ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hi everybody. Just beat the game on normal with the new-and-improved Paradox Mage, and figured I'd share some thoughts since I didn't see much chatter on the forum. Here's Chronos. I did pull one item from the vault.

So wow, the Paradox mage is now very strong with some good offense and solid late-game defense. Most of the buffs are instant-cast and massive speed boosts coupled with great cooldown reduction means you rarely take a hit. I did have 3 deaths, all due to my own stupidity.

Anyone else have any thoughts they'd like to add?

Was killed in Dark Crypt on Nightmare, after saving Melinda, due I couldn't outdamage rare (arcane blade with something else).
http://te4.org/characters/35987/tome/09 ... 99afa05bce
Maybe my buils was wrong.

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English isn't my native language.

Redux is capable of some ridiculous things, especially combined with the Spellbinding tree. Here's my recent winner.

Matrix+Echoes+Redux will destroy whole rooms easily. Empower+Stop+Redux or Empower+Attenuate+Redux are also incredibly strong. Or, while completely overkill, you could do Matrix+Induce Anomaly+Redux to dump paradox like there's no tomorrow (or have a bunch of chances for useful anomalies to occur).

Attenuate really deserves special mention, because it can eliminate the advantage of enemies with Unstoppable, Heroism infusions, and the like. It's also incredibly effective against enemies that split, since the new copies will still have Attenuate on them, and they may simply die immediately if their health is low enough.

The passive damage reduction on the new Paradox Mage works very well in combination with the fact that it generally takes a couple turns of setup to flatten an entire room. I do miss the old damage smearing combined with high temporal resist, and honestly one of the greatest dangers I faced in my recent winner was the sheer amount of damage I would take if I hit myself with Stop.

Entropy may not be the best sustain removal in the game, but it's still very good. It effectively neuters the most dangerous rares and bosses in short order. One of my only two deaths was in the Shadow Crypt against my clone, and I doubt I would have died if I had thrown entropy at my clone instead of at the orc. My only other death was against Atamathon, because I got cocky and didn't get out of melee range, but I easily killed him after returning to life.

Probably on my next one I'll explore the possibilities of Time Stop and Temporal Reprieve.

There are so many good trees to unlock here, I find it hard to pick anything but Cornac as a race, even ending up with only 3 inscriptions in my first successful run - so far it's my only gripe with the revamped PM.

Unless you use Time Stop to set things up.

Question: how do you guys rate the Fate Weaving tree, esp. the first 3 talents?

Fate Weaving as a whole seems very mediocre, especially the first and third talents. The 4th talent seems pretty good defensively, and the 2nd could be useful on bosses, though I've never spent that many points in the tree, as I felt the points would be better spent in the Energy/Chronomancy/Spacetime Weaving trees. I personally don't make use of those kinds of abilities, as I tend to either forget that I have them or just avoid using them in case something even more threatening pops up later.

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With Webs of Fate active you can get +60 to basically everything if you max out Fateweaver and Spin Fate. Seal Fate lets you get Spin off dealing damage.

The problem is everyone hates on defense and saves. The tree is probably amazing on normal (in fact it is, I've tested it quite a bit) and still probably quite good on nightmare. On Insane it's probably a lot less valuable.

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Jack's Cheese and Bread Snack

I dunno, I was considering running a dwarven fate-weaver (on insane), just to see how far the stacked saves would get me.

Webs of Fate is good anyway. Seal Fate is probably best on a Spacetime Folding build. Spin Fate and Fateweaver are way more debatable.

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Jack's Cheese and Bread Snack

It should be noted that both Web of Fate and Seal Fate are instantaneous, so you may as well run them on "auto-use when enemy visible" (although auto use doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment, but not sure if that's a bug in 1.3.1 or due to addons).

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On another note, is there a list somewhere of the various anomalies that might occur? I only recently realized that I've never actually broken 600 paradox on my current, so in theory have never seen any of the major anomalies yet (at least I don't think so).

Obviously spoilery, but even if I have to code dive somewhere to find them, that's fine.