ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

This Let's Play is meant to accomplish several things. One, to fulfill a request for a written LP I saw a while ago. Two, to show people the wacky hijinks that is Insane, if they're unfamiliar with it. Three, for me to play a class I haven't played in forever. I'll be uploading these as Imgur albums. So, here begins the tale of Gaius, the Shalore Summoner.

Why a Shalore Summoner:
Summoners are a class with access to really abusive tricks that, under the right circumstances, can overcome arbitrarily high stats, as seen on enemies in Insane and higher. Antimagic isn't that great on Insane-- antimagic shield and fungus healing both don't help all that much when your enemies can deal literally thousands of damage per hit. Plus it locks you out of gloves of dispersion, which is the only way for most characters to dispel dangerous magic sustains like Essence of Speed without having to overcome saves, which can get really really high. Rather than the paltry benefits of antimagic, we'll be going with Shalore, whose Timeless is probably better than every feature of antimagic put together. Timeless will extend shields and heroism, which are both crucial to surviving massive bursts of damage. It will also double as pseudo-Fungus by extending regeneration, and grant complete immunity to status effects for 15 turns with Draconic Will. Also I just personally like Shalore and use them for everything, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

I've never done a Let's Play before, at all, so please leave suggestions for improvements. I don't really have a good feel for how much explanation is needed, or when to include screenshots, so I'll be adjusting based on feedback.

Episode 1: I DON'T KNOW WHAT WE'RE YELLING ABOUT

Loving this by the way. Learning so many tricks, though I've won on nightmare with summoner, I'm not an insane player usually. Looking forward to the rest of the series.

This is actually fairly entertaining, I didn't think I'd like any non-video gameplay stories. Probably has to do with you seeming to actually know what you are doing with your character so one can learn something new.

How would you rate summoner for Insane difficulty? Like on a scale of 1-6 stars like bpat's great classification.

I don't remember the way bpat classified things, but here's generally what I think about Summoners on high difficulties.

Peak potential: 5/5. Summoners can abuse terrain and line of sight like nobody's business. A lot of classes have one or two talents that can attack from out of line of sight; but every summon can attack from out of line of sight. Being out of LoS is like having perma-Unstoppable; almost nothing can touch you. And since most levels have terrain to hide behind, if played correctly Summoners are invulnerable to harm most of the time.

Ease of play: 2/5. Some classes have powerful passive defenses, like Solipsists and Oozemancers, and they can sort of get away with autoexploring. Summoners are in the same boat as Archmages, in that they're passively very squishy, so autoexploring is even more of a death sentence than usual. But unlike Archmages, Summoners can't press a single button to become invincible, or even just to kill a weak enemy. So mundane exploring and fighting take a lot longer, and that can wear on your patience. That sounds sort of trivial but inattentiveness is a big killer in ToME in general, so I think classes that require you to press more buttons and pay attention to stuff have an actual higher chance of dying, unless you're a robot.

Raw power: 3/5. You have heals, confuse and stun that basically can't be saved against (coming off of >100 physical power), huge -resists, a summon with Taunt, satisfactory AoE damage, no real resource constraints due to Jelly/Rimebark, and pretty good damage in general. But on the other hand the class has no personal defenses, or ways to deal with status, and the majority of its damage comes in the form of melee, which has a lot of counters (evasion, knockback, invisibility). So you do end up being dependent on "tricks" like Summon Control or abusing LoS, when it comes to more dangerous fights.

... b... bwhahahaha! oh, the yeek thing is hilarious.

and how is that you have 0.5 statpoints?

On Insane you only get 2.5 points per level up instead of 3.