[b40] Shalore Temporal Warden - winner - no deaths

[donkatsu]

Lightning Killeye

Made this character to test out the ammo changes and TW changes, as well as experiment with a different stat distribution from my last TW. This... was possibly the strangest character I've played. On one hand I lucked out and never got one-shotted by any overpowered rares or randbosses (obviously). On the other hand, I had the worst drop luck, and I didn't even get an anorithil escort for Providence. Really, go look at my equipment. It's awful. No vanilla voratun jewelry, no jewelry tome, no Chromatic Harness, no Wintertide Phial, no Withering Orbs (this was a major kick in the nuts, since Prescience doesn't give enough stealth detection for dreads), no Girdle of Preservation, no Burning Star, no Daktun's Gauntlets, no Goedeleth Rock, not even so much as a half-decent pickaxe. My entire kit was basically the same from level 20 to level 50.

And yet, this build is really solid. Everything worked brilliantly together, with Invigorate + Timeless being the core of the combo. Both talents are crazy good, and they also have amazing synergy. Timeless lengthens Invigorate from 9 turns to 14, while Invigorate in turn allows me to use Timeless every 21 turns instead of 35. Working off of those two talents, I could then achieve:
13 turns of +53% global speed from the Shalore racial, with only 19 turns of downtime (which could have been reduced further down to 3 turns of downtime, if I spent more generics on it)
10 turns of another +40% global speed from Haste, with only 4 turns of downtime
15 consecutive turns of regeneration, from just one infusion
15 consecutive turns of pinning from Pinning Shot
21 consecutive turns of stun from Scatter Shot
21 consecutive turns of 40% slow from Crippling Shot
5 Dimensional Steps during the 14 turns of Invigorate

Not to mention all the other fringe benefits like twice the Flurries and Piercing Arrows, permanent Moment of Prescience etc. I'd almost call it OP but there's not one definitive culprit. Invigorate is good but probably not gamebreaking by itself, as is Timeless, but together, especially combined with a lot of timed effects, they are monstrously good.

[edge2054]

Yeah, I considered doing something about this combo (though honestly I didn't think about it until after Invigorate was already committed). Invigorate could only work on certain kinds of talents (chronomancy or techniques for instance, the later being more flavorful) but on the other hand Timeless has some crazy good combos with some other talents as well and we still see players choosing to use other races inspite of those combos. It's also a level 20+ talent so you have to get a character 'going' for it to really take off (referring to Timeless of course). ToME 2 had some pretty crazy combos as well and I think half the fun of the ToME games is finding super fun and effective combos. So as long as it doesn't become the 'only' way to play a TW I'm cool with it (as long as Darkgod is cool with it as well of course.)

And congrats Is that the first post b37 TW winner?

[SageAcrin]

I think half of the point of Shalore is synergistic combos, anyways.

I mean, and the great initial skill. But Timeless is a powerful skill in general when used in tandem with short duration/high impact skills, and Temporal Warden already had a fair deal of synergy with that. To change that would be to make Shalore not as fun. >_>

[darkgod]

Yeah I'm fine with it And I should play shalore more ...