ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I'm recently playing around with casting, disease-based reavers.
They are fun to play, and seem quite strong in the early game.

I breezed through everything includig daikara, lake nur, the halfling dungeon and dreadfell - until I met the Master and hit a wall.
I have up to 53 Spellpower when I completely neglect my defensive gear, put everything on I've got in terms of spellpower, and come up to 57 or something through the passive that increases spellpower on dealing damage.
The Master has 60 Spell save.

About one in ten diseases actually catches. If that. I can hurt him with my other spells (a bit), but basically, he leeches faster than I can kill him - and he can kill me a lot faster than I can heal, even with Healing Light 5/5 and a ridiculous healing mod (something close to 200%).


I died thrice until dreadfell:
- Once to a bunch of luminous horrors (those are really, really hard to handle for a disease build due to providence, heals and damage shield + high spell save as well as the fact that none of the disease talents return vim on kill),
- once to a random bone giant alchemist in the graveyard, or rather to the boss into whos room I teleported (I'm more and more inclined to just skip graveyard till very, very late)
- and once to a bunch of nasty undead rares after opening a grave and falling down to a cave.

Basically, stupid deaths that could have been easily avoided (by skipping the graveyard and porting away from those horrors/playing more careful).


The master has killed me twice so far, I'm down to my last life, I have cleared pretty much everything else on the map, and I'm out of options, basically.
Any suggestions except for "start a new reaver, go melee, it's stronger anyway"?

http://te4.org/characters/24377/tome/94 ... 02d-fa4232 would be my character sheet.

Yep, its a risky thing building your reaver around diseases, because some enemies have ridiculosly high spell saves. I tend to think of them more like an icing on the cake - have a build that can kill and survive without diseases, and then have a lot of fun with them whenever they work.

As of the master, you kill him by hurting him from afar with your spells and teleporting away when he gets near and summons stuff. Rinse and repeat, he doesnt have a heal spell. It is advisable to try to clear as much of the level as possible before encounterin the master, some kind of detection is very helpful. Remember NOT to use vimsense, it makes everybody aware of your presence.

(edit: typos)

Can you take out your most recent class points and put them into leech? Leech at 5/5 is really useful in that fight. Your damage will still suck but at least you'll be unkillable while vimsense is active, especially considering that heal modifier.

Either way, you should certainly do elven ruins before the master: the enemies there are generally quite doable despite them being so high level (mostly due to the layout of the map) and it contains great drops and will get you to lvl 30. Also consider using that temporal damage rune for this fight only, 246 damage is mediocre but at least it'll help you wittle him down.

Thank you both!

I do realise building around diseases is risky, but I didn't expect the Master to have 20 more spell save than pretty much everything before him.
I'll go do the ruins and try to temporarily push Vimsense, and I might include the rune as soon as I hit 30.
I actually forgot about the ruins.