Madness RL unmodded, Temporal Warden FTW

[Aesthete]

https://te4.org/characters/150226/tome/ ... 3e6fcf35a7

Biggest enemy: memory leak. I had to regularly close and reopen the program as it started to get bogged down on clones, and towards the end of the final fight it started getting really bad for some reason.

The only "cheaty" thing I did was use the online vault, and all I transferred was the Mercy dagger, since there was no way I was going to farm patrols to get that after it refused to drop, and it seemed likely necessary to win given that the final bosses have in the ballpark of 500k hp.

If you want to know how this was possible, this thread discussing speed mechanics is a good primer. By stacking attack speed with time dilation and equips, I got my bow speed down to 43% of a turn, and dual wield to 61% of a turn at endgame. Temporal energize effects from items could get me up to 300 extra energy per turn on melee attacks, on top of the energy from weapon folding, plus some global speed boosts as icing meant I could get tons of turns on those ultra nasty madness monsters. turn_procs seems to only be reset on a game tick though, so if I got a multiple turns without any time passing (usually through time stop) then the temporal energize item effects would and did cap out.

Weapon procs were crucial in general, as many of the strong ones (like talent forgetting amnesia effect and gloom) work off of the highest of a couple different powers, including accuracy. Seal fate made those debuffs extra fun. One of the fun bits of madness is that your summons get the huge skill level boosts that enemies get, including temporal clones, so with maxed combat accuracy my clones had enough accuracy to beat saves on most things other than enemy summoner summons. Some looking at my character sheet may think me nuts to put 4 points in weapon manifold, but the cooldowns on those get reset for temporal clones, and the skill level is also boosted by madness. That was more to taste than anything.

One death in Caldera, which burned my ring of death, due to heroism running out and not having enough healing to dig myself out of the negative health hole running around all over the place with rare+s breathing down my neck everywhere. Bloodcaller ring and switching back in a regen infusion covered my healing needs for the rest of the way. Cauterize was necessary, it triggered 7 times in total, and was extra good on TW since invigorate doubled the cooldown rate on it along with the other passive skills.

High peak was pretty rough. I basically skipped a couple levels with movement infusion, teleportation, and time stop, but still had a close call or two. Cauterized procced once when a sawbutcher unique blasted me for absurd damage somehow, I had a bleed proc with over 2000 damage per turn that I barely was able to remove with a wormhole cleanse. High peak 10 went fairly poorly, I uncovered most of the level before finding the portal, had tons of rare+s chasing me around the level, and ended up using the fake orb of many ways a couple times with enemies on my (whoops). So I went into the final fight in a hurry and with high paradox, which is not ideal.

For the final fight, I immediately closed the demon portal and dispersed elandar and used the invuln pot, and closed the undead portal and dragon portal not too much later. Elandar was a gigantic punching bag that ironically only got extremely threatening when he was low on health, when he quickly toggled on like 10 sustains. Occasionally he had over 100 resist all with buffs, which was mean of him. Link of pain from my armor helped weaken up Argoniel, and she was rather annoying as she rolled a rogue with the scoundrel tree. When ever she meleed me my crit chance was basically nothing (like minus 70% chance from the debuff), and the fumble debuff is really annoying for a speed freak. She also landed a burning hex once, and I had guardian unity go off and it had a panic inducing 18 turn cooldown when Elandar was raging at low health. Once Elandar went down she was never too much of a threat again, though, but it took awhile to burn through her massive health with almost capped resists and spine of the world. Funny enough, Aeyrn somehow survived it all even though I ignored her. I guess I was annoying enough to the sorcerers to distract them.

Overall I didn't tune my paradox over 300, but I regularly ran extremely hot with high paradox using my skills, time stop is pricey. That was a double edged sword, because extending my buffs by up to 1.5 times was really nice, but I was crapping out anomalies left and right in the final fight. Fortunately I was able to fish a lot of them with the singularity arrow skill, which I pretty much never used for any other purpose, and I could see if I would trigger an anomaly that action by using it and canceling. Sorry if that seems a bit cheaty too, but the code does block intentionally triggering anomalies by checking for the fail at the start of your action, so I couldn't force them if they didn't want to happen, even if I really wanted them to happen.

My build may seem a bit weird, it is much different than the TWs I ran on lower difficulties, but I did make my skill and gearing choices with madness in mind.

[Aesthete]

Oh, and darkgod gave out invulnerability when I was in the final fight, too, when Elandar was in middle health range. If there ever was a time to get invulnerability, its hard to choose a better one.

[darkgod]

Congrats

Still bummed thought that I gave an invuln that was useful, that's not the point ! :>

[Zeyphor]

its official:
a temporal warden legitimately won madness roguelike
therefore, temporal wardens are OP

[Mex]

If there's no stream it's just a meme.

[Cathbald]

I would love that someone got a madness TW win legit, the class is strong but fun and not tedious unlike those other madness contender.

I have a real hard time believing that one though.

Let's start with the start. Clearing the starting chronomancer area in madness? Very good players can't do it consistently in insane, how many tries did that take in madness ? And why bother in the first place ? Seriously one of the biggest red flag, even if you could argue there were a 100 tries before because it's not too painful to reload literally the first zone over and over. Any tips for others to replicate it ?

After that we have escorts, 8 out of 9 escorts saved is already a very good run in easier circumstances. And 7 of those were even in OF/DF/Reknor. And wow that's really good luck on what escort spawned (but hey, RNG is RNG I guess ?) How were you able to save all those ? Luck with portals ? Details please.

Aeryn just... survived ? Randomly ? I mean, she gets killed in less than 10 turn in insane already, sometimes. And your char sheet damage is LOW. I can't see your damage with bow since you saved on melee set but the log tells me you were using storm fury and not an OP randart (you know, those with 90%+ in both phys damage and phys pen ? and double recursion and the like ?) I wonder how good the ammo was. But that melee set has the damage I have in DF on insane. And not even 60% crit ? Combined with only +30% phys damage/pen ? Yeah, damage is hella low.
On that matter, congrats for getting the achievement for 1k5 damage at level 50 only, can't imagine how long the fight were taking. How long did the whole run take while we're at it ?

Back on final fight, you say gloom is OP but didn't use gloom on hit in it ? None of your items have it. Your gloves are like your best item (oh yeah, those items don't seem too great btw, even if we consider that you just wanted to act 20 times for every action the enemies got. After all attacking 20 times for 2 damage is only 40 damage...) As I was saying your gloves are like your best item, but Elandar toggled 10 sustains once low life ? How long did you wear those dispersion gloves, and how lucky were you with what they shut down ?

Did you use the staff to kill Argoniel ? How important were all the random event you got ? Poosh reward is huge, bunnyficated must have been perma on with all your boosts, invulnerability in final fight, no less. How did mercy deal damage since their health need to go down first and as said earlier.... you have basically no damage.

Why not max warden's call if you were relying on clones to deal damage but go 1/1/1/1 in spacetime folding ? Especially when you had enough spare points to invest in Weapon Manifold "more for taste than anything" (grats on being able to tackle madness while taking talent for taste rather than efficiency)

How did you survive with the low res you have, 70 armor and low life ? Ok, webs of fate and clones are a thing but... it's not 100% uptime. And it only takes 2 burst (the first being taken care of by cauterise). You didn't even close all portals and the one you left open is elemental, and unlike dragon those won't target the sorcerors. So you had to deal with another threat for ??? reason. I would have thought taking at least 1 in see the threads rather than 2/5 wormhole would also be good to prevent a death ?

Why bother with Caldera after Master ? You were level 37-38, it wasn't gonna put you to 42 which was the last damage spike you could wish for. Same with anti-antimagic.

Grats on being a "cool hero", surprised you didn't drown in Derth though. Why not ?

Anyway, that's my 2 cents, sad you didn't at least record the final fight, it's not like you had to close and reopen during it, was it?

[Micbran]

I personally would like some footage of madness Unhallowed Morass

It’s already almost impossible on Insane.

[Aesthete]

I deleted my very long list of failures from the unhollowed morass from my character sheet a long time ago. I think it took me about 20 tries, I was just trying to get the achievement and was tilting a bit the night I did it, and didn't think that I was really going anywhere with the TW that finally got through. It is a total crapshoot and grossly unbalanced, I got lucky the time I finally did it. I don't know if anyone here was on the night I did it, but you may have seen the repeated death messages of JCVD died to x in unhollowed morass in chat. If I had started over a madness run on TW again I would not bother at all with that now that I have that achievement, but the one that got through that actually made it to the end.

Overall this run was not intended to get a TW win, I didn't think it was going to end that way, I was just wanted the the TW achievement for self killing and was doing some testing on some of the mechanics for an adventurer build based on the high speed TW skills, and it just kept going and going. The whole run took me a couple months of playing (edit: I got the wibbly wobbly achievement on march 8th, so I guess about a month), it was incredibly very slow, definitely over 50 hours, probably closer to 100 hours.

I would switch items mid-fight, there's a lot of packrat clutter in my inventory looking through, but some of them I would bounce back and forth between regularly, preferably during time stop. Gloves were the slot I switched pretty often, and I regularly switched them in fights. The gloves I used the most are the ones with the perfect strike proc, plus the pretty useless slumber and poison breath procs, and those had gloom on their hit. With seal fate, it is actually a bit of a balancing act with the procs, since if you have too high a chance of proc on hit with gloom it would regularly reset the duration (or god forbid, cleanse it on a save), but seal fate would extend it long enough otherwise. Dispersal gloves I would switch on and off on the fly too, it was my most used charm I think. In the final fight I actually didn't have that much gloom go off, I used it a ton more earlier on with a slightly different gearset, but the stuns and confuses and silences from my arrows (they have a torment proc, I can switch over if you really want to see them) were enough to ruin Elandar's day. My bows were the epoch bow until I found the thalore bow, and finally storm fury (143% attack speed is the key stat on all of those!) That 1h staff I did switch in occasionally if I needed accuracy or spellpower to beat saves, it has a ton of both, but it wasn't my regular weapon.

If I was cheating I would have saved that rogue escort, I really really wanted him alive for device mastery. Unfortunately, that was on the level of dreadfell that stupid bulwark dwarf unique spawned in, and I had like 3 rare+s around as I was jumping all over the place, and eventually something caught up with him. For saving the escorts in general, and for madness with the "hunted!" debuff in general I would often have to proactively run towards the weakest set of monsters I could see and beat their face in before a lot of the rest of the level came my way. "Hunted!" actually made it a bit easier to save some of the escorts than I had on some of my insane characters, since the jerks would be coming after me instead of the moron running suicidally forward, and they could be safer if I put a bit of space or a wall between us. TW has a couple of tricks up its sleeve that really help saving escorts too (dimensional step!), which leads to spacetime folding.

The spacetime folding tree is the ultimate 1 point wonder tree, and its strength is in aspects that are that not well documented. The mines are what let me eventually get through the morass, but spatial tether was the big diamond in the rough. Not casting spatial tether as a debuff on enemies much past early game mind you, casting it on myself as a buff, or on an escort to keep their dumb ass away from all the fighting that was going on when they thought that hurrying was a good idea. Spatial tether on myself was great for the style of blinking in and out hybrid ranged/melee, it made the melee aspect of TW a whole lot safer, since you can get in and get out with a cleanse on enemies that are too dangerous to tank in melee, particularly early/mid game. Dimensional anchor was also really nice, and for a particular reason I only found out by looking at the code: the daze on it ignores saves. Daze is removed immediately on nonzero damage...but you don't do any damage while time stop is up (except from webs of fate, stupid melee retaliation). So if there was something with too high of saves but wasn't stun immune, and I didn't foolishly break it with webs of fate, I could dimensional anchor and debuff (particularly disarm!) while time stopped and dazed and at half saves. Preventing teleportation is also nice too, especially against those pain in the ass orc sorcerers. Also because a lot of the bad minor anomalies in practice were the ones that teleported things around, and spatial tether (on myself) and dimensional anchor provided a nice remedy to that.

Survival overall was due to layered defenses (guardian unity, warden's focus, blade ward, heroism), and being stupidly high speed, debuffs aplenty, and the life leech from bloodcaller. Timeless was also its lovely broken self, especially when it would extend an invigorate so all those passives with cooldowns would come back in a couple of turns. Out of phase also made my resists higher in practice than the sheet shows, and the parry from the blades was better than I expected, and I disarmed anything that I could beat the saves on (skill from loremaster escort). Really, the super high effective speed was incredibly important, it let me recover or run from big hits, and get out of the way of "hope you like cauterize" strength projectiles. Time stop on contingency was really nice for that too.

Mercy lets you get enough damage in the end game with the super speed if you have some physical res pen. That was one of my main gearing worries, and fortunately the merchant gave me that sweet belt. Mercy is effectively exponential growth on damage, so even broken stupid health pools like the 500k that the end bosses have will eventually fall to it if you hit fast enough. There was another trick too, that I only really used on Elandar and the training dummy to get the 1 million damage achievement in 40-50 game turns (without really trying): the razorblade fixedart. Notice that the damage type on that is physical bleed. Bleeds have the same debuff damage merge formula as attenuate, and TW has seal fate...so yeah, you can do the trick that PMs have for obscene damage with attenuate and seal fate, but as a physical bleed instead of a magical debuff. Elandar was squirelly so I only got the dot on him in the 1k-2k range for a bit of the fight, but that combo might have been enough to kill just him in isolation without the mercy. Of course that would not have worked against Argoniel due to spine of the world, but that is why I left the bottom left portal open. The elementals there are chumps, I sure as hell didn't want to deal with dragons breathing across the arena, I saw enough of that from another stream of one of the madness possessor final fights to say no thank you to that. I thought I might have to use my armor with link of pain from a trash mob to argoniel to burn her down, but mercy was enough (edit: I had link of pain up for awhile from elandar to her, that did in the ballpark of a fifth of her health in damage).

Streaming the final fight would have had that disappointment of quitting and restarting, the lag started getting worrisomely bad towards the end. I was genuinely afraid of my save dying due to getting bogged down from that.

And as for why I was a cool hero and didn't drown dearth, this was supposed to be a proof of concept for adventurer builds and achievement run. I wasn't really expecting to win, and was somewhat surprised when it did. I even did objectively stupid things like run Telmur's tower for the Tannen quest, wanted to get that mercy dagger.

Overall, the run was pretty legit aside from what I mentioned, but you don't have to believe it if you don't want to. It should be reproducible, but I will warn you it will take a very long time, and a bad roll on the final bosses skills could kill it. I think Elandar was alchemist and corruptor or reaver, and argoniel was an alchemist and rogue (they both had golems), and rogue was the bonus skillset that really gave me heartburn.

[Aesthete]

Also, as great as armor is on lower difficulties, on madness sometimes it really loses its luster. Enemies regularly have base weapon damage in the several hundreds in madness, and I saw a high peak warhound get to over 2k. It goes from an extremely reliable defense on lower difficulties to much less reliable on madness. Still good mind you, not everything hits that hard and it takes a big chunk of that damage away, but if you don't believe me then run madness yourself and inspect character sheets like I did, and you'll see what I mean.

[Aesthete]

If anyone has a file locker, I can upload the save too if you want to screw around with it in dev mode or something. You can see that this is a lot stronger in practice than it looks in paper, and see how quickly you can get razor blade and seal fate to do absurd damage on a training dummy. That might lead to some nerfs though, sorry about that if it does.

I might tag the items that I actually used before that too, since there is a lot of clutter in my inventory.

[Cathbald]

I played madness a few times already, and i know what you mean i have a screen of 800 char sheet damage mob in nur. Still, not all mobs are like this and I'd use more armor.

I'm interested in the save, yes.

[Aesthete]

Well, sure, I'd like to have more armor too, but there's only so much space on item affixes and lots of the items won't roll the way you want them to.

I'll send a PM with a link to the save.

Also remember, strategy wise the primary damage isn't from the bow in the long term, its from the melee attacks. Procs and seal fate extending debuffs are what make the clone bow shots extra good. I didn't do the bog standard spam shoot button TW, blink blading and bump attacks and such should be mixed in with the arrow skills to keep the speed high.