ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Character here. Ins. Adv. Thalore oozemancer. Three deaths; two from playing around in the elven ruins way too early, and one from Ata, who is impossibly more dangerous here than I ever remember him being.

Good Stuff

• Corner sniping with Acid splash & Acidfire saved me a lot of headache, especially in the prides. In high peak, most every floor I quick-burrowed around the edge of the map till track spotted the floor guardian and corner sniped him off the stairs and movement'd onto them. I ended up killing most of the guardians for funsies though since my gear is trash.
• I ended up liking mucus a lot more than I thought I would. I wish it weren't completely trash from 1-3, though.
• Spine of the World is freakin' great, I don't know why I never bothered trying it before. A wild + oozewalk is all it took to ensure complete safety from phys effects.
• Everybody kinda talks about how underwhelming Mana Clash is, but I found that endgame randbosses universally had about 2,500 mana, which is enough to pull off before committing to a fight. Clash + Reabsorb (and clash again from eye of tiger) wiped the mana reserves of most randbosses, and crapped on vim users. That said, I was durable enough that I didn't bother about half the time
• Nature's Touch + Fungal Growth made for some pretty ridiculous regens - far stronger than regen infusions. I was getting about 330 from regen, and about 650 from Nature's Touch crits. I had pretty low crit mult and didn't max growth, so that could have been pushed higher, but why bother? I was never in danger from level 20 all the way through the final battle.

Bad Stuff

• Eye of the Tiger was a mistake.
• Antimagic Shield pushed sustained equi up pretty high and I found that it occasionally sent my failure rates to noticeable levels. Given that nothing was capable of coming close to killing me, I dropped all the points there and sent them to clash instead.
• I don't know how good Moss is, since it's hard to tell just how much impact it has on a battle, but you need freaking x-ray vision to fight with that stuff.

General comments on the build & run:
I skipped the Corrosive Blades tree. A second oozebeam would have been great, but I decided to opt for Reclaim as my third primary offensive talent. Yes, it's objectively inferior to acidbeam, but it's usable enough to serve as a replacement. It hit harder than oozebeam/slime spit, and the damage bonus it gets on undead is useful since you get the tree before dreadfell. The longer cooldown problem was mostly handled by eye of the tiger, though firing random other talents when it failed to do so wasn't that bad. Losing the piercing damage was annoying but crowds of scrub enemies aren't the biggest source of danger around. In exchange, I used a second heroism infusion, and kept the effect running full-time, which was neat. Unlocking eyal's fury early meant an easy urkis/master fight too, since Acidfire is a thing. Corner-snipe dispelling is pretty boss.

I also skipped out on heavy armor. Early game, melee enemies just melted from oozebeams. In mid, heroism, leaves' tide, oozes, grasping moss, acidfire blinds, and fungus regen meant that anything that tried to get in melee was not gonna make it. In late, it didn't really matter how much damage something had. At that point I only worried about AB flurry dudes shenanigans.

I'm pretty sure that at midgame, barring immunities, you could take away all your direct attack talents and with purely through indirect damage via mucus poison, leaves' tide bleed, moss, etc. There were an awful lot of randbosses I stood next to while they just melted away. Oozemancers are crazy survivable and throwing actual attacks out was an annoyance.

This run's ata was ridiculously more dangerous than I've ever seen him. Eye beams rated at 3,100 damage and he was rated at 500 wpn dmg with talents like Impale (which did 2000 on top of its actual attack) and Pound. Since he had skate, there was no staying out of melee range. Eye beams could be shut down with mana clash, but despite stacking +HP gear and having both oozes and heroism active, I was oneshot by (I think) pound. He's going unbeaten this time around...





After this run, I'll either try one more character (maybe paradox mage), or take a break from ToME. I dunno yet.

Character here. Insane Adv. Higher Necro.
7 deaths, all before the east. Once I learned about Empathy and Purge, I got through the remainder without too many close calls.



Went non-lich, and I think is the first nonlich insane necro win. Spoiler alert: It freaking sucks.

Good Stuff

• Chill of the Tomb corner sniping and invoke are good enough to get you to midgame for the most part. Minions aren't necessary early in and are pain in the ass to manage, and no points to spend on them anyway.
• Morrigor: This is a cool weapon. I stole a copy of Providence for use in High Peak (with charm mastery you could use it, normal providence, and recast it for three uses total), but earlier made do with any offensive spell talent I could get my hands on.
• I managed >100% dark pen without it, so I skipped out on the shades line. Also, shit offensive talents since nonlich, so forgery had nothing big to hit with.
• Blighted Summoning: Took it on a whim since I was about to suicide the character. In practice, it makes skeletons even better and ghouls even worse. The problem with melee skeletons taking too many turns to get into melee is solved, and the problem with archers not shooting shit is (sort of) solved.
• Animus Purge is fantastic and I wish I had tried it out sooner. Even without empathy abuse, it's brutal. Corner sniping with insane-tier summons, bodyblocking guys with 10+ necro minions, throwing antimagic oozes/champions at casters, you name it.
• Dark Empathy is a thing. Look at the tooltip for Dark Empathy in my character sheet.

Bad Stuff

• Non-Lich: There's a lot of reasons this is bad. I'll list them below in its own section.
• Managing minions to full is such a freaking pain, god damn. I hate this class forever now.
• Will o the Wisp is okay at midgame and earlier purely so your minions that get toasted by the tiniest thing have a little more life as enemy distractions, but are obsoleted by Empathy shenanigans. Wasted points.
• While not bad per se, Sacrifice got way less use than I expected since enemies frequently got tied up attacking the minion horde.
• I couldn't fight Argoniel since I ran out of mana. Should've left a portal open, but I probably would've been killed fighting Elandar if I had. I had to resort to using Bloom with Consume soul to regen what little I could. I only finished her because she spent so much effort attacking invincible skeletons, the Staff of Absorption fully charged. I was able to drop a pair of essence absorbs on her in a reasonably short time, dealing enough to overwhelm her vitality regen.
• Necromantic Aura is too small to autoexplore with. Given it takes up to five minutes sometimes to restore super minions, this means you can't autoexplore.

Consequences of avoiding Lichform

The biggest and worst effect of ditching Lich is you miss out on Star Fury. Without Midnight Ray, Invoke is your workhorse at CD 4. Weaker rares may be KO'd by Chill + Invoke + Fear + Rigor, but anything tougher than that and you're spending 3 out of 4 turns doing nothing, and you just blew your strongest spells. In my build, I bought channel staff because I was absolutely desperate for another attack no matter how garbage and was grateful for it. Those points ended up wasted since I ended up maining morrigor + mindstar. Having the majority of your turns be dead turns is by far the worst consequence of avoiding Lich. Even with Gwai's Burninator + Spydric (and 5/5 charm mastery) I spent far, far too many turns in battle idle or moving for no real reason.

Since you have fewer spells to work with, you have to Chill more often which toasts your entire horde. Even with pumped minions from Empathy, if you get any substantial form of cold respen you're going to waste them with every cast - getting cold damage/penetration now actively works against you. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that the Ice talent line wrecks your guys as well, making it a nonoption. Opening with Chill also puts you at the head of the crowd, so your skeletons probably aren't going to attack anything. Archers do nothing, warriors take forever to get into melee. Hallways are especially bad, and they're everywhere.

Your minions, specifically your ghouls, get actively worse since they will soon learn Retch, which'll hurt you and strip beneficial physical effects instead of harmful ones. But you really need the damage that minions provide so you take even longer out of battle to try and cycle minions to get mages and warriors. In High Peak, I often had to stop for five to ten minutes to dig out the corner of the map and clear an area wider than phase door's radius to get minions up and running again. It is crushingly boring.

In comparison, you can pick up Lich, get Moonlight Ray, and just blast things with minions operating purely as distractions. Ray will toast your minions, but using them other than as sacrifice & purge support is far too much work for so little reward. Empathy is weaker without pain suppression from wilds, but it's less critical when you can roast guys with lasers so quickly. This will also hugely improve Vampiric Gift since you aren't spending empty turns waiting on CD's and can get way more heal procs off it.


General Comments on the run:

Animus Purge is the MVP talent of the run. Use empathy to pass 100% res all to something dangerous and they'll last a long time, and wreck things. A Champion of Urh'rok solo'd the room of death for me. In the final battle (which I would have lost in), Argoniel got tied up fighting an indestructible Bone Golem while a Champion mowed down Elandar with constant spell disruption (an incredible stroke of luck that things played out like this, I would likely have lost otherwise). Between Empathy and Animus Purge, this character with 7 deaths before the East narrowly pulled a win.

good job tryble

https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... d93168ba68

You do know if your minions know a talent you don't want them to use, you can order them to set that talent priority to 0, and it will persist whenever you summon the same thing. Also set higher priorities for anything you want them to use as often as possible.

I did this for my own character when manually controlling purge'd enemies (which is neat), but didn't see a way to do so for any minion necro could control.





d('-'d)

Really? I've never played necro, but it lets me do so on any other summoned thing I've ever tried, including alchemist golems, summoner wild summons, and things summoned from items. When summoning spiders from the egg sac you have to spend a lot of time resummoning to set the priorites on everything as they have varying inscriptions, so you have to keep doing it until you've seen everything with every possible inscription type, or those inscriptions will have a priority of 1.

Ok, on further investigation, it seems the only reason I could do that as summoner was I had the summon control talent. Having 1 point in that lets you give orders to any summoned thing, even if not from summoner talents. Having a golem also lets you do that to anything you summon.