Talents

Talents are the permanent upgrades of the heroes in Pascal's Wager. Every hero has a talent tree of four pages, each page a web of up to 18 nodes. Nodes unlock moves, strengthen them, enlarge potion supplies and change how the hero behaves in the Abnormal state. They are bought with Immundus stones at an altar and can never be taken back. The trees of the individual heroes are listed in the table below; this page explains the rules they all share.

Overview#

• Pages. A slot number is page x 100 + position. Page 1 is Attack, 2 is Special, 3 is Alchemy and 4 is Sanity, each with positions 1 to 18, so 72 slots per hero. The shipped trees fill 34 to 38 of them. The unused slots are drawn on the grid with their connecting lines but have no data row.
• Nodes and levels. A node has 1 to 3 levels (one node in the whole game, in the Elena tree, has 4). Of 211 nodes, 147 have a single level. Its level cap is the number of stones listed for it.
• Roots. A node with no prerequisite is open from the start of its page.
• Default nodes. Each hero's basic moves start at level 1 without paying (table below).
• Elena is the Arcade mode hero and her tree works differently, see Elena talent tree.

Immundus stones#

Each level is paid with one stone of a fixed kind. The kinds are items 50001 to 50005.

The stones have no ordinary shop price (Price is -1 in the item table) and stack to 99. See Immundus for where they come from.

Stones needed to max every node, after the free default levels:

Elena's count covers only the nodes that list stones; her seven Sanity nodes list none (see below). The four base heroes together need 197 stones.

Prerequisites and learning#

1. Open an altar's menu (see Altars). The talent tab is read-only anywhere else: outside an altar the game shows a hint that an altar is needed.
2. Pick a node. It can be bought if its prerequisite node (the "Requires" column in the tree tables) is at level 1 or higher; the prerequisite does not need to be maxed. Nodes with no prerequisite are always available.
3. Each level to buy shows the stone it needs and a confirm box. You may add several levels before confirming if you hold the right stones. Confirming consumes the stones and applies the effect at once. When a node raises maximum Health or maximum Sanity, the game works out the matching Health or Sanity gain at purchase so the current value follows the maximum (inferred from the purchase code).
4. There is no refund. The panel lets you un-pick levels before confirming, but the game has no code path to remove learned levels (the only one is in the debug menu).

Starting nodes#

Effect types#

Every node has a numeric type that selects what it does. Values are stored as Value + ValueAdd x (level - 1), and when several learned nodes share a type their values are added together. "Permille" means thousandths: 100 is 10%. The value displayed in the node's text is a different column (TextValue) and does not always match what the game applies; see the hero articles for each mismatch. Heroes: T Terrence, V Viola, B Benita, N Norwood, J Jerold, E Elena. Types used by Terrence, Viola or Benita were traced in the code. Types used only by Norwood, Jerold or Elena are described from their node text and were not traced.

Achievements#

Hidden mechanics#

• The Condition column decides what a node touches. For move effects it is a list of move,combo pairs. For item effects it is a list of item ids or item types, for stat effects a stat id. A node that lists nothing applies to everything of its kind.
• Text and data can disagree. Descriptions are built from TextValue, effects from Value. Examples found in the first three trees: Viola's Adapt to Abnormality: Critical Strike (text 40%, real 30%), Benita's Lingering Wind Whisper (text 66.6%, real 50%), and Sanity: Enhanced Elixir on every hero (text 10, real 5).
• Lucky Madness does not use percent. It adds 5 or 10 to the weight of drop entries, and the code that rolls drops does not test the sanity state at all (controllerstorymode.lua:5355-5380 and fs_herodata.lua:401-431: no sanity condition).
• Abnormal-state nodes are modifiers of built-in effects, not new effects: they shrink a penalty or multiply a bonus that each hero already has. Their code tests IsHeroSanNotNormal, so they work in both the Abnormal and the Lunatic stage. See Abnormal state#How talents reshape these effects.
• Benita's blessing talent is global. The blessing roll reads Benita's talents directly, so Elixir Research helps even when you play someone else (see Blessing#Success chance).
• Unused feature: groups. The code supports talent groups (TalentParent, type 999) where children share a parent's level, but no row in the shipped table uses it.
• Elena's Sanity nodes are not bought. Seven of them are granted by defeating the seven Obsessed Ones in Arcade mode (each monster row names a talent to add) and are restored in later runs through the achievements for those fights. Details in Elena talent tree.
• Strange messages. The "not enough stone" messages use the labels "Not Enough Immundus" for both the Immundus and the Crystal stone and the bare text "Immundus Crystal" for the Diamond stone; this is a text-table oddity.
• Debug switch. A developer flag (DebugTalentOpenAll) forces every node to at least level 1; it is off in the shipped game.

Sources#

• reference/lua_src/gamedata/structdata/exportdata/es_herotalent.lua (211 rows) and luascript/structdata/ms_herotalent.lua:5-81 (type ids), 83-96.
• luascript/structdata/fs_talentdata.lua:5-45, 79-127, fs_herodata.lua:253-300, 342-372, 401-434, fs_herolist.lua:114-134.
• luascript/ui/controller/playerinfoctrl.lua:90-96 (stone kinds), 4280-4331, 4405-4460, 4562-4600, 4850-4930.
• luascript/controller/controllerstorymode.lua:8399-8412 (save menu opens the editor), 1536-1548 (end-of-run check), 1722-1735 (Arcade talent grant); luascript/structdata/fs_userdata.lua:109-123.
• luascript/structdata/ms_achievement.lua:22-46; table Achievement rows with ids 11002, 12007, 20004, 40008, 60002, 60005-60011.
• Table ItemData rows 50001-50005; table StoryMonster (column TalentAdd, 7 rows).
• Abnormal-state types re-checked in the heroes_a pass: animalbase_value.lua 2410 (Norwood), 2476 (Viola Brutality), 2746 (Jerold), 2625 (Benita) and animalbase.lua 6640, 8964 all call IsHeroSanNotNormal.
• Per-type code: logic/playervalue/animalbase_value.lua (many sections, listed in the hero articles), logic/player/animalbase.lua, logic/status/statusbase.lua.
• build/wiki/data/talents_a/talents.json was generated from the table for these pages.