ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

http://te4.org/characters/18250/tome/c8 ... 987632a2d6

Well this one was also played while i got no internet and was the first of many brawlers that managed to survive the early and midgame.

Theres not much to say about my build or the class in general, thats not obvious on first sight.
I chose to make him a skeleton, because i had good experiences with them even with classes that dont profit much from the +10 Str Dex skill and mostly not having to worry about status effects is awesome even if its a pain to use shields. Also brawlers have a lot of generics left over.

Brawlers (or at least mine) are one of the few classes that have enough bonuses to defense to use it well. Tactical Expert is obvious but Set Up looks weak at first and grants almost complete immunity to melee attacks while inflicting a debuff.
With counterstrike (which i got late) and defensive throw you just have to hit the wait key to kill most melee mobs. In fact i killed lots of rushing Quasits just with counterstrikes in 1 turn and only later reconstructed through the log what happened. The damage you do thanks to high attack speed and talents that hit multiple times is pretty high but mostly single target.
Without the Grappling tree you can only inflict stuns and dazes, which is really annoying. You cant even stun chain or stun multiple targets and it only works at melee range.

Heightened Reflexes was pretty fun. You probably know that almost impossible vault thats filled with inaccessible skeleton archers and lava? Heightened Reflexes + Edens Guile allowed me to reenact the Matrix.

I probably should have gotten Haymaker just for the extra damage.

Aside from the many passives my Brawler only used the Pugilism talents + Uppercut and Set Up actively, which made the whole experience pretty boring /=

I could have remedied that by unlocking the grappling tree but i didnt, because the skills were even more single target than the Pugilism ones and required time to set up. Silence would have been nice but im sure that most dangerous mage bosses are immune to it.

Mages were the only dangerous opponents for my brawler and thats where the class falls apart imho.
While Heightened Reflexes allows for a burst of speed, when youre targeted by something that requires time to kill you, it cancels when you use anything that doesnt require a turn like shielding runes. And rushing at mages (probably through the projectile when youre in a narrow hallway) without knowing if there are more around the corner without some form of insurance is crazy. This means its pretty much useless to close distance fast. Its excellent though if you can run away and lure them around a corner.
I used Spinning Backhand as a pseudo rush instead of investing points in rush and it worked mostly well for me.

I could of course have gone antimagic but i distrust movement infusions because theyre useless if you get surrounded and thats when i usually want to flee. Also since youre using few abilities youre not using a lot of stamina which means willpower is useless except for antimagic skills. You need to spend points in Str Con Cun Dex anyway and spreading those even thinner didnt seem advisable. I admit i forgot about psychoportation torques but those afaik dont teleport very far and eat an equipment slot. After writing this is realize ... i was playing a skeleton so antimagic never was an option lol.

Even though this was the only char i played that got so far while still using the teleport rune an outrageous amount of times
i made it somehow to the final battle with "just" 5 deaths. The reason i didnt die every single time more than 1-2 mages showed up was because i got lucky with gear. Just look at those excellent resists! Ureslak and the Girdle of Preservation and the Crown of the Elements AND the Chromatic Harness? How did i manage to die with that?

Well one reason is that i was pretty stupid for not remembering much about the last 2 bosses. But the real problem was that the brawler was almost made to die at the last battle.
Both bosses use mostly instant hit attacks like beams or ball aoes. I couldnt dodge that with Heightened Reflexes at all.
Out of habit i didnt close the portals, which was a mistake because as i said the Brawler really lacks any aoe capabilities and isnt that good at closing distances without the Heightened Reflexes buff or Rush (which was my fault)
Now the last thing that killed this char is, that while his resistances were impressive and he prob could have walked in the Room of Death got the loot and calmly walked out before remembering to kill the dragons, the lack of the 2 resistances that really matter in the boss fight. Blight and Darkness resistance. My blight resistance was criminally low and the darkness resistance even though its a pretty useless resistance otherwise surprisingly ... decent but not enough.
Now all that was still survivable but the problem that ultimately killed the char was in addition to taking a lot of damage he had no way to heal or shield himself enough to mitigate the high damage somewhat.
Shield runes are without the shielding talents almost every time inferior to regen or healing infusions, since they dont benefit from heal mod and have higher cooldowns. Sure they dont take a turn to use and the skeleton racials allow for some durability but if youre in no danger of being one shotted theyre inferior. Skeleton and Brawler seemed like a perfect combination right until the endbattle /=
Btw the Shade of Telos killed me afair with a disease i succumbed to many turns after i killed him and walked the stairs back up /=


All that though managed to make the boss battle the most memorable and hilarious one i had.
After realizing my problem and getting killed pretty fast i "sneak" with help from the teleportation rune around and disable the portals. But i didnt manage to disable the dragon portal, which was a good thing.

You see getting close to one of the bosses, while the other could see me, without having all the shielding runes ready to use was suicide. But i did it again and died.

Now with my last live it dawned on me how to use the dragons for my purposes. If i couldnt get close i couldnt do damage.
Dragons breath attacks have insane range on higher lvls. I had tons of elemental resistance. So while the map swarmed with teamkilling dragons i just teleported from place to place and prayed that the bosses would get stuck in the dragons while they hit them with breath attacks that were meant for me. It worked surprisingly well. It even seemed like they attacked each other, which is not even that unplausible when you consider that the sorcerers are of the Sorcerer faction and the dragons of the Enemies faction. Or one boss could have gotten hit with sand breath and blinded.

I teleported so much that i even ended up in the little room left of the main battlefield with the portal that is inaccessible until after you beat them and rested there. It was a really thrilling battle since with my meagre damage soaking capabilities i was always close to death. When one of the bosses just had about 2k life left (not thanks to me (: ) i got stupid again, joined the fray and died.
Even with my death it was the most fun and challenging endbattle so far for me ^^

Oh and one last thing ... who thought it was a good idea to put shadowstep on gloves? ^^ I dont remember much but im pretty sure i died at least once because of it. With the high attack speed youre constantly teleporting around your enemy and pulling enemies around corners doesnt work anymore because every 2nd turn youre in full sight of all the enemies that so nicely queued up to fight in single combat. Oh and im pretty sure i saw the shout that pulls foes toward you on some gloves once. *shiver*

This pretty much mirrors my experience. A good brawler is excellent until the last battle, when he is stuffed. Grapple MIGHT help, I'd have to start again with that to see.

Hunh. I was under the impression that brawler talents don't work with heavy armor. Is it just massive they don't work with?

Also, since you're not using many activated talents, I probably would've been tempted to start adding in stamina-based sustains like slow motion and daunting presence. Those might've helped a bit with the spell damage and whatnot.

And yeah, I really hate the shadowstep and battle call (or whatever it's called) on gloves!

Well Slow Motion just wasnt worth it. I would have had to get Disengage, Track and Heave first and then its just 15% slower for the first point. No idea how it scales after that.

And Daunting Presence is pretty useless for non dwarfs and its pretty annoying to remember to reenable it after it deactivates itself.

About the armor: yes just doesnt work with massive - i had Striking Stance active when i died

You mean shadowveil and not shadowstep;)
And congartulation to your Brawler, i have not heard of mayn, who came that far

Does it make sense to increase armor mastery considering you are pretty much invincible to any nonmagic attacks anyway? Just wondering - I'm still pretty new to the game.

@ Fhtagn: Yes it is somewhat questionable at first glance but you have to consider that armor mastery lowers the chance of getting critically hit while wearing heavy and massive armors. I think it works against spells too. Also there are a few effects that lower defense drastically like getting blocked, which will catch you off guard, if you usually ignore melee enemies like it was possible with this char.

There are also a few bosses which have ** accuracy (the orc at the ambush and a boss that spawns tentacles for example), those are rare but i usually lose when i try to fight them head on as a defense focused class without armor.

@ Tagedieb: I just won with a Shadowblade and Shadow Veil (at least lvl 5) on gloves would have been awesome ^^. Pretty sure it really was Shadowstep. The gloves i wear on this char atm also have Shadowstep.

Vanir wrote:@ Fhtagn: Yes it is somewhat questionable at first glance but you have to consider that armor mastery lowers the chance of getting critically hit while wearing heavy and massive armors. I think it works against spells too.

Nope, it's just against physical crits.

Also, dying to the orc at the ambush seems quite... irrelevant to me. Well, sort of.
I just think that those generic points might be better spent elsewhere - then again, I'm not sure where.

@lukep: Thanks i didnt know that. Now that makes me kind of regret the 7-8 points i lost there /=

@Fhtagn: Well in retrospect i could have put those points into Cursed Earth or Combat Accuracy (for the cross tier effect)
As for the Ambush - i just like finishing that one alive and that orc might carry artifacts around (!!!). I hate it when things get lost forever ^^. Still it wasnt totally useless.