ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The key to this character seemed to be skipping the optional dungeons for 5 levels or so... a couple of previous versions died against the assassin, et al. This one was a Thalore and the nature affinity was nice but likely unnecessary.

This Doomed was fairly standard with heavy early investment in Shadows. I prioritized that over all other things and they carried me through about level 25 when other skills started to develop.

I picked up the Psionic/Feedback category from my first escort and I unlocked it on a lark and it was... extremely helpful. I took this category 1/1/1/0 until around level 30 and it held up nicely. I eventually finished it at 2/1/2/0. I set the first skill, Resonance Field, on auto-use as it's instant and it proved quite helpful in mitigating damage. When paired with Deflection and even Gesture of Guarding and the Doomed proved extremely adept at mitigating damage. I also picked up two points in Vitality, which is always extremely helpful. The end result was a Doomed was hard to hurt, healed constantly from various sources, and was ultimately very, very hard to kill.

I went anti-magic out of habit and am firmly convinced that this was a mistake. The tweaks to Fungus, anti-magic, and the improvements to utility items and runes recently have, in my opinion, rendered this an inferior option. A stormshield rune or two would have made me even more unkillable. I think an undead Doomed might even be viable on Nightmare with a little escort luck.

My primary non-Shadow damage was Punishments and eventually Unseen Force paired with Mental Tyranny prodigy. Pretty classic.

Essentially, I was so hard to hurt significantly that my shadows finished off most anything and I basically bump attacked my way through most of the game until I finally, very late, unlocked Fears with my last category point. After that... I could have played the game blind.

EDIT: I should point out that I didn't do the underwater dungeon after the Old Forest until right before Dreadfell as I didn't yet have a good movement infusion.

Delmuir wrote:I picked up the Psionic/Feedback category from my first escort and I unlocked it on a lark and it was... extremely helpful. I took this category 1/1/1/0 until around level 30 and it held up nicely. I eventually finished it at 2/1/2/0.

Could you say more about your reasoning here?

I find that taking Resonance Field from an escort is nice for high-mindpower characters, and have occasionally taken Conversion as well, but I've never considered spending a category point on Feedback from an escort. What about it makes it worth a category point, especially if you're not bothering to invest in Conversion or put more than one point in Resonance Field?

Like I wrote, I did it on a lark. There was no reasoning or plan or strategy. It was an instinctual experiment.

As always with Doomed, I was short on generics and I'd gone anti-magic but I think this might have been a mistake as it did prevent any serious investment in Feedback. Ultimately, it was mostly driven by resonance... 50% damage reduction on an instant skill with zero effective cost and a reasonably short cool-down?

My future reasoning will be this:

The Thalore has a solid heal in 1.6 in its racial category but it requires some investment and there are some very, very, very good damage mitigation runes and utility items. I think the category point is better spend on another inscription slot. It's not even clear to me that I needed the Fears category, though I'm less confident in skipping that.

Feedback's resonance skill only has a 15 turn cooldown and with investment it can mitigate a significant amount of damage. It pairs well with the Doom's Deflection shield there's no managing equilibrium or similar. I'm not going to argue that it's ultimately better than anti-magic/fungus but it is cheaper and easier to manage.

Amplification and Biofeedback pair together nicely and offer some low-level healing. I never used Conversion but maybe with a proper investment it'd be worthwhile...

Ultimately, it simply came down to this:

1. Doom is a relatively close quarter combatant and you will take damage.

2. Hate constantly degrades and so it pays to be a little stingy with it.

3. Feedback allows you to mitigate a lot of damage and gain a little bit of regular healing without draining your primary resource and by consuming a resource (basically incoming damage) that is in constant supply.

I'm a huge fan of picking up skills (especially sustains but that's another matter) which use a secondary resource. This isn't quite that but the effect is reasonably strong. Again, is it better than picking up anti-magic or just a good compliment? Should I invest heavily or spread around points? I don't know but experience with this game has taught me that spreading around points is usually better than investing heavily so long as the skills in question compliment each other.

Once you have a roster of active skills that you can cycle through (depending on cooldowns) then fill out your talents with sustains and instant effects.

That's about all that went into my reasoning.