Tome 2.x: what made it special? What did you like about it?

[Pagaronn]

Hi,

One thing that I find hard about RL like TOME is to find reviews. What is it game? What is special about it, What are the improvements over previous version? If I start a game, which one should I start (vanilla, fury or Theme!)?

I enjoyed watching review on youtube of games or reading old 1995 game review from Computer Gaming World when I dig in the past to see what people had to say about Ultime Underworld. For Angband variants, I didn't see anywhere reviews where someone took the time to explain the game. I guess, the fun is playing, exploring the skills possibilities...

I don't have the time right now to start a new variants. I'm invested in UnAngband and trying on side FrogPosChenBang on angband.live., but I would love to read your posts if you have a few minutes.

thanks for sharing your memories.

[Therem Harth]

I think my favorite thing about ToME 2 was just the sheer amount of Stuff. Character types, equipment, monsters, spells, the size of the world. Very little of it is balanced and IME that wound up limiting choices a lot in practice, but it's still a lot to explore.

It's also been kind of fun lately, seeing all the AAA first person looters show up on the market and being like, yeah, Z/ToME/Heng variants were doing this almost 20 years ago.

[emulord]

The brokenness of Alchemy and lost soul mode were what made it special to me.

[Derakon]

I think what made ToME2 special was that it gave you lots of powerful tools, but didn't demand that you abuse them. Like...

* Several classes (and one race, dwarves) got access to cheap, controlled teleportation.
* Possessors could steal the (ridiculously OP) bodies of monsters, getting gobs of HP, useful innate attributes, and extra equipment slots. Combos nicely with the Death Mold, which has amazing stats but is hampered by its default body...
* You could summon massive armies of allied units and just let them duke it out with the enemy from comparative safety, especially if you made use of...
* Spells that create terrain, especially Stone Prison which makes granite walls. Being able to control line-of-sight is huge, and there's a good reason why the Vanilla equivalent makes unlocked doors that take a single action to remove and can't be recreated in the same spot.
* Thaumaturgists can get spells that deal thousands of unresistable damage per cast while slowing their enemies so badly they might as well be in stasis.
* Alchemists can make weapons that give them dozens of extra attacks...albeit this is horrendously grindy, unlike most of the other paths to ultimate power. However, they can also craft non-artifact equipment reliably, including making their own consumables and having a risk-free way to recharge magic devices.
* Magic devices can deal absurd amounts of damage if you invest in their skills.
* You can trivially flip the curses on Amulets of DOOM, turning them from "-6 to all stats" to "+6 to all stats".
* Quests, random or otherwise, mean that there's gobs of free loot and skillpoints everywhere.

And sure, the upper end of the threat scale in ToME2 is significantly higher than the upper end in Vanilla. But it's not so much higher that, say, a Vanilla warrior (i.e. investing heavily in melee and archery skills but with no magic and limited device skills) with access to ToME2 equipment couldn't beat the game.

Then the game goes and gives you lots of places to romp around in and play with your toys. If you want to showboat you can try to beat a ringwraith before leaving the starting town. If you want to skip the early game, you can just head out into the wilderness and snag yourself a good 20 character levels with minimal risk or time investment. There's plenty of dungeons to explore with various gimmicks, and sure, some of 'em are dumb (looking at you, Labyrinth!) but there's nothing mandating that you do them, they're just there.

[Yottle]

What I love about Tome 2 is the vast number of possible characters. There are tanks like half-troll warriors (maybe using Antimagic) that just bulldoze their way through. There are sorcerors, ultimate magic users that can't melee anything. There are the pet-based classes like summoners and symbiants. There are alchemists. There are all of the apparently useless classes like bards. Multiply that by all the different races, sub-races, and gods and there are more starting possibilities than anyone could ever use. The most fun I ever had was a yeek hermit sorceror- that took me months to win with. On the opposite extreme I have won with a lost-soul deathmold sorceror in a few days.
Then there are all of the possibilities once the game starts of where to point skill points and what equipment to use. There are almost never enough points to max out everything you might use so the tradeoffs could go in very different directions.

[EpicMan]

Huge variety of character builds.
-I liked that the game had a bit of a story / campaign, where you investigate (i.e. kill, because its still a 'Band) the Necromancer, find out he's Sauron so go kill him, then get the One Ring and decide whether to destroy it (good guy ending) or wear it (bad guy ending). Then finally go after Morgoth.
-And if your build was super good you could then go into the Void / Nether Realm dungeon and destroy Morgoth's spirit form.
-The main dungeon is split into four dungeons corresponding with the four towns.
-Quests were more involved than in Poslikes and gave various special rewards, like unlocking houses in each town, adding a teleporter between towns 3 and 4, letting the player choose spells for a custom spellbook, etc.
-Antimagic swords that gave you better save / blocking enemy spells based on how negative the bonuses were. And a cursed ego (of Nothingness) that gave huge negatives (like up to -60, -60). Which made it a useless melee weapon, but allowed archer builds the option of just shutting down enemy spellcasting.

[AnonymousHero]

A bit late to the party, but...

My single favorite thing was some of the (probably unintended) crazy combos that you could pull of... For example: A possessor (which counts as a Magic skill[0]) finding the Right body and then going full Anti-magic via Lost Sword quests to deny all spellcasting around him... all the while wielding three weapons, three shields, etc. Another ridiculous one was Alchemy (the 'G' ability) *not* being considered a Magic skill (or am I misremembering?), so you could theoretically get to that skill, and then go full Anti-magic while powering up all your equipment to ridiculous bonuses.

[0] Tangentially, there is hypothetically a (unique?) scroll to allow you to use possession a SINGLE time, so you could even have been an Sword-master, Unbeliever (or whatever) and gained a few extra arms from the Right corpse just by finding that scroll and a good corpse... Anyway, I've played T2 a lot and I have never found this scroll and suspect that it may not actually be possible to spawn it.

[Yottle]

A bit late to the party, but...

My single favorite thing was some of the (probably unintended) crazy combos that you could pull of... For example: A possessor (which counts as a Magic skill[0]) finding the Right body and then going full Anti-magic via Lost Sword quests to deny all spellcasting around him... all the while wielding three weapons, three shields, etc. Another ridiculous one was Alchemy (the 'G' ability) *not* being considered a Magic skill (or am I misremembering?), so you could theoretically get to that skill, and then go full Anti-magic while powering up all your equipment to ridiculous bonuses.

[0] Tangentially, there is hypothetically a (unique?) scroll to allow you to use possession a SINGLE time, so you could even have been an Sword-master, Unbeliever (or whatever) and gained a few extra arms from the Right corpse just by finding that scroll and a good corpse... Anyway, I've played T2 a lot and I have never found this scroll and suspect that it may not actually be possible to spawn it.

I won with an Antimagic Alchemist, so it is possible. Easy, actually. What about an AA elf using artifact exploding ammo (which doesn't destroy itself)?
That scroll doesn't exist in 2.3.x (as I expect you know). It might have been there in earlier versions.

[AnonymousHero]

Heh, of course you did this, you madlad!

That scroll doesn't exist in 2.3.x (as I expect you know). It might have been there in earlier versions.

The scroll is definitely there in the game data, etc., but I suspect that it cannot be generated in game.

My favorite abuse of the antimagic possessor was a possessor playing the Theme mod with Joke monsters enabled, snagging Ingeborg the Runemistress' corpse to gain +2 extra weapon/shield slots and about 10K HP... and then going Antimagic and *casually* wielding a Dark Sword (0, 0) in the 3rd hand for 100% supression of magic while wielding a badass weapon in the 1st hand. It was a slaughter. (Interestingly, extra weapon slot didn't actually do that much in the old pre-AH versions, but IIRC I have ported a patch to actually make them work into my fork. It probably doesn't really matter because it's so OP anyway.)

[ster]

There is no appeal to ToME2. It was a progress simulator.

[Derakon]

If you're going to serve up hot takes, could you at least make them entertaining please?

[budswell]

Great fun variant.

Most success I have had in any variant. Favourite was my demonologist, I ended up dying as I got confused about which demons were mine.

Had the whole gods thing as well which added to normal class powers.

To add to the comments above about different play styles:
My favourite story was one formum member ("Wastrel" I think) who won the game with a hobbit rogue who only dealt damage directly by setting traps. Never hit or shot or wand/rod of damage. Lots of wands of stone to mud to set up "dances" and from memory they used a lot of charm monster wands too.
Remember reading it just "Wow - whole different level at this than me".

Oh, and the first time I tried the troll quest, was a long time before I gave that a go again.

[Sky]

nobody here mentioned that tome2 has a story? actual events?

[Archenoth]

Oh, I certainly appreciated that!

I originally discovered ToME 2 when I was on a computer that couldn't play ADOM, and was wondering if there were other roguelikes with an overworld, quests, and so on that I could get my hands on.

Coming from ADOM, ToME 2 had a drastically different feel--but I was into it.

Actually, ToME 2 was the reason I even got acquainted with bands to begin with!

[Roch]

nobody here mentioned that tome2 has a story? actual events?

Yes, the Void 🥶

So much to explore and do, AND it’s a fun game to play, that’s what made it great.