ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hello!

I read a post here saying that poison tree for a rogue is not very good.
I did agree until I found a very powerful combo where the poison tree works splendid.
It is together with a projection dagger.

The poison spreds around a lot and some areas where a rogue had some difficulties in, is now a piece of cake.

I run nightmare and in the old ruins with all those ogres, poison/projection just works fantastic.
Astelrid is dead with a few blows and while you smack at Astelrid the others die from projection and poison.
No need to run back into the corridor. Just rush/heartseeker and smack him in the room.

The huge ant hills in Old Forest are fun too. Just run in and hit hit hit and the whole room is full of posion exploded ants.
Even the big rooms in Dreadfell are easy. Usually I opened the door and walked back and took them one by one.
Now I just stand one outside the doorway and hit whatever stands in the doorway. The room very fast is cleared.
Here I assume the projection attacks brings them down as many undead are resistant or immune to poison. But not all and it is now very easy.

What I did not think about before is the life leech. It is almost like playing Diablo with a lifeleech ring. Every hit brings back life.
If you drop down, a strike with 'venomous strike' brings back a lot of life and the cooldown is rather low.

I tried a game without projection dagger and that is WAY WAY worse, even if I had good damage daggers.

If you never tried, pls do. The combo is good and if and when you run into a single boss you can always switch to a better dagger.

Projection itself is very strong as AOE. And it can spread on melee hit/crit effects.

As for poison, it considered underpowered because all those immune monsters around there, bosses especially. And for make use of it, you have to pick poison prodigy (50% ignore immunity). Seems like a high price.

St_ranger_er wrote: As for poison, it considered underpowered because all those immune monsters around there, bosses especially.

Poisom immune monsters are indeed a problem.
But the venomous strike still leech life from them if you select the life leech agent making it still useful vs immunes.

Poison immune mobs aren't quite as common as it seems. Here's a mostly complete list:

Constructs
Crystals
Undead (but not Vampires)
Elementals
Slimes
Duathelden (darkness demons)
Snow Giants (for some odd reason)
Maelstrom/Nightmare Horrors
Plus some misc uniques like the Reknor backup boss

So notably vulnerable things include dragons, most horrors, vampires, orcs and most demons - which are among the more common or threatening things in the game. This covers The Master, the pride leaders and the final bosses. The main issues are the undead and snow giants, making it a lot weaker in Daikara and Dreadfell, although as the master is one of the bigger threats there being able to use it on him makes it still useful. I don't quite get why Snow Giants are immune, might see if that's a bug.

Razakai wrote:
I don't quite get why Snow Giants are immune, might see if that's a bug.

It's probably in the lore somewhere, I'm sure. There's a good reason for everything.

Anyways, I've never seen poisons as underpowered. Crippling and numbing are great for dealing with bosses and volatile will save you hours when combined with poison cloud.

Razakai wrote: So notably vulnerable things include dragons, most horrors, vampires, orcs and most demons -

I just cleared out Dreadfell and is going to face some orcs. (wink wink)
This is just another place where poison works wonders. Absolutely wonders.

It's been a while but IIRC ghouls aren't immune either, just skeletons

Player ghouls are 80% resistant by default and I'm relatively sure the NPC ones inherit that, but yeah, not poison immune one way or another.

If they do keep the racial thing it doesn't take much in the way of kit for one to end up immune, though. Don't think that's usually an issue with plain ones, but it can be for rares/randbosses with a ghoul type base.

Will say it'd be real nice if there was some sort of immunity penetration you could pick up outside the prodigy tho'. Artifact, siding with the assassin dude, mashing slime forest jellies into a stew, whatever. Really like the poisons, but it does indeed kinda' suck to have zones where you just look at the points you invested in the tree sit there, able to do nothing save poison the occasional rat or summat.