Cath's BFG - part 3 : Prodigies

[Skiamach]

For Tricks of the Trade: I took it with a Rogue in part for a free Scoundrel unlock. However, if I remember correctly, it unlocked the tree at 0.9 mastery instead of the 1.3 mastery that Rogues normally unlock it at. That was annoying.

[Davion Fuxa]

If that happened it is likely a bug. Only classes without Scoundrel should get it unlocked at 0.9.

[bpat]

I don't think Massive Blow is meaningfully better than YSBMW. It trades off flexibility, potential AoE, and a stun for a situational damage increase. As with Meteoric Crash, you don't actually want to blow up walls all the time making it often more trouble than its worth.

I really want to like Draconic Will but it's just so much worse than Spine on every class other than maybe Corruptor (even then I'm not sure anymore). Also doesn't help that Unstoppable Force Salve powercrept Draconic Will out of relevance.

[Chronosplit]

For Meteoric Crash, I ran that recntly on an Oozemancer for fun along with the bugfix addon that makes it not so easily dodged. It's hilarious when it procs as it more often than not did on Mana Clash or Oozebeam, but it WILL kill your summons (1.6 will fix this) and the lava floor does react to you (Antimagic Shield canceled it out but you probably don't want that). As for the meteor itself, if it hit me when triggering on melee I never noticed it.

[Snarvid]

Erenion code-dived and discovered that Healing mods do not trigger Ancestral Life themselves. There’s a discussion on it at the end of the first page of my Oozemancer guide (see link in sig).

self:attr("allow_on_heal", 1)
self:attr("disable_ancestral_life", 1)
self:heal(data.heal + data.inc_stat, t)
self:attr("disable_ancestral_life", -1)
self:attr("allow_on_heal", -1)

self:removeEffectsFilter(function(e) return e.subtype.wound end, 1)
self:removeEffectsFilter(function(e) return e.subtype.poison end, 1)

But 6-8 turns is pretty doable.

I will also say that I think Mental Tyranny is extremely good on Adventurers with decent Mindpower and lots of damage sources/round, since you can throw in 8 class points for Punishments 1/1/1/5 and put brutal control effects (confusion/slow/stun) on all the damage you do. It also can handle all the respen needs for your character - Mental Tyranny’s 30% mind respen helps you land your initial hit of mind damage, and then each of the Madness effects sticks a stacking additional 35% malus to the enemy’s mind resist. If 30% of all your damage is increased by 10% and then punches the enemy in a resistance you’ve modified by -105%, it’s going to leave a mark.

PES is essentially the Spellpower boosting prodigy in a manner analogous to Superpower or Arcane Might (I mean, it also works for Mindpower, but Spellpower doesn’t have its own prodigy and this is the closest thing), probably worth noting that, and it works well with Invigorate on Temporal Wardens (and it also boosts Magic to re-boost all the stuff that Arcane Might does).

[Stenag]

8*130 = 1040
Since ancestral life does not proc from healing infusion, you need to remove ~10 turn, which means you only have ~20 free turns.
Still pretty strong I think.

[Snarvid]

Oops, you’re right. I’m used to saving the Nature’s Balance in the equation for resetting damaging stuff.

[helminthauge]

Windtouched speed is actually easily accessible to several classes (literally any one who can survive long enough without any spells to stack 500 gold and has like a dozen spare generics).
Go to Zigur, buy the mindstar mastery tree so you don't need a cat point and then dump spare generic points into it (all of its talents count).
Max generic points needed are 20 - 3 refundable - 3 from a charm which is really common = 14. Further reduction includes talents from betraying escorts, 5 lv in spit poisons from Naloren, and more from items (I've seen a pink charm granting 8 lvs, and there's probably some others from fixedarts).

[Cathbald]

It's easy to get yeah, if you go through the trouble of keeping 10+ generics and also don't mind using the bug that let you invest those, take the prod, then remove them all.
Easily exploited bug doesn't mean it's easy to get in normal play.
It'll be easier in 1.6, with only 10 talents required. Just having to unlock harmony which is a good category

[helminthauge]

On some classes you can really carry 10+ generic points at lv 42 if you pick a non-generic-hunger race and don't unlock an escort tree, like rogue and archer.
p.s. damn, alchemist is really shit. I can never go to zigur because of my golem. Otherwise a cd3 bomb would really be nice and alchemist can really have those generic points spared.

[GlassGo]

This guide is painfully outdated.
I guess author lost his interst to the game, or at best waiting for 1.6 to arrive to ambush DG on something.
Is it pinnacle of Western thought proccess - an outdated guide?

Anyway - sudden sadness sad me badly.

[Snarvid]

1. People are allowed to post a guide without committing to a lifetime service agreement.
2. Your slam on "Western thought" is not helpful.
3. Sorry you are sad. I am going to respectfully suggest it isn't Cath's guide that's at fault for that, and I hope you find support.

[Cathbald]

There has been a grand total of 0 patches since i wrote that guide so it's not outdated.

Guess that's the reason you didn't post any exemple of outdated stuff.

[Snarvid]

I think we might be having a multi-thread Timmy/Spike disagreement here. The names are old MtG-developer-side jargon for different player psychographic profiles, and they describe what experience a player wants from an MtG game - Timmy wants huge, splashy impacts (independent of efficiency, so would be extremely happy to e.g. hit an opponent with 1 life for 1000 damage) while Spike wants to win (which usually means extreme devotion to cost-to-impact efficiency, both within and across options). Using these terms in Tome, YSBMW seems like a Timmy prodigy, while Arcane Might is very Spike. To Spike, Timmy prodigies are overpriced for their impact, and therefore bad. To Timmy, Spike prodigies are bland, and therefore bad. What appears to be a factual disagreement about which Prodigies are good may therefore actually be a claim about the kind of experience you want from the game, and therefore may not be resolvable without an explicit discussion of what specifically "good" means to the person making the assessment. (For completeness, the other psychographic profile, Johnny, wants interesting and quirky effects that can be used to make something unique and thereby express their creativity - I'd say Swift Hands, Worldly Knowledge, and Adept are probably the core Johnny prodigies.)

Reposting and paraphrasing from an adventurer thread of mine, I'd also point to 3 main gamestates you will have to manage in a playthrough, which I think of as “peak awesome, average awesome, and floor awesome.” Every build choice you make impacts one or more of these, and I would generally say that from a Spike perspective balancing (although not necessarily evenly) the needs of the these three with your specific class options is an important consideration in which Prodigies you choose while Timmy players enjoy optimizing around peak awesome.

Peak awesome is how good you can be for just a little while. It could be temporary buffs or long cooldown talents. You can’t sustain peak awesome forever, but as long as you can rest between combats you can often decide the outcome of most encounters with your peak awesome, and it tends to feel fun/exciting/put up ridiculous damage numbers. On higher difficulty modes, enemies can spawn with sufficiently powerful defensive synergies that you need a strong peak awesome state to meaningfully interact with them (besides running away, which is frequently but not always an option).

Average awesome is how good you are when your typical loadout of sustains is in place and you’re bump attacking or otherwise using a repeatable rotation of skills. This is a performance output you can keep up forever until someone stops you with a debuff or similar.

Finally, floor awesome is the minimum level of performance your character is capable of without being dead. It’s what you see your performance drop to when game circumstances coincide to screw you in a significant way. Enemies capable of consistent resource destruction and/or shutting off a bunch of your sustains can introduce you to your floor awesome, as can enemies that have huge resistances to your chosen damage type. These situations make up a small percentage of the encounters throughout the game, but they *also* make up a very large percent of the situations that pose a legitimate threat to your progress once you’ve gotten past the early game. Broadly, you can improve your floor awesome by taking more passive bonuses, by investing significantly in respen, by looking for options that let you destroy problematic enemy sustains or buffs, or by having really good escape or reset options that aren’t vulnerable to enemy disruption to allow you to get away and try again.

Classes tend to have competency in one or more of these, and your Prodigy choices (along with gear and escort talents) give you a class-independent way to improve them. Whatever you choose, it’s hard to have all of them at once.

Edit @ Cath: you might include a note on Writhing Ring of the Hunter in your intro as a modifier to the sentence "you only get 2 of these."

[GlassGo]

There has been a grand total of 0 patches since i wrote that guide so it's not outdated.

Guess that's the reason you didn't post any exemple of outdated stuff.

Nope, the reason was me guessin' you are waiting for 1.6 to be released.

For example, YSBMW! is extremely good for Withring One Ogre - with Owergrowth and few +size gear it deal 30-40 K damage to a traning dummy with just the Sawrd alone and the rest of the gear is being trash. Yeah, that's the Sawrd I know.
Probably with gear previous poster have who told about 7 K bump attack damage it will be much much more than that.

Also, if Crafty Hands is so bad, why it was useful for withstanding Entropy boss with its shadows?
What was that melting combo with Eternal Guard and Acid Burst?

Oh well...