ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Stone Warden / Demonologist / Arcane Blade - Tanking Madness

This build is very durable, but the start is a challenge on madness.

You will need the Dwarven Adventurers mod.

Or you can edit your save file and manually add the categories.

Madness Winner

Insane Winner (from before Buckler Training was removed as an adventurer option)

Initial Talents
Corruption / Doom shield
Corruption / Demonic pact
Chronomancy / Flux
Wild-gift / Earthen power
Chronomancy / Matter
Race / Dwarf
Celestial / Light
Spell / Conveyance

Buy
Technique / Combat training
Spell / Staff combat (Optional - I skipped it.)

Level 10
Psionic / Absorption

Level 20
Wild-gift / Earthen vines

Level 36
Technique / Magical Combat

Wyrm Bile
Spell / Stone

How to Play the Build at Various Stages

1: Escape from Reknor

Be careful. Run away frequently. Osmosis shield will probably drain all of your vim when you use it. I played as a weak Chronomancer and avoided melee while using Dust to Dust.

2: Until You Have Rings of Vim on Hit

Buy Armour Training to at least level 2 ASAP.

Continue to avoid close combat.

Open up the Old Forest. Optionally, you can open up everything to make the game easier.

3: With Good Vim Restoration - Obtaining Tarrasca

With Vim on Hit, Osmosis shield will now work reliably. You should be pretty tanky. Do not turn on the vines. Doing so will probably kill you. Unless you are exceptionally lucky, you will not find Tarrasca. The vault is your friend. This is why we opened up the Old Forest.

4: Wearing Tarrasca - Eternal Guard

You are very tanky, but your play style is now changed due to vines.

50% movement speed is a major problem, but the 50% damage reduction of Tarrasca should more than make up for it if you are careful.

This means that you do not move in combat without using a movement infusion. Teleporting (phase door, twisted portal and rockwalk are your friends) is the way to go. Alternatively, Rockswallow brings them to you.

You can now take out those pesky Ziguranth patrols and adventurer parties, which is really good news because you will not be outrunning anybody with a 50% movement speed penalty. If you forget to trigger a movement infusion right before exiting to the world map, you can expect to fight a lot of random encounters.

5: Eternal Guard - Flexible combat

If you have enough resistances on your shields, you should be extremely tanky. I had 10 out of the 12 types on my run through. I was missing temporal and arcane. I made sure that I had temporal on one of the shields in my off-set. If you wield Shantiz telekenetically, you can switch sets without penalty. Be careful when you do so. I like to set block to auto on visible enemies. This parameter will need to be reset EVERY time you switch weapon sets.

I tanked the Room of Death to the point where I was getting 'out of memory' errors.

6: Flexible Combat - End Game

Spectral Guard is a good alternative to Flexible Combat if you do not have enough resistances on your shields.

Once you imbibe the bile and open up Spell / Stone, you will be rocking. Before that combat will be long and tedious.

Essential Equipment

Demon Seeds

Rings - One with Vim on Hit, the other with Vim per Round.
Armour - Removing debuffs is priority #1, so go with Fiery Cleansing from a Fire Imp seed.
Staff - Go for the Fire Imp seed for the extra damage.
Shields - Resistances are priority number one, but telepathy from a Dúathedlen seed is tempting.

Items

Tarrasca
Boots with the highest Undeterred ego numbers you can find.
Shields with as many different resistances as possible.
A staff with Mana on Crit or Mana Regen for your psionic slot.
Anything to increase Mana and Vim regeneration.

Inscriptions

Two wilds and a movement.

Very nice! I had a similar idea a while back (combine osmosis shield + dual shields) but i didn't think it could have cleared Madness so i sort of left it out.

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<Shibari> You're full of shit
<darkgod #tome> ster is a troll
<Sheila> and ster, i do agree with you on most things game-related, but do try to not be such an ass!
<mex> your posts lead to people like me being abused and murdered

Thanks for the guide. Just ran it through nightmare and after level 20 or so, nothing could kill me. I also killed Elandar with approximately 62000 paradox because I just couldn't catch him and when I did he'd teleport away and heal all the damage.

Paradox is a bit of a problem on this build. Fortunately, you are so tough that the anomalies cannot really hurt you. I went 3/5 for Reality Smearing near the end of the game to help deal with the paradox overload.

I'm glad you liked the build. Insane is a lot of fun with this build, if you want to try it. I find that the play time is much faster than most builds, as you will never need to run away once you have Eternal Guard.

I didn't find paradox a problem as due to not actually activating any paradox using abilities, I didn't trigger an anomaly. As long as reality smearing was kept up and I didn't need to use Dust to Dust, my paradox just kept on going up with no downside

I found that high paradox was a problem if I had to re-activate my Chronomancer sustains or if I wanted to do something digging quickly via Dust to Dust.

I noticed your madness winner only invested two points in Absorption, and seemed to have a lot of slack in Generic points. Did you ever try running F.E.M. instead of Absorption?

I think that FEM is the better choice, but absorption was helpful for escaping from Reknor at the very beginning.

I went with FEM over Absorption for my arcane psyshot adventurer build and never regretted it.

I will probably try this again in the 1.5.x world and use FEM instead. Dropping Conveyance in favour of a teleportation rune would free up 6 points. Harmony does not really need more than 6 points either, so we could put 12 towards FEM - 1/5/1/5.

I was also thinking of swapping out Magical Combat for the wonder twins (Wild-gift / Dwarven nature). I always seemed to be out of Mana anyway.

What would you use in addition to Dwarven Nature? I'm taking a spin through Insane with this build (using FEM instead of Absorption) and have spent some time pondering alternatives to the Magical Combat pair. I hadn't thought of Dwarven Nature, but was instead thinking of Shield Offense and Temporal Combat.

Shield Offense will probably prove to be a poor choice due to lack of stamina generation, and I worry that Temporal Combat will fail to help much against the build's biggest weakness -- enemies with high damage subtraction and/or healing. Right now, I've got an enemy wandering in Sher'tul Fortress that has Osmosis and I just can't hurt it. (The character's only 30 and so doesn't have Magical Combat yet.) I suppose Temporal Combat would help plenty against Osmosis thanks to Disintegration.

I would expect Dwarven Nature to suffer a lot of trouble from high equilibrium; I just took the points out of the Vines mobility talents due to high failure rates.



Huh, I'd been pondering alternatives to Conveyance but I was thinking of Movement rather than Teleportation because I've been using it for mobility rather than a a "get out of dodge" escape. I think I'd really miss it if I were down a mobility effect. I suppose dropping a Wild works -- I've been using Regeneration in one of those slots anyways.

Now that Adventurers start with Combat Training, you don't need Matter to survive the escape from Reknor -- that category point can be switched to Tinkers. You lose out on a bunch of what other classes get from tinkers because you're not going to be putting them into your weapon or chest, but (among the rest of the still-nice bonuses) 100% disarm immunity is huge for this build.

I also think a more careful player than I could get by without Vines/Tarrasca. I tried that (along with Tinkers and replacing Conveyance with Slaughter) and died a few too many times to damage spikes, particularly when being slowed meant a shield block wore off inconveniently.

I may at some point try to swap out Dwarf for Ogrewielding Sawrd, freeing up the Earthen Power category point for something else. I suspect with that approach the most difficult part would be getting to the Sher'tul fortress -- that once you've got Vines/Tarrasca and Sawrd you can get by without the survivability of a second shield (or conceivably of blocking at all).

Have you tried steamsaws and butchery instead of magical combat and stone?

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MADNESS rocks