Reference: My winner report, and char sheet.
Overview: Playing a Wyrmic like a Berserker
Breath wyrmics are pretty common, but suffer from a rough early and midgame. A 2H wyrmic, on the other hand, gets to work immediately and stays strong enough throughout the game. It plays very similar to berserker, except that you trade off some frontline ability (power/acc & sustain) for verstility and more buttons to press. You get a lot of attacks with rider effects, so you can deal with situations in a lot more ways. The overall high damage and versatile effects make it fun to play, but on the downside you have somewhat limited access to things like phys/mindpower, accuracy, immunities, cleansing, and mobility.
Attack Buttons
- Wing Buffet: Leave at 1, use it for crowd damage/ranged attack or knockback (check for immunity if you are relying on that). Wing Buffet followed by Ice Wall is an okay escape if the KB works.
- Ice Claw: Leave at 1, use for crowd damage/ranged attack. The freeze isn't super reliable but gives you a turn or two of recovery if it works.
- Stunning Blow: On zerk this is an instant 5/5, but 2H Wyrmic is starving for class points and has other disables. 3 is a good breakpoint. Deals Ice damage.
- Quake: Leave at 1. This is a last resort escape if you're near diggable walls (which is often), since there's a decent chance it'll shunt you out of melee with something brutal. It can totally enclose you in walls sometimes, which is safety from most kinds of enemies in the game. Don't use this as an attack too much, since throwing an enemy out of melee is annoying.
- Dissolve: 5/5. One of your two bigboy attacks. It's not completely overwhelmningly strong, but four attacks is also valuable for delivering blind, on-hit, and on-crit effects (check out my equipped weapon on my char sheet, for example). It gets a blinding hits every two talent levels, so you get your third at 5 (6.5 with mastery). Note it's all acid damage.
- Prismatic Slash: 5/5. Your second bigboy attack. Up until endgame, this is the strongest hit you've got and doubles as crowd damage. Also can deliver a random effect (daze/blind/disarm/slow/freeze), but consider that just a bonus. Deals a random damage type.
- Swallow: 5/5. Hits hard and executes. Checks instakill immunity, so throw it all you want against bosses as a normal attack. Deals nature damage.
- Deathdance 1/5. It's good but hard to find points for. Take it to 3 if you can find the points to spare.
- Breaths: 1/5. This is a weapon wyrmic build so we don't go all in on these. 1 point is good for a quick damage splash on a crowd or at range, and delivering something like disarm/freeze can be useful when you're being pressured heavily (although ice wall is a more reliable crowd disable).
- Static Field: 5/5. One of those abilities that gets more useful the more powerful your foes are. It can crit and deals potentially massive damage (a normal example). Enemies tend to resist this quite a bit (checks your mindpower vs their phys save) early on, Superpower helps.
- Fearless Cleave 1/5. Extremely useful as an attack + move. I detailed a number of use cases for it in the tricks section of my zerker guide.
- Rush 1+/5. You probably don't unlock it til late given how low on class points you are, but given the need for closers it . I floated points in for the final battle and forgot I had it.
Support Buttons:
- Lightning Speed: 2/5. MVP of the class, it's your escape and is super good. Doesn't need many points, 2 is a usable breakpoint.
- Burrow: 4/5. Your antiarmor ability. When combined with Lightning Speed, lets you dig tunnels like 30 tiles long. You can even run through mountains on the world map if you use them before entering the map. You can mix it with Corrosive Mist to get boosted armor penetration, but you probably don't need to bother with that often.
- Icewall: 2/5. Reliably grants a few turns of reprieve if you can get it between you & them, can save your life if used at the right time. Can also block off retreats, a rarely useful but nice bonus. I used that to deliver the killing blow on Argoniel in my run, she very nearly managed to escape and recover all her sustains.
- Nature's Pride: X/5. I used this purely as a button to restore Lightning Speed if things got dangerous (more escapes is good). You could max it and use it offensively, but I don't feel that it's really strong enough to warrant that.
- Nature's Touch / Sudden Growth: X/5. I was seeing full heals of 2k at 5/5 Touch and 2/5 Growth, given my healmod/maxlife values. Pump these to where they need to be to heal you up from near death.
- Waters of Life: 0/5 if you're a Thalore - between AM Shield, Resolve & your natural resistance, you're going to be healed by most of this damage anyway. Otherwise 1/5 will give you a button to reverse a big chunk of ooze, poisonrogue, and diseasecorruptor damage.
- One with Nature: 0/5. It's legitimately a good ability, but its main purpose is to protect you from long-term pressure. Fungus has that covered.
- Healing Nexus: 0/5 Doesn't appear to check against a save, it just hits for free. We don't need the healing ourselves (you're generally either at full health or about to full heal from an ability), and we can mostly just overwhelm enemy healing. If you really want it, 1 point ought to be fine.
- Wyrmic Guile 5/5: Useful purely for how valuable immunities are, although they're unfortunately on the low end.
- Chromatic Fury 5/5: Given how variable our damage types are, the all boost and all penetration is appreciated. Resistances are nice.
- Icy Skin 5/5: Helps protect against the most dangerous stuff in the game: sudden burst damage. Armor is appreciated as it's the most reliable way to shut down enemy melee when stacked enough.
- Wild Growth: X/5 Similar to Icy Skin. Spend points are you can spare here, especially if a low life rating race.
- Fungal Growth: X/5. Every 20% on the tooltip translates to an extra turn of regen. Where you want to leave it at is going to depend on your mindpower and so on.
- Ancestral Life: X/5. Also pretty dependant on mindpower. If high, put this at 3+, otherwise don't bother. This can easily make Nature's Touch & Sudden Growth refund more than 100% of a turn if you invest in it.
- Meditation: 1/5. Sure it's handy to activate and drop a boosted heal or something, but it's not useful enough that I ever bothered in my run. Eq. isn't a major issue either.
- Harmony of Nature: 0/5, This is purely my opinion, but unreliable buffs such as these are not attractive.
Antimagic: 3/1/X/1.
We aren't as taxing on equilibrium as breath wyrmic is, so max AM shield if you like. Antimagic works fine for this build but strictly speaking not all that important with fungus already at hand.
Conditioning (warrior escort): 1/5/0/0
Probably a smart option to mitigate effects. I had 1 UFR from escort and had to rely on it a number of times; going all in on the tree will give you much more breathing room against stun spam, etc.
Race
My recommendation is Thalore.
- Gift of the Woods is a free infusion slot since it can fill the hole when your core regen is offline. Lasts hilariously long with fungus.
- Verdant is unexpectedly useful with Ancestral Life in play - enemies that throw heavy duty poisons/oozebeams and such at you just grant you free turns.
- Guardian of the Wood provides all resistance on a character that's already pretty high-ish in resists in general. Combined with resolve and a bit more all resistance (guardian helm, pearl jewelry, etc), and you can reach the resist cap in most battles no problem.
- Treant Summon Thing: With WIL capped, these guys are dangerous as heck. Sure they're useful to aggro things from around the corner (and waste their big cooldowns before you enter the fray), but they are strong enough that they can just outright kill randbosses sometimes. Unfortunately they will get toasted by your area attacks, but they're durable enough that they can eat a couple without dying. Their strength is such that you don't have to worry about durable enemies outlasting your offense via Vitality and such - you can throw treants at the critical moment at dudes like that. They aren't even bothered by high enemy armor much since they can reach 250+ unarmed damage.
- Max STR, keep WIL high. Spread the rest however you like, I split between CON/CUN.
- Placing class talents is largely preference. Don't 5/5 things too early, try to get all your tools online first. There's nothing in the kit that's is massively important to cap early (although burrow at 4/5 is is pretty close)
- Gear is not very different from your usual priorities as melee: Life/armor/healmod etc to survive, offensive stats (acc, etc) to make sure you can hit good, and whatever immunities you can find. Effect clearing is weak on this build, prioritize immunities where you can.
- Prodigies is probably some combination of ICCTW, Superpower, Spine of the World. Your phys/mindpower will hit reliable levels with the first two (and your damage surges big time). Spine (or something similar) shores up a lot of the effect vulnerabilities this build has. Superpower also boosts most fungus talents pretty well.
- Inscriptions are pretty flexible, with Regen/Heroism probably the only mandatory picks. Dual-clear wilds are valuable if you can find any, and although you can do fine without a movement infusion, it's a safe choice. A really good regen infusion can be used alone thanks to fungus, but beware stun/brainlock. Thalore are fine with just 1 regen no problem. I ran Regen, Heroism, 2 Dual Wilds, 1 Healing, although the healing infusion never got used.
- Category point expenditure is probably going to look like: Inscription, Higher Draconic, Inscription, Combat Techniques, although you can shuffle that around no problem.
How to fight
It's not terribly complicated; you overwhelm enemies with all your damaging talents, disabling them at the same time while your passive defenses keep you standing. Dissolve has three blinding strikes (although a 25% chance each), Stunning blow is two stuns, ice claw freezes, buffet & quake knockback, and Prismatic does a bunch of things. You have backup disablers, namely the breaths (whatever you took - 1/5 is all you need to apply its rider effect), and other low priority attacks like acidic spray & bellowing roar. Depending on your exact choices, you have five stun/freezes, two disarms, two blinds, two knockbacks & whatever you get out of prismatic. Crowds aren't much of an issue, you either eliminate most of them in a strike or two, or you split the crowd with Ice wall, or you just reposition until you can wipe them all out.
Defense wise, you have fungal regen (and AM shield) negating small damage and Icy Skin/Fungal Growth/Heroism mitigating larger hits. Nature's Touch & Sudden Growth are quick-cast full heals for whenever your colossal regen isn't up to the job. When things get dangerous, Lightning Speed out of there, with Burrow up to dig out if you need to. Nature's Balance even restores most of these tools on demand.
Weaknesses
- Effect clearing is scarce.
- Accuracy is lowish - almost none in your trees and you don't want to pump DEX. Look for it in gear.
- You have no easy source of combating enemy healing. Simply overpowering it will work if your damage is high (2x offensive prodigies or strong gear).
- No native source of tracking. If you go antimagic and can't find a thief escort, you'll have to rely on tracking charms.
