to increase your Tenebrium skill if you want to use higher level Tenebrium weapons, but I get what you are saying.

I like the Talent idea, it's probably the easiest solution in regards of maintaining game balance, but it would require modifying items, e.g. Take out the Tenebrium + modifiers that can spawn on items, remove Tenebrium skill level requirements from Tenebrium equipment. I'm not sure how easy it is to implement.

Would a different scaling for the Tenebrium damage bonus be workable?

E.g. -33% at 1, the skill just allows you to handle Tenebrium weapon, but there is actually a damage.
0% at 2, damage penalty removed, +33% at 3, +67% at 4, etc.

You get a lot more Tenebrium with this model but then again you are devoting a lot more points into weapon mastery, maybe you should benefit more from it?

Lol I know, eh?

well with the current model, you are as proficient with a Tenebrium staff as you are with a Tenebrium bastard sword. Maybe the current system is the superior method

Thematically, there being no overlap between the weapon skill and the Tenebrium skill can make some sort of sense when you realize that the skill is all about handling Tenebrium safely.

Imagine, if you will, a person who has both a water balloon filled with normal water and one filled with radioactive water. The person can be skilled with using the normal water balloon all he wants; flinging it, juggling it, etc etc, since there is no risk to his person. But the radioactive balloon requires more care, different techniques to handle properly without risking damage. A Water skill of 5 won't mean a thing if you're pulling your punches trying to use the radioactive balloon with 1 Tenebrium skill.

Conversely, the techniques used to handle the radioactive water balloon would have little effectiveness when handling normal water balloons.

The point I'm trying to get at is that the Tenebrium skill is like an exotic stance that all weapons have; it's not really compatible with how the weapons would be wielded normally if they weren't radioactive pieces of Rot.

I'd agree with that if Tenebrium weapons didn't came in different flavours.

Using your analogy, let's say we also have water guns in our water weapon arsenal. I think we can agree the way you use water balloons vastly differ than the way you use water guns. Now you add radioactive water. While it's true we need new techniques to handle radioactive water, you still don't handle radioactive balloons the same way you would use radioactive water guns.

But anyways I just wanted to point out the weirdness in how weapons proficiencies are applied, but is everyone else happy with this then?

With the advent of the tenebrium skill, mages should have a Void spell equivalent, but that's a gripe for another day.

Now, I'd just settle for actually having tenebrium staves in the game...

But that's the thing, would a Tenebrium staff even be an upgrade for a Mage!?!

Depends on the stats, but mostly because:

a) Crackly evil staff of ominous purple doom

b) A certain quest in Luculla Forest

c) Crackly evil staff of ominous purple doom

Add in a black-dyed robe and hood, laugh.

Exactly, I haven't really seen a staff that would benefit from the Tenebrium upgrade. Staff of Magus is actually dependent on the 2 handed weapon proficiency

+1 for crackly evil staff of ominous purple doom though

One of my thoughts is that staves could add their elemental damage to the damage done by spells of that element, but that runs into the problem of tenebrium again...

Maybe a theoretical tenebrium staff always adds its tenebrium damage to any spell of any element...

At the very least, mages would have a reason to upgrade their staves.

That would require extensive work.

I'm here thinking worst case scenario, we'd have to make the mods ourselves. This would mean we'd have to rebalance all the spells for weapon bonus on top of adding new calculations to determine net spell effect. Lol do you have an easier idea to implement?

It seems the only people interested in this is us two?

Maybe I should have made the title more salacious?

"Worst game ever! Tenebrium broken! Needs fix now!"

The easiest idea, straight up, would be for staves to have a special pool of staff-only suffixes and affixes. Dunno how that would work for scripting, but maybe staves have a higher chance of spawning with Int or mage skill modifiers, or with spells?

Or maybe staves act like the Elemental Affinity talent, lowering AP cost for spells of the staff's element by 1.

Affinity with stave bonus means -2AP... I think the staff bonus should be applicable on one particular spell only then, not an entire spell category. It's a lot better than 15% chance to blind on a staff but it wouldn't be over powering

Looking at item stats it looks like it wouldn't be too bad adding staff only modifiers, provided Larian gives us better tools to add resources like that.

Yeah, that's fine too.

Glad I read this before end game. I would be pissed about having wasted points.

Perhaps the Tenebrium requirement on the weapon should subtract from the normal weapon skill (representing the difficulty in handling a Tenebrium weapon safely), and each point in the Tenbrium skill offsets that penalty.

i.e. a tenebrium requirement of 3 on a two-handed sword applies a -3 to the users two-handed weapon skill, but can be lowered to a penalty of -1 to the two-handed weapon skill if the user had a tenebrium skill of 2.

Let me get this straight. late game there are weapons which are superior but can only be used with tenebrium skill. So all the points you put in to your normal weapon skills become useless. Seriously who is the person that designed this? How does crap like this happen?

Tenebrium skill could perhaps have a prerequisite of 5 in a main weapon skill. You could then only use tenebrium weapons which match your chosen weapon skill. Ranking up tenebrium would apply a small damage bonus perhaps? 5% 5% 5% etc. Maybe this would contribute too much to the damage snowball effect late game.



+ or - what? AP? This could work and end game damage wouldn't snowball with more damage bonuses. I haven't made it to end game yet but have read it gets easy, even on hard. Perhaps combine your suggestion with mine, a primary weapon skill prerequisite of 5 and only use tenebrium weapons of your chosen weapon skill. I like it.

I'm beginning to wonder if I should pursue my current save or wait for another patch or two.

I'd go as far as to suggest that high-end talents need to be looked at as well. There's such a disparity between mage and rogue archetype talents, and warrior talents, that it's almost painful, balance-wise.

Rogue archetypes (MM, SC) and warrior (MaA) archetypes share Leech and Zombie, but the MaA prerequisite talents blow every other talent out of the water with just how powerful they are. Rogues get Guerrilla and that one sneak talent that lets you move at normal rate when sneaking (which is more utility than anything), and Mages get that +2m range talent and that +1 Int talent, and...that's about it. Demon and Ice King are horrendous, with only the Geomancer talent being anywhere near MaA talents, and even then it's still trailing far behind.

I don't know if Tenebrium was originally handled this way during concept or alpha. For example, there is one unique dagger (Snakebite) in the game that comes Tenebrium damage. One of the modifiers on the dagger is +1 handed; there is no +1 Tenebrium on the dagger

If the normal weapon abilities weren't supposed to modify Tenebrium weapons, then this unique weapon was made as a slap in the face for rogues.

Also, why bother separating bows and crossbows in the regular damage trees when there is no separation for Tenebrium bows and crossbows?

@Vedros
If you are going to respec, I suggest hunting for skillbooks

@LordOfBOnes
Also, how about the talents Bigger and Better as well as All Skipped Up? Those 2 talents seem to be made to encourage people to respec.

Funny enough there was some talent balancing that nerfed the rogues. If you look in the code there is a talent for rogues that reduced basic attack AP to 1.

weapons actually made of tenebrium directly are usually a fair bit stronger than equal weapons (outside of crafted ones). I think that was their form of balancing since they probably assumed players would have already invested into whatever weapon they preferred.

Personally I'm among the crowd of 'i can make a normal weapon and toss a tenebrium ingot on it instead of bothering with tenebrium's skill'

BaB and ASU are general talents, so I'm not too fussed about them; you could just as easily use those to grab that extra bit needed for a 5 in your specialized skills.

But the talents that have skill prerequisites, however, are weird. Man at Arms blows every other skill out of the water with its talents.

@Dogi

I can live with the way the Tenebrium skill is right now because as it stands, it's a better weapon ability to abuse than the others anyway. As you said, Tenebrium weapons are already beefed up and letting the skill apply a bonus to the entire weapon adds even more oomph. I just thought others might be interested in knowing how this skill, um, shifts the game balance.

A lot of people say the end game is easy enough but Tenebrium is like extra icing on the cake.

@LordofBones

Well, with the amount of posts by people wailing about how underprivileged melee characters are, you'd think Man-At-Arms characters need all the help they can get so why not super talents

This is a bad design. A person should not get over half through the game only to realize all those points in a dedicated weapon type become useless. If skill books were not such a pain in the rear i could chalk it up as a money sink, but that is simply not the case. with the randomness of acquiring skill books its just bad design for this to happen.

tenebrium skill should probably just be removed and replaced by normal weapon skill.

i would suggest things like letting the stack for reduced amounts or something, but with skill points being limited this would also be a bad design. you simply do not have the points to double-up on a weapon skill like that.

Man At Arms? Underpriveleged?

MAN AT ARMS?

Man, I can understand the mage schools or scoundrel, but Man At Arms? Rage + Nullify + Flurry = Murderhobo.

I'd say melee, ranged, staves, robes and armor should each have their own pool of suffixes and affixes, with unique items having scripted abilities or effects. Magic armor should always spawn with a +1 to their governing attribute (Int for robes, Dex for leather, Str for scale/plate) in addition to any secondary stats.

Also, I'd heavily suggest that Sarongs should have Str and Dex counterparts...surcoats and kilts, maybe?

I think part of the lack of responses to this may be that many people, myself included, are having a hard time wrapping our minds around this tenebrium concept.

If I understand, even if you have 15 in 1 hand skill, you suddenly get no benefit from using a tenebrium dagger because of the material its made of? Your 15 points are irrelevant to your use of a 1 hand weapon made of tenebrium? And yet points in the tenebrium skill allow you to use a 2 handed tenebrium bastard sword with the same effectiveness as a tenebrium dagger?

If I am understanding this correctly, its one of the worst RPG game mechanics dealing with weapon skills I have ever seen.

If its a particularly rare material with specific usage requirements from a story line perspective, I can see there being penalties to your weapon relevant skill that might be offset by a talent or skill line. But no one skill should allow you to use completely different weapons with equal efficiency and no material should be so exotic as to completely negate extensive experience with a weapon.

I would very much like to see Larian or the mod community fix this (unless I am mistaken in my understanding).

You are. And it should come as no surprise to anyone who noticed the damage type triangle on weapons and how pointless of an addition they've made that. The Diablo 2 solution to doing the exact same thing the "damage type triangle" accomplishes is much better.

Rather than bothering with damage types that are almost completely ignored they simply gave +50% damage to undeads to every single mace.

Piercing and slashing almost never being different, or at least different enough to notice the difference is a joke. Not having the choice between them (Dex characters always use piercing, and strength characters almost always use slashing with a choice coming up very rarely) further removes the point of having it.

That is my thinking as well, and why I suggested that the Tenebrium requirement on the weapon subtract from the normal weapon skill (representing the difficulty in handling a Tenebrium weapon safely), and each point in the Tenbrium skill offsets that penalty.

i.e. a tenebrium requirement of 3 on a two-handed sword applies a -3 to the users two-handed weapon skill, but can be lowered to a penalty of -1 to the two-handed weapon skill if the user had a tenebrium skill of 2.

That said, I am not using Tenebrium weapons yet in my game and may be missing something.

I'm at the point in the game where I have gathered Tenebrium enough to probably enhance every weapon I get from here on out with it ... and suddenly find that enhancing a weapon with it causes my damage to decrease! And you can't respec henchmen...

That would functionally be WORSE than the way it is now, since you'd have to invest in BOTH skills, or neither. At least this way if you haven't invested (or respec) you only need to invest in one.

Honestly, I'm a little more concerned with protecting players who have invested points in a weapon skill than not trying to make things even simpler for those who haven't. I don't feel that having 0 skill in (example) two-handed weapons and 2 points in Tenebrium handling should make you a better two-handed tenebrium swordsman than someone with a maxed two-handed weapon skill and 1 point in Tenebrium handling.

Respec is so poorly implemented I don't see it as an option. People should not have to risk permanently losing skills/spells just to respec for Tenebrium handling.

So I'm just checking out the forums and I notice this thread. "No," I think, "that's just too stupid to be true." So I start up the game and find myself a +1 Bow item so I can check out how my archer's damage changes with her Tenebrium bow. No change whatsoever.

So then I think, "holy crap, it really is true. Wow, is that ever insanely stupid." (But with more curse words involved.)

I'm not sure what the fix is, but the point should be: being skilled with bows, or one-handers, or whatever, shouldn't just go away because it happens to be a Tenebrium weapon.

@LordOfBones
Surcounts and kilts would be awesome, along with cloth bracers and boots beyond level 7...

I think the armors should still be able to get other traits other their primary, though, for hybrid builds.

@Jei
You understood it perfectly

Free Tenebrium ores and slabs are as common as, well, I don't think there is anything more common than Tenebrium in the game... maybe empty bottles and cups. Even if your weapon is not originally made of Tenebrium, you can upgrade it anytime (except for staves) if you have a person with skills in blacksmithing. You can't remove Tenebrium.

@Tyhan
Actually, there are enemies in the game who are immune to piercing but not crushing/slashing. Just not a lot of them...

@Gyson
That's not a bad idea. Since Tenebrium weapons are supposed to be more beefy than common weapons, the penalty makes sense.

At this point, I'm OK with just taking out the Tenebrium bonus damage all together. They can make it strictly a requirement for using a Tenebrium grade weapon and let the original weapon ability apply the damage the bonus instead.

@thrakkemarn, ScrotieMcB
I was pretty surprised when I first noticed this and I'm glad I'm not the only one. Hopefully the devs get a chance to rework the ability before we resort to mods.

Just did my first playthrough, tbh didn't pay so much attention to the actual weapon damage since I was convinced that both skills would determine damage. I'm quite surpised this is not the case.

However all this talk about tenebrium being so called "superior" weapons is not really true. You find a alot of non-tenebrium high dmg weapons in late game, even legendary ones. I was specced +5 one hand and +5 tenebrium and I even ended up using a non-tenebrium weapon in the last battle because it was superior damage. Didn't craft any weapons at all.

I agree though that tenebrium skill should be reworked, because wasted points is not good, however it should not buff man at arms users. I found my man-at-arms user to be extremely hard hitting (flurry, battering ram, whirlwind) and had the best synergy with talents. I mean weather the storm is completely insane, 50% resist all elemental damage permanent and picture of health 25% extra vitality, bully 50% dmg vs. some disabled.... None of this insane talents were available for magic users.
However magic users is not to be called bad either, meteor storm is the most hard hitting spell in the game, even on single targets, the witch finger or whatever its called is not too bad either.

Yeah, what I meant was that, for example, magic plate would always spawn with +1 Str and +1 to any other attribute, so both pure archetypes and hybrids don't feel cheated.

Well lets face it, it is lame. And if you don't like it, the simple solution is to download a cheat engine table and just convert your 1h/2h/bow/xbow level in to Tenebrium once it feels appropriate to do so.

@Casta
I did say that the premise Tenebrium weapons are your ultimate weapons is debatable. Of course it's not necessary. I can play the game with white weapons and no armor if I wanted to. For the people who like to maximize their numbers though, Tenebrium weapons are the best choice.

Say you sharpened your cleaver and added an elemental essence, the most you can improve a regular weapon. It's at 100-200 slashing, 40-80 Fire. With 1-handed mastery at 5, your potential is 210 - 420, avg 315.

Now you add Tenebrium. This means the weapon is at 100-200 slashing, 40-80 fire, 40-80 Tenebrium. Assuming you maxed Tenebrium to 5 and got the quest which gives you +1 Tenebrium, your potential is now 288 - 576, avg 432.

With how weapon mastery works, I'm not sure how you can buff one class and nerd another. Like LordOfBones said, it's more the talents being unbalanced

Actually the simple solution is to abuse the ability by using it exclusively. This mechanic only punishes the people who didn't know better and invested in the normal weapon abilities.

It's a better weapon ability (since it doesn't discriminate on weapon type, and you get a free bonus from quest) for better weapons (see my post to Casta about the numbers).

There is also a Book in the geomancer's shop that gives one char +1 Tenebrium. Add another +1 from your gear and your Warrior can get an average damage of >1000 per hit (unbuffed!).

Thanks forgot that one

But yeah it's easy to get 5+ Tenebrium without even adding +Tenebrium gear whereas with regular weapon abilities you don't get that

yes, obviously ignoring weapon skills until tenebrium is the way to go. that is not rocket science.

however, this is a 1 player game. a player who does not come to the forums and do extensive research about his entertainment should not end up punished by stupid game mechanics.

its a bad design, period. you start off with selective weapon skills forcing specialization. then magically later on tenebrium appears that covers all weapons with 1 skill while rendering all of those points completely wasted.

there is no way you can spin that where it is a good game design.

the only possible excuse could be if it were intended to be a money sink to force a respec cost. however, with the enormous pain of acquiring skill books that is not an acceptable excuse.

I am not. I personally think this is poor design. I'm just responding to BlackMarch who seems to be suggesting that a character editor is the solution to this problem.

Here are the changes I'd like to see:
1. Rot now comes in various strengths. The highest possible strength is 5, which means you take 5 Tenebrium damage per tick. Also, the rot in the Immaculate Trial now varies according to difficulty: Rot 1 for Easy, Rot 2 for Normal, Rot 3 for Hard.
2. The Tenebrium ability itself doesn't increase damage at all; instead, its sole function is to mitigate Rot. So if you have Rot 4 and Tenebrium 3, you only take 1 Tenebrium damage per tick, instead of 4. Additionally, each point provides 5% Tenebrium resistance. It is reclassified as a Defense ability. The damage ability for the actual weapon in question (ex: One-Handed) would always apply.
3. When crafting Tenebrium weapons, you can add Tenebrium Bars to the weapon up to 5 times. Each time increases the Tenebrium damage further (7% of base physical damage per bar), but also increments its Rot index (up to 5). You need both Tenebrium and Crafting equal to the level you are going up towards in order to make the new weapon (so for Rot 5 you'd need Tiberium 5 and Crafting 5). No weapon would have a Tenebrium skill requirement to equip, merely a suggestion (assuming you don't like being inflicted with Rot).
4. Being struck with a Tenebrium weapon has a chance of inflicting Rot on the being struck, equal to the Rot of that weapon.
5. When you get the Tenebrium ability from Brandon, it adds one hard point to your Tenebrium abilities, not one boost point. That means the second point would cost 2 ability points, not one.
6. The book in the Geomancer's shop is renamed "Advanced Tiberium Use" or something similar, and adds one boost point to Tenebrium, but does not unlock the skill for further development; you'll have to get the ability from Brandon if you want to invest ability points in it.
7. Weapons cannot roll the Tenebrium ability (ex: +1 Tenebrium; of course they can still be Rot 4 or whatever). Other gear slots can.
8. Tenebrium itself (ore, bars) is Rot 5. Using the Blood Stone case is highly recommended.

I must say that I am quite surprised how the game suddenly introduces a new weapon type late in the game, completely making all other points invested in bows/crossbows/one handed/two handed useless.
Now one could go for a respec, but that would mean losing all skills.

Without reading through the entire thread, I completely agree with the OP and I hope Larian will fix this huge mistake.

@ScrotieMcB

I don't think 5 per tick is really punishing enough. I have no problem throwing a heal spell every now and then so that I don't have to sink 15 points into a skill. Maybe 5% of your life

@Gotcha!

Glad you agree, how would you want Larian to fix it?

It's a lot more punishing than what we have now.

Maybe make it an all-or-nothing thing. Ex: Tenebrium 5 would prevent Rot 5 completely, but Tenebrium 4 wouldn't do anything. Then you could balance whatever damage numbers you need to in order to make it effective; perhaps it would be (Rot number * level), in which case Rot 5 on a level 18 character would do 90 per turn. You'd probably notice that, even with 1600 Life.

Oh woe is me ... atm my skill is either too low or it's not even possible to enhance blunt or staves weapons with tenebrium. So poor Jahar, which I refrained from upgrading has all these points to spend, but I can't even get him a tenny staff! I'll just make him a pure mage then and just skill up his water & air, I was thinking that he would make a good witch & I already looted a bunch of witchy skill books that no one in my band of miscreants can even read.

I don't think staves can get Tenebrium'd.