ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So I was playing an antimagic brawler, blissfully unaware of the fact that tinkers were easily accessible on non-tinker characters. The game was fairly easy, aside from Aeryn, the final battle, and the steam turrets in the palace (yeah... I totally skipped the vents. This is easily avoidable had I been paying more attention). I only died to the turrets, the final battle, and I think a randboss.

But - the final battle was basically unwinnable. I had the sher'tul priest up to 880+ paradox, was constantly burning all his pos/negative energy, but brawlers have pretty weak aoe so I couldn't deal with the spiked tentacles, eventually got surrounded and died several times. I also skipped the tree that lets you cancel sustains, so it was ... especially rough (I put an extra cat point into AM since I thought you needed a talent level of 5 on two of them to use antimagic shield reliably). I wasn't able to get up to 100% confusion and stun resist due to the limited equipment of AM, and I figured that maybe I just went wrong somewhere with the character build.

I checked out the stats on the priest and the tentacles - they had 140+ accuracy (the priest may have had 170+?) and both had 500(!) APR. To me, this effectively meant that both defense and armor were basically useless in EoR. While it may be possible to get above 140 defense (though somewhat unrealistic), it's certainly not possible to get above 500 armor. I feel like these numbers are ... extraordinarily high.

So I rebuilt a brawler, went non-AM and just sorta autopiloted through the game, dying a fair few times due to carelessness. Also browsing vaults in the slumbering caves when you don't need any more equipment is a rather bad idea. I also discovered that you could learn tinkering and went with that instead of AM. Being able to use arcane items, tinkers, and some better drops let that character win, but the final battle was still extraordinarily hard. I'd say roughly 3x harder than anything in the normal game(aside from Liinalli or w/e her name is, as I've never beaten her, though I've only ever tried once), and probably 5-10x harder than the final battle of the maj'eyal campaign (I've beaten maj'eyal with a number of characters, my most recent one being a cornac mindslayer on nightmare. Honestly, not even dark crypt on nightmare compares to the embers battle on normal, and it makes atma feel like a joke. I've also won with an alchemist, way back in 1.0.5).

Basically on my second character I ignored everything that contributed to armor or defense, as the only truly difficult part of the game those would never be a factor. I feel like this is a design flaw, as certain classes have little in the way of defense aside from those factors. Oddly, the tentacles had an extremely low crit chance (5%), making crit shrug off less of a consideration.

I can understand the logic behind having accuracy of 140ish, but I really can't understand the 500 APR. Even if reduced by a factor of 10, that's still going to be more APR than most classes will have armor at that level.

(Characters referenced :
AM orc that died on final battle :
https://te4.org/characters/3802/tome/59 ... 76d627094a
Orc winner:
https://te4.org/characters/3802/tome/05 ... 9182680690

Been my observation that the final battle in EoR is tailored to the tinker classes with lots of tinkers.

Any of the normal classes it is simply luck of the drops.

I won't say I am even anywhere near a great player, but when you can zip through nearly anything with little or no problems, then get to the end and lose 5-7 lives trying to damage one boss; you get the idea that the final boss was custom tailored to a specific set of gear and talents (aka the steam stuff) and anything else is a crap shoot.

My latest orc archer, I had only lost 2 lives before the final battle (both were in hidden vaults that dropped me inside the middle of the vault instead of at an entrance). No matter what effects from the munitions, ammo and special shots I hit it with the silence, pinning, etc. was normally gone the next turn and there simply was nothing that could be done to do enough damage, especially when it seems to heal to 100% every few turns.

On the other hand, my archmage (tri-beam lightning/storm) that got the mana coil cut through the high priest like it was nothing.

The final battle seems a tad unstable.