ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Charsheet: https://te4.org/characters/215967/tome/a90e4edc-a3cf-415b-819e-0c52e47cf27c

This adventurer charactor is from a concept: how to make the best range fighter?

I find gunslinger has the best potential. And the whole build focus on 2 things:

1. Maximum stats for huge weapon damage: When TW enabled, weapon damage of guns is solely based on Cun. In the end game I was able to get 200+ Cun.

* TW a demond + finer energy manipulations = +28 all stats
* Tinker: body: +10 all, head: +10 Cun
* equipments like brass goggle +20 Cun
* Superpower, more weapon damage from Wil
* PES, more from Str
* Heroism, easily +20 all

Imaging a critical shot from saw shell(tinker, 300% dmg), after PES and Heroism, 16000+ (8000+ each gun) from single shot to the dammy.

2. Utilize Awesome Toss. Awesome Toss lasts 3 turns, and will fire everytime you take action. Imaging moving 1000% speed.

* Movement Infusion
* Rampage
* Reflex/Escape

With the help of Static Shot & Supercharge Bullets + Explosive Shot, this build is great at taking on large group (by taking on I mean one shot)

The only shortcoming of this build is early game. Try to survive and you'll feel like a boss from mid game to the end.

Gunner training: Static Shot + Munitions one shot group of mobs.
Bullets mastery: your early game damage and piecing shots.
Elusiveness: for Awesome Toss. Use it to clear groups in early game. But the main use is killing badass random Bosses. The last fight took me merely 2 rounds of Awesome Toss.

Munitions: Pick it up at level 10, use poison bullet, and you'll feel a great boost in damage instantly.
Rampage: great damage, mobility and defence.
Reflexes: preventing shoting yourself(The major reason for archer to die), Sentinel is great(not actually needed to my surprise), Escape for mobility.
Temporal Guardian: Guardian Unity is the best defensive skill in game(preventing you from being one shotted), Warden's Focus is 20% damage reduction/critical chance/critical multiplier.
Force of will: Deflection shield half the damage taken, plus it provides you great amount of crit multiplier.
Thoughts of iron: must pick for steam using charactor. 20% resist all + mental debuff removal + a free injecter.

Warning: the game can be boring to some, since you are extremely tanky, has 2 great heals, 4 debuff removals, 3 escape skills, and 1 shot everyone.

For the awesome toss, I'd add Time stop (it says your damage is zero while it lasts, but the bullets won't fly towards the enemy and so when it ends, you deal damage) and Haste from Speed Control tree
for the movement which procs the awesome toss, Lightning speed from the Storm drake aspect will beat movement infusion.

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Haven't test yet, but if all bullets stopped during time stop, this can be pretty cool! And as you mentioned, to exploit that 2-3 additional turns, movement infusion is not enough, lightning speed is way better since it lasts 3 turns. Imaging the damage...

That said, you have no resource management for equilibrium and only that many talent points. To make this work means you have to take out 3 talents at least from the build, which I find impossible. Almost every talent is core to the build, plus, damage is really not something I worried in mid to late game.

I tried a variant of this build with Lightning Speed in AoA https://te4.org/characters/110656/tome/ ... 6d6278affa

It went through Insane RL without much trouble (had to use Blood of Life against a Rogue rare in High Peak due to super reckless play, otherwise nothing could threaten that character).

Equilibrium wasn't really an issue. During early game you can just tank trash mobs with +Equ-when-hit equipment to replenish it. Later I got Conversion from an Anorithil escort and used it for Equilibrium management.

I decided to use Avoidance and Furnace instead of Force of Will and Rampage for a few reasons. Cloak Tesselation helps during the early game and doesn't deplete with damage. Furnace gives +Phys like Brutality but it also gives respen and is active all the time (with Lightning Speed, the extra move speed from Rampage isn't really needed). Couldn't take Temporal Guardian because the stupid Tinker escort died in a randboss party and I needed the two generic Tinker trees, but I didn't really miss Temporal Guardian and it felt nice to walk around the world map without aggroing every Zig around.

I took Arcane Drone instead of PES because of this (hitting Elandar for 400k feels very satisfying) but PES is probably better. You can replicate the combo against Embers' final boss by linking him with the Amakhtel bits anyway. Since nothing in this build really scales off Mindpower (apart from Static Field, which will still do absurd damage since it's %-based, and Realign / Reshape, which aren't that great lategame) it might be better to get Arcane Might instead of Superpower.

A variant of this build has already, before even going East, allowed me to accomplish one of my ToME goals, and that's one-shotting Worm That Walks. 'Cause I hate that guy.

I haven't tried it on gunslinger, but I noticed on a Psyshot-style adventurer that the Explosives tinkers with AoEs (Explosive Shot, Flare, Botanical Shot) hit everyone in their radius of effect with the full damage of your shot. Saw Shell is probably going to underperform in most situations compared to this, although maybe mobs aren't what you worry about.

Also, I strongly recommend Tk wielding Long Arm if you find it, its speed penalty is negated by Beyond The Flesh's mechanic (fire each time you fire your other ranged weapons), its damage mod of 250% on every shot is quite welcome, and its "turn your shots into beam attacks" is an amazingly good property, especially in conjunction with the above effect (shoot a Flare Shell through a long line of enemies, each one it hits it explodes and does full weapon damage to all enemies within radius of 3).

In any case, at least on Psyshot, if you TK wield a steamgun and fire a talent through your gun, your TK copy will fire an identical version - so 2 Saw Shells, Explosive Shells, whatever. That’s in many cases likely to outdo a gem for stat boosts, although I don’t know how it works with Gunslinger’s Toss, nor how the ammo requirements of 3 guns compares with 2.

I'm currently using three guns in my build; it seems a significant enough damage boost that TK wielding a gem would be the inferior choice. I should compare the two. And yes, I'd thought of TK wielding The Long Arm myself. One of the first things that came to mind, actually, recalling the last adventurer build I'd tried with the TK slot utilized a staff in that place. And noted on the shells with The Long Arm as well! I've found Explosive Shell to be quite effective with three guns, and often don't bother swapping in Saw shell for Single targets. The ones I'm most worried about often summon, or have something accompanying them to annoy me while I fight the more dangerous enemy. Explosive shell works just fine in that scenario, and does quite a bit of damage when it crits, especially with the extra shell there. Saw Shell seemed to lack utility, while I didn't feel I was missing out on much damage-wise with Explosive Shell.

I'll make a point of vaulting The Long Arm if I find it with another character. That could be fun.

Currently I'm working on madness with a better version. It's OP to say the least, I consider it the best possible adventurer. It seems toss doesn't work with TK gun, plus wielding a gem makes me feel tanky On madness, toss is my main damage, so I'd still prefer a gem.

I’m certainly willing to believe that the Awesome Toss shot per move instead of per turn bug + stacking movement effects are probably the strongest damaging effects in the game. Is there any reason in the code that Lightning Speed + Rampage + PES + Weapon Folding + Awesome Toss doesn’t end up with infinite turns as long as there are enough enemies to hit (or, if the Mental Tyranny/madness interaction is an appropriate precedent, enough separate damage types hitting an opponent)? Folding doesn’t list a cap (though Awesome Toss is proof that tooltip and game effect aren’t identical), so you’d need ~30 proc attempts/turn to go infinite on average, which seems like its probably a little tricky if you need legit separate hits and really easy if its just damage types... maybe frontloading bonus turns with Time Stop?

Regardless - if you don’t have sufficiently long Awesome Toss and/or the Hunted ability in Madness is leaving you no safe place to hide, TK wielding a gun when Awesome Toss is down might be worthwhile (I know Beyond the Flesh is instant, can’t remember if grasp is). You listed using Saw Shell, where it’s definitely worth it.

Weapon Folding has a cap, right? I've seen similar effect on equipment(XX% of chance to gain 10% a turn, 30% gain max) with a cap, which btw wasn't there a few versions ago. So I assume it should have a cap now (I was just about to build a saw adventurer to abuse weapon folding when that happened so I remember), do you look into the code? And it is also easy to test.

The ultimate combo: Grace of the Eternals + Essence of Speed + Rampage + PES + Awesome Toss + Timeless + Lightning Speed, if I calculate right, totally 200 shots in 5 turns.

I’ll test for the cap.

I don’t know what else you’re trying to fit into the build, but for a sheer “make impressively large number” exercise you could probably improve the number of shots by about 50% with Fungus (though you’d have to learn it manually rather than with the story unlock due to not being able to go through AM), Psionic Fog, and Fungal Blood, as Ancestral Memory will let Vaporous Step and your Fungal Blood driven Infusions give you large fractions of a turn through regeneration cancels. Fungal Blood would generally lead to less damage than Superpower, but at that point you’re not *really* worried about damage anyway, and the ability to clear magical effects might be more valuable than additional damage per shot. Even just Ancestral Memory + Psionic Fog would be a significant help in the early game, much earlier than Timeless, and certainly being able to instantly reposition yourself has a lot of tactical uses.

Going with Fungus would also have nice synergies with the Aegis tree, for a model that goes Magic and PES+Arcane Might in order to max out the speed on Grace of the Eternals, and would interact well with the Time Shield you have to pick up on the way to Essence of Speed. Cat points getting kinda tight there though...

Madness bosses both have around 200k hp, so I'm worried about damage.
I don't know how many turns fungus could earn, but assume it's around 1 turn, and that's not 50% increase( with Timeless, toss lasts 5 turns ). In that regard, Time stop might do better, and the whole Speed control tree boosts damage, so I might consider it( but too tight on cat points). I'll post my build when I finish this madness run.

As for repositioning, Elusiveness/ Slip away is so underrated ( short cd, instant! get out even surrounded ), this plus three 300% movement talent is more than enough.

Weapon folding does have a cap somewhere. Which makes sense.

Fungus would get you many more turns than that (~70% of a turn for each regen cancel, so Vaporous Step would get you most of 1 and Fungal Blood 2 more) and it also grants EQ regen, but awesome toss does not seem to me to be firing either during Time Stop or during the extra time created from that so the speed bonus portion is moot. Still worth considering for interaction with Realign, but Ooze is probably a better EQ management tool for its durability boost.

Note that if you mainhand the Long Arm its penetrative beam function seems to work during Awesome Toss.

Ooze is prefect for this build. Main hand Long Arm might not worth it, because toss could keep targeting the closest foe, plus guns are my major source for physical penetration.

https://te4.org/characters/215967/tome/ ... f4cf6d9a1d this one is pretty cool with Cunning / Ambush, where you control your shadow to toss around before you do yourself. But I don't think it will work well on boss fight, so I sub it out and take shalore as race in my new run. Every talent tree feels like a must except maybe Technique / Reflexes, if you are careful enough not to shoot yourself.

I thought about Ambuscade and rejected it for similar reasons, as well as grafting in the Mental Tyranny/Punishments/Projection/Mind Link combo, but Hunted makes it not safe to Project on Madness. I do think there's probably a Light + Fugue build that would work well for this following the Madness-winning PM model, but that's another build.

Here's a different approach you could try - if you take:

Ooze 5/1/1
Storm Drake 5
Harmony 1/5/1/1 (love Elemental Harmony with Rocket Boots in this build)

You've qualified for Windtouched Speed, which is a 20% permanent global speed boost but, more importantly, lowers all your cooldowns by 10% (rounding cooldown time down). With Action at a Distance 1/4, Solidify Air is at duration 8 with on a cooldown of 13 and Awesome Toss on a cooldown of 10 with duration 3. This lets you loop Awesome Toss -> Solidify Air -> Awesome Toss perfectly the first time and with very low exposure time thereafter (especially if you use Call of the Ooze or Fatal Attractor to taunt enemies away from you).

It does, of course, depend somewhat on your surroundings whether or not you can block all enemies with Solidify Air, but it should probably free up a lot of design space given that absolutely maximizing speed is no longer as overwhelmingly important - you could potentially drop Rampage, for example, in favor of Flux 1/1/1/1 which is a huge durability boost and gives you interesting instant-speed induced Anomalies (Flawed Design, Clone, Haste, Slow...).