ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The Light Mage

I hadn't seen anything similar to this yet and it seems like the dominant impression of Shadowblades is that they are way too spread out, are delicate and need to be melee. So I decided to post a guide for a Shadowblade that is:

1) not spread out on stats
2) very tough
3) not melee
4) still hits like a truck

This build requires:

a) Stealth (do not need to have great rating)
b) Staves
c) level 4 illuminate
d) the Light tree from escort


The key things to realize is that Stealth gives super ciriticals all the time, but that when done from a distance as a spell you almost never break stealth even if you are not really pumping stealth and that everything in the Light tree crits in stealth.

This build is extremely beginner friendly and allows beginners to play something much more like a traditional mage right from the get go. There is a lot of leeway for variations as well, although its a fairly tight build for its core.

Generic points are fairly tight and very important, since you need Light and Staff as extra tree. However this is balanced out to some degree by not needing daggers at all and not needing any accuracy at all. Light is a heavy investment and staff will require 5 more points than what a normal SB would do for weapons; you still invest in a weapon mastery but also need channel staff. On the other hand you invest nothing in dual wield freeing up a lot of class points.

Your class points are pretty open really, most of your choices in that regards are more dependent on things like lack of mana to run the huge temporal sustain. Once you set up the foundation of stealth and illuminate you can go however you like.

I do not claim this guide is optimal, but it should be good. Vet players should be able to tweak it as they like. So let's begin at the beginning.

Race
I reccomend Cornac. You require two skill unlocks(stealth, light) and should really get a third (temporal). You will also unlock Staff so your general points may be fairly short in supply making other races less advantageous.

Also for beginners the better xp is really a plus. Vets can certainly try out some other races and go for less inscriptions, but you won't fit 5/5/5 racial into this build and make it work that well IMO. Could work though. Dwarf saves racial saves might fit, all 4 skeleton, no.

Stats
You only truly care about one stat: Magic. Everything else is to taste but you will most likely decide to raise Con and Cunning secondarily.

Why Magic? Because your bread and butter will be channel staff and it scales off of Magic. Also you want as high of spellpower as you can get, but really more concerned with Magic than raw SP. Keep in mind that spellpower's largest contributor for you is actually defensive. Offensively it only affects Illuminate and any SP-based charms you use, if you want something dead as fast as possible its actually Magic and your staff stats that will matter the most because you will be using channel staff. So spellpower is basically what you need to consider for your AOE and your defense. If given the choice you almost always want Magic over raw SP. Magic increase your defense, AOE and single target. SP is just defense and AOE.

Cunning is somewhat tricky. You don't need the crit from cunning since you auto crit all the time as long as you stay about 4+ spaces from things, so its much less advantageous that it seems. However you need Cunning for skill unlocks, but probably more importantly as a Shadowblade Cunning gives you spellpower. I maxed this eventually along with con. Cunning also increase your stealth rating. For a melee Rogue or SB this is pretty important, for you its nice to have but for the most part spells from distance 4+ almost never break stealth with just average stealth rating. You really don't need to pump stealth rating with either high cunning or equipment. But it can be useful.

Willpower is a concern. This build has many sustains. You are not required to have willpower but you will probably need to get enough maximum mana to run the sustain, so keep an eye on it or get equi for it, etc. I was able to get mana to a fine level in the 40s but before that it was very tight and needed equipment. However you do not actually spend tons of mana. Also see some possible very specialized stamina concerns in the prodigy section.

Gameplay Offense

Initially you will use Illuminate level 4 AOE from stealth. Early on this is stupidly overpowered. This changes later on, but is always good. Its a huge AOE and with crits it can basically one shot an entire screen of normal mobs. Warning this is a little boring to do when starting out, although kind of fun. Once you hit level 15 or so you just grievously wound everything. Oh and you also blind things. Later on this starts to fall off even with good spell power. And it has a fairly long-ish CD. You can start a fight with it and take a good amount of HP off, but past that you need something else.

Your bread and butter is channel staff. This always hits. This also gives you many options for damage type and lets you enhance Illuminate. You will probably chose light damage. And will probably wind up buffing light as much as possible. Later on I was using Bolbun's Head knocker which is stuck at physical but just did too much damage to not use. Although some rather nice staff artifacts are stuck at one type. You don't need any accuracy. In the level 40s with Bolbum's konocker staff with the Arcane Might prodigy and high magic you can hit every attack for 1500 or more damage. Channel staff has no CD. While its not as impressive as a single nice flurry its considerably more DPS and is very friendly with Global speed. It is range 8 making is very versatile but not quite long enough to deal with mages, but but plenty long enough to not blow stealth.

You should consider obtaining some kind of charm that does AOE based on spellpower such as stormbringer gauntlets. If you invest in charm mastery your high spellpower + auto super crits can make these charms very strong. A good Illuminate followed by SBG chain lightning can clear rooms or close to it even at higher levels. Note that SB are not amazing at charm mastery, only decent. A really specialized character can get to 50% and double up on a charm cast, SB will only do this with serious boosts to the mastery. But you still rock spellpower-based charms pretty darn hard.

Gameplay Defense
Stealth is not adequate defense on its own. Although it has some effects don't even bother thinking about it that way for this build. Its the crits you care about. Your crits are also defensive for this build so ALWAYS have stealth up once you are seriously running Light.

The Light category is your most powerful defense. Although you unlock at 0.8 mastery its incredibly powerful for you because you will have huge spell power and auto super crits. At the higher levels you can shield yourself for well over 1200 hp worth of shield with just Barrier at 5. With only a two point investment in the heal you can heal for over 600. Bathe in the light is insane and can give you something on the order of 4k healing and shield. Since your goal is to fight at range Bathe in the light is quite usable.


You might as well invest in Blur Sight, this will give you decent defense even though you are not pumping dex. Also staff has a buff to add a nice amount of defense and armor.

The Conveyance category is, of course, of key importance. You absolutely want target Phase Door. Maybe not top priority initially but defintely its your goal. Teleport is also a life saver as well. Once you get Light fully on line you may never need teleport really.

You also want to get Premonition and Chant of Fortress. These are ideally gotten from escorts. Premonition can be straightup unlocked on SB but thats alot of extra points. You can settled for Premonition at level 1, but more is good. Chant of Fortress you want at 2-3 points if you can get it. At Prem of 2 and Chant of 3 you should wind up with a specific resistance in the high 20s% and a general resist all in the low 20%. Again you fight at range so Chant of Fortresses's limit of not working at close range (3 and lower) is fine. If you get inside that range you start to risk blowing stealth on attacks and you should consider making use of your conveyance. Chant of fortress need points to be good, but even 1 point is nice. Premonition though scales on spellpower even with 1 point it will give very good protections.

So, ideally, you get the following:
1) a good amount of resistance to soften hits. Roughly 22% resist all + about 28% to a specific non physical type.
2) Massive shielding from light, this last 10 turns and can and should be done proactively
3) Massive healing
4) Massive shield+heal over time with bathe in the light
5) very good extra condition removal
6) good defense from buffs

Personally I didn't feel I needed 5 inscriptions, you have almost all inscrition functons as a talent as well. Phase door, teleport, instant shield, heal, status removal. I did 4 inscriptions and actually used my last category point to increase light mastery. This is one reason that you can do a race other than Cornac. However keep in mind generic points are still tight enough to make leveraging non-Cornacs to be tricky or very tantilizing in their tradeoffs. I think you can probably get away with three 3 inscriptions even, but I'd reccomend 4 also consider that you can even manage decent damage with stealth crits on runes, so having a damage/status removal is an interesting option. Although you probably will find the shorter range runes are annoying to try to use.

Temporal Category Unlock
I highly highly reccomend unlocking temporal but do not say its required. The basic idea of this build must have stealth and staff, so they are required. Taking Temporal makes you much better but is not part of the basic mechanics of the build.

Temporal gives two very very nice things and one very situational but nice to have when you need it ability.

First it augments your defense very nicely with a second shield spell. This shield spell is instant. This is very important. The light spell is not instant the temporal once is. However, and this is very important, THIS SHIELD DOESN"T CRIT. This allows you to shield in emergencies very nicely, it also works with bathe in the light very nicely. Finally by having the two you can basically be shield in perpetuity. This means you do not need a shield rune or a heal infusion. Can still get them but this covers that base. Barrier is more than twice as effective since it crits, therefore this shield is purely for emergencies and is often supplemented by Bathe in the Light. If you can use Barrier instead you should.

Second it provides 45% to global speed via Essence of Speed, which is huge and incredibly valuable both for offense and defense.

Third you get time prison. This is not really something you use that often but if all your other defenses fail or you are confronted with two really nasty bosses at the same time this can be really nice since it lets you just take something out to escape or refresh CDs or deal with them one at a time. It really needs only one point too. When I did the Doomed unlock I had to use this. My clone just hit way too frigging hard. I had to time prison my clone and finish the guy and then I pumped up my shield and blasted my clone when it ran out. I have rarely used this, but when I needed it, it really helped.

Charm Mastery
This one is kind of like Temporal but to a much lesser degree. It is in no way required. You can run this build without it. But there are some really nice charms and this build is actually fairly low on different attacks. I suspect you can win the entire game with only channel staff on this build. You always have a ranged spell you can use every turn that hits like a truck and can't be put on CD, but high spellpower + auto super crits combined with only two real abilities being used makes this one of the best candidates for a charm focus. It is not necessary in anyway, but its highly tempting and you can fit it in as a Cornac. It really helps to get supplementary AOE later on as Illuminate tails off and its CD starts to annoy you some.

Ability Investment

Class

Dual wepaon: none
Dual Techniques: none
Combat Techniques: none or 1/1/1/5
Dirty fighting: none
Lethality: 5/0/0/0 or 5/1/1/5
Shadow Magic: 1/5/5/1
Phantasm: 5/5/0/0
Stealth (unlocked): 5/5/2/5 (adjust this to taste)
Temporal (unlocked): 1/5/1/5

Generic

Combat Training: 5/1/0/0/0
Survival: 1/5/1 (I upped this to disarm traps, adjust to taste)
Conveyance: 5/1/0/0 (displacement shield is great but obsoleted)
Divination (locked) 0/0/0/2
Light (unlocked): 2/5/5/3 (can do more if you want)
Staff (pay for unlock): 5/5/1/1
Chants: Chant of Fortress 2-3 if you can get it

Note: I started with Displacement shield it was very useful early on, but once you have other shields online it becomes obsolete.

Leveling
If you start as a Cornac you can unlock stealth immediately. However this is not the way it has to be. It is probably the easiest though. You could unlock Temporal first so you have time shield, but Essence of Speed takes too much mana to sustain to rush for.

The start is not really rough, exactly. Its even rather easy. But if you get unlucky it may be rough and/or require some juggling back into more traditional SB play.

If you unlock stealth early you will basically be shooting for Shadowstrike + Illuminate. This is probably the easiest route and also the most boring (but rather fast). I would reccomend this route but it can be done many ways.

Basically rush Illuminate to level 4 ASAP while doing the first 4 levels as a dagger SB, as a Cornac this should be no problem. Then get stealth to shadowstrike. You will walk around in stealth and cast illuminate from stealth. This will kill alot of things in one hit. It will also blow your stealth and you won't be able to cast Illuminate for the rest of the fight. I know this sounds not that amazing but it really just levels the early game.

For the first few levels you will probably play as a somewhat normal SB or as an crit illuminate caster with a bow or dagger to finish things. You may wish to get dirty fighting/dual strike/dagger mastery for this and throw them out later by cycling points in a town when you level.

Your main goal in level 10-20 is to get staff and unseen actions online. Unseen actions is not obtainable until level 12 so you can wait to unlock stealth until you get the level 10 category point if you like. Staff will need 500 gold to unlock and you may also use an escort or two. You will probably not have the money for this until the teens. I believe the most effective thing is to have channel staff at 1 and get staff mastery to 5 then up channel staff.

So early on your main options are Illuminate crits and the "standard" SB dagger play. Illuminate + dagger will begin to feel a little weak around level 15/teir 2 areas but at that point you can probably have gotten your staff online. You will probably want a point in shadowstep. Even though you are aiming for a cannon build, early on even with staves shadowstep can be a very nice hit and its a useful teleport no matter what. Plus being able to hit for light and darkness is just kind of cool.

You should shoot for unlocking light by level 20 and should plan to get at least a few points into each of the skills.

Temporal is good to get online around level 20 as well, but you have a lot of leeway here.

Its a good chance you have made enough money by 20 to have unlocked and upgraded staff. Most likely this is going to be your main concern when it come to money.

Once you are getting to level 25 or so you should really feel like you are starting to cruise. How you choose to proceed is alot to taste, but also realize you have some heavy sustains. Essence of Speed and Premonition together take a ton of manna. Fortauntely you spend very little mana. You really only need about 100 mana for you own use at level 40. But still if you run all the sustains it takes a large chunk of mana. So realize it may be pointless to invest in certain sustains too early. I cleared out the lost hope graveyard on this build at I think it was 26 on this build without cheesing it with an early entry. With Light/Illuminate/Channel staff online plus your SB tricks (conveyance etc) you can handle things pretty well, I don't think I had temporal unlocked when I did graveyard.

Escorts
Edit: IMPORTANT NOTE - do not use Illuminate during escorts, you will probably kill your guy.

You basically have to find an anorithil. You have a pretty good chance of this. You only need one, but more than one is nice to save generic points. If you don't this build can still work, but with Light you are literally two to three times tougher. Maybe more. I'd almost go so far as to say start over if you can't get one.

You really want to find a Seer and unlock Premonition. Doing it 3 times total would be nice but is probably overkill. Even just once I think should get very high spell power Prem to about 22-4%. Otherwise you would need a category point + 4 generic points to get the same. Maybe you like Divination a lot and want to do this anyway. You can make that work by shifting some stuff around. But if you want a lot of savings hope for a Seer escort and take Premonition. You get a lot out of the spellpower scaling, extra points are icing on the cake

Its good to get an alchemist or two. But its not necessary either way you are gonna spend 500g and then 750g on staff.

It would be nice to get 3 sun paladins, but even one is still 12% on chant of fortress which is still very nice. You should have a pretty good chance to get at least one. You basically get 12% then 6% then 4% then 2%. Only points are going to make this better. You can opt for chant of fortitude, your mental and physical save are not amazing and the extra life is good. The extra saves scale with your spellpower too, but since you should have Providence and 18% resist with 2 points in fortress magnifies healing/shielding I really think its a clearly superior option even without leveraging your high spell power.

Theif is a nice escort to get you can use all three of those skills and you will probably wind up doing so as a Cornac.


Prodigies
Really this is pretty wide open, but I think Arcane Might is really strong for this build. Staff damage is your focus and is definitely your boss killer. Adding 50% Magic scaling onto your staff is a lot of damage. A lot. Many other mage-type would find this ho-hum for you its a large damage increase.

For your second prodigy you have a lot of options. All the standard strong ones work fine. I originally considered taking Tricks of the Trade and even gimped my guy by siding with the Assassin Lord, but I decided its just not much good on this SB, especially with targeted phase door.

However what I finally did was to take a prodigy many people dislike. I took Never Stop Running. This may seem unusual but I have found it actually really good and addresses an issue this build has rather nicely.

First off although this build is very mage-like unlike a traditional mage you have stamina based stuff, keep in mind that shadow magic sustains like shadow feed are stamina talents and will meet NSR's requirements. However this build basically doesn't use any stamina at all unlike a normal SB using Flurry etc.

Second off channel staff's biggest weakness is that its not range 10. NSR is instant so if you hit auto-explore and then stop 10 away from a caster with range 10 blasts you can pop NSR move up 2 then blast him before he even hits you. Since you one-shot a large number of monsters, its rather nice. Its basically an amazing positioning tool and also gives you really nice and completely controlled escape options that work inside vaults as well. Also keep in mind Illuminate is LOS so while it has a huge AOE it can not hit certain things. Being able to exactly position yourself for it is nice. Same thing for Chant of Fortress, with NSR there is little reason anything should get inside your fortress. with 250 stamina you can move 20 squares in an instant, plus you often are simplying blasting so you can actually keep NSR up proactively. Its not just one-time use. If you keep it going you can short range "teleport" at will. Move up 2, blast, move up 2, blast. That is 2 turns. Or if something does a Rush move on you move back 3 etc. You basically have something around 10 2-square repositions during a fight once you activate it. You can seriously mess with monsters via kiting and LOS and make up for your small range discrepancy. You basically might as well start every fight with it since you don't need the stamina and its advantages are subtle but very strong for a medium-long range fighter. Generally you don't actually move that much, but when you do its important, making this prodigy fit very nicely.

End Results
At level 48 the version of the build I am currently using has the following stats(sorry I don't play this online):

Magic at 114
Cunning 79
Con 68

Crit: 60% (this makes me sad since its actually useless)

Global speed 145%
Spell speed 128%

HP 1143
armor 19
defense 41 (blur sight 29 , defensive posture 11)

Stealth rating 79

Spellpower 87
All damage +20%
Physical Damage +59%

Using Bolbun's (Physical)
Accuracy 24
Damage 289

Channel Staff hits for usually around 2000 damage and never misses. I have a secondary staff incase they resist physical alot, Rod of Sarillion which is dedicated temporal and does maybe 1700 damage, I basically use it because it has a high Magic scale. I basically only lose stealth if I channel staff right next to something and then only sometimes.
I am sure a nice flurry can do more, but with no CD and really high speed this can do nasty things.

Illuminate hits for about 600 in radius 10.

Chain lightning from Stormbringer's hits for about 600 as well with 10 power out of 16 (meaning I can recast in 4 turns).I also have a charm for Aether Breach for similar damage at 17/28. All three of these AOEs together works pretty well.

Barrier shields for 1380 at 5 effective talent
Healing Light heals for 960 at 2 effective talent
Bathe in the Light gives 563 shield on first turn and 3503 when its done at effective talent 5

Premonition shield for 29% with effective talent of 3.
Chant of Fortress 2.4 gives 22% res all

Time shield gets about 600 hp

Finally I have Blinding Speed at 6.5 for +55% global speed short term burst (I haven't really used this). The idea is to have this + willful combat+ snap if I need to kill something with extreme predjudice. Not sure how effective this is.

Conclusion
This build is really tough and hits like a truck. You one shot many normal things but you are also very versatile. I opened the multi-hued drake vault which had I think its 6 level 92 wyrms at level 38. Their initial alpha strike had me down to 200 hp which I was able to shield up and heal immediately, I was able to blast them from outside the vault and go toe to toe to kill three of them then phase door away to reset CDs and do it again and again. Also I can see and disarm all the traps in that area

You have a lot of tricks to stay alive, many active protections and decent passive protection and basically a 50 cal semi-auto rifle staff with excellent mobility.

I haven't tried certain high end things with this build like the Atamathon or the arch-mage leader.

Interesting build, the interaction with stealth/casting is a good catch.

Couldn't find your profile, what difficulties can this clear?

_________________
<shesh> cursed is fine

My only win on Normal is with this guy: the light Shadowblade (http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=40252)

It was before Staves were nerfed (alway strike as physical now -except for some artefact-)
But the character was gimped.
(bad prodigies choice:
-Tricks of the Trade for the stealth bonus and the free scoundrel tree -for Misdirection
- Endless Woes: to get more blind when I was striking with darkness to get an easy Hide in Plain Sight
None really made a difference.)
I didnt bother to spend my characteristic point at the end (around 20 spared). So it balance itself.

Overall I like the versatility of the mage shadowblade. When silenced you can still dual strike with more than decent dommage and without Stamina you can cast spell. But a pure mage may be a little easier to play.

The final fight was easy, didnt even bother to bring the Paladin with me, or to close the portal (still dont know how to do it).
Without any decent defence, I died in the Ambush and the Vor armory by surprise. But everything else was easy (except a few very specific random boss, I didnt know how to approach)

goog guide and good advice for new player.

Sorry I haven't really setup any profile. As for difficulty I am not too sure. I haven't tried it past normal. I have a suspicion its ok on the next one up if you are careful about distance. I am able to stay stealthed against things considerably higher leveled than me from vaults so I would guess its OK. Your shielding is quite strong and your escape options are also very strong. If you swap some talents around and make sure to get enough mana you can even prob travel if you really want more escapes, I wouldn't dp this in normal but maybe in higher difficulty.

In some ways the defense is similar to Archmage. AM has Aegis though, but you have better crits. Now its possible for other characters to get 100% crit. But this char needs nothing extra to have both 100% crit and very close to 300% crit mult. Lethality gets you to right around 200% and then shadowstrike adds 85%-100% depending on mastery. To achieve that kind of crit mult is a significant equipment burden for an AM, but this build has it right out of the box.

I have seen a high difficulty AM build that also leverages Light for a shielding based defense and my suspicion is that this build may be able to leverage something similar because the extra crit mult and easier/more versatile itemization can close the lack of aegis gap.

I am not too sure how stealth works out in the very high difficulties. I know people thinks its basically useless. But a) spells never have the extra check melee does and b) as far as I can tell doing a spell at range 6 or 7 is just WAAAAAAAY safer than a melee attack even when your stealth rating is considerably lower than a melee.


I would say that, at an educated guess, if you can get stealth to stick you can do the next. After that it I really don't know if the defense is enough, things hit really hard, but you could maybe leverage unlocking Diviniation tree and Never Stop Running in a very clever/efficient manner to to make it work. Positioning when done precisely right is very powerful in Roguelikes and NSR is the ultimate tool for it. Its possible. Would need play testing.

Ok I tried out this build in nightmare with this character to 18 so far(this is my first time playing Nightmare or doing it online):

http://te4.org/characters/135593/tome/2add59ba-60d5-4a70-b9da-1a5dad981f69


take a screenshot

I am using the succor mod to let me choose my escorts, I hate random escorts. I would say if you are interested in this build you should probably do the same, at least on higher difficulties. Getting light and staff at the right times can be a big deal.

My observations are the following:

- At 18 I am doing crit Illuminates of about 300-350. I was Illuminate critting for about 200 at level 14.

- 1 point in healing light is healing me for about 370, so full heal at this point.

- it works fine but you need some things earlier
- I unlocked light at 10 and it was a very good idea to do so I think made a HUGE difference
- Get teleport as soon as you can random purples in starter areas can just corner you with no way to get out. Even to the point of neglect cunning and delaying stealth a level or 2.

- I hit 501g right around level 15 and I had saved 9 generics for this, so I went from 1/1 at 0.8 to 5/5 at 1.1
- This turned out to be a difference of 40-50 per stealth channel to 180-220 (with that lucky find tier 4 staff from chest in maze)

- Once unseen actions was at 5 and stealth at two i am staying in stealth quite fine, as long as I don't melee. This isn't surprising since Unseen Action checks are at double the rating PLUS a distance fall off. Melee has a second check against base stealth it is almost always that which gets you.

- Its tempting to consider a race like shaloren for this build. But I can say with confidence having stealth crit illuminate online at level 5 and light online at 10 makes the beginning of NM WAAAAY more dependable and smooth. I would go so far as to say if you play Roguelike you really need to do Cornac and not other races. I am sure Shaloren is doable, and may even be stronger at level 50. For normal difficulty things are pretty easy and you can do whatever.

- I got lucky and had Spellblaze shard + unerring scalpel so the pre-staff levels went a bit easier. Basically until 15 I run around and crit illuminate most things however some bosses and purples may only lose 50% from that (although some purples are one shotted by it), since nightmare starts adding healing infusions onto many things it can be problem when you alternate damage is kinda of wimpy (I had 1/1 on combat accuracy and dagger mastery). I was able to kill maze minotaur at lvl 14 with this, but I got a couple of nice crits with artifact daggers and had to teleport around and play kind of guerilla style.

- By contrast I cleared Old forest pretty easy. Illuminate basically one shots entire rooms. For the treant boss I shielded up (stealth crit about 550), Illuminated him and then blasted him about 5 times for 180-ish damage. He died 2 squares from me he had zapped me twice for about 140 cold which wasn't enough to get through my shield. I didn't freeze on either one, but if I had frozen even on both wild infus + 3 turn providence would have taken care of it.

- I was using displacement shield and swapping it out in towns, but I am not sure its worth the heavy mana cost.

- One very dependable strategy may be to simply avoid all bosses and purples and leverage the cornac high xp rate to power level to 10 on easy kills then clear all the starter bosses once you have light shield+heal. Normal mobs aren't ever really a problem (except during escorts when your stealth Illuminate will kill your guy in one shot), its mostly just boss/purples that are fast or heal that are the issue until you get your staff fully up to par. In normal where they don't heal its pretty easy to teleport/kite and Illuminate em down. Its tempting to try to simply go for light immediately and unlock stealth at 10, but this seems a lot slower and probably not any better especially since you will lack the crits. Light doesn't really come into its own until Unseen Actions, this allows you to do do things like crit shield before you open a chest and immediately illuminate crit anything that comes out.


Update lvl 26
I have gotten this guy to level 26 and cleared the Dark Crypt at 24. DC was mostly fine but I did get essentially instagibbed by a purple when I went too fast around a corner. I found bolbun's head knocker again and it literally doubled my channel staff damage to about 800 on the high end (channel staff ignores armor so the physical is not bad). Nightmare doesn't always but sometimes can do a whole lot more damage than normal. I have found if you pre-shield in NM you are generally good, except in the "initmidating cave" I went down in daikara at level 20 that had multiple level 36 multi hued wyrms, I should have just went back up but hubris got the best of me and the massive breath weapon alpha went through 400 shields and 400 hp in one turn. I am considering putting a pair of points into the two divination spells to pre-scan rooms instead of two extra point in premonition (this comes out to abut 6% less resistance at good spellpower) I would do this with escorts not an unlock but as cornac I can fit an unlock in. Also umbraphage from stealth hits for about 550 for me, if I had real mindpower I think it would waste things rather nicely.

Won the game on nightmare with this guy:

http://te4.org/characters/135593/tome/2add59ba-60d5-4a70-b9da-1a5dad981f69

Same guy as above post. Ironically once I made randart staff at shop I was using mostly darkness damage, I had umbraphage hitting for 1700 at the end. Unresisted randart staff also hit for about 1700 when not resisted. You can make Bolbun's hit harder but it has no other useful ego and being able to swap damage types is very nice in High Peak.

Also cleared the Vor Armory Vault with no deaths and no stair dancing. 5 deaths total. 2 were from stupidity. 2 were instab-gib one shots (one moving too fast around corner, other by unseen orc assassin(critted me 4 times in a row for over 1100 damage and other stuff had gotten my shields) in a situation I should have teleported out of because I was surrounded by High peak mobs and a stair boss), that had I been shielded I would have survived and one was an early situation I just hadn't matured the character enough with.

Also did:
- Dark crypt at level 24
- Cleared full bum rush of things in Celia graveyard (no opening coffins)
- cleared every vault I found except for an intimidating cave in Daikara that was filled with level 36 rare Multi-hued wyrms at level 20. I tried to kill them, but all wyrms breathed on me at once and one shotted me through my shields which means they did over 800 damage in one turn.
- killed every High Peak stair guardian except one who was a Umbral Horror paradox mage and was bar none the most annoying thing I have ever fought in this game. After 30 minutes of enithe of us killing each other and being teleported all over the level and perpetually pinned i said eff it and went up.

I generally was fine with stealth, I only ran into issues if there were a large amount of high level mobs clustered together. I only had about 5 situations where Hide in Plain sight couldn't make me recover nicely, not counting 2 mobs who had specific anti-stealth things. I made no extra investments in stealth, I got death's embrace in middle of high peak. My cunning is actually much higher than I felt I needed, that was just luck of the draw. I didn't even max cunning stat until level 50, I did magic then con and also did some willpower. Most of the game I had cunning just high enough for skill.

One thing to note, the 7 level 110 Overpowered Greater Multi-Hued wyrms in the Vor Armory resisted my crits at least 50% of the time. I was able to tank them singly (and last two doubly) using Barrier and Bathe in the light but I did have to smack them over and over.

Had no real trouble in the prides but in NM specifically you really must get arcane eye. I found burning star which is really great, but arcane eye makes vaults way safer, it also lets you preselect the most optimal damage type on your staff before opening a door.

This was my first time trying NM so I haven't played insane. I think it might work there, but I have a suspicion certain things like shrugging off crits might become a problem and that certain large groups will mess with stealth a lot especially at the various entryways to the prides.

Really anyone who played careful using their shield/heals and divination could win NM with this build. I didn't even use heroism infusions, which is probably better than the cat point I put into Light, although that cat point adds 1 turn to Providence and Bathe in the light so its a good use of cat point compared to other skill tree effects.

I ran around with 3 inscriptions all the way to 50 as I couldn't decide what to do with the last cat point. Finally decided I need movement infusion which was a good decision.

One thing to note is instead of Never Stop running I took Eye of the Tiger. When I first made this build I considered that prodigy but dismissed it as I didn't think it would affect illuminate enough and that is true. But what it does do is allow you to use Barrier a lot more, especially with +45% global speed. Channel Staff is a spell with no CD so you can out put 1.5 spells per tick of the CD on Light spells. So although Barrier has a CD of 15 and a duration of 10 turns, by critting you can basically get the CD to completely finish before Barrier comes down from duration. If you are doing nothing but channel staff you can usually overlap it my about 2 or 3 turns so that you actually had the CD done before the duration. And the faster you go the more CD based stuff you can get down, thus using Blinding Speed or Eden's guile make this effect even better.

So for maximum tankiness probably Eye of the Tiger is one of the better options (alonger with the typical cauterize or draconic will.), although it also has some nice versatility to it as well. I would say this is a superior option to NSR and with a movement infusion you don't need nsr really anyway and since movement infusions prevent stun/freeze/daze its hard to say no to them.

thanks!

I tried the build and it worked perfectly !
http://te4.org/characters/23130/tome/c269ac9f-d3f7-4642-9948-b48614c9d738

Never Stop Running makes a lot of sense for this concept. Good catch!

And, this build is actually very similar to one I beat Nightmare with recently (and quite easily, I must say.) Except mine was based on the Adventurer class. Off the top of my head, it was something like -

Talents:
Cunning/Stealth 5/5/1*/5 (about the same as yours - * = see below)
Spell/Temporal 1/5/1/5 (same)
Spell/Admixtures 5/5/5/0 (great physical AoE damage - yum)
Spell/Stone 5/1*/1*/5 (Crystalline Focus!)
Spell/Phantasm 5/5/0/0 (same - probably overkill with Admixtures running, but it's useful early, and I like the status)
Psionic/Absorption 1/0/0/0 (free staff slot!)

* = plus 4 extra points I moved between Body of Stone and HiPS (or Earthquake, at one point) as I saw fit. Throughout High Peak, I used them to max Body of Stone (which I almost never used, HiPS would probably have been better.)

Generics:
Combat Training 5/1/5/0/0 (yes, 5 Accuracy! Seems overkill, but I really liked it when silenced with my wilds on cooldown)
Spell/Conveyance 5/1/0/0 (same)
Celestial/Light 3/5/5/? (about the same, can't remember exactly how much I spent on Providence except I didn't max it)
Spell/Staff Combat 5/5/?/0 (about the same, I wanted to max Defensive Posture but couldn't)
Spell/Alchemy 5/5/1/0

Race was Cornac, maxed stats were MAG, CUN, DEX, with leftover points to CON (I didn't max Thick Skin until very late), with 5 inscriptions: phys/mental wild x 2, movement, heroism, shield. (No manasurge rune, I got rid of mine after I found Tarelion's staff (gives lots of mana on crits) but even without it, as long as you have ~200 free mana and some mana regeneration from items, you should be fine. Channel Staff, Illuminate and bombs only cost 5 mana/use. ) Prodigies were Arcane Might and Crafty Hands. Also, I catpointed Staff Combat.

So, on top of Channel Staff and Illuminate, this one adds bombs (for better AoE damage) and Earthen Missiles (for an extra bit of punch and range, but mainly for quick bone shield removal.) Also, decent at hand-to-hand combat (not that you should try that if you can avoid it, of course!)

From escorts (CPD, Time Prison, and Healing Light all came in handy here) I got 1 each of Heightened Senses, Piercing Sight, and Arcane Eye, and increases in Celestial/Light and Staff Combat. No Premonition, sadly, but I didn't build any WIL to sustain it anyway. No Chant of Fortress either, but I did fine without it.

I was tempted to side with the Assassin Lord and catpoint both Stealth (to 1.4) and maybe Cunning/Scoundrel (to 1.1), because of the heavy investment on Earthen Missiles (which causes bleeding and thus works well with the Scoundrel talents), paying for that with Crafty Hands, Stone Alchemy 5/0/0/0 and an inscription slot (you still get Nimble Movements to compensate.) This would be an interesting build, but being able to alchemize and not saving the merchant seemed both unproductive and unappealing , and throughout the run I found out that Stealth with just 1.00 mastery was about enough with 8+ range spells anyway.

Another interesting option would be to get Chronomancy/Gravity in lieu of Spell/Phantasm, and maybe use the Rune of the Rift to manage Paradox. Healing Light, especially, works much better when you can pin mobs or move them away so they don't benefit from it

Yet another option: Psionic/Mentalism at 1/x/0/0. Mental saves were my worst problem by far.

Note that this build can't really work with Yeeks, Dwarves and the undead races, as ideally you want to get Staff Mastery from Angolwen (paying for it with alchemy and transmo'ed gems), and you have zero offensive capability early. To make it work, you have to skip the character creation screen (at least don't invest in magical talents), go to Zigur and buy a (good) torque of mindblast here. If there isn't any for sale, start a new character.

As I said, my run was quite easy (for a Nightmare run, at least.) I farportaled a lot more than I use to at this level, found a lot of cool items (notably "dual-wielding" Bolbum and Tarelion's staves - ouch!), and hit level 50 way before High Peak. (Oddly enough, it was only then - playing a level 50 character with great equipment in every slot, imbued with unique gems - that I started dying.)

Final notes:

- on TK Grasp: you'll want a good staff in the extra slot, but since you're not building any WIL it's better to keep Beyond the Flesh OFF most of the time. Turn it on only when in hand to hand combat, especially if it's a high-damage staff like Bolbum's.

- on equipment: besied the obvious things to look for (+spellpower, crit multiplier, etc.), because of the high DEX and defensive sustains (Blur Sight and Defensive Posture), this build benefits a lot from equipment that increases defense. Also, because of the Shadowstrike (autocrits) + Channel Staff (to prime the pump) combo, items that stack spellpower on crits (e.g., Spellblaze Echoes) are more useful to you (or at least, much easier to take advantage of) than to any other build. In other words, be polite, be civilized, and remember to knock 3 times on each door before entering

Yeah I am trying something like your build, Jaumito, but with some variations and on Insane.

Its an adventurer based partially on Mex's AM build but blending in the core of this Light Mage build. Its physical based with Stone like yours.

The main difference is I am using Gravity and not temporal. So I have

Stealth
Stone (for damage penetration)
Meta (various good stuff, CD reduction)
Arcane (for shield)
Bone (for bone shield as ultimate anti-insta-gib and bone spear has some use as phsyical)
Gravity
Absorption (just for TK grasping another staffer for bonuses, also it always crits and never breaks stealth when it attacks I think)


Conveyance
Aegis
Light
Shalore
Staff


So far its worked well up to 20 I know not having temporal is a real decrease but I couldn't fit it and the utility of gravity is pretty amazing, not huge AOE damage but its good, and the ability to hits thigns around corners is amazing. I am still trying to figure oout how to fit temporal in and not lose something extremely key. The limiting factor is class points not cat points.

Not saying its optimal but I am thinking the extra CC of gravity may be worth the loss of speed. My rationale for is twofold a) its very good defensively and b) position and the number of things in LOS have a huge effect on maintaining stealth and Gravity gives you a lot of control on this.

For those of you who haven't done much in Insane you see something like 5x the rares and the rares have more talents at higher levels. So you often see a rare in each encounter and somtimes two or three. Thus the CC of Gravity is nice. Speed is good both offensively and defensively, but doing Gravity well on three rares when you have lost stealth and just saying "see ya, suckers!" and restealthing is pretty valuable on Insane. Also even in nightmare large spawns of mobs (10 or so) is a huge danger to losing stealth so being able to reposition is nice. I would say large spawn counts in LOS may be the worst "stealth debuff". Its almost a guaranteed stealth loss, you should always spread out things if you can.

I am not doing huge damage yet but its good and the Insane start with a mindblast torque is much more reliable than, say, a melee class. You only need 4 levels to get two knockbacks and two range 10 spells, and by either you get an AOE pull . I only have shadowstrike at 1, so once I get a good staff and SS to 5 I think it start to work well. Clairvoyance + Gravity is pretty nice and Gravity well owns those pesky Doomed shadow rares.

No prodgies yet but I think its gonna be:
Arcane might
Eye of the Tiger

This is what I did on my NM run and it worked well, however EoT may not but the way to go with Meta and Shalore. Not sure yet, but I think it will work well with gravity well. However without temporal and SC cast speed the value of EoT is decreased a decent amount compared to the Shadowblade winner.

Edit:
Oh right I forgot I am actually going to take Draconic Will I think, as I was using Mex's strategy with shalore timeless/metaflow/draconic will.

Good thing I wrote this and got reminded before I took EoT in game.

Glad it worked for you. I actually wrote this guide because it made Normal kind of boring it was so strong. In fact my original character wasn't planned to be this build but more wandered into it from a melee staff idea. Once I found Bolbun's and realized channel staff did tons of damage I threw out the melee idea. Then I wandered into Dark Crypt for the first time and I was taking tons of damage so I started using Light more, and I was so much tougher it was really amazing. After that is was all just on cruise control.

Man that is a nice randart staff. Interesting you got Void Shard as well. Its a very nice find really, you can get some ok aoe damage out of it since you can use it multiple time when you up Charms. But the really nice thing is you can hit things around corners.

Void Shard was the cornerstone of my ability to selectively get small numbers of drakes and wyrms in Vor Armoury vault on nightmare. I didn't actually use it for that tactic except then and had actually thought of it until that points but it was clutch. Frankly I don't think this build needs to do it except in that case of a few other possible vaults. My nightmare run was frankly rather easy. If I had actively used clairvoyance/track I have little doubt you can do it in roguelike. I really didn't play it super well. Although the start is a little on the tricky part. I am sure people who play with really solid and consistent tactics can tear NM apart with the build. Literally.

I did not use a mindblast torque from Zigur for my start. If I did it all over again I would use that and it would have been pretty easy. My NM run was done basically as someone with knowledge of the game but only decent tactics.

I guess i should add the mindblast torque thing to the guide.

I am not sure how this build would do in insane. The start of Insane is rather rocky, clearly you need mindblast torque. Since people have finished madness on marauders I am sure this build can get through it. I am not quite sure how they survive madness starts on a pre-unstoppable marauder as there are tons of rares around and many have natively faster speed so you can't run that well and some can 2-3 shot you early on. But with phase door 5 early on I think you can slowly but surely do it. And a 200 point illuminate + 100 point mindblast is significant even on Insane, you should be able to kite for a second mindblast. So you should be able to get a roughly 400 point opener. This still kills most normal stuff and seriously hurts most rares. However killing say the Maze minotaur needs some serious kiting if you are just using the torque and illuminate, and meleeing may be too dangerous.

Once you get to about 15 my experience with adventurer makes me think this build can do Insane and possibly do it fairly well when done by very good players. This may depend rather radically on what charms you have. There are a few key charms people may want in the vault (if you have it, I don't myself) to do key tactics like corner pull aoe. Somewhat innocuous charms like void shard start to take on a larger signifigance. For people with the item vault from donating you might consider getting a collection of 3-4 tactically interesting charms and trying this build on Insane.

Anyway there is a lot of room to play around with charms, the build gives a pretty solid base and you can get a lot of tactical variation from charms. But it won't be as tough as a well played AM I don't think.

Seems a bit weird to me. If you only use Channel Staff and Gravity for damage, how do you manage to spend enough mana to ever get disruption shield up reliably, when you want it up? You'd need a big mana-consuming spell with a reasonable CD or you might find yourself in trouble more often than you'd like, I think. Anyway, keep us informed on your progress, I'd like to know how "low" stealth works for casters on Insane and beyond. 1.00 mastery was enough for me throughout Nightmare with +stealth gear- but just barely.

This discussion re-ignited my interest in "shadowstrike staffers" (as I like to call them ), and I'm having another nightmare run with a Shalore atm. Temporal, Stone, Gravity, and Ooze as talents (plus the cheesy TK staff slot.) Works like a charm so far. Reabsorb from Ooze is extendable with Timeless, which is supersweet. With the near-immunities from Indiscernible Anatomy, once I'll get Draconic Body I'll be invincible for 10 turns on top of being invisible - or so I hope

By the way, I tried a similar Cornac (aborted) just before, who went mindblast and magicless for a few levels and got an Anorithil escort mission - which I betrayed for Track. Keep this trick in mind, if you'd like your to have innate Track on your shadow light guys in the future, it's worth a try. (If Shalore, you might have to get rid of your runes first, though.)

I, uh, haven't worked that out yet. I am not actually very experienced with the AM specific stuff like arcane and meta since I have not actually run an AM. In fact I may have an issue with disruption shield, although so far the build works fine having just finished Lake of Nur, however I have made almost no real use of disrupt shield.

I also haven't figured out my stats as I have been sorely tempted to increase strength, which just seems wrong. He hasn't found a good staff yet and is only hitting for about 300, if he had bolbun's he'd be hitting for double that.

How is bone shield working for you with disruption shield by the way? If I remember well, hits check disruption then damage then bone, so it should work as long as you always have a damage shield up. If not, I guess your own manastorm would probably remove a bone shield charge/turn when disruption shield goes poof, not good. Never tried that combo, so I don't really know.

Well honestly I have like used disruption maybe twice and only to try it out and its didn't do much good. That isn't to say its not good its just that haven't needed it or I have used other means.

Basically I am using boneshield as an anti-insta-gib. Sometimes you take a corner and if you are normal speed and some hardhitting rare is faster than you, you get killed with nothing you can do. Or you get hit from off screen by skirmishers. So bone shield stops these and also gives me some time to establish some CC and then shield with rune of reflection (found that early in TM2) or with an recontructions shield. I know there are ways to deal with this to some extent and I make extensive use of a clairvoyance wand, but bone shield lets me use auto explore and no matter what some people say auto-explore can get you insta-gibbed on insane if you don't have serious constant defense or serious speed.

So far Bone shield gives you enough time to get a few nukes off or to not start from a large disadvantages from a bad start. Most melee mobs just can't really close the gap to me or if they do I reestablish the gap. Probably later on I will need a more robust defense.

However what I am considering doing, and this is not stealth based, is making an arcane combat build that uses Boneshield as an initial buffer to offload procs to consume mana and then finish the fight (defense-wise) using disruption shield.

I may also do this with this build, in that bone shield is basically a buffer, that is its huge strength and weakness. Thus it gives you time to spend mana. Since its instant and so is Aegis, when using bone shield it may be best to NOT run it perpetually. However for this stealth/gravity "crush" build staff really doesn't consume enough mana and gravity uses paradox. So consuming enough mana may be tricky, earthquake can do it. I am still noodling it around in my head.

But my initial take is to use bone shield as a buffer and reevaluate the always on usage.

On this crush mage I have some gloves with track so for the most part there is no reason I should turn a corner and get hit more than 5 times unless I really screw up.

I will say I have almost died about three times forgetting to check on my bone shield. Bone shield gives you the option to not shield up immediately sometimes with KBs and pins things don't hit you much because they are trying to mvoe instead of attacking. You may go 6 rounds without needing to shield or only 2 if they dot you up. I should really have more than 2 deaths (both of which were very early) due to poor play and those 2 deaths actually weren't that poor play. Also with corner AOE hits I can pre-damage stuff, then take the corner and blast them before needing anything but Bone Shield.

Thus if I did have some kind of good large mana expander I could do that and then Disruption Shield at round 2-6 instead of running it all the time. I think my only large one is Earthquake, but Aegis + about -100 mana may be fairly good. I dunno also I only have 1 point in disrupt shield atm.

Edit: oh right I am forgetting the 25% mana limit. So yeah disregard that reasoning. yeah its gonna be tricky to use it right since I don't think aegus lasts all that long.

We will see.

Edit2: maybe I will just earthewquake/disperase/metaflow/earthquake/disperse Bone shield probably lets you do that and maybe keep low willpower. He and come to think of it take displacement shield just because its a heavy mana cost . And run probability travel all the time.

Or zero if you're flurried. You should really stop relying on bone shield for auto-exploring once you hit Reknor, on insane these assasins are pretty brutal (and quick) and often come in pairs.


Not enough to use it yet, I'm afraid, except as an emergency manasurge. When you think you're at the point you need it for real defense (assuming that's what you're after here), try to dump points here to keep the mana/damage ratio at about 0.5 or less (be sure you have Shielding sustained before checking.) You don't have to max Disruption Shield right away, since the ratio is capped at - can't remember, I think it's 0.15 or 0.25 - and gets better as you get more spellpower. You'll also want a large enough manabar you'll never want full anymore with disruption on, since that "missing" mana is effectively extra hitpoints, at said ratio (say, assuming your mana/damage ratio is 0.25 and you have 100 mana out of 500 max left after sustains, you have effectively (500 - 100)/0.25 = 1600 extra hitpoints. Aegis - the talent - can bump that even higher.)


I don't understand that part. Unless you mean "low mana" instead of "low willpower"? Then it makes sense, but if you have to do that often in combat just to burn mana (instead of actually killing critters), it's a hint there's a flaw in your build. And I certainly wouldn't want to run another expensive sustain like probability travel, it's hard enough to manage that second health bar with Essence of Speed, etc. on