ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The idea started a bit as a joke, I wanted to check the power of hounds in insane since in normal/nightmare you can basically win without using other class talents.

Then a bit before I started, someone mentionned that elemental discord ignore status resist so I thought blighted summoning might actually not be terrible since every hounds will have its own elemental discord cd and refresh it when they die/respawn.
To get "full" use of blighted summoning I decided to go thalore, because treant get corrosive worm, a really nice skill. Yeek were considered but I had no thalore insane win yet and I'd rather have corrosive worm than dark portal on my summons.
Finally I wanted a bikini for a while and decided I'd try one game with it at least.

Actually this is not the end of the hoops this TW decided to jump through. I didn't take stasis because it's best at level 10 and I wanted hounds. Then I went inscription then fate weaving. I started to keep class points for when I'd unlocked threaded combat but then I realise I didn't need it. So I continued hoarding class points, and kept my category point, just in case I needed it eventually. I won with the cat point and 15 class points unspent.

Link to the winner : https://te4.org/characters/101797/tome/ ... ba113247ea


First game I died in unhallowed morass after getting 666k gold from DG, sad Second game I decided to skip the unhallowed morass because you can get unwinnable conditions >.>

T1 were uneventful, except the last level of scintillating caves where 2 uniques and 2 rares were waiting in view of the stairs. There were 2 summoners, 1 doomed among them, I ran from the level and did it after cleaning all the rest of the T1.

Got the hounds at level 10 and focused exclusively on them until 5/5/4/0. They did a lot in the T1 in which they were unlocked and almost all the work through the T2, with almost no deaths. They continued to carry in dreadfell, until the master showed up and I had to weigh in. I got Arcane Might at level 30, not knowing if hounds would last until level 42 and because they don't get elemental discord to the max level before level 40 anyway. I pumped will as a third stat and gradually increased my base paradox to try and get the most out of hounds/treants. Neat side effect was longer invigorate and arrow echoes.

Cutting to the east, Arhungol went great except for the 5 times or so my sustains got dispelled It was only in the first level though, the next ones I was able to stay out of sight of most mobs and clear the few in LoS relatively fast while the hounds toook care of the rest. Vor:Armoury was going to be the hounds real test, they had elemental discord by now and the damage wouldn't get much worse.

I opened the door then went one room back through the south door. Gnarg was never able to close in melee as there was alway a hound or treant in the door. I helped them kill Gnarg and let them do the rest, shooting only to speed things up.
But what about the Room of Death?!
I tried to lure the wyrms one at a time, or two if I couldn't. At some point I pressed rest and after a few dozen turns a loot pile appeared, my hounds had killed an op wyrm on their own! The other 6 i had to help because i couldn't keep them from running after me.

Briagh got a bit scary, everyone coming at you, big open rooms, no rest. This was my biggest scare by far.

Coming back west I stumbled upon malediction and this is probably one of the best possible TW weapon. It's only T4 but damage stats are T5, has life steal, apply curse of death and vulnerability on hit (10% chance level 3) and curse of impotence and defenselessness on spell hit (10% chance level 3). Imagine that with threaded combat! I did not replace it for the rest of the game.

Did Tannen because I hadn't done it in a while, then back east. Prides were unenventful, patrols had some hard starts but were usually getting rolled over. I just want patrol to no longer be allowed to have two rares necro and 1 rare summoner at the same time and I'll be happy.

High peak is where hounds started to fail me. The were still a disctraction but sometimes couldn't respawn fast enough and their damage was mostly ignored.

Then I went into the final fight and hounds shone again! (past of shine is shone right? looks weird but so does shined)

Elandar was a bit of a bitch to kill but now is the time to introduce another mvp of this run, invigorate. With high enough paradox you get to 10-11 turns of invigorate, and invigorate also speed the cd of charms, so I could keep dispersing him. I can only imagine how good it is if you unlocked survival! After Elandar die everything becomes easy, I actually spend a nice amount of time in melee of Argoniel because she was focusing hounds anyway.

Haven't done Ata yet because I don't have all pen, only phys pen, and so probably can't kill him. I'll probably try Linaniil though.

Thanks for reading, if you have any other fun build idea I'll take them :p I did a ghoul bulwark already and probably gonna try to make something silly with tricky defenses next but not sure yet.

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I write guides and make addons too now, apparently

You can go here for a compilation of everything I wrote, plus some other important stuff!

Includes general guides (inscriptions, zone, prodigies), and class guides (Demo, Anorithil, Bulwark, Zerker, Sblade)

Great job bud

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Stumbled upon this post because I got interested in Blighted Summoning and searched forum for it.

Thumbs up for the win! (even though it's a bit late)

Totally agree on invigorate, I got it maxed on my nightmare winner since I'm pretty sure it gets even longer duration at level 5 with high enough paradox and can be further boosted by Timeless basically granting you 50% cd redcution for most fights (finished both sorcerers before it expired with maxed Time dilation, Haste and speed buff from Shalore booosted by Timeless). But for other races it's nearly just as good.

As for Blighted summoning, I was thinking about Doomed builds with shadows, Empathic Hex might be good. And I wonder if it works on Cursed Sentry. I assume the list isn't full, since description says that other summons may also be affected.

For some other interesting builds I'd probably look at Range Amplification Drone and Arcane Amplification Drones, they are extremely underrated and underused IMO. Just started solipsist character with Range Amplification Drone in mind since most of its talents have exactly 7 range, which means they will get 10 with prodigy. That includes Nightmare (radius 10 cone, lol), Inner Demons, Deream Walk and whole Psychic assault tree.

And Arcane Amplification just adds 160% modifier to all your aoe spells and beams (not only arcane), nuff said.

Not sure how Revisionist History works, but if it simply returns time up to 20 turns back, it might be extremely good unless you get one shotted.

Rakshor Cunning might be interesting with Cornac (Skeleton with antimagic possibly? Not sure how it will interact if you turn into sceleton after learning AM). But the randomness makes it much less desirable. Still, for unconventional builds it's golden, and downright better than Wordly Knowlede for those who want to go Undead, since it grants you some free generics and category points. Additional life is also not bad for Roguelike (with another additional life from Skeleton and maybe 2 more from Blood of Life and Ring of Death it's almost Adventure). The obvious downside is loss of prodigy of course, but I never said it's optimal. Tradeoff is Prodigy for bunch of generic and class point and Category point. It may be totally viable for builds that have only one important prodigy and generally pair well with undead.

Another one I've never seen in builds is Secrets of Telos, not sure how good it actually is and if it's even possible to obtain consistently, but for Staff Vim users it's probably great, 30% spell crit and 50 spell power, 140% magic modifier and Damage Resonance (have no idea what it is). Ogre might like it very much.

Probably the worst possible prodigy is Tricks of Trade, since Stealth has terible scaling with mastery levels (not a single qualititive change past level 5) and Scoundrel just isn't good either. But the main downside is that you need to side with Assasin Lord which will cripple your late game.

But again, maybe with like 1.7+ mastery with 150+ Cun it can actually let you be permanently undetectable by most foes, then it'll be very good indeed (especially with Silent Blade. for example). I wonder if anyone tried it on Insane. Not sure if there are mastery artifacts for Stealth/Scoundrel though. I can imagine how rogue comes to enemy, uses mark of death, then bumbs it a couple of times with silent blade, then goes to safe place. Rinse and repeat. With mastery around 1.7-1.8 (achievable with cat point and prodigy) we will get Shadow Dance at 13 seconds CD with 6 seconds duration of not breaking stealth and radius 4-3 (0 on unlit grid) to be revealed after duration ends. But mainly it's used for Stealth power (since otherwise it doesn't matter if you are stealthed or not). It indeed can grant you some huge Stealth power. Wow, and I just noticed that Hightened sences have 0.25 modifier. But still, to reach such stealth detection (98) enemy will need 940 of CUN*talent level. So with talent level 10+ it's extremely easily achievable. With just 94 cunning. Sure, detection will decrease by 10% for every grid, but you want to get close to your enemy to actually deal damage anyway. Though you can use Throwing Daggers, effectively increasing your stealth range to 3 (for max Shadowstrike bonus) or even to 7 for max safety. Not sure if enemies will still chase you if when you are stealthed though. If not, you can probably clear the whole game without taking damage after achieving enough stealth. At range 7 enemies will only have 40% detection power. And if you get some bonuses from items you can probably reach something like 150 stealth power. At that point enemy will need 375 detection to find you. And this is basically impossible, since it will require 100k+ Cun*talent modifier. Even at 200 stealth detection power they will need 10k. Quite achievable with 500 CUN and 20 talent level, but barealy. 150 is good threshold where most enemies won't be able to see you with ~3700 CUN*talent requirement. Talent level 15+ and 250+ CUN are still needed though. Though there always are things like true vision etc, but not sure how those work on enemies. Yet being able to safely dispatch most enemies from distance might be a good tradeoff.

That's it for my recent theorycraft ideas, feel free to use any of those if you want to play something unconventional (maybe some of them were used already though, I'm quite new there).