ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Topic Title... It's a lie, more like a lot of alchemist questions...

1 - My golem... Exactly what is the scheme for it gaining class talent points? I get one every level, but it obviously doesn't come close. How much can I afford to spend on it?

2 - The Alchemist protection talent states that it's a passive giving me and my golem 20% protection from elemental damage of my own bombs, and 3% for elemental damage from other sources. Is this ONLY normal elements, or is this 3% basically the golem equivalent of thick skin (and the eventual 15% resist all (including physical)? Or does the 3% only affect the possible elements for my bombs (fire, acid, lightning, and cold)?

3 - About these elemental damage sustains for alchemist bombs... Do they override the default fire damage, or add damage on top of it? And can I have more then one active at a time, or am I forced to pick and choose?

4 - Channel staff is INCREDIBLE. Why mages don't get this, I don't understand... But it states that it 'fires a bolt of my staffs damage type' (at 120% power). Does this 120% power based off the melee damage I would deal with the staff, or is it based off of my magic stat and spellpower? How can it be increased?

5 - On a similar note, if my staff has damage bonuses to multiple elements (certain egos boost 4-5 different elements at once), which one does it use? Or will it hit multiple times for each element? If so, does it divide it's damage amongst the elements, or hit full force for each element, effectively multiplying my damage by 4 or 5?

6 - Does staff mastery in any way affect the damage of channel staff? Or is it exclusively for melee combat?

7 - What is the point in dumping extra talent points in imbue armor? It doesn't appear to change anything...

8 - Why is my golem so accurate? While I don't want to complain, I'm concerned that accuracy could become a problem since I've been devoting no points to it's dex stat, and it's accuracy ought to be suffering, yet I haven't seen it miss yet. (And I'd know. There's a big difference between a whiff, and 120+ with bills tree trunk.)

9 - Finally, just how much can I do with my *REALLY* tanky golem after my alchemist dies? I know when the golem dies (or self destructs... does that count for 'taking you with me' achievement?) you get your regular trip to the eidolon plane, but If I had enough oomph on my golem, could I continue controlling it for the rest of the floor? Beat a boss? Finish an escort (and would the main character get the reward?) Can I keep travelling to the next floor? Are there any hazards to using the golem after your alchemist is dead? Could I (theoretically) complete the rest of the game with the golem?

1. I... actually don't know. Haven't bothered to actually pay attention, despite winning alchies and everything It's one every few (2-3, so either 25 or 16ish, plus what it starts with and anything extra you potentially feed to it -- there's three spare class points you could potentially give it... and five generics and a category point, if you really want to.) levels, though.

2. Possible bomb elements.

3. They override, with fire as the default (and most overall damaging). You can only have one running at a time, so yeah, you have to pick and choose. Do note, if you didn't before, that while the non-fire infusions are running, all fire damage from other sources (so your staff, the heat tree, potentially stuff like gwai's burnanator) will convert into the infusion's element at a reduced rate. It's a pretty good idea to swap staff element away from fire if you're using one of the other infusions, as there's some damage loss.

4. Based off weapon damage. Channel staff is almost literally a ranged bump attack, except it has infinite accuracy and APR (auto-hits and ignores armor completely, even if the staff's doing physical damage) and criticals off spellcrit instead of physcrit. It also doesn't trigger on-hit or on-melee damage.

Mages don't get channel staff naturally because they don't need it More seriously, lore wise I believe alchies get it whereas magi don't because alchies are more of a tool-assisted spellcaster than the other, more innate-based, arcanists. They can always rescue an alchemist like everyone else, though.

5. Staff damage element is what it says in the tooltip, and can be changed with command staff. There's only one damage type on a staff, and channel damage matches it. The percentile damage boosts are separate from the damage type, but other than (obviously) boosting the damage, they don't do anything in particular to channel staff.

6. Staff mastery boosts channel damage. Physpower increases the damage of channel staff, though staves scale off magic instead of strength. I'm actually unsure if the base physpower boost from strength increases the damage or not... haven't exactly checked. Eh. Spellpower has no effect on channel staff damage, though again, as noted, channel staff crits off your spell critical (whereas a melee bump would crit of physcrit. Don't melee if you have channel staff, heh.).

7. Opens up the next tier of items for imbuing. Tlvl one imbues iron, tlvl 2 steel, etc. The talent runs off raw, so what matters is how many points you've put in it regardless as to your effective talent level.

8. Golem power gives the golem equivalent levels of combat accuracy, basically, and weapon mastery. Might be equivalent plus one (so 1/5 power is 2/5 accuracy for the golem) if I'm interpreting the code right, now that I look at it. They're pretty accurate because of that.

9. The golem's sole limitation is that they can't leave the zone you die in. They can change levels, but not zones; so, say you die on old forest one, you could theoretically clean out OF 1-4, but you couldn't head on to Lake Nur or return to the world map. Other than that, sky's the (theoretical) limit; if you can kill the boss, go for it. Save an escort, whatever you can manage. Your alchie will continue to gain XP based on what the golem kills and any gold you pick up will automatically divert to the your alchemist's coffers, though you'll have to pick up manually and tote around any items you don't want potentially disappearing on you.

I believe the Golem gets one class point per three levels.

So yeah, it's kinda point restricted. It never naturally gains Generic, though there's a few event sources in the game that can be given to him if you really want. Ditto Category points. (This is mostly a waste of time, but it is rather hilarious that you could conceivably save up a few Generic sources and the one category point item, and get your Golem 1/1/1/1 Celestial/Light if you wanted.)

Physical power from any source boosts any base weapon damage attack, including Channel Staff. Of course, the statistical multiplier on staffs is a large Magic one. So physical power, magical crit and the Magic stat boost channeled staff power. Slightly unintuitive, but not really that important unless you're trying to make a staff cannon.

There's no feasible way to give your Golem more accuracy, besides equips. Trying to pump their Dex is a lost cause that will give you a worse Golem in the long run. As such, they need that currently-high accuracy-after Golem Power L5, they're not getting a lot more than that, ever. Fortunately, when he decides to miss all the time(Which isn't even that common), you've still got your own attacks.

Concievably, you could beat the game with your golem. You'd just have to be in the final room of the game when your Alchemist died. Otherwise, see previous comment. <_<

Did not want to start a new topic on Golem.

Question: What are the two slots on the right
of the char sheet of the Golem for?

Gargoth wrote:Did not want to start a new topic on Golem.

Question: What are the two slots on the right
of the char sheet of the Golem for?

They're gem slots, which you can only use after getting the right talent in the Advanced Golemancy class tree.

The greater staffs modify more then one damage type. This can be important for the very simple reason that you can modify both fire and acid, fire and ice, or physical and one of the other star types.

With a 5/5 infusion build you actually passively do extra fire and change it all to acid at a lower percentage then bump up the acid again. Fire is NOT the most damaging once you get stuff that modifies 2 or more at once. (such as the greater staves or damage all bumps). You can bump your bomb category once and find a +.30 mastery item. Anything other then fire eventually does the most damage.

Since we are in spoliers I will help a little on the non intuitive nuances. As an alchemist you should look for a greater staff of some type and set it to a vile. Darkness is really good since that gives you a fallback damage type not normally resisted by the things that resist fire and acid. If you heavily rely on channel staff then a greater staff set to some star other then physical bumps your channel twice (but honestly topaz long range bombs are just more fun).

The best builds generally start with taking out the first point of fire infusion and building bombs 5/5/5 before ever starting on infusions or the golem itself, bombs that only damage enemies are JUST that useful. Taking the first point out makes explosions all instant instead of fire burn. You should get all 15 in bombs before you do anything else, golems will be the strongest relative to other creatures in the early dungeons and nowhere else. Then you want 5/5 in infusions and 1/1/1/1 in your golem tree. After that you probably want the advanced golem tree(This puts you in the mid 30s for level)

Fire alchemy should be completely ignored, there is never any reason to get it. Your first two category points should probably go for extra infusion slots. Your golem starts with three rune slots. Remember to upgrade the golems equipment and runes, they can use 2 shielding runes(3 if yiou find the artifact reflection rune). The gem slots on the golem equip manakin all change what type of damage his base attack does. Golems should pretty much only worry about str and magic. This means they end up being very capable staff users if you prioritze the magic and find a few alchemist escorts. Golems can take escort rewards, many times you want them to have them.

Alchemists can cheat around many build requirements just by watching out for gear with large stat adds and then enchanting it with stat adds. Your golem cares about spellpower but an alchemist never does (both channel staff and bombs completely ignore it). Extra str bumps channel staff though from the physical power.

skein wrote:Your golem cares about spellpower but an alchemist never does (both channel staff and bombs completely ignore it).

Channel staff ignores it, but Throw Bomb doesn't. It uses a combination of Spellpower and the bonus on the gem (based on tier) instead of normal spellpower scaling, though. This makes it less important.

skein wrote:Fire alchemy should be completely ignored, there is never any reason to get it.

I think you can still use Body of Fire to cheese through bosses and elites all the way to the end. They have very high priority set on dodging projectiles, so you can force them to spend every turn dodging when you are in range. It can also act as a odd, finicky style of detection. Heat can also be quite good in extended fights, especially for filling in cooldown gaps instead of Channel Staff. Smoke Bomb and Fire Storm both look quite useless.

I'm not sure if it is the best use of a Category point, but it's far from useless.

That last bit was off. Bombs do, in fact, scale with spellpower. I just double checked, heh. The particular line of code is And ah, ninja'd.

Wasn't aware of greater staves doubletapping non-fire infusions, though. Far as I was aware, having any of the infusions on just flat overwrites the benefit from fire infusion, so it's not a fire -> acid conversion, ferex, it's just acid. Might be different for the non-bomb stuff, but the penalty for conversion there cuts into a bit. Need to do some checking, I guess, because if that is happening, it's probably a bug. Can't really parse the code itself well enough to see if it is or not.

As for taking out the first infusion point... ehn. Yeah, maybe the most optimal route, but with an alchemist it functionally doesn't really make much of a difference. By the time you start running into stuff you might have needed the slightly faster damage, you'll have the points to invest in infusions

As for fire being the most damaging... that's probably got more to do with kit than anything related to alchie talents. There's a ridiculous amount of ridiculously huge +fire damage equipment running around, way more than for cold, acid, or lightning, so far as I'm aware of.

Sorry to ressurect an old thread, but how is bomb damage exactly calculated? In the tooltip it says "the gem will explode for 82.8 fire burn damage", is this before or after modifiers? My SP is 31 and Fire dmg modified is at 14%. I'm level 8, and upon hitting a level 11 mob, I get 47 fire damage + burning. How is the final damage (47) actually calculated?

Its after modifiers, however the tooltip also includes the damage done over time from the burning effect.
It should do the amount of damage listed (barring resistance), but not always instantly.