- Get a good phase door rune. You can usually get something with power in the high 20's or low 30's by level 15 or so.
- Get a cloak of the void walker (other out-of-phase inducing items/talents will probably work, but I've only used this one because it also gives you a teleport)
- You'll want one other phase door/teleport ability.
- Time shield is also *very* handy. The other reasonably handy ability is displacement shield.
- Movement infusion dramatically helps with the monotony of this technique, as does anything that allows you to go through walls.
Note: This does *not* work without something that adds to the out-of-phase bonuses. I have only tried it with the void walker cloak. I assume it works with other things, but I haven't tried it yet.
When you are greeted with monsters:
- Invoke the phase door rune. This will increase your defence, resist all %, and resist % for all your resists equal to the phase door run power. Your cloak of the void walker will give bonuses to that. The max seems to be +50 defence, +40% resist all and +40% to each of your resists. However it will also reduce the amount of time for debuffs by the power of the rune plus your bonuses up to a max of 60% (it seems -- haven't checked to code for the max yet).
- When you are down to 1 turn left on your out-of-phase bonuses, use a teleport skill (or the void walker cloak's ability). This will *extend* your bonuses to 5 turns again. Very important note: You get the bonuses for your phase door rune for the duration!!! I think this is a bug, but it is probably quite tricky to fix
- When you are down to 1 turn left on your out-of-phase bonuses, use another teleport skill. Depending on your class and the number of teleporting skills you have at your disposal, you can keep this going almost indefinitely. Even my arch mage with only phase door skill, the cloak and the rune, only has to dip back to the original rune occasionally.
Also, I originally thought about this for the crazy defence and resist bonus, the debuff time reduction is actually the most powerful. I'm currently in the prides and have no debuff removal other than (the admittedly OP) timeless and the other thing you get in the east (the name of which I forget at the moment). But now for the good part:
- Timeshield, at the highest level, *also* reduces debuff time by ~50%!
- Although I haven't specifically verified, I'm pretty sure that displacement shield makes it so that displaced attacks do not debuff you (seems obvious...). At the highest level that's 72% of attacks. If you have gear that can get you to 30% resist for things you find important, then you've only got to deal with (after resist all and resist) 18% of the damage -- and that's only on 28% of the attacks.
Like I said, I'm in the prides with my arch mage and having a pretty easy go of it. The only things to watch out for are:
- Anything that can kill your sustains.
- Groups that can stun you enough to cool down your teleports.
- Anything that can blow you to pieces even with the crazy reductions. I can tell you from experience that at level 33 I couldn't deal with 4 overpowered level 88 dragons at the same time
I'm pretty sure that I could take them one at a time, though.- Vaults that don't allow you to teleport. Note that the phase door rune will *still* give you the out of phase bonuses, but there is no way of extending it beyond 5 turns. You need a back up plan!
The main drawback for this technique is that it is monotonous. The phase door rune is not controlled, so you end up anywhere. If you are a type A personality, I suspect this will bug you a lot. You end up fighting in pretty much random areas of the map at first. Once you've basically cleaned it out, then you can move about normally. Movement infusion helps a lot for this because you can phase door to a bad location and just run right back (with stun immunity for a few turns as a bonus!). Skills like probability travel is also nice because it can seriously cut down the amount of travelling you do.
The other thing is that you are constantly having to keep track of how long before you go back in phase. I got in the habit of counting my keystrokes to help me. If you get slowed without noticing it, it can seriously screw up your timing, so be careful. Althought this is really super, crazy, over the top, over powered, it is also quite difficult (at least for me). The movement and tactics are really quite difficult, so I'm not sure how much people will want to try it.