ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So... just last night, I finally unlocked the ability to play Doomed... which is something I've been wanting to do literally since they were first coded. Memory fades, but I'm pretty sure that that means it's been years. Last night, I started playing a Doomed... and realized almost instantly that I have *no idea* what I'm doing - or at least very little. I haven't even played Cursed heavily in a long (long) time. I've looked in the wiki for help, but since that's as of beta18, my guess is that it's a bit out of date.

I can sort of see how Doomed are supposed to work in general in the medium-to-endgame, but I have very little idea of how to start one out. The following is what I *have* been able to figure out (combined with what I've heard from others), but I get the feeling doomed are a tch fragile to start, and further insights would be much appreciated

Stats: as far as I can tell, I care about Will, Cunning, and Con, in about that order, and not a whole lot else.

Generics:
- Dark Sustenance: You need drain. Drain is the primary way that you get back Hate. In the early game, I'm guessing that you want to put two points in immediately, and then add poitns as your hate economy requires them. I'm guessing that this is one fo the trees you want to seriously consider taking 5555, and possibly think about throwing a cat point at.

- Gestures: This is your mindstar-buffing tree, and gesture-buffed mindstars serve as your backup weapon when you're out of Hate/cooldowns. The first two look like a go big or go home, depending on whether or not you expect to be reduced to melee attacks with any regularity. The third is just a handy passive that you'll likely want to max if you can spare the generics for it, and the fourth is a potentially handy passive if you are likely to be attacked in melee all that often, that also makes the first two more appealing. Seems like a tree that you could max, if you wanted to actually try to be a solid melee combatant (particularly if you can pick up a point of Mindstar Mastery from escorts) or one that you might take to 115x. You could even ignore it if you were generic-hungry, but Doomed don't really look that generic-hungry.

- Unnatural body: Why would I care when I have Feed and Devour Life? I'm expecting to leave this one at 1. Relentless is awesome and should be maxxed. Seethe and Grim Resolve are kind of odd, and I don't really know what to make of them, though Grim Resolve does look like a potentially nice source of poison/disease defense, which might be nice.

- I'll obviously want to get the Physical Training tree to max Thick Skin, but I'm not sure that I'll even want one level in armor training. Most of the really good mindpower stuff seems to be cloth some day. Probably leave it untrained until and unless something shows up that makes it really appealing

- Cursed Gear (or whatever it's called): I've always found this tree kind of awkward when I've tried it on Cursed. It looks like Doomed have a few more generics than they know what to do with, though, so maybe? I don't even know which curses I'd be going for.

- AM trees: while the inherent penalties to healmod make the fungus/AM shield combo a bit weaker here, it's still essentially 10-18 generics for a *huge* buff to survivability. Probably worth seriously considering

- Racial trees are racial trees.

- Escort trees: meh? Don't know of any that I'd really go for.

Class Skills:

- Force of Will: I'm pretty sure that I'll want at least one of Willful Strike or Reproach early, and Deflection looks like it's likely going to be too good to pass up. aside from that, no idea, other than the bit about the passive buff to crit damage being interesting.

- Darkness: looks like it would reward a solid investment at some point, as a defensive measure, as a damage buff, and for the bits of damage it deals out naturally. When to make that investment, and which ones to invest in, though, i dont' know - except that if I want to put much into the tree, I'll likely want to max dark vision, and if I'm not putting enough in the tree to make dark vision worthwhile, i might not want to put any into the tree at all.

- Shadows: I've heard that these are a serious case fo Go Big Or Go Home. If I'm investing any in here, it should be at least 514x, it probably wants to be 555x, and I may want to dump a cat point in for good measure. As this is one fo the shiny things that drew me to Doomed, I'll be in the "go big" camp.

- Punishments: Similar to Force of Will, actually. I'm pretty sure I'll want at least one fo Willful Strike or Reproach early, and Madness looks awesome and exploitable and I'll want 5 of it. Beyond that, no idea.

- Fears: From what I've heard, it's kind of meh as a tree. Spending a cat point for meh is not something I'm interested in doing.

Prodigies:
- The combination of high mindpower, Madness, and a lot of dink damage makes Mental Tyranny almost a must-have. If you're regularly doing blocks of 150 in there somewhere (I have no idea whether or not I will), that and the high cunning suggests that Endless Woes might have some appeal (and Endless Woes does some nice stuff to Dark damage, too, so that could be nice). Spell Feedback and Tricky Defenses also look like they might be nice, in different ways, probably leaning towards Tricky Defenses. Blighted Summoning - I really have no idea. You'd want to get the stat qualification via gear rather than points, but that's potentially doable. Is Empathic Hex worth it? More interesting for yeeks, in any case (...though keeping one alive long enough might be a trick). Eye of the Tiger would depend on how frustrating the cooldowns are. Certainly, pumping cunning and wielding mindstars will give you a nice high mindcrit, and the Force of Will buff will give you reason to keep pushing it, so it has the potential to be worthwhile.

/*******/

Specific things I *don't* know.

- I'm pretty sure I should be starting with Willful Strike or Reproach, and the more points I put in them at the very beginning, the easier the beginning will be. Do I eventually want to max both of them anyway? If not, how do I choose between them?
- I'm *guessing* that the Punishments tree deals mind damage, and the Darkness tree deals dark damage. aside from that, and the lightning and flames from the shadowcasters, I have no idea which attacks are dealign which damage types.
- If I do go Mental Tyranny, does that extend to my Shadows, too? Would it let them inflict Madness? Are Shadows ever likely to do the 150% damage necessary to make Endless Woes worthwhile?

I'm at level 19 with my most successful Doomed thus far. Observations:

- I have yet to need more than 1 point in Drain. Long-ish cooldowns and my shadows killing off monsters at a steady rate mean that so far I've always had enough hate for whatever I need.

- I've gone 5/5/5/1 in shadows (plus cat point for that fourth shadow). The first dozen levels were hard, and I was basically reduced to kiting monsters with Wilful Strike while my shadows served as short-lived distractions, but now they are virtually clearing levels by themselves. All I have to do is stay out of the way so monsters don't have a chance to hurt me, and throw in Force of Will abilities to support my shadows as and when I feel like it.

- Pursuant to the above, I should note that the Weirdling Beast fight was extremely hard, as it regularly shut down all my sustains, making the shadows - my sole form of defense - disappear. I got through by the skin of my teeth with heavy use of healing/regeneration infusions. Also, the Anti-magic trial was a little scary, as the arena floor has vault-style teleport protection, meaning your shadows can't Phase Door in to join you. You have to disable the sustain, then survive until you can re-enable it and summon new ones.

- Armour Training: 50 gold + a couple of temporary Strength items + a generic point = free access to helms, gauntlets and iron boots, hugely expanding your item selection. I get this for every character I can, doubly so if they're going to be limited by Antimagic.

- The Force of Will tree's talents don't damage shadows, which is great for hanging back out of harm's way (in so far as the short range permits) and acting as support. I particularly like the third one as it's a powerful AoE with both daze and knockback. Overall, the knockback on all three active skills is great for keeping enemies away until your shadows can finish them off.

- I've tried putting an early point in Darkness, but have yet to work out the practical applications. It doesn't seem to stop melee monsters from chasing me, and the patterns in which it spreads are too random to be sure of cutting off ranged monsters' LoS quickly.

- I read somewhere that shadow AI isn't currently set up to be able to use Empathic Hex, so you may want to hold off on Blighted Summoning until that's fixed.

- In regards to starting skills, I don't know how I'd have got through my first couple of tier 1 dungeons without Wilful Strike. Reproach might have multi-target damage, but being able to knock back high-HP monsters like trolls to buy time for the cooldown to expire (or for shadows to interpose) was invaluable. But I didn't use Reproach much, so maybe it works too.

- Prodigy-wise, I'm presently contemplating defensive prodigies, or maybe Spell Feedback. Eye of the Tiger can be obscene on high-crit nuke builds, but right now so much of my damage is coming from shadows rather than talents that it might not act as much of a multiplier if the trend continues. Endless Woes gives darkness damage a chance to blind, but between the existing class skills it seems like enemies are going to have debuffs coming out of their ears even without burning a prodigy on it.

A few comments in order since I've won with a couple of doomed now:


Dark Sustenance: You can actually completely ignore this tree and get by. You get hate from plenty of other sources as it is, but I also understand some people would probably think I'm crazy if I tried to tell them this. That said, the tree definitely isn't 5/5/5/5 worthy. Devour Life's scaling is pretty awful and its only redeeming factor is being able to be used directly at 5, and the scaling on the other 3 aren't enough to justify maxing them (but both the third/fourth talents are definitely okay to toss a few points in assuming you'll actually remember to use feed).

Gestures: The first talent you obviously keep at 1 if you plan on meleeing basically never. I tend to take it to 4/5 or so because I like gesture slamming dudes, and doomed can make it hurt pretty hard later on. The second talent is great, the third is pretty good (free crit? don't mind if I do!) and the fourth is pretty nice if you end up in melee range a lot, which is likely since doomed are kinda short-mid range casters who can melee dudes. You don't really need to max Gesture of Guarding (another talent where 3 or 4 out of 5 is good) or even the second/third ones, but they're certainly worth the investment.

Unnatural Form: Pretty much a 1/5/1/0 tree just like on cursed. Relentless is amazing, Seethe IMO doesn't give enough returns past 1 for me to want to invest in it (i play AM doomed so, generic-strapped! especially if you pick a race like thalore.)

Combat Training stuff: Max thick skin is good of course as you noted, but always always always get one point in armor training. Don't forget you might luck into an early rare/randart packing some serious mindpower or mind damage or any other juicy stats. And if you don't go AM, then Dakthuns Gauntlets are some of the best you'll ever find and they're gauntlets so you need 1 armor training.

Cursed aura: Preference. If you picked non-cornac (cornac is kind of pointless on doomed, so..) and thus have actual good racials and are going AM, then definitely don't go anywhere near this. If you're not AM, then it's a solid pickup. Shrouds is the curse you want to focus on, free resists for moving and killing dudes are awesome as hell.

AM stuff: Doomed are so amazing with AM it's absolutely ridiculous. Don't worry about the healmod thing, mid-late game you'll constantly be running on a full tank of hate from the amount of killing you'll be doing, and I can guarantee that's true even if you skip the feed tree. Fungus is amazing, and Doomed can put Aura of Silence to fantastic use with their mindpower. AM Shield is, of course, also great. I can't stress enough just fantastic it is on them.. Spell Feedback is also a great prodigy to have on them, incidentally.

Escort trees: Yeah, pretty much meh. You don't need any of them for status cleansing because you're nigh-immune to stun/confusion already, and doomed have enough things to sling generics into as is.


Class stuff!

Force of Will: An amazing tree even if you ignore Deflection. Don't let the seemingly small numbers mislead you, Blast is your single best 'wave arm, watch room of enemies explode violently' button, and Unseen Force does hilariously rude things to any enemy you just don't feel like dealing with. The crit damage bonus for leveling the tree up is icing on the tasty as hell cake.

Darkness: Also really good, but for different reasons! 5/5 in the first two gives you some LoS blockage as well as the ability to shift around quickly in your cloud. The other 2 skills do kinda bad damage unless you pick up Mental Tyranny because, well, you're not going to be stacking dark damage. But with it even they become pretty decent. The first two skills are definitely the breadwinners here, though, but you don't need to seriously invest in the tree at all til your mid-late teens IMO.

Shadows: I personally never use this tree but I do know it needs a category point into it to really shine. And yeah, it takes some big investment and doesn't really pay off at first at all. Someone else can comment on this, though.

Punishments: Reproach is pretty good and stays great all game (personally I level both of them early on and use them both all the time). Hateful Whisper does some pretty decent damage and has some actual range (not a lot of it, but more than reproach) and can help soften up dudes in groups (later on it will probably just outright gib its target), Agony is pretty nice because its cooldown is super short and you can fire and forget it and it will keep trying to proc Madness for you. Madness is, obviously, amazing, and even more amazing with Mental Tyranny. I tend to keep Agony low level until mid-late game honestly but it's not a bad skill by any means, keep in mind it has really good range as far as Doomed is concerned.

Fears: Aren't really that bad, but a build with shadows probably doesn't want to spare the category point or class points on it anyways so it's kinda moot. When I do pick them up I do it late, and by lategame doomed are steamrollers anyway so they mostly fall under 'win more' buttons.

Prodigies: Right on the money on Mental Tyranny, there's not much to say about it other than getting a boost to your best damage type and letting you only have to worry about stacking one damage type and making Darkness stuff capable of doing actual damage is godtier. Spell Feedback is absurdly amazing. Endless Woes kinda falls flat because with Tyranny you only get the mind proc and you can already confuse anyways. Tricky Defenses is okay but still not as good as Spell Feedback. For Blighted Summoning, your summons derive spellpower from you so you need to actually have a good magic stat and not just cheese the requirement with items--at least, that's how it works with summoners so I'm assuming the same applies to everyone else, but that makes it not a very good pickup unfortunately. Eye of the Tiger is a good choice (since even your gesture bumps will reduce cooldowns), but still loses out to Tyranny/Feedback IMO because doomed doesn't have a ton of problems with cooldowns generally.


Other stuff:

Both Reproach and Willful are really good, and while you don't need to max them early or anything you should consider it sooner or later, I can't imagine playing while ignoring one of them.

Force tree is physical, Dark tree is darkness, punishments is mind. This is why Mental Tyranny is exceptionally important. Note that even without super +phys stacking, before getting tyranny, blast and unseen force are still crazy good. Dark tree's damage is, as noted, pretty bad since it's not an element you'll be stacking, but Tyranny fixes that.

I doubt Tyranny applies to shadows but personally haven't tested it. Also, my current doomed that I won with is, uh, dead next to Atamathon and you can't escape from there or I'd go reallocate some class points to check it for you.

I'm pretty sure that pertinent summon stats are based on will/mindpower, actually. In particular, if they weren't, then shadow builds would need a whole lot of magic, as their damage (from what I've heard) is pretty heavily dependent on their spells.

I actually completely forgot that shadows cast magic so they actually have a magic stat that isn't awful, unlike the problem with summoners and blighted summoning where the spells their summons get do need the summoner to have not-trashy magic.

Oops. (can you tell I was serious when I said I don't use shadows? lmao)

Do want to throw out that feed power, at least, while nice (5/5 it and it's about on par with the damage boost from, say, a tier 5 +dam gem, which would bring it close to the utility of 5/5 imbue gem), currently appears to be bugged. While it does give you the +dam%, it doesn't inflict an equivalent malus to the enemy you're feeding on. If it ever gets fixed, it will definitely be worth maxing, as it'd be equivalent to 10%+ resall vs. a single target, on top of whatever resistances you might happen to filch from the critter. As is, it's still pretty nice in an objective sense (10+% all dam isn't exactly something to sneeze at, after all), but notably less useful than it should be, going by the description.

The tier four is... not as good as it used to be. It could really stand to go back to feeding on resall, too, t'be honest, and just be special cased so it doesn't feed on resall over 100%. Then it'd be pretty darn incredible, heh. It's still fairly alright, I'd say, if you've got a good target to leech off of.

I do like getting devour up to 5/5, though. S'nice to be able to start the feed off with a lil' bit of damage and a wee titch of healing, yeah.

Well lets see...

The trick is getting to 20. That's the hard part- but if you go all in for shadow rush it's more like the trick is getting to 12. I swear if I make 20, I can make 30, and then it's just patience and itemization.

Now'd be a pertinent time to say I've not had such hot luck with my favored class since b44 or so. So, take your grain of salt and other vets feel free to contradict.

General Notes: Doomed are *FANTASTIC* at slugging it out. They are miserable at spike damage. Their biggest player mistake weakness is picking fights unprepared (deflection shield down/ low hate for the most part). Their second biggest weakness is not hitting your enemy in his weakness. Ways that make 'em better at slugging it out work great (AM and AM shield + deflection combos, armor + deflection, creeping dark LoS control, all amplify eachother). Finding out how to do spike damage (detection, preemptive creeping dark, preemptive unnatural force, LoS target, agony, focus shadows, wail on 'em for crits <- idealized play). Know thy enemy, and hit him in the jewels: LoS the ranged. Gesture the non stun immune. Knockback yoyo the melee. Madness + agony just about everything.

Force of will tree:

So willful strikes a handy little one point wonder, but it's scaling isn't fantastic. I tend to leave at one until late game- and use it all the damn time too

Deflection: miserable scaling. Fantastic one pointer. Please note that even when deflection shield is emptied, it tries to regen 2 or so 'shield' a turn which is effectively health until you're knocking single digit HP's. Or, in other words- it's two hp regen per turn plus an ablative buffer. 2 hp/turn regen is nice.

Blast: Oh... it's lovely. But I beeline the next skill for its ridiculousness. One point provides a lovely little 3 turn daze breather- if you're not floating agony or hateful whispers already. See how those cause issues?

Unnatural Force: Okay, so at one point it sucks. At three points its good. At five points it's like ~200 damage 3 knockback (random direction) 30% chance of second strike, at 5 points AND a cat it's ~240 damage 40% second strike, which just grinds solo enemies (see: bosses) pretty nicely.

Darkness Tree

Creeping Dark/ Darkvision are hardly useful at 1/1, begin to be useful in corridors at 3/3, and are fantastic at 5/5, especially in corridors, and especially if you're swinging around movement infusions too just in case of retarded darkness spreads on open ground.

Please note that the +crit damage from force of will and +damage % in darkness tree combine multiplicatively.

Dark torrent: well, here's the gap filler for reproach / willful strike / agony spam, it'll make a full rotation. ~20% chance (CAN WE GET THIS MOVED TO MINDPOWER BASED?) to blind and make target(s?) stop targetting you: aka go hit shadows again. Or something like that, I've never really noticed and doubt it works. However nowadays it does leave some nice creeping darkness trails pretty often, which can act as carpets with the +move speed on darkvision for gesture users.

Dark Tendril: once upon a time this was semi useful for LoS abuse. Now, it's useful vs bosses, maybe, or the rare knockback immunes (wyrms!). I don't recommend it really at all anymore, it's mediocre in comparison to throwing more points at madness or unnatural force, or even dropping a cat point and getting panic out of fears. I'd rather have 1/1/1/1 in fears than five in tendril.

Shadows:

So, step 1, get some shadows. Step 2, 1 point in shadow warriors for fade. Step 3, get 4 points in shadow mages and they start ressing themselves: NOW you profit.

Note that focus shadows has a percentage chance to trigger shadows using blindside on target- IF the shadows can see the target. HOWEVER, shadows are guaranteed to teleport to and protect a targeted ally instead of 'checking' for blindside, and you can focus shadows a shadow that decided to actually go smack the right enemy...

Shadows suck in vaults. You'll waste plenty of hate just tryign to get them to follow you back into the no teleport vaults thanks to an unlucky use of phase door.

Punishments:

Reproach is not half bad! It scales identically to willful strike, I leave it at 1 for a long, long time typically. Note it'll eventually trigger madness checks.

Hateful whisper: yes this can echo around back onto people it's worn off of, as long as there are things for it to bounce to and fro from. This makes it a supremely efficient hate to damage power in crowds, as long as you've got 3 points or so in it.

Agony: I probably do more damage with this ability than any other on doomed, and I don't usually lead with it. Repeatedly triggers madness checks. DON'T cast again on targets already afflicted with agony, ESPECIALLY on turn 5 of agony where it does it's highest damage amount- that's wasteful.

Madness: oh, it's so lovely at 1 point, and it's lovely with more. ALL mind damage checks madness- gestures, agony, that random + mind damage on hit from your gloves or something. Did I mention it gets checked PER? It's kind of like oprah, but you're giving away status effects.

Fears:
Umm... they need a redesign. They're potent enough anyways, but heighten fear is actually misdescribed compared to implementation- it works if enemies see YOU for the turns listed. AKA creeping dark and heighten fear don't play nice. FANTASTIC shutdown on bosses, and panic is a lovely, lovely panic button or pace controller for fights. I think of it as a better banishment, but it's got a chance ot screw you if you use it too late.
I advise only playing with this tree if you're experimenting, not a serious run.

Feeds...
I tend to go 1/4/1/1 until mid thirties, and then pump to 3/4/1/1. DON'T kill harmless things asap, just keep feeding off them. 1 point in feed will keep you busy for a long time.

Gestures:
Combines nicely with darkness and the +movespeed. Note even with 1 point, you'll eventually be swinging madness check, stun check, cross tier effects check, for about half a turn spent on a gesture swing. I usually don't do this.

Unnatural Body talents:
1/5/1/1 is my usual spread, and only because the fourth tier power has that itty bitty chance to throw off poisons or diseases. Thereby meaning if I'm not swinging cure magical, those crazy lethal 30 turn mid-high damage diseases can be ignored and I can focus incription prep on other things.

Cursed Items:

Shrouds is lovely. Nightmares is lovely. Itemization sucks (what do you mean my level 6 edens guile find has curse of MISFORTUNE?). That cursed sentry skill gives you something to do with all that weaponry, is actually fairly damaging, and can make a hallways plug in a cinch. Playstyle choice, but I think throwing 5/4/1/1 is worht the investment nigh everytime.

Antimagic:
Probably yes please. Doomed do it well- deflection shield loves this damage blocker stuff.

Okay I think that's it for my not so brief overview and general thoughts.

Playstyle builds: magestyle caster ( forces + punishments), melee hit and run (gestures + darkness), attrition summoner (punishments + shadows). I'm sure there's more- interestin genough most builds have significant overlap on the other builds. A doomed can switch styles pretty handily.

Ah, Doomed. My favourite class so far!
Here's an example of a winner that also killed Atamathon on the 1st try: http://te4.org/characters/15281/tome/23 ... ade363ee71

I had no idea what to do with the class but went with Shadows and Force of Will first.

Shadows are nice bodyguards and can actually kill stuff when leveled. I haven't bothered with the 3rd skill early though, only got it later for Atamathon. With additional cat point (or from an item like me) you get 4 shadows which is nice.

Force of will skills were my basic nukes and worked well. Deflection is a nice shield, it doesn't absorb that much but you can just enable and forget about it. Blast is a great AoE and Unseen Force helps with crowd control.

Darkness is an excellent field control tree. It provides large damage boost and movement speed increase. Dark Tendrils may be leveled some if you plan to use it, but it's pretty meh (the long travel time makes it only marginally useful). Dark Torrent is a nice ray that has longer range than Willful Strike.

I also got Fears around when I returned from the West. I wasn't sure if it's worth it, but they are freaking awesome (on things that aren't immune). Main reason was that I wanted to nail Atamathon at last and fears have some pretty serious debuffs, the most important being save reduction (Atamathon has 90+). Reasoning was, if I could get my mindpower to 80+ it should be enough (with Tyrant skill that gives +15) to actually apply fears to him and make him killable. It turned out he's immune to fears though, so... They are also great for crowd control with the Paranoid fear. They made prides pretty easy.



As for generics, I put some points at random. Well, Feed is nice but not essential. I leveled it for the purpose of debuffing Atamathon, but again, it didn't work (Feed Strengths can't lower "all" resist).

Gestures are pretty good, you can melee stuff quite easily with that tree. It also provides excellent debuffs so I was leveling it as well. The last skill is a nice survivability boost with melee damage reduction.

I went antimagic because why not but didn't have too much points to level it. Waited all the way to the East before completing my first potion quest, damn storm wyrms couldn't be found anywhere. You should be fine if you're not as obsessed with Atamathon/debuffs as I was.

As for prodigies I got Spell Feedback and Mental Tyranny. Mental Tyranny is just amazing. Get it.

I didn't get Punishments but they seem to be a valid replacement for Force of will. Reproach has pretty nice damage but low range. Other skills provide crowd control and more damage. Also it deals Mind damage instead of Physical so might be better depending on equipment and if you can't get Mental Tyranny yet.

Bonus: Atamathon
He's immune to fears and Feed Strengths didn't do anything because it cannot lower "all" resist. Gesture of Malice worked perfectly though. That + darkness debuff resulted in a reasonable damage. Heroism and movement infusions were of course essential. Shadows helped considerably as cannon fodder and additional source of damage.

I pretty much agree with omni's summary.

Since Dark Gifts usually get short shrift, I'd like to expound on them a bit.

Curses scale, and at 5 they give +9 to a stat (or corpses, wich gives +5/+5 I think?). The way I like to play it is with 1/1 or 2/2 for the early and mid game, and put more in them once the rest of my generics run into scaling issues.

Generally I don't gear specifically for curses, but use them as a tie-breaker when I have to decide between equipment of similar quality.

As already noted, Shrouds is pretty nice, especially with the movement speed bonus from running around in the creeping dark.

Madness the curse seems to be more of a Cursed thing, but as a Doomed you probably will get into melee from time to time, and then the damage bonus is nice.

Corpses is actually better than I used to think, since the ghouls it produces can Leap right into people's faces and the ghoul barf heals your shadows. For undead Doomed it should be pretty sweet.

Misfortune has that neat CUN bonus, and a chance to boost damage when it could kill something. Between Agony, Creeping Dark and Unnatural Force, there's a lot of opportunities for it to kick in.

Nightmares gives WIL and summons horrors. 'Nuff said.

_________________
Ghoul never existed, this never happened!

Ah yes, that's a good write up on Dark Gifts (*cough* cursed items).

Also, might I note I write horribly on two hours of sleep...

I just want to add in I imagine gesture based doomed and nightmares curse seem like a match made in heaven. You're just begging to fill that summon nightmares meter repeatedly.

One important thing: Currently Mindstar Mastery does not help you at all if you have gestures active as it only takes very specific properties from the mindstars like base damage.

Shadows may be not worthy taking early, but it's a 1-point-wonder-tree. Even one shadow can absorb enemy blasts and debuffs, and when it is killed, you will have another one shortly. Not good against area/chain damage enemies, though, but it can be always switched off.

my doomed winner maxed shadows. Dominate, gesture, agony, darkness, devour, unseen force and loop.