ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hello. I'm interested in building character around very high (150+) CON with 40+ CON Amulet of the moon included (for Subcutaneous Metallisation in particular). So I'm looking for classes with notable CON scaling skills. Any ideas/tips what classes/categories I should pay attention to? Secondary stat will probably be STR with PES to further boost CON. But if there are magic CON users STR is not set in stone.

As for Race, I'd most likely go with Ghoul, since despite their disadvantages they have perfect skillset to utilise heavy CON build.

Bulwark is quite obvious, but I'm looking into something more unconventional. Conditioning is another obvious one.

Con is not remotely useful for pretty much anything, the only talents I can think of off the top of my head that even scale with Con are Technique/Conditioning, which has no attacks.

If you want a Con class, your options are to use it as a secondary skill on a fighter class like Zerker or Bulwark, where it does you no good besides some mostly negligible max HP, healmod, and phys save, or get some addon classes. Radiant, from the Celestial Oddities classpack, is a quite excellent caster that scales on Con.

There's also a Bloodruned race in one of my race packs that gains Spellpower from Con, so you could use that to make a Con caster out of any magic class.

I don't know of a single other class that notably benefits from ANY Con, let alone absurdly high levels of it.

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Let slip the toast of war.

The only thing I can suggest when it comes to CON is a Berserker, because of two reasons:

1. Unflinching Resolve and Relentless Fury scale with CON. Vitality can also get a good boost out of it, but it's generally not advised to invest a lot into it. If you want maximum CON milking, I guess pick a Dwarf.
2. CON's Healmod+1 point in Fast Metabolism, because FM scales with healmod. In some instances in the earlygame, this can result in your regen countering Berserker Rage's health drop completely. It's not really as noticable later unless you stack more healmod through gear, but a point is nice to have when resting and the like.

You can also pick up Juggernaut if you want but it's by no means necessary.

Well, I didn't necessarily look for attack that scales with CON, just wanted some good skill that can give me significant advantage when my CON is sky high. A decent example is Unflinching Resolve that can go to 70+% with high enough CON + category mastery items. But it alone won't make much difference to matter. So I though about other ways to utilise CON, but it seems there are indeed none. At least I've looked through database and searched for skills with CON in description and besides few Bulwark and Berserker skills there are none that scale with CON. Though if I wanted to make max CON character for some reason I'd definitely look for Brawler Ghoul and got Blacksmithing from Tinker escrot. It can result in skyhigh levels of CON and STR with high enough DEX. But again, there is not much point to do it since nothing really scales with CON aside of some prodigies. But even then there are simply better prodigies to use.

Possible build would be Brawler Ghoul with Tinkers, Blacksmithing, maxed Unified Body with very high DEX base (100+). And PES+ICCtW prodigies. This way it's totally possible to reach 200+ STR and 300+ CON when PES is active. The downsides are obvious. First of all, Blacksmithing as of now is terrible escort Category becuase with 0.8 mastery it's impossible to get all the level 5 bonuses it provides.

EDIT: I wrote this but then I remembered that Blacksmithing can't be unlocked through escort, so disregard this part. But it won't make much difference anyway, 200+ STR and 300+ CON accordingly are still totally achievable. The sad part is, you won't be able to get Metallisation with PES+ICCtW, so not much point getting so high CON. Still, without ICCtW 150+ STR and 250+ CON are possible, so maybe PES+Metallisation might work. With it and Fighting Stance buff it will result in 300+ damage reduction from any source for 6 turns. Quite impressive but a bit obsolete on such tanky character plus damage will be low.

Bloodspring is another much more offensive option but it also has quite long cd, and requires blight damage focused build to work.

Well, i though about Berserker/Dwarf, but Dwarf has quite poor CON scaling, all it gets is a bit of armor and saves with huge diminshing effect.

As for Fast Metabolism and Berserker, effect of Berserker Rage is negligible compared to damage monsters deal (it won't drain your HP out of combat anyway) and it's very easily countered by regen infusion. So no point looking that way.

The subcutaneous Metallisation prodigy seems like one of the better things to do with absurdly high con. Once you drop below 50% you get your full con as flat damage reduction vs everything. With enough resist all helping out and other sources of flat damage reduction on top of it you could probably get some really huge damage reduction. Probably wouldn't help much against burst-damage, sadly.

Meant to post this earlier but the post didn't get put up. The Prodigy Subcutaneous Metallization scales with con, providing flat damage reduction. I think that as long as you pick a class that has solid damage reduction to pair with the prodigy, you have access to the conditioning tree either innately or via an escort, and you are a race that has some con-scaling abilities, you could probably make something out of this?

Maybe try a Ghoul Bulwark, which actually can make pretty solid use of the con via racial talents and a few class talents that scale with HP/Con (and also because they can provide a fair amount of damage reduction via blocking/armor), although it needs to find a decent source of healing since it cannot use inscriptions. Gunslinger's another option. You can nab conditioning and then have automated cloak tesselation in the avoidance tree give you a bunch of flat damage reduction. Gunslinger already likes conditioning since it lacks ways innately to deal with status effects. Dwarf Stone Wardens could also do something with this, thanks to armor and blocking being things they can make use of.

Most of these builds aren't, like, top-tier. At all. But they can handle nightmare/insane. Ghoul Bulwark in particular has an acknowledged Insane Roguelike win.