[1.0.4] Uncle Infester, Nightmare RL Shalore Reaver Winner

[supermini]

Yay, I unlocked insane!

http://te4.org/characters/13640/tome/d2 ... 81f7ab6731

The build is more corruptor-y and less reaver-y than I would have wanted, but earlier hybrid reavers on NM felt very clunky in mid-game. Main damage combo is virulent + timeless + virulent + cyst burst + catalepsy. If facing blight resist, throw in vimsense and life tap, disease resist is handled with epidemic. The only thing I didn't account for is huge spell saves (especially in the final fight). Unlocking curses and getting curse of defenselessness might have been the way to go, but I'm not sure what I would have dumped...Both charm mastery from survival and providence from celestial light were too useful. It probably would have been lightning rune.

Defense-wise, track was the most important thing. I carried around a tracking item from the moment I found it and kept using it every 10-15 tiles. That way I could prepare myself for the fight and I wouldn't be suprised or surrounded. You have to lose autoexplore, and yes, it takes longer, but there is no way I would have made it to the end game without it. Other than that, bone shield, lightning rune and heroism gave me leeway going into the fight but I also loaded up on escape options (double movement, teleport, dark portal, psychoportation charm) and I dumped a lot of offensive potential for status immunities (stun and blindness in particular).


The big issue for me in this run was lack of dispelling. I did about 30 or so farportals, killed about 50 adventurer parties, made randart gloves (twice), and there was none to be found, so I had to give up. That meant facing things with bone shield and essence of speed was much more dangerous, and Elandar fight would have been impossible - if it wasn't for guardian totem. It took me about 45 minutes but I was able to summon enough totems for them to manaclash Elandar enough so that I can defeat him (not without bone shield deactivating a few times and causing quite nasty scares when El got a double move). I wouldn't do it again without dispelling - I'll just use the item vault instead of being stubborn about it. This run took close to 50 hours because of that, and I still didn't find any.

Prodigy combination is swift hands and cauterize. Cauterize saved my bacon more than once, it's one of the best prodigies in the game. Swift hands were used to swap in items. I wouldn't say it was a key part of the strategy, but it added a lot of utility. Swap in wintertide phial to clear mental, switch to staff of arcane supremacy to clear magical, swap in psychoportation charm to tp when silenced, shield of earth for stone wall, duathedlen heart for blood grasp...It's a lot of options packed into one prodigy and it's going to still be good after the nerf in 1.0.5. You don't really need to swap entire item sets to get mileage out of it, just one item is usually enough.

The only death came in the final fight because of a bug. Using the eternity counter (the hourglass artifact) weirded out my game and set my spellcasting speed to not-a-number, which caused Elandar to have infinite turns and kill me. Luckily I was wearing the ring of the dead but after I ressed the save was corrupted completely and it took DarkGod's intervention to get it working again (thanks DG!). So yeah, don't use eternity counter until 1.0.5.

Questions, comments, etc. are welcome.

[Faeryan]

Sweet! Hope you whacked Elandar for me too. I was running a Reaver myself at the same time (normal difficulty) more concentrated on the melee skills.
While the game proved rather effortless except a few tough boss mobs the last fight was too much for me to handle. Could have imagined myself having a decent chance had I had a controlled tele to move to portals and close them before they started spewing monsters.
Before I died the first time I had both of the sorcerors in around 50% HP but by then the adds were too much to handle.

While I'm deceased now it was fun looking at Unca's achievements in real-time while playing the same class.

[supermini]

Yeah, we were in High Peak in about the same time. Too bad you didn't make it... Die and learn I suppose.

In melee mobility issues become more apparent - you only get bone grab and it's not a top-tier mobility talent. I'd go double move infusion or double controlled phase door if undead at the very least. I'm not sure if that's what I did on the normal run but then again I also didn't get virulent disease then because I didn't notice it was instant cast...

[SageAcrin]

Interesting build/class choice. I believe that makes you the first Reaver Nightmare/Roguelike winner, congrats!

I don't think there was much to be done about the spellsave. I'm pretty sure you had the right idea on build, you basically were able to rack up 85~ once you got some hits in. That's enough to get by, and I think other builds would have worked worse on Nightmare. The raw damage on diseases I generally discount as overkill and not as fast in practice as just bursting your highest damage, on Normal. Nightmare is quite another story, though, I think you had the right idea. Just something you have to put up with, with the build.

Personally, I had a similar experience, with Arcane Eye replacing Track. You can sorta get a feel for when you don't have to use it, but that only makes things faster if you mouse move a lot(which I do). But in general, you need to scout all the time, constantly-I only auto-explored when I was done with about 80% of the floor.

Also, not finding a Dispersal in that much time is terrible luck, ouch. Didn't even find a Corrupted Negation staff?

Also, here's hoping the infinite scaling changes make dispel a little less mandatory. In the end, you still had to use a (very non-optimal) dispel in practice, to win, after all that searching...

[supermini]

Interesting build/class choice. I believe that makes you the first Reaver Nightmare/Roguelike winner, congrats!

Thanks!

I don't think there was much to be done about the spellsave. I'm pretty sure you had the right idea on build, you basically were able to rack up 85~ once you got some hits in. That's enough to get by, and I think other builds would have worked worse on Nightmare. The raw damage on diseases I generally discount as overkill and not as fast in practice as just bursting your highest damage, on Normal. Nightmare is quite another story, though, I think you had the right idea. Just something you have to put up with, with the build.

I thought it was slow as well, but it turns out with shalore it only takes about 3 turns to explode the entire room, or 2 with the speed buff. Relying on soul rot and drain when diseases failed was tedious because the change to dexterity means that even normal mobs are capable of shrugging off crits on nightmare and soul rot doesn't do all that much by itself, when it doesn't crit.

Also, not finding a Dispersal in that much time is terrible luck, ouch. Didn't even find a Corrupted Negation staff?

Nope, is that even in 1.0.4? I don't remember ever seeing it.

I missed out on all sorts of items this run. Every farportal run it seemed I'm getting nothing but greatmauls. If you take a look, both my boots and my cloak are below par.

Also, here's hoping the infinite scaling changes make dispel a little less mandatory. In the end, you still had to use a (very non-optimal) dispel in practice, to win, after all that searching...

Yeah...On some builds it's always going to be mandatory I think. I was able to let Elandar have triple move on me because I had bone shield. Even with Essence of Speed toned down, Elandar getting a double move on you is never going to be pretty on a lot of classes.

[SageAcrin]

I thought it was slow as well, but it turns out with shalore it only takes about 3 turns to explode the entire room, or 2 with the speed buff. Relying on soul rot and drain when diseases failed was tedious because the change to dexterity means that even normal mobs are capable of shrugging off crits on nightmare and soul rot doesn't do all that much by itself, when it doesn't crit.

Not so much slow as that, on Normal, a Reaver can do 2000~ a turn fairly easily with spells backed up with Reaving Combat.

It's not often that an enemy was durable enough for you to really care about adding more damage. Mostly bosses, and mostly lategame ones.

I'm not saying it's bad on Normal, just a lot better on Nightmare, where even durable mobs can often stand up to that kind of damage for a turn or two.