[b43] Durzo the Halfling Shadowblade - Winner

[Vanir]

http://te4.org/characters/18250/tome/1e ... 1b1c50140b

I waited a long time for this release, because i was totally unable to unlock marauder with rogues.
Now the purpose of this char was to unlock marauder first and win the game second. While i did get the unlock at lvl 42 (yes you can laugh ^^) by that point i was amazed at the staying power of the shadowblade and my initially unfocused build strategy bore rich overpowered fruit.

I made him a halfling not because i planned where this char ended up but because of the hp mod and general rogueness (didnt even know that the racials changed).

I had planned to use Invisibility instead of stealth at first (i never used Invisibility on any char before) but never got around to it because of the lvl and 36 magic requirement.

This character survived despite my complete inability to play rogues because of the much better mobility at first and then because of Shadow Veil. Not having to waste cat points on Phase door and Teleport runes is a huge thing. You have Shadowstep and Rush to get close to enemies and both daze.

Illuminate was very useful for the whole game even just to soften big groups of foes with the added benefit of working well with the Lifedrinker later.

I only put 1 point in Dirty Fighting because Dual Strike stunned well enough.

The Ambush tree is amazing. Not only do you get something to pull casters and archers to you; it also dazes and silences them for 8 Turns. While Shadow Ambush is great Shadow Leash only got 1 point, since disarm is pretty much silence against melee classes, which i could handle anyway, and doesnt pull them towards you.

Ambuscade essentially gives you a weaker copy of your character with the exact same status otherwise. Lets say you want to chainstun something with just Dual Strike. You can use Ambuscade and use the Dual Strike talent of the shadow then switch control back and your original char still has Dual Strike available. While it gets decreased resistances you can use the wild infusions for resist all and suddenly its capable of tanking. The cheesefactor is pretty high and i admit that i used it to clear the Room of Death. Maybe thats why i didnt get the Are you out of your mind? Achievement ^^

The final ability in the Ambush tree is Shadow Veil. At first it looks kind of dangerous to any sane player. You get some resist all and deal a ton of damage every turn AND are immune to all status effects and teleport to a random enemy within sightrange but you lose control of your character. Sounds like a mixed bag and my first reaction was to use it with ambuscade since the copy was expendable. That worked well enough but left my real character vulnerable and i was unable to switch back to him because Shadow Veil didnt even let me do that.

Finally in the east i was sleepy and decided to just use Shadow Veil to speed up fights and i was surprised at how well it worked against anything. I started to use it against bosses after using a regen infusion and Luck of the little Folk, which gave me a ~100% critical chance (combine that with 215% darkness weapon damage from shadow veil).

To expand on that i got myself Essence of Speed and used Eternitys Counter, which ... let me act while using Shadow Veil.
Pretty much every 2nd turn i could do anything i wanted, which completely eliminated the one drawback of Shadow Veil.

The logical step was to use Shadow Veil all the time to enjoy high damage and immunity to status effects and the 42% resist all. To achieve that i looked out for equipment with mana and stamina regen. I got pretty lucky with the artifact i bought from the merchant (+2 stamina). Mana wasnt a problem even though my max mana was pretty low with Essence of Speed sustained. The final nail in the coffin for just about everything else in the game was me getting the Eye of the Tiger prodigy, which lowers cooldowns on crit. Some abilities just arent meant to have lower cooldowns ^^

Im pretty sure around that point i killed some bosses without noticing them >.> or maybe not since i didnt notice anything ^^

I also took Arcane Might instead of Lucky Day, since Luck of the little Folk was enough to increase my crit rate to 100% for a decent amount of time. However i did forget about the avoidance aspect of luck and the defense increase would have been nice. Still it increased my damage by a lot so i shouldnt complain.

After getting both the Lifebinding Emerald and the Goedelath (or however thats spelled) rock and no plain voratun amulet i fought Atamathon and won (after 2 Deaths and savescums - to be honest i only do that for Limmir and Atamathon. My memory is pretty bad and Atamathon with his high speed and insane range of powerful attacks that are likely to crit a lot is hard to judge before fighting him with a char. If i knew i would get obliterated very likely i wouldnt have gone there but as i said its hard to judge)

The fight was challenging. I could silence him to prevent him from using the beam attacks and runes and my resistances were pretty good. Criticals were a problem but even they didnt do enough damage while i was using Shadow Veil. I tried to keep him either stunned or silenced and lured him to the corners of the map. From there it was possible to teleport to the other side to escape for a while if i failed to stun or silence him. The reflective skin wasnt a problem even while using Luck of the little Folk because of my high darkness resistance + Shadow Veil. After looking through my talents again i just realized i could have used Time Prison on him to trivialize the fight -.-.

I managed to protect Limmir on the first try even though i didnt find a single item that granted demon telepathy. Shadow Veil sometimes blinked me to the demon portals and i was lucky that my Phase Door didnt fizzle when i tried to get back to the lake.

Btw Duck and Dodge was very effective and i always thought Evasion required stamina or a turn, which made it pretty useful. I wouldnt have got it though, if i hadnt struggled to find good things to put generics in.

As usual i opened every vault even in High Peak, which was laughably easy. One runed bone giant stairboss gave me a few problems though. By that i mean i had to remember to silence him instead of just whacking at him with Shadow Veil on.

The last boss fight was very easy. I silenced the Reaver and used Shadow Veil. Thinking the fight might last a bit longer i didnt use many talents to conserve stamina and mana for extended use of Shadow Veil. The battle lasted just enough time for the first of the summoned creatures to enter my sight. After getting blinked to it and finishing it i got back to the sorcerers and finished them both at pretty much the same time. The paladin survived though i think i was supposed to get an achievement for that. Could be wrong though and she appears alive and well in the message log thats in the charvault.
Oh and i tested the Staff of Absorption on her so she followed me around. Never tested the staff with my other winners >.>
After checking the achievements of my berserker the achievement im seemingly missing is for letting her sacrifice herself to close the portal. Didnt get the dialog so maybe it didnt open yet?

I forgot to write about status effects. They werent a problem for the most time and then i got Shadow Veil. Indomitable is really useful if you have multiple physical effects on you and just want to clear the stun. I got the 2nd wild infusion pretty late and shortly thereafter i used Shadow Veil all the time anyway. One Curse of Death killed me once though.

Deaths: All deaths i had were before the use of Shadow Veil. For some reason i cant see where and when i died in the new charsheet so i have to go from memory. Im pretty sure i died up to 3 times at the Golem Graveyard. Not to the main threat there but to 3 chests that spawned things my character was unable to deal with at the time. One of them cast the earlier mentioned Curse of Death on me that i noticed after i had teleported away ^^ didnt have the 2nd wild infusion then. I think that one killed me again. In addition to the chests there was a intimidating cave there filled with storm drakes etc. Im not sure if i died there but looking back it was one of the most difficult times of the run so i think its likely.
I probably died twice at the beginning. I didnt lose any lives to Bill or Dreadfell though so i have no idea where that happened.

I found the Blood of Life and the Ring of the Dead.

I love the new Artifacts. Fortunes Eye was very helpful for planning where to send my shadow copy. Eternitys Counter is just awesome although the penalty to movement speed will get you ambushed by orcs and adventurers. So without essence of speed i had to remember to turn it (creative mechanic btw) before going to the worldmap. (or just take it off)

Frozen Shroud was almost made for my char. Im not sure i would have traded it for Ureslaks molted scales though.

Deaths Embrace (not too sure if that ones new) looks perfect for Shadowblades but i couldnt do much with the stealth boni. I wish i could have gotten some points into invisibility. You can use it to make yourself invisible without any damage penalties, which was nice if i wanted to be invisible in addition to doing insane damage, being immune to all status effects and having awesome resist all.

The 2 daggers arent new but i think they deserve a mention here too. The Lifedrinker is meant for Corruptors but it works equally well for Shadowblades. Darkness Damage, high normal damage, Blood Grasp on spell hit, and tons of spellpower all of which are useful to a Shadowblade.

The Mandible of Ungolmor has the useful Spydric Poison on crit and converts 30% of its damage to darkness damage, which is sadly made redundant while using Shadow Veil.

So all in all a very powerful and versatile and very hard to kill character. Very fun to play and you can do almost nothing wrong lategame and play veeeeery relaxed. Kind of the complete opposite to my brawler ^^

There were some strange things happening lategame and im not sure theyre bugs so ill just post them here.

While using Shadow Veil i got 42% resist all. In addition to that all my normal damage resistances seemed to increase too. So for example 50% fire resistance became 70%. I always thought first resistance to all applied then the special resistance. I still think thats true so it could be Shadow Veil is more powerful than its supposed to. What makes it strange though is that i had no blight resistance for most of the game and when using Shadow Veil no 42% blight resistance appeared. Or maybe im just stupid and resist all automatically gets added to special resistances and only gets displayed if you have the resistance already.

While using Shadow Veil and sometimes even without it and Essence of Speed was sustained with Eternitys Counter there was some odd behavior of talents. For example using Shadow Step i get teleported to the enemy and then i get the usual targetting cursor as if i selected another talent. Even if i cancel the attack my character still attacks. The same happened also with melee range talents.

[Reidan]

wow nice gear must have been some insane damage, and yes the last part is how the resist tooltip works

[Tagedieb]

Gratulation to the win
I had the same issue with the targeting cursor in my stealthbuild too. I believe its the mandible-dagger which causes the double targetcursor. i had it since i found him and its has something to do with the spydric poison it is inducing.

Interesting chaotic build, my experience with shadow veil was also pretty awesome, might be a bit overpowered if i think it through.
the arcane might prodigy is an interesting option and might provide some nice possibilities for shadowblades for example with the light generic tree from escorts. The invisibility isnt as good as you might think, as it does reduce your dmg by 70%, so you might not have missed much by not getting it.

[Vanir]

@Tagedieb: Well since i never put points into it i wasnt sure if the damage penalty would scale down 70/60/50/40/30 etc.

I dont think Shadow Veil is overpowered on its own. The "problem" was that i did my best to make it gamebreaking. ^^
Just using it without a speed bonus is likely to get you killed /=

Btw i saw your character report - 2 very different approachs to the class ^^

@Reidan: Thanks that clears that up.

[Tagedieb]

now that you are telling, iam not sure if invis damage reduction is counted down too.....
And yes quite different aproaches. So far i was so addicted to stealth that i never seriously tried a nonstealthed Shadowblade.

[greycat]

Now the purpose of this char was to unlock marauder first and win the game second. While i did get the unlock at lvl 42 (yes you can laugh ^^)

I'm not laughing. I still haven't unlocked that damned class!

Good job!

[azrael]

Durzo? I think you mean Blint

[PureQuestion]

As the creator of, uh, all those artifacts, I'm very glad you liked it. I haven't seen anyone else use Eternity's Counter, actually. Any idea why it was different for you?

[SageAcrin]

hey, one of those is my knife.

As to Eternity's Counter...I actually have ran it, and I can say why pretty easily-the bonuses are pretty great if you feel you can mitigate the downside, it's just that the downside on both ends is powerful.

I actually ran the Defense version on my Brawler-any form of extra durability was extremely welcome, the Brawler was running Mobility so that the large Defense boost looked better, and I had very fast swing speed so I didn't really care if I knocked some of it back. I eventually phased it out for Fortune's Eye, but it wasn't a massive change off to me.

In this case, Essence of Speed negates the movement penalty effectively(you still move above 100% speed), while boosting the upside at close range(Since the swing rate was around 200% with that+the naturally fast swings+145% global-as was mentioned earlier, they were going for high speed to take strong advantage of Shadow Veil.). Eating some resists for a big damage bonus is a legitimate tradeoff.

[Vanir]

@azrael: Wow someone finally noticed one of the references ^^

@PureQuestion: I mainly used it for the reasons SageAcrin listed but the most important thing was that it let me act while using Shadow Veil.

I also used it on this char http://te4.org/characters/18250/tome/24 ... 780917d661. Couldnt play that one all the way cause of a bug, which is why i removed all the equip (check the resists).

The reason i used it on him was that he was pretty durable even with the penalty and my movespeed was at 50% anyway cause of the vines. Since i never moved during fights the horrible movement speed wasnt an issue.

[azrael]

Vanir? I think you mean elf guy from Eragon

[Vanir]

First time someone didnt think i stole from norse mythology and you are right lol

Also make that annoying elf guy ^^