One Ghoul's Nightmare-Elnorana, Nightmare/Roguelike Archmage
Posted: Fri May 24, 2013 7:23 pm
This will be long, I have a lot of thoughts about this run.
If you want the tl;dr version-http://te4.org/characters/10195/tome/11 ... aae22ee635 Here's the mortem. That's a pretty good one.
The long version's probably more interesting, though.
Naturally, I'd been thinking about Nightmare for a while; People seemed to say it was playable, more or less. I got curious and was looking up winners for it, and happened to notice that no Ghoul had ever cleared.
Or come close. The record was a 154 deaths Exploration Ghoul Sun Paladin, who'd made it to L38. Not the best combo for Nightmare, but still an impressive statistic. Seeing a hacked stats Nightmare/Roguelike character make it to L34 and die in Reknor was also interesting.
I like Ghouls. At the time, I had a much higher opinion of them-it's dropped since. Quite hard. But that's getting ahead of myself. I decided to clear one, because of this. So I began looking for the best Ghoul to clear Nightmare.
This quickly degenerated to "Corruptor and Archmage, no one else has a chance". Corruptor struck me as less likely to clear than Archmage, just because Archmage has such a big toolkit, even though I feel Ghoul Corruptor is a better Corruptor than Ghoul Archmage is an Archmage. Shadowblade was an outside, but I didn't want to slam into the earlygame a dozen times.
I still did, anyways, actually. But that's getting ahead of myself. I don't want to think of the earlygame of Nightmare with a Ghoul Shadowblade...
The build concept was simple enough-Tribeam, Temporal/Wildfire/pick up Light from an escort, take Cauterize/Unbreakable Will, the latter so I could deal with Silence. Silence was the only thing that killed my Skeleton Archmage, and Ghoul is worse at dealing with it, not better. Basically, use tribeam, and get Essence of Speed ASAP to cover that speed penalty-it's essentially fatal on Nightmare. From there, run around beaming enemies until my setup gets going-it worked until Dreadfell easily on Normal, and I didn't see it changing on Nightmare.
One of my valid assumptions, luckily. They weren't all valid. And that build definitely didn't stay the same.
-Blighted Ruins
Simple enough, beam the mage, if he dies from the first hit, I've forgotten and am on Normal, reload. If he hasn't, good, I'm playing Nightmare! Run out the door and die.
Okay, okay, that was just one run.
I generally had an 80% attrition rate in the Blighted Ruins-the 2 radius Lite meant that every time I rounded a corner, an enemy could move and Stunning Blow me. I had a 50-50 shot not to get stunned, and if I did, I had a chance of Phase Dooring away still.
This was basically every corner. And then there's running into multiple mages/archers out of LoS.
This was avoidable...by using Arcane Eye over such a huge amount of the dungeon that I figured it'd take more time to do than just killing characters randomly and reloading would. That lite radius is so, so horrible for Ghouls.
Oddly enough the Bone Giant's kinda easier. This is practically the only time I'll say this about Nightmare, but you draw so many more higher end skeletons, at higher levels, that you often hit L4 before him-so you have a lot more versatility for the fight, and all he does is hit a bit harder. Easy. Relatively. Which means he's still probably harder than the next three bosses I'd do.
-Other Tier 1 dungeons
Nightmare order: Norgos(Easy, I got 1.03 Frozen Norgos but even the new version would have been fine.), Trollmire(Got flooded, Shax is a little harder than Prox was.), Scintillating Caves(Enemies upgrade relatively less than other areas, can't move). This is the easy part.
The other three all have nasty things. Kor'pul has Shade, who does around 200 with his L6 Freeze. Heart of the Gloom has L6 Shadows/Shadow Mages/Shadow Warriors on the Withering Thing, that can do 100+ damage with spells and 70~? with melee(I don't think I let them actually hit me, that's an estimate). Rhaloren Camp gets enemies that have dredged up L5 Earthen Missiles-the Inquisitor isn't so bad, but that's 200+ damage on a random enemy, which can appear with other enemies.
I went with Kor'pul->Heart of Gloom->Camp, IIRC. Kor'pul is relatively not so bad, overall. By Heart of the Gloom, I had picked up Essence of Speed L2, and could use it by shopping for some mana gear. So Fireflash(I think I had to respec to it at this point. Get used to me talking about degenerate temporary respecs, by the way.)->Controlled Teleport, with Arcane Eye to spot, until Withering Thing dies. This would become a theme throughout the run. Camp wasn't too bad, I'd just had it one-shot me before(Shock->doubleturn and Earthen Missiles. One enemy!). This was irritating, so, definitely do it last.
By this point, I had a mostly functioning Ghoul that tribeams off 138% global speed. It's a start.
Tier 2-
This is where things started getting fuzzy. I had the earlier order hammered out through previous runs. By this run, though, I hadn't cleared tier 2 yet. Despite some 15 deaths, including three that made it to that area. Admittedly, one of those was me being an idiot. (I forgot about Sand Breath and went into a dragon cave. Oh look, now I can't get out and am dead. Oh well.)
Anyways.
Old Forest first-Snaproot has Freeze, and he's possibly the only enemy in the game that can't notably leverage it on Nightmare. Oh, he'll freeze you a while, but if you cure that, it's all he had, really. This wasn't so bad, either, though IIRC I had a few rare scares at various points. Also, horrors like to show up here a lot more on Nightmare due to the level range. (Just like how horrors actually show up in Tier 1 dungeons occasionally, IIRC. It's kinda funny.)
Next, Maze. Minotaur has a very good Confuse, and you get more horrors/bandit kings/etc, and letting Minotaur touch you is probably fatal. Within that, not so bad! By this point I was getting jaded by enemies killing me in two hits. That's normal, right? Confuse seems like an issue, but I've always been good at playing within the limitations of status(probably part of why I like Ghouls), and just trucking away from the Minotaur vaguely, or teleporting, worked fine.
From here, things get blurry. On Normal, I generally do SWL.
This killed my SECOND Ghoul to get this far, as it turns out that Sand Breath's massive blind duration is a problem(Teleporting works, but Queen was in the first room, and the teleport fizzled.). And a Ghoul has no fast fix. Uhoh.
So, to my annoyance, I had to wander into Daikara.
I got the alternate, which most people seem to think is spectacularly lethal. I dunno...it probably is pretty bad if you're playing melee. For a ranged attacker, having a bunch of holes in your hallways at random doesn't really do much. Getting short term confused both didn't happen much(By this point, my Will was sky-high, so I had an actually okay save there. You need mana with this build. All the time. I ran most of this segment at 100-200 range.), and I fortunately didn't draw a lot of Boulder Throwers(which are just a monumental pain in the rear.).
I remember having more problems with Varsha than Rantha(who I had gotten to with one other Ghoul), but I can't really recall specifics, besides that fire resistance is a better resist for enemies than cold. Also, the open area's annoying.
I picked up Celestial/Light during this-got the Escort for it in...Old Forest, I think? *Checks* Yeah, Old Forest 1. Had saved enough Generic to instantly get Providence, which provided me with a (fairly bad in many ways, but universal) status button.
For my class points, I was investing in Illuminate, and saving up for Pulverizing Auger. The latter was a strange decision I made around this point, when I realized how anemic my damage was-I figured it'd be worth it for utility and damage combo. I was very right on that one. Illuminate, I had figured out from a previous run, was also really great.
SWL next. Got the alt, which mostly meant a lot of teleporting and less loot/less fuss. Works for me, though my equipment was very notably ragbag at this point(Penitence for a staff, fairly bad armor and equips across the board outside of the stuff I'd storebought). SWL wouldn't help this. I wouldn't get major help on equips for a very long while, though a couple of new artifacts kept me from splattering. Queen wasn't so bad-which is to say, I still had to teleport, but this time I didn't have it fizzle due to a better guess. I'm not sure how to do that with this build without running at least once. But it worked out.
Now, I should have went on to other things, but instead I went to Lake of Nur.
This is because I was of the opinion that I should have been able to beat Weirdling Beast, except my last Ghoul-the one that got farthest before this-got stunned through stun resistance and was forced to sit in Time Shield DoTs that I didn't know stacked, and is listed as killing themselves.
So I was a little bitter, and did something stupid. I kited up/down the stairs, got the Bone Shield down(humorously, a strategy that no longer worked as well later in the run-this run was started in 1.03 and finished in 1.04.) and killed him. Weirdling is a nasty package of stuns, Bone Shield, pins, everything to make your life miserable, and with no maxes on any skills, he becomes a killing machine.
But respeccing to Fireflash/Congeal Time does a lot of damage to him, and a valid strategy was to kite up and down the stairs until Fireflash connected. Which I did. Essence of Speed makes such stair strats not as bad, except I didn't have that on so that he wouldn't eat it-I cast it *after* he used Devourer. Also part of the high challenge level there. I still didn't get much time with it on, because he also has Negation...
Stupidly nasty fight, and probably a bad idea to do this early. I didn't cut it as close as I expected, but it was hard. But hey, I got like three achievements for it. That's why I'm playing this, right?
(I'm not sure why I played this.)
At any rate, Halfling Ruins was easy enough at this stage-teleporting the Yeek away and statusing Z got me the save, which in turn got me fairly good Mindsave(35~ IIRC?). Thankfully-I would need that Mindsave for Dreadfell. I think I did the Ring of Blood some time before that, but I'm not precisely sure when. It's still not that hard on Nightmare. Thankfully. I'm thankful for the few things that weren't.
And then I ignored all the other optional dungeons. I never did do the Graveyard-too risky-and the rest got done much later. This was, in a few cases, a bad decision, but ultimately I was okay with the choice.
Well, except for the fact that my equipment was sad along the lines of "Penitence or a 10 Spellpower mana boosting staff" and such. It wasn't a good run for equipment-all the earlygame big equips(Garkul's helmet, Stone Wrap, any of the boots, Silk Current, stuff like that. No good randarts, either. Vargh Redemption was something, at least.) had basically passed me by, leaving my equipment very unhappy.
Oh well, I had mana equipment. That was important. And I had dug up a decent(300~) Shielding, though I still didn't have a second good one, IIRC. It's not like I was likely to save against anything, or get and keep valid resists By this point, I was realizing how skewed my values were, but hey, I was alive, right?
-Dreadfell, and the rest of the west before the east
Dreadfell...ah, Dreadfell. The good news was, I had managed to do everything I could to make Dreadfell reasonable, barring one thing.
I was a ranged magical attacker with high durability against sudden strikes, high speed, high mind save so that Banshees could not reliably silence me(I believe only one managed to connect with it before dying, and in a safe position), and a ton of versatility.
The bad news-that one thing was that a Dreadmaster could Disperse me and kill me.
The former did happen. I got a Dreadmaster rare on my case that nearly killed me-I forget the subclass, but it barely mattered(RE: It wasn't a very good subclass). I got some decently lucky teleport positions and took the stairs off the floor, then came back to it. Not much to say about that besides that it could have easily ended the run.
The good news was that I got some equipment...sorta. Morrigor and The Untouchable.
Both are very new. Morrigor being a generic blank slate of 24 Spellpower/12% Spellcrit, a twohander that requires Magic to equip, and can eat souls of enemies to get a random skill it can itemcast at L1.
I later found out that in 1.03 it could bug out and attempt to eat a rune. This was the cause of one of my two forcequits throughout the run, as it was making it impossible to look at any enemy's statistics, for...some reason. Regardless, I happily ate a Vampire with it and got itemcast Forgery of Haze. Not all that good-it had a bad habit of casting Stone Wall on its self, then Illuminate, hitting me if I hadn't jumped out the way of the Stone Wall cast. But then again, it's an item cast Stone Wall, sort of. Still good.
Untouchable is a stack of poor stats for the time...but produces barriers if you're hit for more than 20% of your life from one turn to the next, and have no barrier up. Good barriers. This saved my life at two different points, I think, and was generally nice. Having said that, it's not at its best if you're above 100% global, because there's a delay on the barrier effectively then.
I also picked up a nice, very low(14? 15?) CD second Shielding that scaled off Willpower, with 250 or so power. This would be in use until High Peak, IIRC-I really like low CD Shielding, and I feel that my habit of using those over more powerful/longer shielding was very justified on this run. I had already found another, similar but non-scaling, one before this.
Besides, it was like a 400 barrier after Shielding by this point.
I also picked up Neira's Memory during this. Perfectly accpetable belt. Another thing that would save my life.
This would remain my equipment status quo for a while, which was very unfortunate, but not as unfortunate as it could have been.
Outside of that one hazard, Dreadfell was hard but nothing I couldn't deal with with my quintabeam(As I was referring to Illuminate/Flame/Lightning/Manathrust/Pulverizing Auger by this point. I'm aware one of them isn't a beam.).
Up until Master.
When I checked out Master's stats, I figured I was dead. 600 Freeze? Can summon 11 Minions at +8 your levels? Can double his global speed?
After a bit, I calmed down and thought about the best way. Which was clearly to do the same thing I'd done to the last boss I couldn't kill, at all, ever, in a straight up fight.
Fireflash from outside of LoS. I think I permanently capped Fireflash off at or around this point, when I realized this was going to be a theme.
Yes, I didn't have any way to not blow myself up with it, at this point. Why do you ask? (It's not *that* hard to avoid.)
Insert me dealing some 3500 HP(x2) down over the course of teleporting across the entire floor, making large tunnels around the place so that Master couldn't get shots the AI was happy with, and in the end getting Master stuck in a corridor that he didn't want to leave.
Tunnels would also become a theme in this run. Somewhere in here I figured out that, if you use Pulverizing Auger on a wall as you come down a stairs, then Ghoulish Leap into the corridor(or CPD, for those without a Ghoul, which should be everyone), enemies wouldn't have noticed me yet, thanks to my Global speed bonus. How very Metal Gear Solid. "There's a hole in the wall? Eh. No big deal."
The Ambush was something I also solved with tunnels. Arcing a Auger up to the diagonal left, and one square left from that, of the entrance to the Ambush will produce a nice tunnel that only one enemy can access you from. It's not too bad from there, and doesn't gain incredibly on Nightmare, so...
Reknor nearly killed me. I drew a Shadowblade Shadowblade rare.
That's not a typo. It was a Shadowblade enemy with the Shadowblade class. It promptly silenced me 10 turns.
Then used Shadow Veil.
That I lived was truly surprising. I seriously considered a forcequit(I'm not going to lie-had things gone sour at a few points later, I'm not sure this run would have ended legit. I was sick of Nightmare and it got worse. But I would admit that, if I had.). Instead I had a shield on(He didn't use Ambush instantly, and I had misread his skills as a Rogue/Shadowblade combo, somehow. This is why I was still in visible range.), Neira's Memory, and Untouchable's barrier.
This left me with around 30 HP after the onslaught. Somehow. He had a pretty bad level of Shadow Veil, at least. I teleported away, regrouped, killed his ass(respec to L5 Flameshock, respec to L5 Congeal Time, leave him unable to do meaningful actions. I couldn't leave him alive after that. Too dangerous and too easy to kill, and he had been left at 10% HP when he did that. Another source of anguish when I thought I was going to wipe.).
The only other really memorable things, as I recall it, were two.
First, I surprisingly got Guiding Hand(Nightmare). I had saved every Escort. Go fig. None of them were Sun Paladins, sadly, and too many were Seers(I think I got Burning Jewel either in Dreadfell or Reknor, I never used Premonition, and Arcane Eye doesn't really need levels much. Not that leveling it would be bad.), but all told, I was happy with my draw there. Unflinching Resolve L1 means a lot to a Ghoul, too.
Secondly, the boss took bloody forever, and was largely done with, you guessed it, out of LoS Fireflash very slowly killing him. This is brutally tedious against an enemy that can heal somewhat and requires some actual combat to overcome that occasionally, but he did way too much damage and I had no real way to slow him down reliably. Too much saves/resists.
Around here I hit L30. So naturally I took some time out to set myself on fire. Once I was done with this, I learned Cauterize.
Interesting fact; Cauterize never triggered once across the entire run. It could have, though. I don't regret this grab.
Still, I'd made it East, which was, at this point, a huge accomplishment to me. I cast Stone Wall to break targetting, and watched the fight between these two strange people with interest, before killing them both in a Fireflash. Odd people in the East. I then left about half the cave because there was an Oozing Horror(L50 or so) wandering around that could nuke my entire mana bar at one shot.
Have I mentioned that Essence of Speed isn't that good this early? Because, it isn't. Because you need your mana to be higher than 300 or so. Really. Shadowblades can get away with it, but juggling around it all the time was not worth it until late, except for the fact that it negated Ghoul's downside.
-The East, and the return
Okay, east time! First, check the stores, see if they have anything good. IIRC, they didn't. Because...that's my luck here. Oh well, spider time.
Ungole is kinda a sad boss on Nightmare, outside of a damage skin that does 120 damage every time you hit it. Not actually terrible, but very doable compared to the stuff before. Again, no problem with that here-it was nice to have my worries only involve getting mobbed by surprisingly decent Freeze casts from spiders.
Also I had to forcequit and redo half the dungeon because of Morrigor; This is when it decided to try to eat a Rune. Oh well.
I did the first level of the Sunken Cave. Unfortunately, thinking made me realize that I was going to have to deal with silence in here.
A lot of silence.
Very long silence.
Now, Silence is a funny skill. As mentioned before, it nearly killed me, and it killed my previous Normal Skeleton Archmage twice, when I was less experienced.
See, Silence on an undead mage shuts down everything but items and race skills. That's bad enough for a Skeleton, who has a shield and a heal on racials.
Ghouls have a lousy regen which I hadn't even bothered to level, because Nightmare level damage is far, far too high for it to mitigate anything useful.
Great. Just great. Guess I'm skipping the rest of that dungeon for now.
I'm not sure this was the best choice, though, as it meant I was doing Vor Armory next.
Vor Armory was one of the two times I should have died and only skill got me out of it. I had a decent equipset, a build that didn't have a great midgame, and I was having to do Nightmare Vor Armory-this is bad enough.
But the game threw me a horrifying curveball. Both Ak'gishil and Kra'tor the Gluttonous spawned on Vor Armory 2. Ak'gishil in a room to the south, and Kra'tor in the main chamber, with Gnarg.
This happened to me on one other run, way back when I started, having Kra'tor spawn here, a Necromancer Ghoul I believe-my first clear, I think. It killed me. I was beginning to think I had a horrifying hilarious parallel. I stared at it for a while, closed down ToME, convinced myself the run was over and that I'd had a good run but the RNG just had got me, it wasn't my fault, and went and did other things a while, then went to sleep.
Then for some strange reason, I woke up with a plan.
First off, clearing out the rooms that the bosses weren't in wasn't too hard-Pop a door open at range with Pulverizing Auger, and use that to slowly remove the In Vault status from enemies one at a time. So I would have a safe area to teleport to in a pinch.
Secondly, I examined Ak'gishil's stats carefully, and came to the conclusion that I could slugfest it-and only it-down. Eventually. If I never let it get to melee. Thankfully, Spydric Poison is a wonderful thing. (I think the people that feel it's overpowered probably got this from Nightmare. Then again, I feel that Nightmare is nearly undoable without some insanely good area control, and without this and a few things like it, it would largely degenerate into pet class spam.) This was stressful, but I did it.
Then I popped the doors to the main room, slowly killed down mages, and woke up Kra'tor.
The original idea for Kra'tor was that I'd hopefully status him, and Psychoport away if that didn't work. Bad plan, considering his saves and resists, but I had no better. Even this felt unfeasible, though; He had, among things, 20 range breath spam. That was getting old. It would get older.
What I actually did was teleport away and watch through Arcane Eye, curious, as he spammed his way up to 95% equilibrium fail rate.
Turns out he roars Aura of Silence as much as he can once he's awake. Or maybe he only does it if you're in range, but doesn't check if there's walls in the way...regardless. Personally I think this is entirely in character and should be left in. Also, it makes him remotely sane when he spawns places like this and Reknor...
It takes him an insane amount of time to actually get a real fail rate-I waited thousands of turns for it-and he's still dangerous if he has even a 50-60% fail rate, that wasn't good enough.
So when I finally popped out, he still got one Silence off and I had to run. But otherwise I kept him pinned and very slowly(*very* slowly. My damage was still barely breaking 400 on an Auger crit. This was my best damage. Against enemies with 5000-6000 HP by this point.) whittled down his life.
He dropped the Blighted Maul. I didn't know he could have an arcane weapon. If he had hit me with that, I probably would have been oneshotted through barriers. A terrible rush to see there at the end.
Compared to Kra'tor, Gnarg is cake. Same kind of strategy but without having to deal with his equi and he's less magic durable. Probably would have killed me if he got near me, but that's Nightmare. Much better.
I was pretty amazed when I finally got to pick up the Athame. Never thought I'd live through that.
The loot was terrible...except for one thing. I picked up Vox.
Vox, which gives 80% silence resist. I mean, it's good in general, but that one specific thing made it amazing for me.
Suddenly, I found myself eyeing my horrible damage and thinking questionable thoughts of total build change. Ones that, ultimately, I went through on. Thank you Vox.
Obviously, Briagh wasn't as bad, though the usual disclaimer about Sand Breath is there. Due to that, it took an insane amount of kiting to kill her, and she tends to heal a lot. Still, I wasn't really in dying risk, just very long battle risk, which was normal at this stage of the game.
Back West! Didn't expect to get here. Except now I was wondering if I'd get far enough to live. My damage was pitiful and it was becoming increasingly clear it wasn't good enough to cut it.
Doing the backup guardians didn't help a lot. Oh, most of them weren't bad. Long, bad not bad. Corrupted Sand Wyrm is dangerous enough, so is Aluin, but pinning them helps some(even though Aluin can cure it, IIRC. If enemies curing a status made it terrible, I wouldn't have cleared.). Nimisil was oddly competent, though I can't recall why-not competent enough, anyways.
Then there was Massok. Who I tried to kill for a while, despite his ability to blow off a sizable chunk of my life, with a barrier up, with Rush. I gave up when he Battle Shouted and healed for 2000.
This wasn't helping my feeling that I would die if I didn't get one of the top tier weapons, and soon.
I also did the Temporal Rift in this period. Why? That'd come up. But I had some ideas by this point. Was obviously not that bad by now. I also did the Ancient Elven Ruins, again, not too horrible at this stage(still kinda challenging because, well, enemies get Freeze. Don't really like that spell much.).
There was an obvious course for that, of course. Going to Telmur gives me a good shot at a good staff.
There's just one problem; The Shade of Telos could easily kill me. Very easily.
I discussed opening up the item vault rather than doing this, but I decided, at the end, to go with it and run if I got a bad situation in Telmur. Then I'd use the Item Vault.
I didn't do this. Even though I got into a bad situation. One of the worst, in fact. The final room of Telmur was a small oval packed with Telos' Shade, a good set of boring skeletons/vampires(which can still kill you of course), and a rare Bone Giant Archer.
This guy got one shot on me and did 1200.
I doublechecked. It wasn't a critical hit. Just Steady Shot. He blew through a shielding, a displacement shield, and half my life bar. In one shot.
Fortunately, I had Pulverizing Auger. This didn't keep the Telosghost away from me, but did keep the Bone Giant happy in an upper left corridor, after I teleported away from him.
This was more than bad enough, though. I actually had the other time Untouchable saved me-by producing a 1k barrier, I had taken so much damage-occur here. The Shade of Telos has great resists and no skill maximums-meaning that it was gaining some 10+ on every skill-and a massive 800 damage(IIRC) Freeze among good ice skills.
That I lived through this is also really stunning. I came as close to dying as with the Shadowblade, and I had much worse escapes. At one point I had to Controlled Teleport into the main room and hope I didn't land on anything, with 200~ HP and no barriers up. But it worked out(mostly because everyone else besides the Shade and that bone giant tooling around in the upper left wall was dead from collateral damage from either me or Telos.).
And he couldn't heal. So I could eventually win, as long as I didn't die.
My reward? The full drop, Telos Top/Bottom, which I would, for strange reasons, proceed to use for the rest of the game.
Things were finally looking up. Tannen was next, and with my increased firepower, his tower was more annoying than actually horrifying.
Of course, he was constantly pelting me with 400~ damage every turn and could bomb me through Stone Wall(???). Not pleasant, but I lived.
At this point, I enacted my overall plan, which had changed considerably since I got Vox. I actually started it back in Telmur, but the final piece fell into place when I hit L42.
Namely, instead of Wildfire, I would go with Meta and Quickened Spells(I had this on for Telmur. Without a doubt, it saved my life-the massive cooldown decrease got my barriers and heals up that much faster, and it was an incredibly near thing as it was.), and Spellcraft.
Then pick up Temporal Form, and change my staff to...Cold.
No, I didn't really do Cold damage, but it didn't matter, because Temporal Form took my highest damage bonus. Which would be the 55% Cold I had between the two pieces of the staff.
Instead of barely strengthening any of my damage, I would, a lot of the time, practically double it-an 85% Temporal damage bonus-, and get resistance piercing on it. And Spellshock with it.
My damage in the span of a few dungeons had nearly tripled. Things were really looking up.
And on top of that, it's is_spell. So Quickened Spells lowers it. And Metaflow would reset it. Very much looking up. (Any Meta/Temporal build should take that Prodigy, I feel.) Picking up some iron Spellbinding Boots-which I believe I used the entire game from that point on-in Shatur got me 40% reduction, so now I was running around with 5CD Fireflash, 4 CD Auger, and 2CD beams.
Around here, also(just before Telmur to be precise), I upgraded to 1.04, and started looking hard at Time Shield.
I think it might be overpowered, to be honest. It doesn't do anything specific incredibly-It's not a huge duration drop on status(though it's very good), it's not a lot of healing, it's instant but so are other barriers, it's long duration but so are other barriers, and it's good power but so are other barriers.
But it does all of that.
Of course, it could have been terrible otherwise, but being a Ghoul, I would have used it for the effect reduction. Even if a Silence *did* get through, suddenly I could actually heal it with Relentless Pursuit. I promptly set L1 Time Shield to autocast when seeing enemies, along with my better Shielding.
Yep, life was looking possible.
The one downside; I got my first merchant artifact, right before things got good after Telmur. It contributed to my black mood in this period of the game. I named it "I hate all equipment", because you see it was a wizard hat with massive, perfectly coordinated, mindpower bonuses.
Seriously it was like +27 Mindpower total after stats or something and bonuses to most mind type damage types. No magic boosts at all.
-The East, Part 2
Back East! I began to look at Orc Breeding Pits.
Yes, I should have done this earlier. Yes, I think I got Black Robe here. Yes, I really should have done this earlier.
In my defense; There was literally an orc patrol sitting on it and it was insanely hard to lure it out of the way without getting into an Orc Patrol ambush. Which I never got into, and never wanted to.
It wasn't too hard, obviously the boss is stationary and very vulnerable to Fireflash as such. I was expecting more problems with getting mobbed, but they never came up.
Naga next. Not a lot to say here-I got Silenced once through Vox and my high Mind Save, but not in a situation where it was horribly dangerous, thankfully. Quick respec to Ghoulish Leap 4 and I was safe. Lots of Spydric Poison work and Fireflash. It could have gone badly, it just didn't, thankfully.
And now I was staring down the Prides. This didn't feel very fun. Gorbat was Silence/Mana Clash hell, Rak'shor ...is Rak'shor, and Grushnak had the potential to mob me.
So that left Vor, where enemies get to swing 600+ in Freeze. Oh well, I had cold resistance(practically the only resistance I had. As a note, that's not a big deal on Nightmare, because every Orc has L8 Skirmisher, piercing 40% of your resistances. Enjoy, physical fighters!).
This wasn't too bad overall. My spellpower had skyrocketed to 70+-suddenly I had real status rates again, and would until the very end-and Illuminate and Flameshock hit physical save. So, enemies get blinded really easily, then I follow up with a Fireflash, which usually killed thanks to my high temporal bonus to damage.
So Vor was a series of me blinding and using temporally charged lightning, flames, explosions and arcane power to smear my enemies across space-time. I love this game sometimes.
Vor himself was way too dangerous to kill without Disperse Magic-I think I could have done it, I just didn't want to, not with Cleansing Flames in the mix to constantly pull off my Temporal Form. With, he was mostly doable-didn't have a lot of ways to deal with the heavy status load I hit him with.
Suddenly, the Aeryn signal flashes in the air and I go and kill a Ritch and find a 500+ Shielding. Time to get some potions!
Oh, and save the world, I guess.
Eruan is an amazing place for runes/infusions and having such an insanely high level on it made it better, not worse. As mentioned, I got a 500+ Titan Shielding with 14 CD or so. (I tend to forget my actual CDs, thanks to all the reduction.)
For the Charred Scar, I managed to actually dig up 70% in Fire resistance. And somehow drew no Wyrms. Trucking down the corridor with 138% global speed and L4 Ghoulish Leap made this the fastest treck through the Scar a Ghoul has probably ever made(well...no, there's been Ghoul Cursed before, maybe one of those did it faster).
Fyrk wasn't so bad, just Dispersed his Magic so he couldn't cleave my resistances like a guillotine hitting a potato.
I mentioned potions earlier. I did actually get those. And I tested something on one of them, when I lost Serendipity.
Namely, I curiously forcequit to see what would happen, and the game had not saved. So, I was able to avoid losing Serendipity.
Then I slammed my head metaphorically against a wall for a while, wondering why I did this on an otherwise legitimate run. I blame a very bad night's sleep there, which was making me make questionable gaming decisions. (Then I went and fought Massok. No, really. I killed him that time. But that was REALLY stupid.)
Then I lost the other potion I planned to get besides Focus and Foundations, when I came in this time(Mysticism) and called it good enough. If this invalidates my run to you, I'm sorry. It doesn't for me.
At any rate, easier and nicer areas aside, it was time to make a hard choice. I chose Grushnak, on the grounds that it didn't specifically counter anything I did, and wasn't Rak'shor.
Sadly, I could not, in fact, tunnel in Grushnak barracks, something which puzzles me. Two prides allow for tunnelling in the fixed setups, two don't. Not sure why. I'd rather see them all allow it, there's not a lot of reason not to(Skipping major battles? Is that a bad thing? You lose the loot and EXP after all...) Regardless, Illuminate works very well, as does Illuminate backed up by Fireflash with Temporal Form on it.
Similar strategies with generally totally different execution was a lot of the Prides, I think.
The most notable event here happened in one of the Barracks-a Fearscape Invasion Portal.
I stupidly went in. I nearly died from THIS too, getting a massive cloud of Darkness over 80% of the field(Duathdlens, you see), and having multiple L90(!) demons jump me.
Also, there was this one rare that could hit me for over 1000. I don't know what it was. It died before I ever actually could see its stats. I think a Daelach or something got it mad with Fire Storm, and won. Go fig.
Grushnak himself was a matter of never letting him get near me, as he could easily oneshot multiple barriers/me if he did. Nothing new there.
Gorbat was next, and did give me a lot more trouble. I had to swap my cloak(Radiance, I forget when I got this. Nice cloak, not my first choice for this character but it gave me another barrier to use while silenced, and more Celestial/Light, so it's all good.) to a heavy duty +120 or so Mana one I found. This made it very hard to oneshot my Mana with Mana Clash.
This generally gave me the border I needed, though I had to run after a Mana Clash more than a few times. Fortunately I had a Psychoportation torque for that-I'd figured out after a while that this was one of the best emergency options in that case. I also got silenced a few times, through Vox. Neither really came up.
Probably the biggest danger involved an Oozemancer Master Wyrmic that literally wandered off after a while. He was there...somewhere, he was hitting me with 20+ range breaths from out of LoS. But, I had no idea where, and a Duathdlen had Darkness'd most of the arena.
He's still there, somewhere. I just walked out the other end of that floor after trying to find him for a little bit.
Gorbat himself was better than expected, though still a major threat. Spell Feedback can be cured with Providence, and you can use a beam to set it off with minimal duration on the counter status, but it's still rough, and he has all the usual stupid breaths that I've been complaining about for pages now, along with summons. Summons aren't as threatening as you'd think, but they're still threatening.
Rak'shor was...interesting. The redesign is actually easier than the original...something I approve of. The entrance areas are amazingly lethal(I took 2000 damage from the one that still exists, in one enemy turn. Really. Thank you high end barrier stacking+Aegis...), so having less of them in Rak'shor is pretty okay, and the new horrors are surprisingly competent. Summoning random undead on death is pretty great, and they all have some surprisingly good focused attacks. They're not as flexible as corruptors/blood mages, but they're a lot better at taking hits than many of them. I'd say the general area content has gone up in power, but that there's less horrifying death setups that you really ought to teleport out of and take your chances. Overall, I think it's an improvement but a bit easier.
Rak'shor himself surprisingly resists blind and kept summoning minions.
Also, Summoning. Why does he have that, it's silly seeing Rak'shor have an Equi skill, and he used it to summon Void Spectre. Like, really? You cheesy bastard.
Outside of clogging the entire floor with approximately 60 undead over the course of his run, he wasn't so bad, but he was overall the highest threat of the four. No shock there.
So...I had gotten Orcrist. With less horrible stress than expected(note: Still plenty of it). Prides are oddly doable on Nightmare, relatively, which is to say they're only somewhat more lethal instead of extremely. I'm okay with that.
I needed to dredge up some fast cash-I finally had equips for my slots in general, except gloves, which could potentially be a huge boon to my run. Not the best, necessarily, but good enough equips. But my gloves were still iron/nightseeking/heroic, which was pitiful for this point.
This led to me doing the Bearscape(surprisingly good EXP at that point, on Nightmare), Golem Graveyard(because it was there), and the Infinite Dungeon entrance. This got me pretty close to L50(Nightmare gives a lot of EXP), and got me enough cash to buy gloves.
Heroic/Warmaking/two things that don't matter. Perfect! Now we're good for the endgame.
-High Peak
I had already taken out one of the guardians in the Slime Tunnels-the Shadowblade Gwel didn't have Shadow Ambush or Shadow Veil, thankfully, so it wasn't too awfully bad. I took out the Dragon Archmage-which was annoying-and teleported away from the Archlich Necromancer(too much effort) and the 19900 HP Corruptor(I have complained about high end demons being able to draw Corruptor at all. There is no way I will ever fight that guardian without absolutely insane offense, and never will if he has Fearscape. By the way, there needs to be an achievement for killing all four. ).
This led to High Peak, which I was rather surprised I had reached. I consoled myself with the realization that people would probably understand if I died going up High Peak on Nightmare.
I didn't, though. The bosses were taken care of with a combination of out of LoS Fireflash, luring them somewhere and then teleporting to the stairs, and teleporting them forcefully to somewhere else while I went up the stairs, depending on the situation. I got enough incidental EXP to hit 50 halfway up, which was good enough. (By the way, the late points went to Time Shield and Freeze, and a few more points on my beams. I naturally kept four points out of circulation solely to shuffle them to various status. My late Generic went to finally using Arcane Shield, which I felt I had enough Mana to float, and leveling various heals, teleports and Providence. I stand by Arcane Shield being largely overkill for Nightmare, but it's better on a build that doesn't have to always run a 250 sustain...)
This isn't to say that I didn't have scares. It was, by and large, a constant mass of scares, having to constantly hope that teleports hit(Because if they failed, I would have to use CPD/Ghoulish Leap as my escapes, which isn't as good). There were also two stairs that were unguarded and I don't know why to this day. That worried me, but not enough to not take them.
Then there was stuff like the Bloated Horror that hit for 2000~ damage by my estimate...at melee range...but had stealth so good that I almost never could see it. Did it just phase door next to me? Probably not! Keep firing! And then it died. Eventually. Very slowly. (The other class it had was Oozemancer.)
At any rate, I reached the top, took a deep breath, walked into the portal...
...literally had my jaw drop as I checked Elandar's stats and instantly dropped a Stone Wall on him.
1800 damage Freeze, 253% global speed, and everything else jacked up to insane damage. Okay, deep breath, time to Metaflow to reset Stone Wall and put him in the box again, after I take out these two portals(So I can be the first person to get Portal Reaver(Nightmare), because I'm silly.), and then keep him in the box as much as possible.
This was a good strategy. Unfortunately when the Stone Wall was almost off CD, he got out of the box and did 5000 damage in the space of three or so turns, utterly obliterating Aeryn. Um. Uh-oh.
What followed was a massive series of very careful kiting, an insane amount of Stone Wall(my constant and chronic mistake during this battle was casting L1 instead of L5 Stone Wall, giving me less duration. This was frustrating and I would have been incredibly sad if it had killed me), using an absolutely insane amount of teleports to shake off Elandar, eventually getting him to get distracted by the undead damaging him and proceed to obliterate them(seeing him wipe out ten L100 or so undead in a few actions was also disheartening-I was thinking they might compete for a moment), dealing with repeated Burning Hexes from Argoniel(and later from a Dread), finding a nice spot I could hollow out in one of the pillars to rest, having a Xorn eat said hollowed spot(The only thing an elemental notably did in the fight), and an absolutely insane length slugfest with an absolutely insane monstrosity of an enemy.
I don't think it was winnable without Disperse Magic or another way to take off that Essence of Speed. That's just way too much speed. Fortunately I could respec to that. Fortunately, my build had the tools I needed. The fight took around an hour, IIRC, and in the end I could just barely hold up to Elandar.
Just barely. At one point, near the end, Elandar crit me with Freeze, dealing enough damage to shut down 1800 in barriers, down to 50 or so HP left on them, through 70% Cold resistance. Just barely.
But, almost to my shock, a 766(IIRC) damage Temporal Pulverizing Auger finally splattered Elandar across space and time, getting me the win.
So yeah. That's the story of a Ghoul's nightmare, which they woke up from.
Some final notes;
-Ghouls...are bad whenever the game gets challenging. They're only really good when it's not hard to start with. I hope to make another thread to discuss this, but obviously I just typed quite a bit, so I'll leave that another time. Suffice to say, they're decidedly a challenge race right now, and I'm curious if that's what people want them to be.
-Retooling Nightmare without making Insane not Insane seems hard. It seems like a lot of what makes Nightmare ridiculous right now is a few attacks specifically scaling obnoxiously(Freeze!), and it's very hard to fix that without making Insane not nearly impossible. That could be desireable, but I don't really feel it is. Probably the simple thing would be to have Insane raise skill caps, once Nightmare gets rebalanced.
-Archmage is, as I've mentioned, definitely one of the best Nightmare competitors. The better Runes/Infusions in general and the huge ability to do degenerate, slow kills from outside of LoS is very, very good on Nightmare, where enemies do entirely too much damage.
-Nightmare is basically built for point shuffling. Any doubt I had about that is gone-point shuffling should stay and constant respeccing is essentially an unintended feature that works out, as it stands. It's certainly possible to clear Nightmare with it, but it would so strongly benefit Summoner(the only other class that has a notable amount of Nightmare clears) that it would make Nightmare the Summoner Show. Which is just boring. Think of the other classes.
-I actually backed up my save four times in consideration of reloading it if I died, just because I was so sick of Nightmare. If I had died...I don't know what I would have done, since I would have been stuck with illegitimate achievements, which I would hate. I didn't, though-it never actually came up, I never even had Cauterize trigger, somehow. Yes, you have to trust me on that. Yes, if you don't trust me, I understand; That's something you have to hold on trust for any Nightmare/Insane run, really.
-That Morrigor glitch ate Pyromancer(Nightmare) off my character and they'll never get it back.
-Time Shield is probably a bit overpowered right now. My thought is that, instead of its current power, it should be (40, 350) or so. This makes it a bit low on raw power, but very versatile and effective otherwise.
Otherwise, I really like it. Temporal is a category that's only good lategame, right now, and Time Shield gives it a good earlygame effect and brings it more in line with the other categories. Essence of Speed is quite powerful, but it's not a skillset, and it takes notable building around it to make it any good.
So yeah, I think that's all for right now. I'm not sure anyone will read this whole thing, but I needed to say it. I had a lot of thoughts on this run, because I had to think a lot to live. Happy it's over.
If you want the tl;dr version-http://te4.org/characters/10195/tome/11 ... aae22ee635 Here's the mortem. That's a pretty good one.
The long version's probably more interesting, though.
Naturally, I'd been thinking about Nightmare for a while; People seemed to say it was playable, more or less. I got curious and was looking up winners for it, and happened to notice that no Ghoul had ever cleared.
Or come close. The record was a 154 deaths Exploration Ghoul Sun Paladin, who'd made it to L38. Not the best combo for Nightmare, but still an impressive statistic. Seeing a hacked stats Nightmare/Roguelike character make it to L34 and die in Reknor was also interesting.
I like Ghouls. At the time, I had a much higher opinion of them-it's dropped since. Quite hard. But that's getting ahead of myself. I decided to clear one, because of this. So I began looking for the best Ghoul to clear Nightmare.
This quickly degenerated to "Corruptor and Archmage, no one else has a chance". Corruptor struck me as less likely to clear than Archmage, just because Archmage has such a big toolkit, even though I feel Ghoul Corruptor is a better Corruptor than Ghoul Archmage is an Archmage. Shadowblade was an outside, but I didn't want to slam into the earlygame a dozen times.
I still did, anyways, actually. But that's getting ahead of myself. I don't want to think of the earlygame of Nightmare with a Ghoul Shadowblade...
The build concept was simple enough-Tribeam, Temporal/Wildfire/pick up Light from an escort, take Cauterize/Unbreakable Will, the latter so I could deal with Silence. Silence was the only thing that killed my Skeleton Archmage, and Ghoul is worse at dealing with it, not better. Basically, use tribeam, and get Essence of Speed ASAP to cover that speed penalty-it's essentially fatal on Nightmare. From there, run around beaming enemies until my setup gets going-it worked until Dreadfell easily on Normal, and I didn't see it changing on Nightmare.
One of my valid assumptions, luckily. They weren't all valid. And that build definitely didn't stay the same.
-Blighted Ruins
Simple enough, beam the mage, if he dies from the first hit, I've forgotten and am on Normal, reload. If he hasn't, good, I'm playing Nightmare! Run out the door and die.
Okay, okay, that was just one run.
I generally had an 80% attrition rate in the Blighted Ruins-the 2 radius Lite meant that every time I rounded a corner, an enemy could move and Stunning Blow me. I had a 50-50 shot not to get stunned, and if I did, I had a chance of Phase Dooring away still.
This was basically every corner. And then there's running into multiple mages/archers out of LoS.
This was avoidable...by using Arcane Eye over such a huge amount of the dungeon that I figured it'd take more time to do than just killing characters randomly and reloading would. That lite radius is so, so horrible for Ghouls.
Oddly enough the Bone Giant's kinda easier. This is practically the only time I'll say this about Nightmare, but you draw so many more higher end skeletons, at higher levels, that you often hit L4 before him-so you have a lot more versatility for the fight, and all he does is hit a bit harder. Easy. Relatively. Which means he's still probably harder than the next three bosses I'd do.
-Other Tier 1 dungeons
Nightmare order: Norgos(Easy, I got 1.03 Frozen Norgos but even the new version would have been fine.), Trollmire(Got flooded, Shax is a little harder than Prox was.), Scintillating Caves(Enemies upgrade relatively less than other areas, can't move). This is the easy part.
The other three all have nasty things. Kor'pul has Shade, who does around 200 with his L6 Freeze. Heart of the Gloom has L6 Shadows/Shadow Mages/Shadow Warriors on the Withering Thing, that can do 100+ damage with spells and 70~? with melee(I don't think I let them actually hit me, that's an estimate). Rhaloren Camp gets enemies that have dredged up L5 Earthen Missiles-the Inquisitor isn't so bad, but that's 200+ damage on a random enemy, which can appear with other enemies.
I went with Kor'pul->Heart of Gloom->Camp, IIRC. Kor'pul is relatively not so bad, overall. By Heart of the Gloom, I had picked up Essence of Speed L2, and could use it by shopping for some mana gear. So Fireflash(I think I had to respec to it at this point. Get used to me talking about degenerate temporary respecs, by the way.)->Controlled Teleport, with Arcane Eye to spot, until Withering Thing dies. This would become a theme throughout the run. Camp wasn't too bad, I'd just had it one-shot me before(Shock->doubleturn and Earthen Missiles. One enemy!). This was irritating, so, definitely do it last.
By this point, I had a mostly functioning Ghoul that tribeams off 138% global speed. It's a start.
Tier 2-
This is where things started getting fuzzy. I had the earlier order hammered out through previous runs. By this run, though, I hadn't cleared tier 2 yet. Despite some 15 deaths, including three that made it to that area. Admittedly, one of those was me being an idiot. (I forgot about Sand Breath and went into a dragon cave. Oh look, now I can't get out and am dead. Oh well.)
Anyways.
Old Forest first-Snaproot has Freeze, and he's possibly the only enemy in the game that can't notably leverage it on Nightmare. Oh, he'll freeze you a while, but if you cure that, it's all he had, really. This wasn't so bad, either, though IIRC I had a few rare scares at various points. Also, horrors like to show up here a lot more on Nightmare due to the level range. (Just like how horrors actually show up in Tier 1 dungeons occasionally, IIRC. It's kinda funny.)
Next, Maze. Minotaur has a very good Confuse, and you get more horrors/bandit kings/etc, and letting Minotaur touch you is probably fatal. Within that, not so bad! By this point I was getting jaded by enemies killing me in two hits. That's normal, right? Confuse seems like an issue, but I've always been good at playing within the limitations of status(probably part of why I like Ghouls), and just trucking away from the Minotaur vaguely, or teleporting, worked fine.
From here, things get blurry. On Normal, I generally do SWL.
This killed my SECOND Ghoul to get this far, as it turns out that Sand Breath's massive blind duration is a problem(Teleporting works, but Queen was in the first room, and the teleport fizzled.). And a Ghoul has no fast fix. Uhoh.
So, to my annoyance, I had to wander into Daikara.
I got the alternate, which most people seem to think is spectacularly lethal. I dunno...it probably is pretty bad if you're playing melee. For a ranged attacker, having a bunch of holes in your hallways at random doesn't really do much. Getting short term confused both didn't happen much(By this point, my Will was sky-high, so I had an actually okay save there. You need mana with this build. All the time. I ran most of this segment at 100-200 range.), and I fortunately didn't draw a lot of Boulder Throwers(which are just a monumental pain in the rear.).
I remember having more problems with Varsha than Rantha(who I had gotten to with one other Ghoul), but I can't really recall specifics, besides that fire resistance is a better resist for enemies than cold. Also, the open area's annoying.
I picked up Celestial/Light during this-got the Escort for it in...Old Forest, I think? *Checks* Yeah, Old Forest 1. Had saved enough Generic to instantly get Providence, which provided me with a (fairly bad in many ways, but universal) status button.
For my class points, I was investing in Illuminate, and saving up for Pulverizing Auger. The latter was a strange decision I made around this point, when I realized how anemic my damage was-I figured it'd be worth it for utility and damage combo. I was very right on that one. Illuminate, I had figured out from a previous run, was also really great.
SWL next. Got the alt, which mostly meant a lot of teleporting and less loot/less fuss. Works for me, though my equipment was very notably ragbag at this point(Penitence for a staff, fairly bad armor and equips across the board outside of the stuff I'd storebought). SWL wouldn't help this. I wouldn't get major help on equips for a very long while, though a couple of new artifacts kept me from splattering. Queen wasn't so bad-which is to say, I still had to teleport, but this time I didn't have it fizzle due to a better guess. I'm not sure how to do that with this build without running at least once. But it worked out.
Now, I should have went on to other things, but instead I went to Lake of Nur.
This is because I was of the opinion that I should have been able to beat Weirdling Beast, except my last Ghoul-the one that got farthest before this-got stunned through stun resistance and was forced to sit in Time Shield DoTs that I didn't know stacked, and is listed as killing themselves.
So I was a little bitter, and did something stupid. I kited up/down the stairs, got the Bone Shield down(humorously, a strategy that no longer worked as well later in the run-this run was started in 1.03 and finished in 1.04.) and killed him. Weirdling is a nasty package of stuns, Bone Shield, pins, everything to make your life miserable, and with no maxes on any skills, he becomes a killing machine.
But respeccing to Fireflash/Congeal Time does a lot of damage to him, and a valid strategy was to kite up and down the stairs until Fireflash connected. Which I did. Essence of Speed makes such stair strats not as bad, except I didn't have that on so that he wouldn't eat it-I cast it *after* he used Devourer. Also part of the high challenge level there. I still didn't get much time with it on, because he also has Negation...
Stupidly nasty fight, and probably a bad idea to do this early. I didn't cut it as close as I expected, but it was hard. But hey, I got like three achievements for it. That's why I'm playing this, right?
(I'm not sure why I played this.)
At any rate, Halfling Ruins was easy enough at this stage-teleporting the Yeek away and statusing Z got me the save, which in turn got me fairly good Mindsave(35~ IIRC?). Thankfully-I would need that Mindsave for Dreadfell. I think I did the Ring of Blood some time before that, but I'm not precisely sure when. It's still not that hard on Nightmare. Thankfully. I'm thankful for the few things that weren't.
And then I ignored all the other optional dungeons. I never did do the Graveyard-too risky-and the rest got done much later. This was, in a few cases, a bad decision, but ultimately I was okay with the choice.
Well, except for the fact that my equipment was sad along the lines of "Penitence or a 10 Spellpower mana boosting staff" and such. It wasn't a good run for equipment-all the earlygame big equips(Garkul's helmet, Stone Wrap, any of the boots, Silk Current, stuff like that. No good randarts, either. Vargh Redemption was something, at least.) had basically passed me by, leaving my equipment very unhappy.
Oh well, I had mana equipment. That was important. And I had dug up a decent(300~) Shielding, though I still didn't have a second good one, IIRC. It's not like I was likely to save against anything, or get and keep valid resists By this point, I was realizing how skewed my values were, but hey, I was alive, right?
-Dreadfell, and the rest of the west before the east
Dreadfell...ah, Dreadfell. The good news was, I had managed to do everything I could to make Dreadfell reasonable, barring one thing.
I was a ranged magical attacker with high durability against sudden strikes, high speed, high mind save so that Banshees could not reliably silence me(I believe only one managed to connect with it before dying, and in a safe position), and a ton of versatility.
The bad news-that one thing was that a Dreadmaster could Disperse me and kill me.
The former did happen. I got a Dreadmaster rare on my case that nearly killed me-I forget the subclass, but it barely mattered(RE: It wasn't a very good subclass). I got some decently lucky teleport positions and took the stairs off the floor, then came back to it. Not much to say about that besides that it could have easily ended the run.
The good news was that I got some equipment...sorta. Morrigor and The Untouchable.
Both are very new. Morrigor being a generic blank slate of 24 Spellpower/12% Spellcrit, a twohander that requires Magic to equip, and can eat souls of enemies to get a random skill it can itemcast at L1.
I later found out that in 1.03 it could bug out and attempt to eat a rune. This was the cause of one of my two forcequits throughout the run, as it was making it impossible to look at any enemy's statistics, for...some reason. Regardless, I happily ate a Vampire with it and got itemcast Forgery of Haze. Not all that good-it had a bad habit of casting Stone Wall on its self, then Illuminate, hitting me if I hadn't jumped out the way of the Stone Wall cast. But then again, it's an item cast Stone Wall, sort of. Still good.
Untouchable is a stack of poor stats for the time...but produces barriers if you're hit for more than 20% of your life from one turn to the next, and have no barrier up. Good barriers. This saved my life at two different points, I think, and was generally nice. Having said that, it's not at its best if you're above 100% global, because there's a delay on the barrier effectively then.
I also picked up a nice, very low(14? 15?) CD second Shielding that scaled off Willpower, with 250 or so power. This would be in use until High Peak, IIRC-I really like low CD Shielding, and I feel that my habit of using those over more powerful/longer shielding was very justified on this run. I had already found another, similar but non-scaling, one before this.
Besides, it was like a 400 barrier after Shielding by this point.
I also picked up Neira's Memory during this. Perfectly accpetable belt. Another thing that would save my life.
This would remain my equipment status quo for a while, which was very unfortunate, but not as unfortunate as it could have been.
Outside of that one hazard, Dreadfell was hard but nothing I couldn't deal with with my quintabeam(As I was referring to Illuminate/Flame/Lightning/Manathrust/Pulverizing Auger by this point. I'm aware one of them isn't a beam.).
Up until Master.
When I checked out Master's stats, I figured I was dead. 600 Freeze? Can summon 11 Minions at +8 your levels? Can double his global speed?
After a bit, I calmed down and thought about the best way. Which was clearly to do the same thing I'd done to the last boss I couldn't kill, at all, ever, in a straight up fight.
Fireflash from outside of LoS. I think I permanently capped Fireflash off at or around this point, when I realized this was going to be a theme.
Yes, I didn't have any way to not blow myself up with it, at this point. Why do you ask? (It's not *that* hard to avoid.)
Insert me dealing some 3500 HP(x2) down over the course of teleporting across the entire floor, making large tunnels around the place so that Master couldn't get shots the AI was happy with, and in the end getting Master stuck in a corridor that he didn't want to leave.
Tunnels would also become a theme in this run. Somewhere in here I figured out that, if you use Pulverizing Auger on a wall as you come down a stairs, then Ghoulish Leap into the corridor(or CPD, for those without a Ghoul, which should be everyone), enemies wouldn't have noticed me yet, thanks to my Global speed bonus. How very Metal Gear Solid. "There's a hole in the wall? Eh. No big deal."
The Ambush was something I also solved with tunnels. Arcing a Auger up to the diagonal left, and one square left from that, of the entrance to the Ambush will produce a nice tunnel that only one enemy can access you from. It's not too bad from there, and doesn't gain incredibly on Nightmare, so...
Reknor nearly killed me. I drew a Shadowblade Shadowblade rare.
That's not a typo. It was a Shadowblade enemy with the Shadowblade class. It promptly silenced me 10 turns.
Then used Shadow Veil.
That I lived was truly surprising. I seriously considered a forcequit(I'm not going to lie-had things gone sour at a few points later, I'm not sure this run would have ended legit. I was sick of Nightmare and it got worse. But I would admit that, if I had.). Instead I had a shield on(He didn't use Ambush instantly, and I had misread his skills as a Rogue/Shadowblade combo, somehow. This is why I was still in visible range.), Neira's Memory, and Untouchable's barrier.
This left me with around 30 HP after the onslaught. Somehow. He had a pretty bad level of Shadow Veil, at least. I teleported away, regrouped, killed his ass(respec to L5 Flameshock, respec to L5 Congeal Time, leave him unable to do meaningful actions. I couldn't leave him alive after that. Too dangerous and too easy to kill, and he had been left at 10% HP when he did that. Another source of anguish when I thought I was going to wipe.).
The only other really memorable things, as I recall it, were two.
First, I surprisingly got Guiding Hand(Nightmare). I had saved every Escort. Go fig. None of them were Sun Paladins, sadly, and too many were Seers(I think I got Burning Jewel either in Dreadfell or Reknor, I never used Premonition, and Arcane Eye doesn't really need levels much. Not that leveling it would be bad.), but all told, I was happy with my draw there. Unflinching Resolve L1 means a lot to a Ghoul, too.
Secondly, the boss took bloody forever, and was largely done with, you guessed it, out of LoS Fireflash very slowly killing him. This is brutally tedious against an enemy that can heal somewhat and requires some actual combat to overcome that occasionally, but he did way too much damage and I had no real way to slow him down reliably. Too much saves/resists.
Around here I hit L30. So naturally I took some time out to set myself on fire. Once I was done with this, I learned Cauterize.
Interesting fact; Cauterize never triggered once across the entire run. It could have, though. I don't regret this grab.
Still, I'd made it East, which was, at this point, a huge accomplishment to me. I cast Stone Wall to break targetting, and watched the fight between these two strange people with interest, before killing them both in a Fireflash. Odd people in the East. I then left about half the cave because there was an Oozing Horror(L50 or so) wandering around that could nuke my entire mana bar at one shot.
Have I mentioned that Essence of Speed isn't that good this early? Because, it isn't. Because you need your mana to be higher than 300 or so. Really. Shadowblades can get away with it, but juggling around it all the time was not worth it until late, except for the fact that it negated Ghoul's downside.
-The East, and the return
Okay, east time! First, check the stores, see if they have anything good. IIRC, they didn't. Because...that's my luck here. Oh well, spider time.
Ungole is kinda a sad boss on Nightmare, outside of a damage skin that does 120 damage every time you hit it. Not actually terrible, but very doable compared to the stuff before. Again, no problem with that here-it was nice to have my worries only involve getting mobbed by surprisingly decent Freeze casts from spiders.
Also I had to forcequit and redo half the dungeon because of Morrigor; This is when it decided to try to eat a Rune. Oh well.
I did the first level of the Sunken Cave. Unfortunately, thinking made me realize that I was going to have to deal with silence in here.
A lot of silence.
Very long silence.
Now, Silence is a funny skill. As mentioned before, it nearly killed me, and it killed my previous Normal Skeleton Archmage twice, when I was less experienced.
See, Silence on an undead mage shuts down everything but items and race skills. That's bad enough for a Skeleton, who has a shield and a heal on racials.
Ghouls have a lousy regen which I hadn't even bothered to level, because Nightmare level damage is far, far too high for it to mitigate anything useful.
Great. Just great. Guess I'm skipping the rest of that dungeon for now.
I'm not sure this was the best choice, though, as it meant I was doing Vor Armory next.
Vor Armory was one of the two times I should have died and only skill got me out of it. I had a decent equipset, a build that didn't have a great midgame, and I was having to do Nightmare Vor Armory-this is bad enough.
But the game threw me a horrifying curveball. Both Ak'gishil and Kra'tor the Gluttonous spawned on Vor Armory 2. Ak'gishil in a room to the south, and Kra'tor in the main chamber, with Gnarg.
This happened to me on one other run, way back when I started, having Kra'tor spawn here, a Necromancer Ghoul I believe-my first clear, I think. It killed me. I was beginning to think I had a horrifying hilarious parallel. I stared at it for a while, closed down ToME, convinced myself the run was over and that I'd had a good run but the RNG just had got me, it wasn't my fault, and went and did other things a while, then went to sleep.
Then for some strange reason, I woke up with a plan.
First off, clearing out the rooms that the bosses weren't in wasn't too hard-Pop a door open at range with Pulverizing Auger, and use that to slowly remove the In Vault status from enemies one at a time. So I would have a safe area to teleport to in a pinch.
Secondly, I examined Ak'gishil's stats carefully, and came to the conclusion that I could slugfest it-and only it-down. Eventually. If I never let it get to melee. Thankfully, Spydric Poison is a wonderful thing. (I think the people that feel it's overpowered probably got this from Nightmare. Then again, I feel that Nightmare is nearly undoable without some insanely good area control, and without this and a few things like it, it would largely degenerate into pet class spam.) This was stressful, but I did it.
Then I popped the doors to the main room, slowly killed down mages, and woke up Kra'tor.
The original idea for Kra'tor was that I'd hopefully status him, and Psychoport away if that didn't work. Bad plan, considering his saves and resists, but I had no better. Even this felt unfeasible, though; He had, among things, 20 range breath spam. That was getting old. It would get older.
What I actually did was teleport away and watch through Arcane Eye, curious, as he spammed his way up to 95% equilibrium fail rate.
Turns out he roars Aura of Silence as much as he can once he's awake. Or maybe he only does it if you're in range, but doesn't check if there's walls in the way...regardless. Personally I think this is entirely in character and should be left in. Also, it makes him remotely sane when he spawns places like this and Reknor...
It takes him an insane amount of time to actually get a real fail rate-I waited thousands of turns for it-and he's still dangerous if he has even a 50-60% fail rate, that wasn't good enough.
So when I finally popped out, he still got one Silence off and I had to run. But otherwise I kept him pinned and very slowly(*very* slowly. My damage was still barely breaking 400 on an Auger crit. This was my best damage. Against enemies with 5000-6000 HP by this point.) whittled down his life.
He dropped the Blighted Maul. I didn't know he could have an arcane weapon. If he had hit me with that, I probably would have been oneshotted through barriers. A terrible rush to see there at the end.
Compared to Kra'tor, Gnarg is cake. Same kind of strategy but without having to deal with his equi and he's less magic durable. Probably would have killed me if he got near me, but that's Nightmare. Much better.
I was pretty amazed when I finally got to pick up the Athame. Never thought I'd live through that.
The loot was terrible...except for one thing. I picked up Vox.
Vox, which gives 80% silence resist. I mean, it's good in general, but that one specific thing made it amazing for me.
Suddenly, I found myself eyeing my horrible damage and thinking questionable thoughts of total build change. Ones that, ultimately, I went through on. Thank you Vox.
Obviously, Briagh wasn't as bad, though the usual disclaimer about Sand Breath is there. Due to that, it took an insane amount of kiting to kill her, and she tends to heal a lot. Still, I wasn't really in dying risk, just very long battle risk, which was normal at this stage of the game.
Back West! Didn't expect to get here. Except now I was wondering if I'd get far enough to live. My damage was pitiful and it was becoming increasingly clear it wasn't good enough to cut it.
Doing the backup guardians didn't help a lot. Oh, most of them weren't bad. Long, bad not bad. Corrupted Sand Wyrm is dangerous enough, so is Aluin, but pinning them helps some(even though Aluin can cure it, IIRC. If enemies curing a status made it terrible, I wouldn't have cleared.). Nimisil was oddly competent, though I can't recall why-not competent enough, anyways.
Then there was Massok. Who I tried to kill for a while, despite his ability to blow off a sizable chunk of my life, with a barrier up, with Rush. I gave up when he Battle Shouted and healed for 2000.
This wasn't helping my feeling that I would die if I didn't get one of the top tier weapons, and soon.
I also did the Temporal Rift in this period. Why? That'd come up. But I had some ideas by this point. Was obviously not that bad by now. I also did the Ancient Elven Ruins, again, not too horrible at this stage(still kinda challenging because, well, enemies get Freeze. Don't really like that spell much.).
There was an obvious course for that, of course. Going to Telmur gives me a good shot at a good staff.
There's just one problem; The Shade of Telos could easily kill me. Very easily.
I discussed opening up the item vault rather than doing this, but I decided, at the end, to go with it and run if I got a bad situation in Telmur. Then I'd use the Item Vault.
I didn't do this. Even though I got into a bad situation. One of the worst, in fact. The final room of Telmur was a small oval packed with Telos' Shade, a good set of boring skeletons/vampires(which can still kill you of course), and a rare Bone Giant Archer.
This guy got one shot on me and did 1200.
I doublechecked. It wasn't a critical hit. Just Steady Shot. He blew through a shielding, a displacement shield, and half my life bar. In one shot.
Fortunately, I had Pulverizing Auger. This didn't keep the Telosghost away from me, but did keep the Bone Giant happy in an upper left corridor, after I teleported away from him.
This was more than bad enough, though. I actually had the other time Untouchable saved me-by producing a 1k barrier, I had taken so much damage-occur here. The Shade of Telos has great resists and no skill maximums-meaning that it was gaining some 10+ on every skill-and a massive 800 damage(IIRC) Freeze among good ice skills.
That I lived through this is also really stunning. I came as close to dying as with the Shadowblade, and I had much worse escapes. At one point I had to Controlled Teleport into the main room and hope I didn't land on anything, with 200~ HP and no barriers up. But it worked out(mostly because everyone else besides the Shade and that bone giant tooling around in the upper left wall was dead from collateral damage from either me or Telos.).
And he couldn't heal. So I could eventually win, as long as I didn't die.
My reward? The full drop, Telos Top/Bottom, which I would, for strange reasons, proceed to use for the rest of the game.
Things were finally looking up. Tannen was next, and with my increased firepower, his tower was more annoying than actually horrifying.
Of course, he was constantly pelting me with 400~ damage every turn and could bomb me through Stone Wall(???). Not pleasant, but I lived.
At this point, I enacted my overall plan, which had changed considerably since I got Vox. I actually started it back in Telmur, but the final piece fell into place when I hit L42.
Namely, instead of Wildfire, I would go with Meta and Quickened Spells(I had this on for Telmur. Without a doubt, it saved my life-the massive cooldown decrease got my barriers and heals up that much faster, and it was an incredibly near thing as it was.), and Spellcraft.
Then pick up Temporal Form, and change my staff to...Cold.
No, I didn't really do Cold damage, but it didn't matter, because Temporal Form took my highest damage bonus. Which would be the 55% Cold I had between the two pieces of the staff.
Instead of barely strengthening any of my damage, I would, a lot of the time, practically double it-an 85% Temporal damage bonus-, and get resistance piercing on it. And Spellshock with it.
My damage in the span of a few dungeons had nearly tripled. Things were really looking up.
And on top of that, it's is_spell. So Quickened Spells lowers it. And Metaflow would reset it. Very much looking up. (Any Meta/Temporal build should take that Prodigy, I feel.) Picking up some iron Spellbinding Boots-which I believe I used the entire game from that point on-in Shatur got me 40% reduction, so now I was running around with 5CD Fireflash, 4 CD Auger, and 2CD beams.
Around here, also(just before Telmur to be precise), I upgraded to 1.04, and started looking hard at Time Shield.
I think it might be overpowered, to be honest. It doesn't do anything specific incredibly-It's not a huge duration drop on status(though it's very good), it's not a lot of healing, it's instant but so are other barriers, it's long duration but so are other barriers, and it's good power but so are other barriers.
But it does all of that.
Of course, it could have been terrible otherwise, but being a Ghoul, I would have used it for the effect reduction. Even if a Silence *did* get through, suddenly I could actually heal it with Relentless Pursuit. I promptly set L1 Time Shield to autocast when seeing enemies, along with my better Shielding.
Yep, life was looking possible.
The one downside; I got my first merchant artifact, right before things got good after Telmur. It contributed to my black mood in this period of the game. I named it "I hate all equipment", because you see it was a wizard hat with massive, perfectly coordinated, mindpower bonuses.
Seriously it was like +27 Mindpower total after stats or something and bonuses to most mind type damage types. No magic boosts at all.
-The East, Part 2
Back East! I began to look at Orc Breeding Pits.
Yes, I should have done this earlier. Yes, I think I got Black Robe here. Yes, I really should have done this earlier.
In my defense; There was literally an orc patrol sitting on it and it was insanely hard to lure it out of the way without getting into an Orc Patrol ambush. Which I never got into, and never wanted to.
It wasn't too hard, obviously the boss is stationary and very vulnerable to Fireflash as such. I was expecting more problems with getting mobbed, but they never came up.
Naga next. Not a lot to say here-I got Silenced once through Vox and my high Mind Save, but not in a situation where it was horribly dangerous, thankfully. Quick respec to Ghoulish Leap 4 and I was safe. Lots of Spydric Poison work and Fireflash. It could have gone badly, it just didn't, thankfully.
And now I was staring down the Prides. This didn't feel very fun. Gorbat was Silence/Mana Clash hell, Rak'shor ...is Rak'shor, and Grushnak had the potential to mob me.
So that left Vor, where enemies get to swing 600+ in Freeze. Oh well, I had cold resistance(practically the only resistance I had. As a note, that's not a big deal on Nightmare, because every Orc has L8 Skirmisher, piercing 40% of your resistances. Enjoy, physical fighters!).
This wasn't too bad overall. My spellpower had skyrocketed to 70+-suddenly I had real status rates again, and would until the very end-and Illuminate and Flameshock hit physical save. So, enemies get blinded really easily, then I follow up with a Fireflash, which usually killed thanks to my high temporal bonus to damage.
So Vor was a series of me blinding and using temporally charged lightning, flames, explosions and arcane power to smear my enemies across space-time. I love this game sometimes.
Vor himself was way too dangerous to kill without Disperse Magic-I think I could have done it, I just didn't want to, not with Cleansing Flames in the mix to constantly pull off my Temporal Form. With, he was mostly doable-didn't have a lot of ways to deal with the heavy status load I hit him with.
Suddenly, the Aeryn signal flashes in the air and I go and kill a Ritch and find a 500+ Shielding. Time to get some potions!
Oh, and save the world, I guess.
Eruan is an amazing place for runes/infusions and having such an insanely high level on it made it better, not worse. As mentioned, I got a 500+ Titan Shielding with 14 CD or so. (I tend to forget my actual CDs, thanks to all the reduction.)
For the Charred Scar, I managed to actually dig up 70% in Fire resistance. And somehow drew no Wyrms. Trucking down the corridor with 138% global speed and L4 Ghoulish Leap made this the fastest treck through the Scar a Ghoul has probably ever made(well...no, there's been Ghoul Cursed before, maybe one of those did it faster).
Fyrk wasn't so bad, just Dispersed his Magic so he couldn't cleave my resistances like a guillotine hitting a potato.
I mentioned potions earlier. I did actually get those. And I tested something on one of them, when I lost Serendipity.
Namely, I curiously forcequit to see what would happen, and the game had not saved. So, I was able to avoid losing Serendipity.
Then I slammed my head metaphorically against a wall for a while, wondering why I did this on an otherwise legitimate run. I blame a very bad night's sleep there, which was making me make questionable gaming decisions. (Then I went and fought Massok. No, really. I killed him that time. But that was REALLY stupid.)
Then I lost the other potion I planned to get besides Focus and Foundations, when I came in this time(Mysticism) and called it good enough. If this invalidates my run to you, I'm sorry. It doesn't for me.
At any rate, easier and nicer areas aside, it was time to make a hard choice. I chose Grushnak, on the grounds that it didn't specifically counter anything I did, and wasn't Rak'shor.
Sadly, I could not, in fact, tunnel in Grushnak barracks, something which puzzles me. Two prides allow for tunnelling in the fixed setups, two don't. Not sure why. I'd rather see them all allow it, there's not a lot of reason not to(Skipping major battles? Is that a bad thing? You lose the loot and EXP after all...) Regardless, Illuminate works very well, as does Illuminate backed up by Fireflash with Temporal Form on it.
Similar strategies with generally totally different execution was a lot of the Prides, I think.
The most notable event here happened in one of the Barracks-a Fearscape Invasion Portal.
I stupidly went in. I nearly died from THIS too, getting a massive cloud of Darkness over 80% of the field(Duathdlens, you see), and having multiple L90(!) demons jump me.
Also, there was this one rare that could hit me for over 1000. I don't know what it was. It died before I ever actually could see its stats. I think a Daelach or something got it mad with Fire Storm, and won. Go fig.
Grushnak himself was a matter of never letting him get near me, as he could easily oneshot multiple barriers/me if he did. Nothing new there.
Gorbat was next, and did give me a lot more trouble. I had to swap my cloak(Radiance, I forget when I got this. Nice cloak, not my first choice for this character but it gave me another barrier to use while silenced, and more Celestial/Light, so it's all good.) to a heavy duty +120 or so Mana one I found. This made it very hard to oneshot my Mana with Mana Clash.
This generally gave me the border I needed, though I had to run after a Mana Clash more than a few times. Fortunately I had a Psychoportation torque for that-I'd figured out after a while that this was one of the best emergency options in that case. I also got silenced a few times, through Vox. Neither really came up.
Probably the biggest danger involved an Oozemancer Master Wyrmic that literally wandered off after a while. He was there...somewhere, he was hitting me with 20+ range breaths from out of LoS. But, I had no idea where, and a Duathdlen had Darkness'd most of the arena.
He's still there, somewhere. I just walked out the other end of that floor after trying to find him for a little bit.
Gorbat himself was better than expected, though still a major threat. Spell Feedback can be cured with Providence, and you can use a beam to set it off with minimal duration on the counter status, but it's still rough, and he has all the usual stupid breaths that I've been complaining about for pages now, along with summons. Summons aren't as threatening as you'd think, but they're still threatening.
Rak'shor was...interesting. The redesign is actually easier than the original...something I approve of. The entrance areas are amazingly lethal(I took 2000 damage from the one that still exists, in one enemy turn. Really. Thank you high end barrier stacking+Aegis...), so having less of them in Rak'shor is pretty okay, and the new horrors are surprisingly competent. Summoning random undead on death is pretty great, and they all have some surprisingly good focused attacks. They're not as flexible as corruptors/blood mages, but they're a lot better at taking hits than many of them. I'd say the general area content has gone up in power, but that there's less horrifying death setups that you really ought to teleport out of and take your chances. Overall, I think it's an improvement but a bit easier.
Rak'shor himself surprisingly resists blind and kept summoning minions.
Also, Summoning. Why does he have that, it's silly seeing Rak'shor have an Equi skill, and he used it to summon Void Spectre. Like, really? You cheesy bastard.
Outside of clogging the entire floor with approximately 60 undead over the course of his run, he wasn't so bad, but he was overall the highest threat of the four. No shock there.
So...I had gotten Orcrist. With less horrible stress than expected(note: Still plenty of it). Prides are oddly doable on Nightmare, relatively, which is to say they're only somewhat more lethal instead of extremely. I'm okay with that.
I needed to dredge up some fast cash-I finally had equips for my slots in general, except gloves, which could potentially be a huge boon to my run. Not the best, necessarily, but good enough equips. But my gloves were still iron/nightseeking/heroic, which was pitiful for this point.
This led to me doing the Bearscape(surprisingly good EXP at that point, on Nightmare), Golem Graveyard(because it was there), and the Infinite Dungeon entrance. This got me pretty close to L50(Nightmare gives a lot of EXP), and got me enough cash to buy gloves.
Heroic/Warmaking/two things that don't matter. Perfect! Now we're good for the endgame.
-High Peak
I had already taken out one of the guardians in the Slime Tunnels-the Shadowblade Gwel didn't have Shadow Ambush or Shadow Veil, thankfully, so it wasn't too awfully bad. I took out the Dragon Archmage-which was annoying-and teleported away from the Archlich Necromancer(too much effort) and the 19900 HP Corruptor(I have complained about high end demons being able to draw Corruptor at all. There is no way I will ever fight that guardian without absolutely insane offense, and never will if he has Fearscape. By the way, there needs to be an achievement for killing all four.
).This led to High Peak, which I was rather surprised I had reached. I consoled myself with the realization that people would probably understand if I died going up High Peak on Nightmare.
I didn't, though. The bosses were taken care of with a combination of out of LoS Fireflash, luring them somewhere and then teleporting to the stairs, and teleporting them forcefully to somewhere else while I went up the stairs, depending on the situation. I got enough incidental EXP to hit 50 halfway up, which was good enough. (By the way, the late points went to Time Shield and Freeze, and a few more points on my beams. I naturally kept four points out of circulation solely to shuffle them to various status. My late Generic went to finally using Arcane Shield, which I felt I had enough Mana to float, and leveling various heals, teleports and Providence. I stand by Arcane Shield being largely overkill for Nightmare, but it's better on a build that doesn't have to always run a 250 sustain...)
This isn't to say that I didn't have scares. It was, by and large, a constant mass of scares, having to constantly hope that teleports hit(Because if they failed, I would have to use CPD/Ghoulish Leap as my escapes, which isn't as good). There were also two stairs that were unguarded and I don't know why to this day. That worried me, but not enough to not take them.
Then there was stuff like the Bloated Horror that hit for 2000~ damage by my estimate...at melee range...but had stealth so good that I almost never could see it. Did it just phase door next to me? Probably not! Keep firing! And then it died. Eventually. Very slowly. (The other class it had was Oozemancer.)
At any rate, I reached the top, took a deep breath, walked into the portal...
...literally had my jaw drop as I checked Elandar's stats and instantly dropped a Stone Wall on him.
1800 damage Freeze, 253% global speed, and everything else jacked up to insane damage. Okay, deep breath, time to Metaflow to reset Stone Wall and put him in the box again, after I take out these two portals(So I can be the first person to get Portal Reaver(Nightmare), because I'm silly.), and then keep him in the box as much as possible.
This was a good strategy. Unfortunately when the Stone Wall was almost off CD, he got out of the box and did 5000 damage in the space of three or so turns, utterly obliterating Aeryn. Um. Uh-oh.
What followed was a massive series of very careful kiting, an insane amount of Stone Wall(my constant and chronic mistake during this battle was casting L1 instead of L5 Stone Wall, giving me less duration. This was frustrating and I would have been incredibly sad if it had killed me), using an absolutely insane amount of teleports to shake off Elandar, eventually getting him to get distracted by the undead damaging him and proceed to obliterate them(seeing him wipe out ten L100 or so undead in a few actions was also disheartening-I was thinking they might compete for a moment), dealing with repeated Burning Hexes from Argoniel(and later from a Dread), finding a nice spot I could hollow out in one of the pillars to rest, having a Xorn eat said hollowed spot(The only thing an elemental notably did in the fight), and an absolutely insane length slugfest with an absolutely insane monstrosity of an enemy.
I don't think it was winnable without Disperse Magic or another way to take off that Essence of Speed. That's just way too much speed. Fortunately I could respec to that. Fortunately, my build had the tools I needed. The fight took around an hour, IIRC, and in the end I could just barely hold up to Elandar.
Just barely. At one point, near the end, Elandar crit me with Freeze, dealing enough damage to shut down 1800 in barriers, down to 50 or so HP left on them, through 70% Cold resistance. Just barely.
But, almost to my shock, a 766(IIRC) damage Temporal Pulverizing Auger finally splattered Elandar across space and time, getting me the win.
So yeah. That's the story of a Ghoul's nightmare, which they woke up from.
Some final notes;
-Ghouls...are bad whenever the game gets challenging. They're only really good when it's not hard to start with. I hope to make another thread to discuss this, but obviously I just typed quite a bit, so I'll leave that another time. Suffice to say, they're decidedly a challenge race right now, and I'm curious if that's what people want them to be.
-Retooling Nightmare without making Insane not Insane seems hard. It seems like a lot of what makes Nightmare ridiculous right now is a few attacks specifically scaling obnoxiously(Freeze!), and it's very hard to fix that without making Insane not nearly impossible. That could be desireable, but I don't really feel it is. Probably the simple thing would be to have Insane raise skill caps, once Nightmare gets rebalanced.
-Archmage is, as I've mentioned, definitely one of the best Nightmare competitors. The better Runes/Infusions in general and the huge ability to do degenerate, slow kills from outside of LoS is very, very good on Nightmare, where enemies do entirely too much damage.
-Nightmare is basically built for point shuffling. Any doubt I had about that is gone-point shuffling should stay and constant respeccing is essentially an unintended feature that works out, as it stands. It's certainly possible to clear Nightmare with it, but it would so strongly benefit Summoner(the only other class that has a notable amount of Nightmare clears) that it would make Nightmare the Summoner Show. Which is just boring. Think of the other classes.
-I actually backed up my save four times in consideration of reloading it if I died, just because I was so sick of Nightmare. If I had died...I don't know what I would have done, since I would have been stuck with illegitimate achievements, which I would hate. I didn't, though-it never actually came up, I never even had Cauterize trigger, somehow. Yes, you have to trust me on that. Yes, if you don't trust me, I understand; That's something you have to hold on trust for any Nightmare/Insane run, really.
-That Morrigor glitch ate Pyromancer(Nightmare) off my character and they'll never get it back.
-Time Shield is probably a bit overpowered right now. My thought is that, instead of its current power, it should be (40, 350) or so. This makes it a bit low on raw power, but very versatile and effective otherwise.
Otherwise, I really like it. Temporal is a category that's only good lategame, right now, and Time Shield gives it a good earlygame effect and brings it more in line with the other categories. Essence of Speed is quite powerful, but it's not a skillset, and it takes notable building around it to make it any good.
So yeah, I think that's all for right now. I'm not sure anyone will read this whole thing, but I needed to say it. I had a lot of thoughts on this run, because I had to think a lot to live.
Happy it's over.
