How to deal with the incoming damage (Nightmare difficulty)?

[deathgrasp]

I've attempted going nightmare lately, and i find a bit of an issue actually getting far with it.
Everything I play soon turns out to be paper, be it a bulwark that dies in 3 turns from an elite, a paladin that dies from being hit 4 times in a row by an adventurer, or an archmage that dies from a single hit when an enemy sees him.
So, my question is: how do you guys deal with that in order to beat the difficulty?

[cctobias]

Well if you are dying in one hit on your archmage then you are not shielding. AM has very strong shields when used right. I recommend reading Mex's AM guide in Mage spoilers and there is also a thread discussing disruption shield.

I have a NM winner shadowblade that made heavy use Light shields (since there is no Aegis for SB) that was actually quite tough, you can see a description of it in the Rogue spoilers. He was able to do the graveyard without pre-opening coffins (at lvl 26) and was able to clear the OP Wyrm Vor Vault. He still got corner gibbed once, but see below for wands of clairvoyance.

Another method for survivability is Unstoppable which can be cheesed. I am not a fan on using it but I am currently doing it on Insane, generally you won't a lot of speed and damage for this due to limited time.

You can get a lot of mitigation from debuffs and CC, stuns are important but also things like Gravity tree can do amazing things to keep you alive when used right or a Temporal Warden caster build has teleports and damage smearing.

Movement infusions are your friend and they give 5+ turns of stun immunity.

Also I very very much recommend using wands of clairvoyance and track. Knowing the lay of the land is invaluable and on NM+ auto-explore will eventually kill you IMO. Eventually something with a lot of speed and the ability to slow will show up. On NM it may only happen once a game, but possibly more depending on if you are an active defense type character. Knowing something is around a corner and popping you movement infusion and being assured of starting the engagement with a stun is a lot of mitagation.

I think some newer players doing warrior may be shunted into the idea that armor is more valuable than it is. Alot of extremely damaging things either do damage types not helped by armor or have a lot of armor penetration. So pay attention to resistances. Try to get the right resistances for the right places and realize that certain curses and/or spell shock reduce resistances

I am not sure why you are having trouble with sun paladin they are extremely tough.

Finally the most overpowered ability is probably being able to run away, never ever overlook conveyance, teleporting to a stair up is essentially a guaranteed rest and able to try again. Random teleport is nice but can get you killed controlled phase door and teleport can be very strong, or just save a movement infusion. Always have a line of retreat. You first job in clearing a level is to establish your line of retreat.

[Furey]

If your issue is starting out (say under level 10) on nightmare, then your issue is that for some of them you are in fact, melee. They don't do well initially on nightmare.

I have won with all warrior classes on nightmare, and can tell you that the trick to surviving is to go to Zigur and buy a torque of mindblast. This should allow you to kite and kill to get to level 10.

Once you are level 10, you will be able to melee *most* things. Bear in mind that some rares at that level might still kill you fast, and you might need to kite/mindblast some more.

If you are saying that you are dying in 4-5 hits from something...why are you still there? Nightmare hits hard. Very hard. Put a shield on. Rush in, shield pummel, assault, whatever. If it is *not* dead, movement infusion and run away. Most melee classes in nightmare will require hit and run tactics, since early to mid-game most just don't have the shields and defenses to stay and slug. Also, tactical positioning is essential. On normal you could rush into a crowd and just whirlwind to kill them all. On nightmare, you die fast like that.

Just my 2 cents.

[deathgrasp]

The cases im speaking about were:
Archamage being one shotted the moment i saw the enemy, so I didn't have time to pop the shield. Not using auto explore and using sight spells could've saved me most likely, but that's still hard to see coming.
The sun paladin was against a skirmisher-adventurer. I moved out of its LOS, and died in a single turn (had half hp or so and my second life up). In the log I saw I got hit for 4-5 times in a row for 250 physical each.
The bulwark was earlygame, in the maze (level 11 or so).. I'll check the mindblast.

Thanks for the advices, I'll attempt again using the speed infusions.

While at it, how effective is blindness on monsters?

[Mex]

Arcane Eye + Vision lets you map out the area around you and check around corners.

When it's at level 4 you can target yourself and it will follow you around detecting any invis/stealth for you.

I would advise reading my guide if you would like to know the most optimal Archmage build, or if you're looking for some info on what and why something is good.

ToMe has a learning curve for sure, it's a matter of patience and learning what each class can and cannot do at each stage of the game.

Blind is excellent at lower difficulties such as NM-.

[deathgrasp]

attempting, as much as possible, to avoid straight forward guides on 'how to'.
on the other hand it was obvious i was missing something, and it was my lack of using vision (apparantly) and not playing carefully enough.
thanks for the tips.

[cctobias]

Well I suppose we should separate out early NM+ and less early NM+, because the advice changes due to lack of initial options

Early on, especially for melee, can be tough since your vanilla start really doesn't give you much in a typical situation.

There are two main methods to helps out there and no amount of advice will help because it will basically depend on things you just don't have. An unlucky skirmisher spawn on NM+ in your first zone my just kill you with no real recourse and telling you to use vision + some sort of monster seeing thing (arcane eye, clairvoyance, track) won't mean poop cuz you won't have it.

There are two main ways of dealing the early game, which I will say I do not think are entirely necessary on NM to do together:
-Get the mindblast torque mentioned previously
-drown the NPCs in the towns for gear and XP

Generally the MB torque is a decent and not too cheesy move for melee on NM, but drowning NPCs is not something I would say is necessary. On Insane+ I would generally do both as there are simply too many rares and bosses that do too much damage and you need the edge. Also stacking +life is a good early startegy if you can do it.

Now, in general, on NM+ there are certain rare types that are particularly dangerous, skrimisher is one, doomed shadow summoner is another, also oozemancer. There are others and those two are dangerous for quite different reasons. But its not a surprise that a skirm got.

In general I would say on a decent character a skirm rare shouldn't one shot you, but they can shoot from very far away AND they can shoot through things. Because of them you need to be particularly careful. As both I and other have mentioned seeing ahead is key, but until you get that because you most likely early will not, you need to be very careful. You need to make sure you immediately recognize that something hit you with a skirm ability and you need to be prepared because they can both stun and pin and your best or even only way to survive is to retreat. This alone makes an early phase door, preferrably controlled phase door, an ability that can make the early like twice as easy to survive. On the last two insane runs I have had conveyance and when you shoot an oozemancer rare in OF and then another rare pops around the corner you immediately check its talents. In my case that rare was a skirmisher. On that character I am running gravity and might actually have taken both, but I did the safe thing and telported so I can take them one on one and at more favorable positions. Similarly on my more melee oriented guy sometimes you get pinned by a skirm and you have no wilds left, you teleport, recover and use clairvoyance/movement and smash em in the face before they can shoot you.

So initially sometimes you just get screwed and you simply don't have the tools. If you get mindblast torque you can do some kiting and with careful play are usually ok. With NPC drowning you can get better equipment and start at around lvl5-9 depending and have a lot more talents to deal with the start and actually have things to counter stuff.

Starting off as say a melee based shalore and going to Trollmire 1 immediately you don't even have wild infusion, if a skirm stuns you, you are in trouble. If he has both stun and pin it can be bad. Your only hope is being able to phase door away, but that most likely won't save you. With the torque you can maybe hit it, depending on position, or maybe not if its far away. If you drowned NPCs and were able to buy a phys wild infusion and have a decent weapon and rush and maybe some lvl 4 talent it starts to become much more of something seems possible. You can wild out of the stun, phase door out of the pin, and rush em when you are able. With a t3 or better weapon you should do enough damage to kill em if you get in close, but you still need to be careful since skirms do good damage. You may be need to PD, run away, and use a corner etc.

Anyway the point being that there is the bare minimum start strategies and then you ease into the more developed ones, in the end most people cheese the start of Insane and I personally use a MB torque on NM most of the time. You just don't really have the stuff at lvl 1 to have adequate counters so the game is not really that interesting at lvl 1 on NM+ IMO. So your priority is to mature a few counters (this includes damage, it depends on your build) as mentioned in this thread and basically do some set of cheessing you are comfortable with for your very first few start instances.

Edit: I have done Shadowblade on NM (winner) with no cheesing at all for the start but I also used stealth crit Illuminates to start, so I was getting rares to 50% life and blinding them before I melee them, and eventually switched to all range. I do not feel MB torque is really necessary for ranged types on NM but it is easier and I generally would do it for melee.

Edit2: also some base types make the rare version extremely dangerous be very careful of rare bees and swarms, they have 200% global speed. If you run into, for example, a midge swarm skirmisher (don't ask me how that is possible) you need to be very careful about HOW you run away. This creature type has 200% global speed so you may get hit by two talents just trying to move once and those two talents might hit mutliple times, so its possible to see 4-5 hits just trying to move out of LOS. This is one reason a teleport (or dream walk etc.) can help a whole lot in Old Forest.

[cctobias]

attempting, as much as possible, to avoid straight forward guides on 'how to'.
on the other hand it was obvious i was missing something, and it was my lack of using vision (apparantly) and not playing carefully enough.
thanks for the tips.

I can understand this but the AM disruption shield mechanics and other subtleties of shields are non-obvious and can only be figured out through trial and error that is probably not interesting gameplay.

For instance what order are shields considered when figuring out which one gets hit by an attack? Is Displacement shield first or last? If its last its crap.

Or you can figure it out yourself, but either way AM shields have been proven to be strong enough to win in Madness and you can keep them up perpetually if you want to.

[bpat]

Everything I play soon turns out to be paper, be it a bulwark that dies in 3 turns from an elite, a paladin that dies from being hit 4 times in a row by an adventurer, or an archmage that dies from a single hit when an enemy sees him.

Your problem is that you're taking three or four turns worth of damage with your melee characters and you're not precasting your shields as Archmage. For Nightmare, my general rule is to not stay in range of melee enemies when under 50% health for melee classes unless I know for sure I can survive the fight. I don't let enemies melee me period as ranged classes, the best they can usually do is Rush to which I respond by Phase Dooring away or using a Movement Infusion to create distance. Rod of Spydric Poison also completely shuts down melee foes so keep that on your hotkey bar. Summons are good facetanks so hold onto any items that summon allies. Also you should always autocast Shielding Runes when enemies are visible as caster classes unless you're very good at using them properly. Wild and Heroism Infusions are also essential for stun/pin/confusion removal and emergency health respectively.

As for stats and gear, armor and armor hardiness are both great and resistances are good but flat health is much less useful than it is on normal. I prefer to focus on escape methods more than on pure defense which is why I run at least one Movement Infusion on almost every class.