ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Which list are you referring to?

This one it's outdated wyrmic is better or on par with every class in the S and A tier, plus the S tier is supposedly reserved for classes that beat madness yet the only two legit madness wins have been possessor yet it's not even listed

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Ah, fair enough - thought you meant another list. Overall this list is still good and quite accurate I'd say.

Several other classes have beat madness legit beside possessor. Some of them were admittedly in 1.4, but many of those are still viable (definitely AM and PM, possibly AB, SB, Brawler) - the link was indeed for a Wyrmic madness win.

I'm not bumping up wyrmic for an obvious infinite dmg exploit with AAD.

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<shesh> cursed is fine

It might have been possible but no other madness wins are legit they just invincible whole game and edited the files/cheat engined resists/vaulted op items/used exploits or savescummed

There's documented visual proof of the entire two possessor winner runs

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Your list, which indeed is very good, so your call.

I'm of course in the camp that (1) it's only using skills doing exactly what they say they are going to do, (2) it's not actually infinite damage, although very high, and not a spell, so 'only' single target, (3) it's on a long CD at 20 turns. That said, do I think it should be nerfed? Yeah, I do. But many madness builds have been nerfed over time. That doesn't mean that they haven't won.

But not all things that should be nerfed are exploits. Actually, many of the combos used for madness wins are really quite abusive, and borderline exploits. Is Attenuate with its genuine potentially infinite damage an exploit? Is AB with Sawrd / projection egos an exploit? Is timeless on Continuous Butchery an exploit? Is simply using Mercy with some skills an exploit? I'm sure many examples exist. To me, it seems you've drawn the line rather arbitrarily, just because you don't like it.

Should things count as an exploit only based on insane damage, or should ridiculous defences / utility not also be considered exploits? For example, AM is essentially invincible with enough -CD reduction, surely that is an exploit as well then? Sure, the game takes longer and requires even more patience, but in the end, you've simply broken the game mechanics here too?

I suppose, if we take Kruzifixxion view of the world that only fully documented wins should be tier S, then absolutely fair enough, let's stick to making it Possessor only. But even on possessor, I recall there being some dodgy stuff about possessing your own shadow? Sounded borderline exploit in the same vein, but I don't know the details I admit.

The win aside, it should still not be a tier C class, as it has incredibly strong utility with ice wall, lightning speed and burrow.

Some more food for thought, did these documented Possessor wins use/abuse Projection? Because pretty much every possessor guide I've read encourages everyone to abuse Projection, because Projection's ACTUAL effect kind of sucks a lot but Projection's abuseable effects, like using psionic minions without expending a body or abusing separate cooldowns, are incredibly valuable and are a large part of a strong possessor.

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Let slip the toast of war.

Actually, to add to my previous post I've put together the below list of what could quite easily be considered exploits for each of the Tier S classes. What I'd like to understand is, why are these 'less of an exploit' than what I used for Wyrmic? Many of these are essentially making you invincible, or creating absurd damage. If I'm going to be honest, Madness does require some absurd combination to beat, and it's a very fine line between 'incredibly OP' and 'exploit':

Paradox Mage

• Infinite damage: Attenuate has theoretically infinite damage
• Invincible: Temporal Fugue together with Bathe in Light creates huge shields, together with the huge general utility the Paradox Mage has, it makes them close to invulnerable (note: not actually invincible as Archmage)
• General: Elemental fury enabling crazy extensions of stun / attenuate / entropy (note: stun / entropy both quite easy to land with Empower)

Archmage

• Invincible: Stone wall can get 100% uptime (would require 1 20% spell CD item, but that's not unheard of, and even without it, it's close to 100% uptime)
• Invincible: Shields can provide EHP of 24k (from Mex’s own guide), and given that one can stonewall pretty much all the time, this leads to complete invulnerability (especially as can use Draconic Will to avoid all effects)

Arcane Blade (disclaimer: I don’t know the quirks of some of the mechanics, below may not be correct)

• ‘Infinite damage’: Sawrd, Projection Dagger, Elemental Fury, Flexible Combat, Flurry, Destala’s Scales together (or a combination thereof) can result in absurd hits (note: I'm sure there's even more ways to abuse Arcane Combat procs than mentioned here)

Sawbutcher

• 'Infinite damage’: Use Timeless to extend Continuous Butchery, and rapidly rack up charges with other talents

Possessor – Really don’t know the class well enough to comment, but both the Projection abuse (thanks PseudoLoneWolf) and possessing your own shadow sound potentially abusive / unintended

Brawler – I have no bloody idea how shesh did it, unless there's something I'm missing, I can only say bloody great work

Note: I don't actually mean infinite damage on any of the above, just very high, but similarly my build did not have infinite damage either, so seems fair enough

You don't need any spell cooldown reduction to have 100% Stone Wall uptime, just sustain Stone Skin and melee attack yourself to reduce its cooldown.

PM using their skills isn't an exploit, plus they've never won madness & if you're manually setting each clone to cast bathe in light it isn't worth it in the first place. One has got to Vor A before but died so proof of concept is there but no one's went all the way yet

Brawler and sawbutcher didn't "win" either NONE of shesh's wins are legit. These are proof of concept runs that you can get to the end with infinite tries. He isn't an actual person he's an account used by multiple people. Every "win" he has is blatantly savescummed

So as of now there's a AM, AB (there's literally no proof of the 1.4 AM/AB runs being legit, but lot's of proof of AM not being able to make it past dreadfell in 1.5), and Possessor proof of concept win (possessor entire run was recorded but savescummed), and one legit Possessor win that didn't savescum or cheat at all and recorded the entire run. So some of these classes can actually get to the end of the game and kill the final bosses, they just need 3-infinite lives to make it happen. In theory a PM/AM CAN win, but it hasn't been done yet. The community USED to believe in any madness win that looked legit on the char sheet, but time's have changed now and the tides have turned on people who cheat/exploit madness wins, and the burden of proof is now on them to record the full run if they want anyone to believe that it was an actually legit roguelike run.

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To be clear - actually I don't think any of the things I mentioned are truly exploits, I think they are just incredibly OP skills, similar to what was used in the Wyrmic run. The argument was more that, either in they are all using exploits, or they are all using OP skills. Also the point was the 'invincibility' is as much an exploit as 'extreme damage'.

In general, you speak as you're 100% sure that all these wins are not legit? What proof do you have of this claim beyond not having seen the proof? Genuinely curious as I haven't heard / seen it. Also, you seem to refer to a shift in the community opinion on how to view this, what is this based on? I haven't seen anything on it myself, but I might have missed it. I'm in the chat a lot, and certainly haven't seen in there, and if here on the forum, I must have missed it.

In my mind there's three different steps (1) legitimate and proven, as the possessor run you mentioned, (2) legitimate but not proven, or (3) illegitimate. Point here being that just because you don't trust it, that doesn't mean that the win is not legitimate - in my mind (2) would still be a real win. Of course, people are allowed to not trust (2), but that is a completely separate point. The AM/AB/PM/SB/Brawler wins are all either (2) or (3) - from what I know there's no way to know. Calling everyone cheaters just because they haven't recorded their game-play for 24+ hours feels rather harsh to me. Finally, even when recording, surely one can still savescum by editing out parts? Unless it is all streamed live?

On a small separate note, I've personally got past Vor A with PM (died in second Pride), without any savescumming at all. Of course, as per the discussion above you're free to not believe in that, but I don't really have any reason to lie about a character that didn't win. So, I well understand how the temporal fugue stuff works.

Minmay: Didn't realise stone wall was even more broken than I thought!

Well played!
There are always people who don't, but "I want to believe"©.


Even on livestream your game can crash, and it would look like you intentionally force that crash for rollback.

If only I knew earlier, that I need streaming the entire run, my 1.2.5 madness win would be slightly(because adventurer class) more legit.

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Wyrmic "The static pain" - easy training dummy kill
So, apparently, this is why we have Fixed cooldown talents

I'm 100% sure that no shesh win is legit, and there is proof out there of it.

and btw I do believe you when you say you got to the prides on a PM

The shift in the community is easy to explain. It started when I exposed Archmage's weakness giving fact after fact of how they aren't the best class in the game, which is a lie that's been passed down to new players and the cycle continues. I talked to 100's of people on the reddit, discord, and steam forums about how AM isn't that great and at first people didn't want to believe it, as it's hard to go against something you've been conditioned for years to trust. Then I started talking to lots of vets of the game in discord about it daily until they finally understood where I'm coming from. I finally realized that the ONLY reason these lies get passed around are because of the so called AM & AB "madness wins". Here's some proof of what I'm talking about

viewtopic.php?f=39&t=48418&hilit=arcane+blade

"They have enough damage to clear madness" this is what almost everyone goes with & "they have aegis/disruption shield etc." When all the points the OP made are true, AB isn't good or fun anymore. Just because there's an AB so called "madness win" doesn't mean the game is balanced around madness. Same goes for Archmage. So these classes are kept in their weak state because of "wins" when there is NO proof of the runs being legit. In 1.4 you couldn't even do the infinite Stone Wall exploit yet there's not a single 1.5 AM or AB madness win when they can now achieve immortality? Kinda strange right?

So I started talking to people about madness wins, and again no one believed me. They said they're legit just because they "trust" or "want to believe" the player is legit. They said the burden of proof is on me to prove these wins aren't legit.

This changed when Mex actually started playing again to prove that he can win madness legit on AM, and this time he started streaming the entire run on twitch, even the drowning part. There isn't proof of the AM win in 1.4, but there's proof that me & 100's of people all witnessed on twitch that AM isn't good on madness, and can't even make it to the east in 1.5. It proved everything I've been saying about AM to be true. If Mex, who is THE Archmage, couldn't do it then how is the class that great at all? After that both Mex & Ster (Ster also did a PM run proving the superiority of the class & exposing AM even more) did stream entire madness possessor runs and won on twitch.

If the guy who's known for winning on AM & AB (and people blindly trust his wins to be legit) knew that there IS validity in my statements and doubt, and started to stream madness runs after not playing for a long period of time, then that's saying something. If players are truly looking to complete a legit roguelike madness win they will follow his example & stream it if they're doing it for some sort of "glory" or whatever. If they're doing it for fun and don't really care if people know about the win then proving themselves won't really matter, but the fact stands that the burden of proof is now on the player

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Fair enough, interesting comments and a helpful perspective. Overall I'm still in the camp of it's a question of "Do you want to believe or not?", where you're very much in the no camp - and nothing wrong with that.

I also agree that just because something is 'madness viable' doesn't mean it's a fun and / or OP play for the average player - many of the madness builds would still require a huge amount of patience and excellent execution.

One thing I'd like to add to what you mentioned though, the fact that even strong players struggle when streaming isn't surprising, for let's be real here, any win on madness requires a looot of play, so unless you stream for hundreds of hours, that isn't conclusive. Beyond this, some players (like me) just hate the concept of streaming. You and anyone else is free to not believe, at the end of the day I'm happy with knowing myself what has been achieved, if others believe it really is secondary. Possessors are a bit of a special case, simply because they're a bit of an insane class that actually benefits from the crazy madness monsters.

I agree that I think the strength of AB is overplayed in general. Theoretical damage is huge, but getting there is very, very hard.

On AM, I slightly disagree - it's a class that requires a ridiculous amounts of patience, but by all accounts should be able to get there. As long as you have perfect control, damage output is basically irrelevant. That said, my own madness AM died in dreadfell as you predicted (though I think this was mostly because a mistake on my side, rather than a weakness of the class)

What's the discord servers and stuff you mentioned? Are they actually active?

The discord is pretty active when we're talking in it, we even got darkgod & shibari in there

https://discord.gg/9pmFGKx then join the #tome channel

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