ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

To clarify, I'm wondering which classes and which trees merit the most from spending a cat point to increase a talent tree's mastery. I've been playing a lot of unsuccessful Shadow-based Doomed lately, and that has definitely inspired this question. Are there other trees that are worth increasing in mastery besides the Doomed's Shadow tree?

Raising category mastery is a niche tactic. Really, really niche.

You should get your Inscription slots and unlock the stuff you need to unlock first, and if you have an extra cat point left over THEN think about boosting mastery.

Sure it's niche, but having 1 or 2 exceptionally strong abilities sounds fun! I'm curious too--is stealth still worth catpointing, for instance? What about Cursed Aura?

Doomed's Shadows is a popular option, because it gives you extra shadow.

Other one is Psionic/Solipsism.

I personally dropped a point in Spell/Arcane, for a really ridiculous Disruption Shield strength.

while arcane isnt a good choice (u cant get it lower than 0.15 mana / damage - only max arcane resist from disruption shield rises beyond lvl 5-6.5 and decent spellpower) some people put one in bone to get more boneshields?

the cursed aura tree can get pretty sick in infinite dungeon above lvl 50 i guess, with a cat point even more. all ur items will be cursed and u will have every curse maxed at some point. i dont even know if theres a limit for this? u can get lvl 7 curse and its effects improve even for further lvls in it imo. the tree is 1.0 base and increases to 1.2 which means u get a free lvl every 5 lvls. one thing i tried on 1.05 release but the first talent was bugged there so it didnt curse further items

other than that i never did that before as mostly inscription slot/another full category was better imo

I believe that an extra cat point in Necrotic Minions gives you an extra minion, as well.

Tharsonius wrote:some people put one in bone to get more boneshields?

Bone Shield doesn't benefit from category points anymore. If you're running a class that has more category points than it needs (Brawler and Reaver come to mind), I recommend Survival for Charm Mastery or an escort category light Light, Conditioning, or Stone Alchemy over boosting a tree. At the moment the only tree worth boosting is Shadows for the fourth shadow but you can get 1.50 mastery anyway with Umbraphage so it still might not be a great idea to boost it.

Archmage -> Spell / Water, maybe. It bumps up the duration on a maxed-out Shivgoroth Form to 12 turns, and with maxed Quicken Spells, the cooldown is 14, meaning you can have it active almost permanently. It also bumps the duration (as well as the effect) of Glacial Vapors, which helps increase the amount of time you can have multiple instances of it up for healing. (Between the Shivgoroth Form 150% cold absorption, +% cold damage modifiers, healing modifiers, and up to 3 stacks of Glacial Vapors [which is possible using Metaflow], the amount of healing you can get is quite large. The build I've gotten furthest with in the game was based around this combo.)

Soar wrote:Archmage -> Spell / Water, maybe. It bumps up the duration on a maxed-out Shivgoroth Form to 12 turns, and with maxed Quicken Spells, the cooldown is 14, meaning you can have it active almost permanently. It also bumps the duration (as well as the effect) of Glacial Vapors, which helps increase the amount of time you can have multiple instances of it up for healing. (Between the Shivgoroth Form 150% cold absorption, +% cold damage modifiers, healing modifiers, and up to 3 stacks of Glacial Vapors [which is possible using Metaflow], the amount of healing you can get is quite large. The build I've gotten furthest with in the game was based around this combo.)

How well does this work without unlocking the Ice tree (the one you get for dealing 1 million points of cold damage)?

I've got three characters on record that used the build, surviving to level 22, 14 and 39, respectively (roguelike mode). I didn't breach the damage threshold to get the Ice tree until the final one, at level 32, so most of the playtime was without Ice.

It's been nearly a year since then (I've only returned to the game again recently), but the only trouble of consequence from lacking Ice that I recall was that wearing down enemies with high Cold Resistance sometimes ended up being an extended process thanks to the lack of Resistance Penetration. However, with the sustained healing from the combo in combination with the rest of an Archmage's defensive arsenal, surviving a protracted battle of attrition was usually not problematic. Enemies with a straight-up 100% cold resistance tend to rely on cold as their primary offensive damage type, which gets negated by Shivgoroth Form, so they didn't prove all that much of a problem either.

That said, once you do have the achievement for the Ice tree, unlocking it should take priority over adding a boost to Water.