ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

After winning on that character https://te4.org/characters/112505/tome/ ... beb702dc0c i see, that my build optimized pretty poorly. But even with that, this walkthrough was like a breeze.

Remarks to build:
- Wild-gift / Harmony pretty useless (besides sustain speed bonus, but i don't want hurt myself to get this buff). Other then that, i don't saw any possibility to use Waters of Life, even when i have poison status effect on me, therefore 2 points wasted.

- Device mastery worth maxing, especially with + 9 from Improved Form. With Will of Ul'Gruth & Plate of the Blackened Mind i have plenty of attack skills.

- Got waraxe with projection & cripple_on_crit ego on first try from Old Man https://te4.org/games/addons/tome/mex-startrebalance That weapon carried me through all west & some east. At the beginning didn't even realized how lucky I was. Perfect for crowd controll spreading detrimental status effects (slow + cripple + gloom + blind + ...). With start in last hope & char recycler addons it should be not so hard to get anyway, take a look on them.

- Have 5 remaining class points, but no place to spend, because went with 1h + mindstar. Balance in solipsism tree actualy can be bad, if your other saves higher than mental.

- For more min-maxing worth pick an ogre with tinkers. And maybe even dagger mastery with proper body.

- You cannot make full use of corrupted strength, because swiching gear allowed only in native form.

- Furnace, Mow Down sustains that works even without steamsaws, worth spotting them. Automated Cloak Tessellation also good choice.

Videos:
Final fight https://www.twitch.tv/videos/156131888
Forgot to show gear stats in previous video, so here it is:
Gear/stats and Athamaton https://www.twitch.tv/videos/156139617

I've thought a lot about Possessors. I do think they are significantly above the fold in a non-specific assessment of "facerolling power," however defined, but I also think there's a separate effect here that isn't automatically contained in that phrase. Specifically: as you increase the game difficulty the game asks all non-Possessor classes to accomplish more difficult tasks with the same resources. This isn't a complete model of game difficulty scaling, as the difficult tasks accomplished (killing higher tier and higher level enemies) yield much better item rewards at higher difficulties (particularly killing uniques and bosses, who are much more common on Insane and drop something like 8 items rather than 1), but it's adequate to express the difference between Possessors and non-Possessors. There is a point where a non-Possessor character has hit max level and optimal- or near-optimal gear where every opponent is only an opportunity to lose, not an opportunity to improve, and in particular as late-game vault enemies can dramatically over-level the character (100+ level enemies vs 50th level character) and may combine talents from multiple classes in lethally synergistic fashion you may wish to avoid seeking them out because they can only worsen your odds of completing the game.

This does not happen for the Possessor. If you encounter an arbitrarily powerful randBoss in a Farportal or High Peak vault, and you're able to Possess and kill it, you gain access to a significant fraction of its power. This means that, potentially in an absolute sense and certainly relative to the other classes that we've used to establish our expectations of game difficulty scaling, Possessors become more powerful as the game difficulty increases.

Which, combined with their high learning curve, means they're a terrible class to learn the game on, but a really fun alternative playstyle when you're tired of other TOME content.