ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So, I like to get Bloodcaller on most of my characters and that means playing in the Ring of Blood. Now that rogue enemies can now deal damage correctly this quest has become for me like luck of the draw. I was wondering if anyone else felt this way, if not how do you deal with the Ring of Blood?

a) Bring lots of gold; then

b) fail anyway and cry like a girly-man; then

c) hack the unlock file.

Rather than hack the game, just vault the bloody thing.

But in all seriousness, it's always been a luck thing. Did I get a good pair of gloves? Can I live through the Rogue's poison (which is the killer fr me)? What do I do against a Rogue, bear, and an Orc Archer, while blind? These all existed before the current version. It's just one more thing to look out for.

The game is pretty strongly rigged in favor of the house, which is perfectly reasonable when the "house" is a group of telepathic Furbies who make a living by destroying people's minds and selling them into slavery. They're not nice people, is what I'm saying.

But, yeah, it's always been a very luck-based quest, which isn't so bad seeing as you can keep trying as long as you have money.

I retract the Vault comment. I apparently forgot it was tier four,

If I may be so bold--what characters benefit well from Bloodcaller? I got it on an Archmage, and ended up transmogrifying it in favor of FURTHER FIRE RINGS, and also due to my shield dependency.

There was a thread devoted to that question a while back. The consensus was characters that do a lot of damage each attack and characters that do a lot of little attacks. As an archmage, you may be living mostly through your shields, with rather low Hp. Thus, the ring may not have many chances to heal you when it actually matters. Or maybe you're on Nightmare+? At the harder difficulties I imagine the ring being less useful, as you are more likely to be killed before it has a chance to work.

I rarely lose at the Ring of Blood. Tactics are mostly pretty straightforward:

- Don't engage anything capable of poisoning you without healing/regen infusions off delay.
- Stun them immediately
- Try not to fight multiple enemies at once. Particularly ones capable of stunning you.
- If blinded and/or poisoned, run around in circles avoiding the enemies until healed up.
- Try to kill things quickly where possible so you don't end up surrounded by new enemies or forced to face multiple foes at once.

Shade wrote:I rarely lose at the Ring of Blood. Tactics are mostly pretty straightforward:

- Don't engage anything capable of poisoning you without healing/regen infusions off delay.
- Stun them immediately
- Try not to fight multiple enemies at once. Particularly ones capable of stunning you.
- If blinded and/or poisoned, run around in circles avoiding the enemies until healed up.
- Try to kill things quickly where possible so you don't end up surrounded by new enemies or forced to face multiple foes at once.

and always begin first by levelling up to add three stat points to CON or WIL. I prefer WIL.

I probably have about 75% success rate. I can get it first time for lots of characters, and then suddenly die 4-5 times in a row. I have won the game on brawler several times, so u get to know how to use the talents.

I think I may have been the one who brought up Rogue/Assassins not having Knife Mastery, so I MIGHT be guilty of that I do realize they already dealt very significant damage before. So perhaps it's the whole Rogue/Assassin NPC class that needs some rebalancing?

I did find the RoB itself to be fairly difficult before(haven't tried it the last releases, though)..so I can imagine how much of a problem it is now.