[Ranylyn]

Kameron8 » Tue Jun 09, 2015 10:57 pm[/url]"]

Reducing the M reduction to 1 constantly would make the skill pointless.

I vote to leave this as-is. "Perma-knockdown" is only successful if the mage stays in a one-tile range, which most would rather not do, I'm sure.

If you ever get tome smacked in melee range, unless your move is greater than the person smacking you with the tome, you will never be able to get away. If you use your one action at 5m to run away, they use their two to run up to you, and tome smack again. For a trait that is meant to give diversity to different weapons, this one is way too crippling in particular situations.

If your opponent is attacking with a Tome, why are you trying to run away? You don't get good Wil + Def builds (Hexer exists, but I'm the only one crazy enough to level as a Haxer judging from all the Hexer balances made based on Evoker will) so they're either doing poor damage or you can deal very hefty damage right back. A one-tile range is nigh-suicidal for many tome users to sustain for long. Sure, there's always ways to exploit this, such as Life Drain to mitigate the damage the Tome Smacker needs to worry about, and of course Sderg mentioned the highly situational infinite loop that only one very specific class combo can exploit, but overall, it's not a massive issue.

If the M cost reduction WAS only 1, there'd be no point to ever Smacking at all, ever; your opponent would still get two actions, and you would not want to stay at that range/ attack with the tome.

That said, I AM fully in support of making it do PHYSICAL damage. As well as probably giving it a substantial penalty to hit, because dodging a book is likely far easier than the magic within it's pages.