Stone Warden / Demonologist - Tanking Madness

[vonfackenheim]

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.

[ster]

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.

[roffster]

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.

[vonfackenheim]

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.

[roffster]

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

[vonfackenheim]

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.

[visage]

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?

[vonfackenheim]

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.

[visage]

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.

Dropping Conveyance in favour of a teleportation rune would free up 6 points.

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.

[visage]

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).

[jenx]

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

[visage]

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.

I also think a more careful player than I could get by without Vines/Tarrasca.

I was hoping to report back after beating Madness, but alas my most recent run met an ignominious end on the 10th floor of High Peak. ...and I think that's it for me trying Madness for a while.

Some observations, based on that and my many preceding attempts at alternate builds:

My build was somewhat different from vonfackenheim's:
Initial Talents: FEM, Demonic Pact, Earthen Power, Flux, Strife, Doomshield, Ooze.
Category from level 10: Tinkers
Category from level 20: Vines
Category from 36+bile: Magical Combat + Earth
Prodigies: Superpower and PES

Tinkers are amazing for this build. You want 100% immunity to all the critical status effects, and Disarm is definitely a critical status effect for this build.

I'm definitely now of the opinion that I don't want to use a variant of this build to try to beat Madnes without Vines+Tarrasca... after many attempts that tried other approaches for tanking. In this run, I took Vines at 20 instead of 36 because my preceding run had hit a wall at around 33, with nowhere survivable enough for me to get the last three levels and pick up Vines+Tarrasca.

I went with Superpower + PES because I was relying on Dominate for resistance penetration for most of the game -- I needed all the mindpower I could get. In the end, it was insufficient; my mindpower was topping out at around 85 or so even with PES and I was running into enemies with 130+ mindsave and 100%+ resist-all. Dominate also suffers from Orcs being able to cleanse themselves of it. :p On any future attempts, I'll be dumping Strife for something else; that's a shame, because Strife provides both respen and mobility on top of the utility effects like pinning and hatevision. That means I'll likely be dropping Superpower. PES is likely to remain high on my list of potential prodigies, though -- once you can tank through anything, the limited uptime of an offensive prodigy isn't a huge deal.

I went with Earth over Stone for two reasons: I was short on class points by that point, and I wanted to see what Augur could do with a dual-shields-plus-staff build. For all that the peak-case damage of Augur is lovely, I'll probably go back to Stone in any future attempt -- the respen sustain is just too valuable. ...and Augur digging through walls is a downside. A note, though -- I found that the difference in mana generation/consumption wasn't too bad; while Augur itself consumes more mana per attack than Earthen Missiles and produces less (from mana-on-crit items), Flame Bolts generated plenty of mana in any situation where I was facing more than a single enemy. (It definitely helped that I had a ring of 11 mana-on-crit, though.)

Most of my damage before Augur (and after the first few levels) was from weapon damage and from Earthen Fury (the shield ego that gives you a damage proc equal to your armor value). The latter is an awfully rare ego; while I've had runs that found a dwarven steel EF shield in a shop, in my last run I didn't see any the entire game... but fortunately I had a stralite EF shield in the vault, along with Titanic. Procs other than EF added a sizeable amount of damage for much of the game, but that dropped off significantly as I ran into more and more enemies with 90%+ resist-all and that could ignore Dominate one way or another. Even after Augur, weapon damage and EF were key sources of damage.

Since I took Superpower and PES as my prodigies I did not have Eternal Guard. Eternal Guard is not necessary, but it is very nice and I'm likely to try it again if I take another shot at Madness with this build someday. I would definitely have liked to have EG in the cases where my sustains were disabled; note, however, that you cannot depend on block having 100% uptime with EG when you're slowed (or, I assume, under Burning Hex). For best results with EG you do need to focus your shields on getting resistances to cover all of the spike damage types, which means you're probably going without Earthen Fury and other offensive effects.

Ooze: I think this is a great tree for the build. In the early game, Mitosis saved me many times; in the late game, Indiscernable Anatomy meant I could ignore crits and made it a lot easier to hit 100% on important status immunities. It's entirely possible that Mitosis was very useful in the lategame... but it's hard to say just how much damage the oozes were absorbing as they generally died before I got a turn to inspect them. The equilibrium recovery was definitely convenient, and I did use Reabsorb as a panic button a few times.

A side note about Demon Seeds: switching them takes zero time, so you absolutely should be swapping out your shield, weapon, and helm seeds based on the situation. ...sometimes turn-by-turn. I'll admit, though, that I just left the Air Recycler in the helm slot most of the time for the silence immunity.

Items I pulled from the vault for this run: Titanic, a T4 shield with Earthen Fury, Tarrasca, 11-mana-on-crit ring. Items that I would have had to pull from the vault if I hadn't found them: a pair of gloves of dispersion (for Osmosis and Shield of Light among other things); a pick of Perfect Strike (for Dreadmasters).

Inscriptions: I went with Heal/Move/Wild early and Heal/Move/Move late. I could see value in running Pain Suppressor with 100% uptime, and want to try that at some point (is there an easy way to automatically use Pain Suppressor when available?); I'm currently unconvinced on the value of a not-100%-uptime Unstoppable Force.

Some thoughts on trees I didn't use:
Matter: most of the value of this comes from dispersing Recovery, and that's mostly covered by Healing Nexus.
Demonic Strength: an extra instant heal would be nice in the early game, and +30% damage would be nice late, but I couldn't justify it.
Agility: I've really liked the damage reduction from this the times I've used it -- 5 points in endgame means knocking 300 damage off of 45% of incoming damage chunks. I could imagine running it in place of Ooze if I needed to get by with fewer class points. The upside is that it's not a sustain so you can't be stripped of it; the downside is you can't guarantee it'll proc on the damage spike that would otherwise kill you. Also, if you want to use it in the early game you're going to want to put stat points into Dex...
Lethality: The respen only affects weapon attacks, so it doesn't help with Magical Combat or Earthen Fury.
Light: The additional cleanse was really nice the times I took it, but in my final run I just couldn't spare the category point for it.
Conveyance: I considered Blindside to be good-enough mobility to justify not taking this. Given that I'm dropping Strife in the future, Conveyance is on my queue to try next time I take a run at madness with this build.


Final note: OMG, a summoner boss with Grand Arrival sucks so very very much. "Oh, look, Ritch Flamespitters putting debuffs on me for -125% fire resistance. ...and Warhounds putting -125% physical resistance on me, too. Brainlock? Oh, sure, throw that on me as well."

[St_ranger_er]

is there an easy way to automatically use Pain Suppressor when available?

Press m and find desirable salve icon (looks like greenish amulet), drag it on hotbar, then set to autouse. Better to have 1 injector total, since it consumes all charges one by one when setted to cast when available (atleast it was the last time I tried it).

[visage]

is there an easy way to automatically use Pain Suppressor when available?

Press m and find desirable salve icon (looks like greenish amulet), drag it on hotbar, then set to autouse. Better to have 1 injector total, since it consumes all charges one by one when setted to cast when available (atleast it was the last time I tried it).

Thank you. The key was putting the "activate object" icon for that on the hotbar, as opposed to putting the item itself on the hotbar.

(A shame that there's a "do no activate this while the effect is still up" option for auto-use...)