First impressions

[Plak]

Of the tier 1 dungeons, Trollmire (except the bonus boss) and Norgos are the easiest on Normal, while scintillating and rhaloren are probably the hardest. The boss of Kor'pul is much easier if you get to him by digging through the wall. Of the tier 2 dungeons, the Maze (if and only if the floor doesn't have holes in it), the Forest and the Sandworm Lair are all easier than Daikara and can be done in that order. If the Maze has holes, skip it for now. Lake of Nur can be pretty hard, you can postpone it. When you get frozen and don't have a way to cure it, keep trying to attack enemies, this will also damage the ice block. Don't stay in an ice storm.

As an Archmage:
You only really need to put as many points in Mag as you need to unlock talents. The extra spellpower is nice, but not nearly as good as the extra mana from Willpower. You can buy the generic combat tree for 50 gold in every weapon shop in Last Hope; get it, and put points in Thick Skin as your Con allows it. Gear that increases max health (or lets you survive below 0 health) is usually a keeper, and worth buying when found in shops. Never necessary, but always helpful in surviving mistakes. Unlock Temporal as soon as you can (Shalore is stronger overall, but Cornac is easier because of this) and max Time Shield asap. It's an instant, massive shield that last ten turns, making your Archmage effectively tankier than any other class. Get at least 1 points in every Aegis skill asap, always sustain Shielding (Arcane Shield can wait until you've got enough mana from Willpower), it also boosts your shielding runes. You don't need much healing, one regen/healing infusion max. Get 1 point in teleport asap. Get 4 points in phase door asap, which gives you an effective talent level (with the 1.3x multiplier) beyond 5 and allow you to teleport enemies with it and, most importantly, choose your destination to get yourself to safety. Buy a movement infusion from Last Hope or Angolwen, you won't always be able to cast spells. Having a wild that cures mental status will help with confusion and silence. After unlocking Temporal, the safest use of your second cat point is an extra inscription slot.

[Davion Fuxa]

I think it is debatable to say what elements of the starter dungeons or their bosses are harder then others. Outside of Trollmire and Norgos' Lair being generally easier, the rest all have comparable elements of difficulty - outside of the Heart of the Gloom, which has the one 'element' that makes it particularly killer sometimes, and not just on Nightmare and above difficulties.

[Marson]

Trollmire is deceptive. Norgos is probably a better place to start. Trollmire has lots of open space and no real hallways, so it's easy to get lured out into the open and ganged up on. Let the snake come to you. In Norgos, you can control your placement so you only have to facetank one mob at a time.

I don't invest in Con unless I have specific talents that scale with it. In the case of Thick Skin, Con doesn't increase its value, the Con is only a requirement, so I use items in order to invest the talent points. Start hording early.

[HousePet]

The Weirdling Beast always has the Bone Shield talent active. Maybe you are mistaken about fighting it the first time?

As for the teleport, I notice that Stone Wall tiles aren't marked as no teleport. A quick check doesn't show anything that would make me suspect the no teleport flag isn't restored afterwards.

[Noel]

Here's a link to your berserker that got taken out by the Weirdling Beast at CL13:

http://te4.org/characters/131680/tome/f ... 7aeed2972d

As Sradac said, the theme is "Die and Learn." (or Adventure mode: "Die More and Learn More" )

Sub-theme: play to the strength of the classes, both offense and defense.

Your Berserker build has offensive damage pretty well covered, and HP/Con defense well covered, but is weak on debuff offense and pretty much missing debuff defense. Stun/freeze is powerful - as a Berserker, you need Berserker Rage (up to 56% stun/freeze resistance) and Unflinching Resolve (Con-based chance of removing physical debuff). I always prioritize these when leveling up, so that I've got better debuff defense -- having just one physical wild infusion isn't enough by the time I get to Lake Nur.

Doubly important when playing Roguelike -- it's your only life.

Also, I always unlock Bloodthirst at CL10 for Berserkers -- Mortal Terror and Bloodbath are class-defining talents.

Helpful offensive debuffs for early Berserkers: stun from Stunning Blow, daze from Rush and Mortal Terror, and confusion from Warshout. Get 'em and use 'em. Sparingly, though -- spread the debuffs out rather than stacking them all at the same time and then ending up with everything on cooldown.

Also, some talents scale well with additional points and others scale poorly. The best balance between new talents and scaling up existing talents depends on both play style and experience (i.e., deaths).

Here's a Cornac Berserker that I just ran through the Weirdling Beast at L13. Only did Trollmire, Norgos, and Kor'Pul before Old Forest. It was an ugly fight -- took forever, and WB kept healing and deactivating my Berserker Rage. Survived due to Berserker Rage, Unflinching Resolve, Healing and Wild infusions for debuff removal, and Vitality (one-point wonder for current Berserkers). That kept me alive long enough to slowly wear down the tentacly terror.

Check out the build differences:

http://te4.org/characters/1768/tome/eda ... 5f4be71b8e

[EatThisShoe]

The game is pretty random. You can have a run where you find nothing but good items and a run where you don't find anything but white items (give or take a little bit of exageration). You can find an area in a run which you breeze though and the next run you get there and the area is super hard with lots of different monsters which are perfectly to murder you in less than nothing. The weirdling isn't consistent. Why would I with 2 beserkers once practicly breeze through it and the next time which while some of my gear was slightly infirior had a major compensation of 11 rounds of invunerabillity be nothing but 100% impossible to beat? This can only be boiled down to RNG. Again, some RNG is to be expected, but some sort of control over it is also expected.

The weirdling is not simply random, there are a lot of factors that can sway the outcome of the fight which are predictable and counterable. Some of those factors probably played into your fights without you realizing it. For example the weirdling's bone shield absorbs one instance of damage per orb circling around him, and he regenerates orbs every few turns. If you have items with damage on hit effects, or if you apply DoTs like bleeding from Death Dance, or insidious poison from weapons, each DoT tick will be another instance of damage and remove another shield. Damage on hit effects are each separate instances as well, so with 2 small damage bonuses you can tear through his shields in 2 turns rather 6.

On top of that the weirdling also has corrupted negation which can disspell your buffs and sustains. You can play around this by leaving important sustains off at the start and turning them on after he casts corrupted negation since you know it will be on cooldown.

Lastly he also heals, I believe he can spawn with regen infusions. In addition he has Taint of the Devourer with consumes debuffs on him and heals him for each debuff. So if you loaded him with debuffs and he devoured them it can heal him for quite a bit. It helps to be cautious with how many debuffs you stack on him, just a stunlock and a DoT may be all you need, and more might actually make things harder.

Put that all together with his freeze and stun and it's quite possible that you wasted your big hits on his Bone Shield, let him devour a ton of debuffs, and then got frozen while his Bone Shield regens. You can beat the weirdling without knowing all of this, but know what he is capable of and preparing for the scenario in which he uses all of them optimally is how you minimize the importance of any RNG effects.

On the topic of RNG: ToME does have tons of RNG effects, certainly. However there is a reason so many players don't feel they are a big deal. Those players know that they can deal with the situations you describe and lose less than 5% of the time, possibly 1%. In this sense the RNG is not the deciding factor in whether they die or not. ToME gives you enough tools to survive even when you fail tons of saves and get stunned at the worst times. A big factor however is preparation. Checking shops to shore up your weaknesses. Making sure you have good condition removal and escapes, or even bad ones if that's all you can get, I'll take a charm with disengage or a minimum value movement infusion any day. Scouting enemies with creature detection can help you inspect them before they even engage you. You should always be planning with the assumption that things will go wrong, if an enemy can freeze you then just assume that it will, every time, and it's no longer a matter of RNG. If you have multiple debuffs consider what your back-up plan is when you don't remove the stun. Do you have one wild infusion or two? Could you have blocked the stun by using your movement infusion offensively since it grants stun/pin immunity? Could you have stacked your class stun immunity with stun resist items and gotten to 100%? Maybe you couldn't do all of those, maybe none, but then you still might be able to wait out the stun under a kinetic torque or totem of thorny skin. And then if you can't do any of that, then you take a risk and teleport away. When you consider something like freeze RNG you are disempowering yourself to find the solutions that exist in the game. I promise you that enemies who have the Freeze spell will open with it almost always, you should expect it. You should expect them to cast it again as soon as it comes off cooldown. You can still beat them every time.

[Elhazzared]

Thanks for the help on the mage thing and the areas. Also I am trying the mage with con as a secondary stat and ignoring the will, so far I haven't had any problems but I also am not using any spell that requires major mana to cast along with 2 cheap sustains. maybe it will work out for me, maybe not but so far is going well.

Noel, yep, that is the character alright! I remember that helmet pretty well, especially because in that run I had 3 awesome helmets droping lol.

I heavly dislike the beserker rage because many a fight I have is a close call and if I'm bleeding life every turn I'm sure some of them I wouldn't make it. You do are right however in that 56% resist is pretty good, does it stacks with items that give immunity percentages to try to say, get a 100% stun resist? Not sure if anything works against freeze however, unless it would be a freeze resist?

I don't tend to use offensive debuffs aside from the stunning blow and one by rush. I prefer focusing on damage over debuffs and tend to pick debuffs that will also have damage included in them. Shatering blow is another one i usually have early on with the billy's tree trunk until I get a better weapon though I could also get it on the warshot tree though my main focus is maxing out the other tree as you proably noticed.

It is a pitty I hadn't registered before or you'd be able to find my other beserker that got to the weirdling beast at the same level with similar gear but killed it very quickly.

EatThisShoe, i know I can offer no prof but I can guarantee you that I killed the weirdling beast, it had the shield buff on it but it didn't block any of my attacks. I used a rush as an opener, as i normally do, then I kept wacking at it doing damage every turn. I used a regen infusion and kept beating at it and it just died. Like that, it didn't tried to heal, the shield did nothing whatsoever. It put a few debuffs on me but nothing serious... Frankly it wasn't that much of a problem.

I still feel the game is pretty RNG either way. You can lessen the RNG slightly, but you have no ways of making sure and that is the problem with the game. You cannot be sure that you will remove the debuffs you want to remove. You cannot be sure you'll teleport out of harm's way. You cannot be sure that a movement infusion will be enough to get you out of harm's way. You can normally get an item or another that gives you a better chance of ignoring a stun, but getting 100% immunity is probably not going to happen. You have no control over one or two shot kills in characters that have low life and no damage resistence.

This is why I consider the game pretty RNG. You truly have no control over all the important things that can kill you in a heartbeat. You may be able to lessen them slightly but not enough to be an important factor. This are things that other games usually do well, they give you forms of controlling the engagement for the most part. With either very reliable ways of getting out or reliable ways to get through enemy special abillities.

[cttw]

... Which is why nobody has ever won the game!

[Elhazzared]

Just because the RNG screws you 99% of the times, it oesn't means the 1% isn't there.

[cttw]

It couldn't be that they are better at the game than you. I has to be luck.

[Elhazzared]

I am not saying they are not better, I'm saying the game is still very much RNG dependent.

Just now my mage died. I'm not even sure what happened. I had over 200 health, I had my shield up, still around 500 energy or more on it when I fought the horned beast.

Another guy showed up, they are not dangerous since they don't really put too much of a dent in my shield. But suddenly I'm at 11 health in a single round... Somohow in a single round I took over 700 damage. Didn't remembered to check the log at the time to see what happened exactly but seems totaly legit (sarcasm). Tried a phase door to teleport far away enough to recover life and cooldowns but of course, it was just the time the spell chose to fizzle and drop me near another monster somewhere else. Completly not RNG dependent at all.

[cttw]

Well you were told to use teleports, stick to phase doors, and blame the rng for mysterious burst damage numbers mentioned out of context. Oh well I'm sure you'll get to the hard, random part someday.

[Elhazzared]

I used the phase door cause it was enough to get me out of the situation, it was at level 4 so I could pinpoint the destiny and avoid death. i had used it many other times without a problem. the teleport could land me in a room with an enemy which ultimatly would lead to my death at only 11 life and it being their turn. The phase door did teleport me more than far away from the current fight, but it fizzled and instead of bringing me where I wanted it put me in another room I had not explored yet and had an enemy.

For all intents and purposes there are 2 options. Go with the RNG option of telport.
Go with the RNG chance to fizzle the phase door and then if if it fizzles then go with the RNG chance that it drops me in another room with monsters just like the teleport.

I obviously took the less RNG way, it still screwed me.

Either way I'd like to know how I was hit for over 700 damage in a single round of combat, unfortunatly I shall not know cause I forgot to see the log. At the time my mind was running over my options of how to get the hell out alive rather than see what had happened.


EDIT:

Oh there is a partial log after all.

Apparently he hit me twice in a row for around 300 damage both times. How nice!

Horned Horror hits Cybil for (72 to time), 0 physical, (19 to time), 0 lightning, (38 to time), 0 lightning, (74 to time), 0 physical, (19 to time), 0 lightning, (63 to time), 0 physical, (19 to time), 0 lightning (0 total damage).

Horned Horror lashes out with a spinning backhand.
Your time shield crumbles under the damage!
The fabric of time around Cybil stabilizes to normal.
The powerful time-altering energies generate a restoration field on Cybil.
Cybil hits Horned Horror for (16 resist armour), 0 blight (0 total damage).
Horned Horror hits Cybil for (47 to time), 74 physical, 19 lightning (92 total damage).
Cybil is not stunned anymore.
Cybil receives 106 healing from Temporal Restoration Field.
Horned Horror throws two quick punches.
Horned Horror casts Chain Lightning.
Horned Horror's spell attains critical power!
Cybil hits Horned Horror for (16 resist armour), 0 blight, (16 resist armour), 0 blight (0 total damage).
Horned Horror hits Cybil for 56 physical, 19 lightning, 72 lightning, 70 physical, 19 lightning (235 total damage).
Talent Manathrust is ready to use.
Talent Arcane Reconstruction is ready to use.
Talent Dig is ready to use.
Cybil receives 106 healing from Temporal Restoration Field.

Cybil hits Horned Horror for (16 resist armour), 0 blight (0 total damage).
Horned Horror hits Cybil for 80 physical, 19 lightning (98 total damage).

Now, I'm not sure whether or not there would be more damage up there (there is a limit to what the log shows), but this is all that happened in the single turn before I teleported... Several attacks in a turn where I took over 700 damage, heck I even took more than I expected, apparently the temporal healing offset some of that damage too... considering I was level 16 and that was the maze, I had famed all low level areas, had pretty good items too. I don't really know what to say to this.

[cttw]

From reading your log:

1) Your shield ended
2) You attacked
3) You got hit for 92
4) Horned horror throws two punches and a critical chain lightning
5) You attacked
6) You got hit for 235
7) You attacked
You took 98 damage

So... no.

[Elhazzared]

First, read from up down, that's is the correct order you can also noticed it's when the shield breaks right after the first damage report on the log.

Second, no I never attacked, those damage you see there are automatic retaliatory damages... The last attack I had made was a flame attack, it was so far out that isn't even on what survived of the log.