ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Yeeks are built for mindpower classes, they're fragile, and they're speedy. They also have a difficult time of it at first. The answer to "which classes should I play as a yeek" varies *drastically* on your level of play. If you're just trying to survive the first two dungeons, you need a class that will come online quickly, and let you paper over the vulnerabilities that the yeek has. I have no information for you there. Once you get past that point... well, there are classes out there that start out vulnerable, which really doubles down on the early yeek difficulty, but that can be *fun*. It also means that your difficulty spike is right at the beginning, so if you die, you can just restart. For that, I would honestly suggest going with the obvious yeek advantages and picking something mindpower-based, wielding mindstars. There's also a pretty obvious win to going antimagic, if you do.

- I've had a lot of fun with Yeek Doomed in the past, but that was very much playing the initial dungeons from a "losing is fun" perspective. Also, that was before they nerfed low-level electric eels, so it's not going to be quite as starkly lethal now. Also, yeek plus afflicted can get you 100% confusion resistance off your race+skills pretty early on. That's nice. If you want to *really* push the boundaries of the early-game suck for later power trade, go yeek doomed with a heavy early focus on shadows. You go from desperately trying to survive the early game to walking around like a tiny god by level 12 or so while your enemies fall like wheat around you. It's pretty entertaining.

- Yeek solipsists, long-term, will let you fully exploit the yeek advantages while blithely ignoring the yeek disadvantages. Short-term, my play expereince was that if I didn't get a lucky drop or two in the first level or two of Murgol's lair, I was dead. Don't bother resurrecting at the Eidolon until you get off yeek island, even if you're playing adventurer. Better to restart. Go with pure hammer for your attack technique in order to double down on the "early difficulties for late-game power" schtick. The yeek speed thing and the solipsist speed thing stack in nice ways, too.

- Yeek mindslayer should work pretty well, but honestly, I haven't put in the time to figure out the new version of mindslayer, so I can't really speak to that.

- Yeek Oozemaster is another one that should work pretty well but that I haven't put a lot of work in on. Most of my oozemasters wind up Thalore for the resist-stacking. If you do go with this one, you probably want your early focus to be on the bloated ooze side of things, for the survivability.

Yeeks have a couple features that make them stand out, good and bad. The good: you get a global speed passive, you get levels extremely fast due to their experience multiplier, you can get some extra bodies when you need them with the activated talents, and you get some cheap confusion and silence immunity if you need them. The bad: your HP pool is total garbage due to basement levels of life rating and constitution, you have very skewed starting stats towards will and cun and away from physical stats if your class needs them, and you are small.

The really dominant factor there if you actually want to win is the HP pool, and whether the faster exp helps you get a build online quicker to handle the game's difficulty spikes despite the wacky starting stats. Global speed is always good, both defensively and offensively as it means that there are less chances for enemies to get double turns on you, and more chances for you to get double turns on them.

So ideally you'd want a class that has some sort of protections against one shots or has built in ways to expand their effective HP that aren't dependent on having a naturally high HP pool, and hopefully don't rely too much on you paying perfectly 100% all of the time. Resilience effects, like necromancer's sacrifice and sawbutcher's grinding shield, that make it so you can't take more than a certain percentage of your max life in one instance of damage have natural synergy with your naturally smaller health pool, but there are other options like damage shields, die at -life buffs, and such. Heroism and pain suppression salves are really good in general, but they are extra good for yeeks. I haven't tried possessor, but that seems like an alternate way to get around your natural squishiness.

I just had an insane win with a yeek sawbutcher, and the experience curve mixed with the late bloomer nature of the class had a pretty interesting interaction. I died repeatedly and rather embarassingly in the Ritch hives until I floated a point in the so-so explosive steam engine range attack talent, and once I got past the early game hurdle and to the mainland I had surprisingly few close calls and no more deaths to the end of the game, even killing Atamathon before going to high peak. It honestly felt easier than it should have been.

For comparison, immediately prior I did a yeek doomed and got the master and died there. I'm not sure it was bad so much as very very slow, and my focus so hard building and gearing to not get one shot led to a blind spot where I ended up getting killed due to stunlock.

A tip though: don't forget your dominant will activated ability, it stays useful throughout the game even if you aren't building too hard for mindpower. Some enemies will have piddling mind save throughout, and it can be nice to have an extra body in a fight. Especially so when you are playing on a high difficulty and an enemy summoner puts a warhound, DESTROYER OF WORLDS, right next to you. That warhound probably has a mind save of 1, and for an instant action it is now your warhound, DESTROYER OF WORLDS, until it disappears.

Actually, Dominant Will doesn't even scale with your mindpower.

It just checks your level + willpower (modified) against their level.

Hmmm, good to know. I guess you could target some bigger nasties more regularly than I thought with that.

Summoner really does even out Yeek's issues and accentuate their strengths in ways other, generally "stronger" classes, cannot. The meatshield nature of summons (especially turtles) makes up for low early survivability. The global speed is useful combined with summoner abilities later since it allows you to "burst summon" several creatures at once fairly quickly. The healing utility and 2-stat reliance (wil-cun) means you can fairly easily put points in other stats to help make up for Yeek shortcomings (usually strength so you can be a damage source yourself, to get armor, and to benefit from PES, but it also means that early con points to help ease some of your early survivability issues aren't"wasted," nor are early/mid-game dex points you may take if you're scared of dying to crits). The biggest problems are the tedium of managing the class and its finnicky positioning (like a solid third of your own summons can and will hurt you if you don't use them right) and that it doesn't do enough to make up for your poor survivability against enemies who are good at ignoring and getting around your summons. I've lost multiple Yeek summoners to The Withering Thing in Heart of the Gloom because it'll just teleport past my summons right into my face, then start surrounding me with shadows as I try to run and summon blockers. Summoner is especially noteworthy because arguably there's no other race that is just... better at summoner than yeek is. People can make that case for posessor, mindslayer, archmage, and other classes that yeeks tend to perform well in fairly easily. You just don't get enough by playing yeeks that you wouldn't get from other races. But summoner... Yeek's large cunning bonus puts it very close to its second summon right away. iirc you can pump cunning to 20 at level 2 and immediately have 2 summons at a time. Other races can't do that. Additionally yeeks mind control and summoning racial powers mean you can actually build an even larger army than other races are capable of, and your major dependance on will/cunning means Yeeks' large stat bonuses still feel relevant even later in the game (okay, cunning not *quite* as much because you do eventually cap at 11 nature summons regardless of how high you pump it). There just aren't other races that you can really say do summoner better than Yeek. Shalore, Thalore and Cornac all have *something* to offer, sure, but none of them offer all of what Yeek does. That's really not true of, say, possessor.

It’s absolutely true of Possessor. Yeek have some of the best activated targeted racial abilities in the game, and Projection doubles that. Many of the default assumed best racials in the game target the player, and that just doesn’t really get much better when you apply it to a temporary shell that has a hard time doing damage. A permanent global speed boost isn’t bad, either, and the staggering fragility of Yeeks simply vanishes when inside a host.

Also, Shalore Possessors really want Arcane Might and PES. This makes them super-strong, but means they aren’t getting the Flexible Combat toolbox. I don’t know where Yeek rates against Ogre, but they’re arguably tied for best Flexible Combatant Possessors.

_________________
My class guides: Possessor, Oozemancer

What I've been seeing on posessor so far has mostly had them behind either Cornac, Shalore, or Ogre, but I'm honestly willing to believe I've been misled, as I think people tend to underestimate Yeeks in general because of their rough early game (for example, I think Yeek Archmage is actually pretty solid, although still mostly outclassed by Shalore, but a lot of what I see when people mention it tends to be that they're objectively awful rather than simply outclassed). My attempts at playing posessor have all been super rough so far. It's definitely a class I've had a hard time wrapping my head around, so I was mostly basing that assumption on hearsay. I can say that, in my few experiences playing a Yeek posessor, getting de-shelled in the early game wound up being lethal. That's not to say that Yeek's can't be posessors, I just don't think their toolbox makes surviving their early game quite as easy as the summoner's does. It does definitely make it easier, though, and I'm probably not giving it enough credit, and it probably shouldn'tve been my go-to example of a class where other races outclass yeek, since archmage or paradox mage make better, clearer examples of that phenomenon.

Yeah, in my Possessor Guide I originally had those as the top three way, but edited in a “Projection makes Yeeks potentially way better than I had thought” line after I grokked how jaw-droppingly nasty that could be. I just haven’t saddled up for another Insane runthrough on Possessor yet, will probably do Yeek at some point after we finally get the no-drowning patch. My suspicion is that endgame if you’re running a Sawbutcher body with Razorlock you’ll be straight-up better off as a Yeek than an Ogre, and if not it’ll depend on how patient you’re willing to be - one of the few tools that Possessors lack (although some hosts have them) is a really good corner-snipe, given that Projection is on a 17 turn cooldown while Wayist starts at 47 you can dramatically increase your Wayist uptime. Might even be worth going to 2-3 points in Wayist in order to boost their stats. (Also, Ogrewielding is hugely powerful for Possessors given that it allows you to use Battle Psionics and Psychic Blows together, but it makes the size of your hosts really important and that can be rather annoying, as none of the standard workarounds for size matter once you assume a host body.)

I agree that Yeek is hard to get started with on Insane (even besides the “no bosses to drown” issue), and in that regard I get why Summoner is favored. I just hit Summoner’s power cap, and my boredom wall, somewhere around Dreadfell/High Peak. Whenever I think about playing a Summoner, I play Oozemancer instead, since I still get a lot of cool summons and a strong early game but curve out much better late game, and you’re automatically not taking Shalore/Ogre as an Oozemancer.

My recommendations for Possessor starts:
- get a shield inscription
- get a ranged weapon for your off set and/or blasty torque + movement inscription
- float points in Battle Psi to get some skill damage while your weapons are terrible. This again rewards movement inscriptions and shields, since you can stack up DoTs while your shield is up and then run away to let the DoTs tick.

_________________
My class guides: Possessor, Oozemancer

Exellent thread, and inspiring I shoudl say. )

_________________
English isn't my native language.

More to add about Psyshot: you might want to focus on Psionic Fog, Uncertainty Principle, and Molten Iron Blood when you can get it, probably also Blunt Shot depending on how long you prefer the Stun. Do not forget that you have Vaporous Step for an instant teleport and heal. You may or may not run into Generic point issues though, depending on what you're crafting and how many Alchemists you've betrayed (you want both steampower and those sweet racial buffs, plus Thick Skin and what you can into Psiblades even though you can't use the Sustain). Keep an eye out for summon Tinkers and those with abilities, Fatal Attractor will save your life.

Your first Racial, if you can get it to stick by reducing Mental Save, is better for infighting than Lucid Shot as you should be maxing WIL. Reducing Mental Save and raising your Mindpower will be more pressing than for any other Psyshot which will already need it for Inner Demons. Luckily, this class has a good few ways to do this such as Psionic Fog. By the way, note that this all does not make Dread any worse to pick up as Mechanical Arms is great for you.

All this talk about Steam talents and tinkers with abilities means you should look for a second generator as soon as you can get an inscription slot, however in the campaign it may take you a good while to find one due to lack of shops. Maybe look into an addon if you feel that you need it? I remember seeing one that puts steamtech stores in Last Hope.

I never used Psionic Fog, by the time I was looking seriously at it I felt I was better off with other things. Could see it as a big upgrade for a Yeek, tho.

I *greatly* prefer Toxic Canister to Fatal Attractor on a Psyshot. If you engage at range enemies are often willing to attack your Canister anyways, especially if you put it on the shortest path between the two of you, and the damage can be quite impressive if you use Solidify Air to trap enemies in spaces with toxic gas under them. It’s my Vault opener - drop Vaporous Step, kick open door, instant-speed port away in a blast of ouch, drop Canister in the doorway, drop Condensate over Canister, when it’s destroyed and an enemy step through the door blast them with Solidify Air, when it wears off rinse, repeat. (Depending on how dangerous the enemy is you can hit them more between lockdowns.) Once you’ve got Antimagic Shield + Resolve up and running the poison doesn’t hurt you anyways.

_________________
My class guides: Possessor, Oozemancer

Did a Yeek insane possessor run, can confirm that they get the job done. The early game is rather nasty, especially with how weird possessor is, and it is really annoying to try play your best to limit damage to bodies before you can get the body snatcher tree online. Running Sandworm Lair was like pulling teeth since I didn't unlock vermin possession. Using psionic projection power works, but it plus the 2her abilities to create clones bogged the game down, and I had at least one crash, and my save file is huge. I relied on it a bunch mid game to try to limit damage to my body, but it was unnecessary once I got to the east.

End game I was absurdly OP, it was sort of sad how badly I crushed it once I got past a couple of bad run ins with orc patrols. For most of the prides I used one of those rhalore corruptor rand-uniques that had bulwark (for step up) and something else but built in bone shield, step up plus double shields plus dismissal plus out of phase teleport gear buffs made it so for most of the prides through high peak only about 300 damage total got past my shields. And towards the end of the last pride I found an amulet with about .4 mastery in both the possession tree and the 2h talens, and it just wasn't even fair. Final battle I turned into slasul and had like 7 or 8 prodigies plus cursed skills, and well, the sorcerers really didn't last very long, and only did a few hundred damage to me. I think I did more damage to Aeryn than they did, since I was using blighted maul and that results in a whole lot of friendly fire.

Possessor is sort of a gamebreaker overall though, if you know what you are doing.

Edit: oh, and my tinker escort was foolish enough to spawn in aggro range of an archer/solipsist ghoul in dreadfell, among other things, so I never got tinkers. See above as to how much that mattered in the end.

Sorry for this super late response, guys and gentlegals. I love all the thoughtful comments and will definitely practice Yeek Summoner. I will use the almighty Sheila guide to build a Yeek that will kick logic to the curb and do the impossible!

Solipsist is probably the class with the best synergy with Yeek because they don't care about the awful life rating and appreciate that Yeek can get away with a 1/1/1/1 racial spread. Also Solipsist is rather point hungry, especially with generic points (because you should always go Antimagic) so they benefit a lot from fast levelling.

_________________
My wiki page, which contains a guide and resource compilation and class tier list.