The Tavern

Does it suck, is it great, what

I like it for the character building aspect. I like it as much as crawl but for different reasons.

There's a couple of topics on the Tavern about Te4 already.

In my personal opinion ToME is fun until you try to play it seriously. Then you realize how fucking wonky the majority of skills are and how seriously unfun 'optimal' play is. ToME is also a prime example of content bloat. It's worth a shot though; I have spent a solid 40+ hours on it and enjoyed most of them.

Can you elaborate on that

Sure can!

So, LoS is not reciprocal in ToME making it important that you always scout out ahead of the PC's LoS. Fortunately (or unfortunately) there are a good bit of skills that allow you to do this, such as Arcane Eye. Anybody who has won a Te4 game on nightmare will tell you how important scouting skills are in serious play due to the independent LoS and the ubiquitousness of 'unique' monsters in Te4 which can very well one-shot even the tankiest of characters on higher difficulties.

As for the wonkiness of skills, I mean, you just gotta try it to see what I mean. The game is still very much under construction. There are many, many skills that are worth flat out ignoring and a handful of 'must have' skills. Not saying thats necessarily a problem, of course, and for many people seperating out the shit skills from the worthwhile ones can be part of the fun.

Again, I've enjoyed the heck out of this game (even bought it on Steam with the DLC) and encourage you to give it a shot.

In addition to what Greyr said, imagine a version of crawl where detect creatures spell still exists, there are no clocks of any kind, there are pickaxes, you can farm for fixedarts, and summons can still attack outside of los and are easily teleported. This should give you a good idea of what optimal play in ToME4 is like. Not surprising I guess, since it has its roots in Angband, but still.
To make it worse, on the higher difficulties, most classes simply cannot reasonably win without abusing these things, and the ones that can are the ones that have some other really insane abuse (highlights: extending your HP by over 1000%, camping inside a wall, creating a clone of your character that suffers no penalty for dying and can be directly controlled, ddoor-style literal invincibility except you still have full HP afterwards).
Also, terrible performance and stability, really huge levels, really long and numerous branches, and ridiculous amounts of equipment swapping.

Note that if you're playing on Normal almost none of these problems are relevant.

If you want to try tome my advise is to not play on nightmare+roguelike, and just enjoy the skills and hack'slash elements of the game. My favorite and pretty much the only thing i played was cornac arcane blade.

I do not have a very long period of time play, I do not know the status quo.

The disadvantage of tome4 is terrible game balance (a lot of one-shot kill/death) and very huge and boring level (like gehenna of nethack) and boring and patience and luck based unlockables.

most of the game is the spam of z use attack talent r.

If it is modified, it will be a great game.