ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hats off to Benli. This was my first time really playing a Cursed since all the sweeping changes to the class, and I gotta say, it was a lot of fun.
http://te4.org/characters/1022/tome/eac ... bc7c025018

Went with the typical dual-wield build plus antimagic. The class takes a little while to get going, but once you get a few points into your key skills it's very playable, and a good departure from other melee builds. Definitely felt squishier than a bulwark or a berserker, but there's just something really fun about being able to sense all the foes around you, blindsiding them from nowhere, disabling crowds around you with your gloom....

Sadly, she met her untimely end in Dreadfell to.....yup, a dreadmaster and its horde of summoned dreads. This was a really frustrating death. The dreadmaster appeared next to the staircase as I entered the level and one of it's first actions was to summon more dreads. Being surrounded and unable to move, I attempted stair-scumming several times, trying to take them out one by one. However, being surrounded, my 900-something hp would fall by hundreds each turn, which didn't give me enough time to whittle them down and make this tactic work.

Seeing as that wasn't working, I crawled back upstairs and switched to the one torque of pyschoportation that I'd managed to find so far. Being that I was antimagic, that and a 13-cd movement infusion were my two big escape options (apart from blindside and the speed bonus from surge and rampage). After creeping back downstairs, I popped the pyscho-teleport and ended up around 27 paces from my original position, no down staircase in sight, and my torque on a 40-something turn cooldown. And that was pretty much that. Dreads between me and the up staircase, and couldn't find the down staircase before everything was on cooldown and there was literally nothing I could do.

That summon dread ability is ridiculous. Once dreadmaster used that, I think pretty much my only chance in continuing the game was to hope for that one lucky teleport to put me near the next staircase.

You might have been able to make some headway if you'd managed to acquire some decent damage-when-hit gear, but yeah - that sounds pretty harsh. I can remember killing a dread via gloom damage back in the day, but you don't even have that anymore.

Heh, yeah, my very first time doing the antimagic quest when it first came out, I ended up using the gloom to take down a dread. Took forever. Since then, I always build my melee types so that they have options for downing a dread.

To this day, though, I still don't really get how to go about it when you're surrounded by dreads. Now my melee guys usually sport at least two sources of teleport when stomping through Dreadfell, but that doesn't really work with antimagic--the pyschoportation charms are pretty rare for the lower levels, and the one I found had a ridiculous cooldown (over 40 turns!).

The obvious response is to not let yourself get surrounded. I had one show up once while playing a berserker and I was able to rush it and destroy it before it summoned (high accuracy and damage). But considering that Dreadmasters are stealthed and tend to hide in walls, it's not always so simple. Or, like this time, I was in a narrow corridor with regular enemies on either side. When I first saw the Dreadmaster, there was just no way to get to him quick enough before he used summon, and once he used summon my game was essentially over (short of a lucky teleport, like I said). And Cursed don't have access to the Combat tree with Precise Strikes and the other Accuracy-adding talent (I forget the name). This guy didn't have great luck with drops either--I never found that amulet, or the Unerring Scalpel, or anything else like that. (My accuracy looks low on the character sheet, but that's my swap set--my main weapon set, which I was using for most of the battle, had accuracy boosts on both the mainhand and offhand weapons.)

The frustrating part was that, being on the stairs at first, I was able to go back up, look over my equipment options, and try to figure out a workable strategy, and yet I still couldn't really come up with anything. I suppose I could have started doing farportals and hope for better equipment, or I could have just killed the process and reloaded Dreadfell, but I opted to make a break for the down stairs and hope for the best. Just didn't pan out.