Rockstar (http://te4.org/characters/124463/tome/9 ... 292da576ef)
Level 50 Insane Adventurer Higher Skirmisher
- The basic idea when I started was trying to (ab)use Bombardment to do huge damage and Highborn's Bloom to eliminate the high stamina cost of using bombardment. This didn't quite work out as I expected.
- Highborn's Bloom lasts for 8 Bombardments at 125% attack speed and using it effectively doubled my stamina. Use a few bombardments/shots first so you're not full and stamina can regen before you use it.
- Increased capacity ammos are very important for skirmishers. Bombardment eats though ammo very quickly and I would almost always run out of ammo before I ran out of stamina. Two tricks that can help with this: Movement infusions reload every step along the way, so you can get 9+ reloads in a single turn. Swapping in ammo from inventory takes a turn (or no turn with Swift Hands) and starts out with full ammo. It does get tedious manually reloading every pouch in your inventory one a time, though.
- Antimagic was a huge mistake for this character. Fungus and the extra turns on regeneration was great, but otherwise I didn't invest enough into Willpower for the Antimagic parts to be effective. Meanwhile I had to pass by many gear upgrades that would have easily made a huge difference in character power. (For example, weapons: There's four fixedart shots (all T4), two are arcane. Only one fixedart T4+ sling, which is arcane.) I had to skip quite a few good rewards from escorts too. In the future, I would either invest heavily in AM or not at all.
- 0.22 Acrobatics mastery on an amulet found in the Maze let me save a couple generic points without losing anything.
- First death was in Hidden Compound, when I was lightning'ed for an unexpectedly high amount by a rare
- Don't remember the second death.
- Third death was in a farportal containing many heavily armored bulwark bears, which I could bearly damage.
- Fourth death was an intentional tactical suicide. Fourth level of Dreadfell the stairs into the level were in a 5x6 room, with 29 enemies and me. Unfortunately, Many of these enemies has the unresistable (at the time) acid wave rune. Stairscumming let me kill a few at a time before I died. Unfortunately, some of them could summon more. More stairscumming later, I had killed the summoners. Unfortunately, somehow during my previous fights I had aggroed Aletta Soultorn, who then went around the level and attracted everything towards me. This led to a total of four bosses inside the 5x6 room, plus more enemies streaming through the door. This was basicly a no-win game-end situation if I tried to fight. I decided to take my chances and ran blindly as fast as I could through the level, using a life to life to reset my health and cooldowns before I found the stair down and out of there. (20 levels later I went back for revenge.)
- During dreadfell, I was expecting this guy to die and start over. I kept playing and strangely didn't die. I'm surprised I made it.
- First prodigy was Cauterize at level 30. (I delayed getting AM until then so I could pump my Mag with gear. Waiting to get AM was probably another factor in it's lacklustre performance this run.) According to the achievement count, this saved my life nine times during the rest of the run. Yay cauterize!
- Second prodigy was Swift Hands and was a massive change in how I played the character. It was probably also the only reason this character ever won the game. Before swift hands I was just trying to nuke everything before it killed me. After swift hands, I became a debuff afflicting factory of death. Changing ammo every turn allowed me to cycle through different ammos to use whatever status effect the enemy didn't have and bombardment or noggin knocker would give a very high chance of applying it that turn. If you look through my inventory, each turn I could: manaburn, global slow, remove magical effects, stun, confuse, blind, disease, silence, or disrupt spellcasting (very powerful). Switching ammos also gave me near infinite ammunition. If I wasn't switching ammos then there was many different "on use:" items that I had in my inventory, and I always had access to whichever one I wanted at any time. Common ones included: Spellhunt Remnants, Essence of Bearness(!), Earthen Beads, Disengage rings, Rod of Spydric Poison, and Invoke Tentacle totems.
- Third stat after Dexterity and Cunning was planned to be Will for antimagic and stamina. However, I changed to Strength as my damage was falling behind and I needed far more carrying capacity for all my Swift Hands items.
- Backup Guardians were all killed, except for Massok, who was some kind of Oozemancer/Something with 97% resist all and Snaproot who had Vitality healing for 1,467 health per turn.
- My worst enemy: brittle clear ooze. For whatever reason, they could clone faster than I could kill them. I ended up killing several hundred of them in the Slime Tunnel.
- By endgame, this character's damage was sorely lacking. I could debuff everything, but had a hard time actually damaging it. High peak I spent mostly digging and bypassing as much as I could on the level. My strategy: cause high peak to become structually unstable and colapse! Didn't work, killed some mages instead.
- The final fight was very long, hard and mostly Aeryn's work. I closed all four portals as quickly as I could and spent the rest of the fight keeping both mages debuffed to uselessness while me and Aeryn slowly whittled their health down. This was also probably the only time where I actually used Swift Hands every turn of the fight.
- This character was named Rockstar only so that I could make a pouch of shots named Rolling Stones.
Metalhead (http://te4.org/characters/124463/tome/b ... 3799b795e4)
Level 50 Insane Roguelike Shalore Skirmisher
- Starting out from the last clear my strategy was silimar, but not going AM and planning on using the Hidden Resouces prodigy instead of highborn's bloom. Lower cooldown, has some neat side effects (Works at 0 resources, gives you 100% chance of acting during confusion, talent fail % and fear.). Shalore's Timeless would've let me do a 15 turn hidden resources too.
- While I was around level 20, Bombardment was changed between patches 1.2.2 and 1.2.3 to make it deal the correct amount of damage. (Instead of always 100% per shot. My first skirmisher was unknowingly abusing bugs, whoops!) This threw a bit of a wrench into the plans for this character. Testing bombardment on Rockstar using testing dummies before/after patch showed bombardment damage was down 24%, and bombardment was only doing 86% more damage compared to just single shots. I hadn't invested anything into bombardment/hidden resources yet at the time, so I changed plans and went for a called shot/swift shot/venomous strike build instead.
- Venomous Strike is one of the highest % damage abilities skirmishers have. Didn't notice that on the first character. It also has about half the stamina cost of any other ability and a short cooldown. If I had found an insidious poison shot to get a 3rd poison going, it would done more damage than a full power kill shot.
- Invested more in Bash and Smash on this character, does quite a bit of damage and gives an ability to use against enemies with projectile deflection, which can be very annoying.
- Without Bombardment, Hidden Resources wasn't needed. Cauterize and Draconic Body instead.
- For stamina, 5/5 Breathing Room can keep a full cycle of kneecapper, noggin knocker, swift shot and venomous strike going indefinitely. Maximum stamina and extra stamina regen just give you more kill shots and allow higher fatigue. (I was running 26% stamina on this char. I guess I should have looked at using Pace Yourself, but stamina never seemed to be a problem and points are tight.)
- I wanted to try Vile Life on this character because I had heard good things about it. (And Vile Life is pretty metal.) It is damn good and worth the cat point. I thought 50 sounded low but Blood Splash scales with attack speed and healing factor. By the endgame I probably could have dropped my regen infusion as Blood Splash was covering most the healing I needed. Elemental Discord was good, had fun watching some enemies continuously freeze themselves. Healing Inversion has lots of neat tricks that can be done with it. Vile Transplant wasn't of much use to a ranged character (and the self-damage was a turn-off.) If I had more spellpower, this tree would have seen a lot more use. Most of these abilities check spellpower to apply so I was only affecting low spellsave enemies.
- The third stat to increase was an interesting choice. (First two being Dexterity and Cunning.) Strength would have given me physical power and carrying capacity (I'm a packrat.) Magic would have helped Vile Life, and a quite a few of the abilities I recieved from escorts or items. Willpower for stamina, for more kill shots. I kept putting off the decision for ten levels, then dropped 25 points into Willpower.
- Only death (using Blood of Life) was in Briagh's Lair. Similar problem to the 4th death in previous run, where entering the level gave me Briagh plus two other bosses and a few rares within a few spaces of the starting point. What I should have done is immediately leave the level, go kill a pride or two, come back with a higher level and better equipment. But I figured I was already 48, had pretty good gear and I wanted to get back west so I decided to fight. Bad move. I managed to kill a couple of the rares before teleporting away and running as far into a corner as I could get to recover. Briagh has the uncanny ability to find you anywhere in the level and tunnel straight towards you, bringing his friends with him. I almost managed to kill almost all of them, but one ungodly strong Doomed gigantic gravity worm boss brought me down.
- Yaldan Baoth (helmet) is an amazingly good item. Between that and my amulet, it was better for me to NOT see enemies. I left points out of Piercing Sight so creatures would stay stealthed or invisible. I would have no downside and they would be doing 40% less damage. Left Elandar invisible during the last fight, which let me ignore him.
- As usual, getting Ring randarts from the merchant first paid off. Also got an unexpected 18% all resist on my sling, giving me 56% all resist after eternal warrior.
- Last boss fight was much. much nicer than the previous character. No portals closed, much quicker fight.
- Went on to kill Linaniil, who was a much tougher fight. Used insidious poison to counter Draconic Body as I didn't expect to get Healing Inversion on her. Disengage ring + Tumble + movement infusion let me escape to heal up. Cauterize proced a few times during the later fights.