ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Which list are you referring to?

_________________
<shesh> cursed is fine

Your list, which indeed is very good, so your call.

I'm of course in the camp that (1) it's only using skills doing exactly what they say they are going to do, (2) it's not actually infinite damage, although very high, and not a spell, so 'only' single target, (3) it's on a long CD at 20 turns. That said, do I think it should be nerfed? Yeah, I do. But many madness builds have been nerfed over time. That doesn't mean that they haven't won.

But not all things that should be nerfed are exploits. Actually, many of the combos used for madness wins are really quite abusive, and borderline exploits. Is Attenuate with its genuine potentially infinite damage an exploit? Is AB with Sawrd / projection egos an exploit? Is timeless on Continuous Butchery an exploit? Is simply using Mercy with some skills an exploit? I'm sure many examples exist. To me, it seems you've drawn the line rather arbitrarily, just because you don't like it.

Should things count as an exploit only based on insane damage, or should ridiculous defences / utility not also be considered exploits? For example, AM is essentially invincible with enough -CD reduction, surely that is an exploit as well then? Sure, the game takes longer and requires even more patience, but in the end, you've simply broken the game mechanics here too?

I suppose, if we take Kruzifixxion view of the world that only fully documented wins should be tier S, then absolutely fair enough, let's stick to making it Possessor only. But even on possessor, I recall there being some dodgy stuff about possessing your own shadow? Sounded borderline exploit in the same vein, but I don't know the details I admit.

The win aside, it should still not be a tier C class, as it has incredibly strong utility with ice wall, lightning speed and burrow.

Some more food for thought, did these documented Possessor wins use/abuse Projection? Because pretty much every possessor guide I've read encourages everyone to abuse Projection, because Projection's ACTUAL effect kind of sucks a lot but Projection's abuseable effects, like using psionic minions without expending a body or abusing separate cooldowns, are incredibly valuable and are a large part of a strong possessor.

_________________
Let slip the toast of war.

You don't need any spell cooldown reduction to have 100% Stone Wall uptime, just sustain Stone Skin and melee attack yourself to reduce its cooldown.

To be clear - actually I don't think any of the things I mentioned are truly exploits, I think they are just incredibly OP skills, similar to what was used in the Wyrmic run. The argument was more that, either in they are all using exploits, or they are all using OP skills. Also the point was the 'invincibility' is as much an exploit as 'extreme damage'.

In general, you speak as you're 100% sure that all these wins are not legit? What proof do you have of this claim beyond not having seen the proof? Genuinely curious as I haven't heard / seen it. Also, you seem to refer to a shift in the community opinion on how to view this, what is this based on? I haven't seen anything on it myself, but I might have missed it. I'm in the chat a lot, and certainly haven't seen in there, and if here on the forum, I must have missed it.

In my mind there's three different steps (1) legitimate and proven, as the possessor run you mentioned, (2) legitimate but not proven, or (3) illegitimate. Point here being that just because you don't trust it, that doesn't mean that the win is not legitimate - in my mind (2) would still be a real win. Of course, people are allowed to not trust (2), but that is a completely separate point. The AM/AB/PM/SB/Brawler wins are all either (2) or (3) - from what I know there's no way to know. Calling everyone cheaters just because they haven't recorded their game-play for 24+ hours feels rather harsh to me. Finally, even when recording, surely one can still savescum by editing out parts? Unless it is all streamed live?

On a small separate note, I've personally got past Vor A with PM (died in second Pride), without any savescumming at all. Of course, as per the discussion above you're free to not believe in that, but I don't really have any reason to lie about a character that didn't win. So, I well understand how the temporal fugue stuff works.

Minmay: Didn't realise stone wall was even more broken than I thought!

_________________

Fair enough, interesting comments and a helpful perspective. Overall I'm still in the camp of it's a question of "Do you want to believe or not?", where you're very much in the no camp - and nothing wrong with that.

I also agree that just because something is 'madness viable' doesn't mean it's a fun and / or OP play for the average player - many of the madness builds would still require a huge amount of patience and excellent execution.

One thing I'd like to add to what you mentioned though, the fact that even strong players struggle when streaming isn't surprising, for let's be real here, any win on madness requires a looot of play, so unless you stream for hundreds of hours, that isn't conclusive. Beyond this, some players (like me) just hate the concept of streaming. You and anyone else is free to not believe, at the end of the day I'm happy with knowing myself what has been achieved, if others believe it really is secondary. Possessors are a bit of a special case, simply because they're a bit of an insane class that actually benefits from the crazy madness monsters.

I agree that I think the strength of AB is overplayed in general. Theoretical damage is huge, but getting there is very, very hard.

On AM, I slightly disagree - it's a class that requires a ridiculous amounts of patience, but by all accounts should be able to get there. As long as you have perfect control, damage output is basically irrelevant. That said, my own madness AM died in dreadfell as you predicted (though I think this was mostly because a mistake on my side, rather than a weakness of the class)

What's the discord servers and stuff you mentioned? Are they actually active?

The discord is pretty active when we're talking in it, we even got darkgod & shibari in there

https://discord.gg/9pmFGKx then join the #tome channel