Character Report of my Ins.Roguelike antimagic cornac zerker, my Character Report of my skellington Ins.Adv winner, and the sheet for my Ins.Roguelike Krog. There's a lot of post-win thoughts there, I recommend you take a look if you want more information. Also, the 1.5 guide on the forum isn't terribly inaccurate, so look at that too if you want more opinions. And there are always plenty of winners in the character vault whose builds you can analyze.
Overview
Berserker is simple. You bump into things, and they die.
Hopefully, they die before you do; and you have a couple tools to ensure that things go in your favor. Although the class is called Berserker, you actually have a number of okay defensive tools, so don't let the class fool you into thinking it's a glass cannon.
Berserker's really straightforward compared to most classes; your tactical choices in combat are sharply limited, although that isn't really a bad thing in my opinion; it lets you focus more attention on things like your positioning/tracking all the billions of things you need to keep an eye on in tome. A decent starter class, imo. Berserker is all about taking down an enemy quickly enough that they never have the chance to wriggle out of your disables and fight back properly. Not much to say other than that, really.
Although I said above that Zerker's not a glass cannon, it's worth noting that you have no notable sources of armor, defense, resistances, or damage reduction. Thus, you're forced to rely on different methods of survival. Primarily you'll be enduring weakened hits from stunned foes and outhealing them. Playing in a manner which minimizes absolute incoming damage (by limiting aggroed enemies or keeping enemies out of LOS when possible) help. Lastly, you have the ultimate last resort survival talent: Unstoppable.
I call this a partial guide since I have little experience with DLC material (don't even own cult yet) other than bits such as fighting random ember rares/bosses. You'll have to look elsewhere if you want extensive info on tinkers, zerker in EoR, dlc races, or whatever new stuff popped up in the cult expansion thing. A better player can provide more/better info.
Note: This guide assumes you're familiar with some basic ToME concepts like how Power vs Saves work etc.
Races
There aren't any unusually strong or terrible choices for zerker, other than higher/ghoul being on the bad end. Do whatever you want - some relevant things are noted below.
Seems Good
- Cornac: I like cornac - you can get Bloodthirst online and fill your inscriptions slots all by lv20, which is likely where you're partway through exploring tier 2 zones (difficulty dependent, though). You will have tons of spare generics to spend on things like antimagic/fungus or a weird escort generic tree if you like. I expect antimagic cornac berserker is probably pretty popular, though I haven't checked the vault.
- Drem: Haven't confirmed it (no dlc), but if spikeskin works with bloody butcher then that's effectively free phys res reduction against any melee bleedable enemies, all for 1 point. Frenzy is hard to dislike although we have few super impactful buttons to double - Twist the Knife seems the most interesting use. From below seems like an easy access out-of-LOS aggro talent which is always convenient to have.
- Dorf: Stoneskin outright blocks 15% of all incoming weapon hits even with just 1 point invested, which is nice, and more points will trivialize most melee enemies if you stack high armor sources. Stonewalking is a 1 point free escape that's handy surprisingly often. Other than that, between Power is Money (keep ~3000 gold on hand), daunting presence, and danger sense, you can get pretty major bonuses to saves (including a reroll on failed saves), allowing you to build for saves instead of immunities - a really strong option if you can attain relatively high saves. Unflinching Resolve will keep what gets through from bothering you too much.
- Orc: Just good stuff. Skirmisher is pretty valuable as a sorely needed unconditional source of resistance penetration, Hold the Ground is free cleansing, and Pride of the Orcs fills a much-appreciated complete cleanse role similar to Relentless Pursuit - When Unflinching Resolve is overwhelmed by tons of debuffs, just throw a bunch of effects off.
- Ogre: Alas, antimagic Ogre isn't really a thing anymore. Overall, Ogre's got good stuff going for them and every racial is good. Ogrewielding is strong since you have physpower to spare, and the benefits of an offhand dagger or mindstar can help shore up offensive weaknesses when you run into a huge armor or healspamming enemy. All the infusion bonuses give you some big honking utility, help you withstand damage pressure, and allow you to escape losing encounters.
- Krog: An interesting choice. You're Antimagic by default and have built-in stun & silence ability. These push you into wanting both Fungus & Dirty Fighting (twist the knife to extending a silence on a caster gives you the ability to apply >15 rounds of silence on a dude pretty easily), but you don't have the category points for all of Fungus, Dirty Fighting, and Bloodthirst as well as two inscrips, and therefore have to choose one to give up (mine gave up Fungus because lol 6k healing from 5/5 Vitality). As for the racials, they're all useful. Wrath is up to 8 turns of stun (nearly guaranteed if you go Dirty Fighting), Drake-Infused Blood is a useful passive even at 1/5, Fuel Pain is kinda like a ghetto inscription slot, and Drakeblood Strike is a much-appreciated high power attack button with lowish CD and silencing ability.
- Halfling: Halflings are similar but worse dorfs. Chance on hit to gain anti-melee bonuses, high source of saves, etc. Luck & indomitable are less relevant later game, since you'll approach max crit and stun immunity soon enough from talents and gear. Indomitable is almost obsoleted by zerker rage alone.
- Skeleton: This works...kinda, see my winner. Bone shield makes early game a breeze (still pretty practical lategame, too) and immunities are nice. Losing infusions hurts much less than it used to, and shield & reassemble make up for it. Lacking movement infusions would hurt a lot, but Never Stop Running takes care of your mobility for good, although you will need to rely on blink & teleport runes until then. Makes DEX a sortof ghetto CON substitute since it boosts boner shield by about 3.5 per point. Rattley boys are strong in shorter battles but the lack of long term sustain from regen spam is their big downside. Vile Life is a weird but workable substitute that gets pretty good depending on your crit and healmod totals. Ultimately, this works well in the early game and less so late.
- Doomelf: Pitiless doesn't appear to make any mental checks, so is fine for us to use. Haste is instant free pain suppression but somewhat weak without investment in WIL. Corruption of the Doomed is likely to grant you doublecasts of both Haste & Pitiless in any dangerous battle, which is when you'd most want them. Resilience mixes okay with Vitality and Scoundrel's Strategies (if you bother to take something that niche) - crit reduction is always appreciated. Overall there's nothing exciting since you're already pretty capable of permastunning most targets.
- Yeek, Thalore: Kinda similar - Wants WIL, has situational resistances, can summon. Global speed is always good. Treants in particular are brutal if you pump WIL (especially if you go ICCTW/PES). Works well with an antimagic WIL character.
- Yeti: Unfortunately the best stuff here overlaps with Zerker's strengths, although the passives are nice - Phys res is always appreciated on a pure melee class. Algid Rage is a weaker Stunning Blow, Mindwave's a weaker warshout. Resilient will provide a lot of healing when your CON & healmod start rising.
- Shalore: Timeless would be fantastic but it doesn't work with Unstoppable; not a whole lot of useful things to extend otherwise, although effect clearing is always a strong button to have. Grace doesn't overlap with Blinding Speed - staggering them is a bit less useful than you might think since most dangerous enemies don't survive the duration of either. Secrets isn't a huge deal since Zerker has good access to crit elsewhere. Shalore's most impressive talents, though definitely good, are not especially synergistic with zerker in general.
- Ghoul: Racial speed penalty is bad. You're forced to spend turns negating it and Retch puts frustrating limits on your comfortable fighting area/duration. Seems Fine if you can handle those problems. Later game undead lanterns give you a second Retch which is pretty cool.[/size]
- Higher: Racials aren't valuable, you're not pumping MAG, Bloom is basically useless (you might think it'd be good to provide infinite Fearless Cleave, but you can pretty much do that anyway). Pass.
- Whitehoof: Sadly, fearless cleave doesn't count as movement. The other racials aren't bad, just numerically too weak to be usable.
Most of your trees require a 2H weapon, but you probably knew that already!
Note: A bunch of comments below talk about 'floating' talent points. If you're not familiar, you can unlearn the last few points you spend (the most recent 4 class talents, the most recent 3 generics), so if you want to boost Combat Accuracy right now but would like it to stay at 0/5 lategame, unlearn and relearn combat accuracy when leveling up so you keep the points spent there unlearnable.
Two Handed Assault:
Early 5/1/1/1+, 5/1+/3+/1+ Late
- Any enemy you can keep stunned forever is pretty helpless. The fact that this is two strikes is this talent's saving grace, and it is excellent. 5/5 it early unless you have another source of stun.
- Fearless Cleave is extremely good for a number of reasons, but points don't improve it much so can stay at 1 unless you have points to spare. Pumping it to 5/5 and using it as your main attack is a pretty significant boost in the later game.
- Death Dance is just a more powerful Cleave with Bleed added. You can leave it at 1 if you get other sources of bleed. At 5/5 it's as powerful as Windblade damage-wise if the bleed actually lands.
- Execution has a number of nifty uses (see the tricks section below), although it boils down to a ~double damage attack. Put points here as you like. I usually leave at 1 and go to about 3 lategame.
Early 1/1/1/5, 3/1/3+/5 Late
- Rush really wants a point or two early for the range, but alone isn't good enough to be your only closer. I usually leave it at 1 until late, relying on the best gap closer of standing outside of LOS behind a corner. It's handier for re-closing when knocked back without expending your escape abilities.
- Precise Strikes is for classes that don't get free accuracy/crit from rage/mortal terror. If you aren't pumping DEX, leave at 1 and never use it. If you've achieved max crit (or close enough that Zerk Rage will get it for you), leave at 1 and never turn it on. On Normal mode where you've got less access to powerful equipment, it's worth considering going 5/5 since you'll probably not amass much crit & acc from your gear.
- Berserker can one or two shot a lot of low armor/res enemies, and a couple points in perfect strikes means you can blow out hard-to-hit types pretty easily. I usually just float points here when I need to and lock them in near the endgame. Remember you can just activate any single target attack talent (including 'Attack') to auto target a nearby invisible enemy if they're the only one in melee range.
- Blinding Speed is good, giving you a couple free turns basically for free although with a hefty cooldown. You either 5/5 this or skip it entirely (typically if you have another source of speed - aka Eden's Guile or you're a Shalore). Use it to burn down dangerous targets during a window of vulnerability. It's also a great way to blitz down fragile-but-dangerous bosses like Urkis.
Early 0/0/0/0, 0/0/0/0 Late
- Floating 4 points here is strong in the very early game and can be worth it since life regen at that point is pretty darn useful, but most of the benefits are too hard to justify beyond then. Stamina is easily managed via Bloodbath even with no points here.
- Spell shield's only useful in the rare case that you're pumping saves hard and are ok with scrimping on your other class talents to pay for it.
Early 1/1+/3/0, 3+/4+/4+/0+ Late
- Warshout is your secondary defense when Stun fails, or your chance to disable a crowd long enough to reposition. It applies based on your phys power and so will land basically all the time and often land a brainlock, too. I found that Stunning Blow was sufficient to disable most dangerous enemies as so left this low until midgame.
- Berserker's Strength is hard not to use - it's one of your best talents. The massive offensive benefit of physpower, crits, accuracy alongside the very significant defensive benefits of immunities is really really good, so skipping it is hard to justify especially considering you can just offset the life loss with a teensy bit of +Life Regen gear. If you're undead, it's a good idea to ignore BS for a short while until you've got some regen gear or bloodbath is online.
- Sunder Armor is an armor buster early game, shield buster later game. Your physpower is so high as a berserker that you don't seriously care about reducing enemy saves, but dealing with massive enemy armor can be hard. Sunder works much less well in the late game...30 armor pen is better than nothing but facing some roided out bulwarks at 150+ means you'll just need to acquire other sources of armor piercing to combine it with. Shattering shields is a neat bonus but I need to test whether damage comes before or after the hit...
- Relentless Fury's good when you can trigger it. It costs a turn, but'll earn you several turns back over its duration (effectively free to cast at 2/5, and about 2 net turns gains at 5/5), not to mention the stamina recovery. You can deliberately drain stam with cleave to precast it, and is more convenient to activate with Never Stop Running, basically allowing you to cast it whenever you want. You'll also want a lot of points here if you use Unstoppable with any frequency - Unstoppable's high stamina cost often pushes you into a range where you can trigger this, giving you a free action or two and get your stam back.
Basically mandatory, open at 20 at the latest.
Early 1/5/1/5, 5/5/1~5/5 Late
- Mortal Terror is often considered a good pick only for its crit bonus, but I disagree. Sure, anything you can daze with this is doing to die swiftly, but can remain dangerous in that time even if stunned or confused. Bosses/Randbosses without sufficient defenses are easily dazed, and that effectively destroys their ability to hurt or disable you while you burn them down. Daze is really, really brutal; a dazed enemy is offensively completely worthless.
- Bloodbath is maybe your best source of sustain and is extremely strong when you first pick it up (execution is guaranteed crit and a handy way to refresh its duration). It gets better later game, not by scaling, but by being maxed out all the time.
- Bloody Butcher is zerker's only source of phys pen, and it sucks. Sure, the power bonus is much appreciated, but far too many enemies are bleed immune and you only have one source of bleed natively anyway. You might want a few points here unless you find sources of phys pen in gear, but don't expect this to be a highly useful talent. Dreadfell sucks really bad in particular. The one upside is that it drains enemy physical resistance rather than giving you penetration, which is a little better.
- Unstoppable can get you killed if you're unfamiliar with its quirks, but it's basically the berserker's defining talent. In a 1v1, you win if you can take the enemy down in 7 turns. With Relentless Fury and Blinding Speed, you can get yourself several more actions within that window. In a group fight, you don't need to eliminate everything before it ends, just enough to heal up...but beware, since anything that blocks healing will ruin your day. Don't be frozen when it ends, clean impending doom/healing nexus, etc. If you failed to kill anything then you need to escape danger, clear debuffs, or have a powerful heroism infusion ready to go when the effect ends. Keep these caveats in mind and Unstoppable will save your life a lot, and probably your run. Side note: Prematurely canceling Unstoppable manually still provides its healing. Another side note: Unstoppable costs a lot of stamina - 120 at 0% Fatigue. High fatigue can actually push Unstoppable's high resource cost up to slightly problem levels if your max stamina is low. Keep that in mind if you're skipping ICCTW, have low WIL, and like to spam cleave. You really don't want to get caught needing to pop Unstoppable but spent too much stamina ahead of time!
5/1/1/0
Ignore this tree. You don't have the class points to spare, but if you are willing to scrimp elsewhere, there's slightly useful stuff here.
- Juggernaut protects you from the most dangerous thing in the game: tons of crits. Phys res (of which it gives a lot) protects you from one of the other most dangerous things: enemies with preposterously high weapon damage. You can just get some gloves with it as a charm effect instead of going for the unlock, though.
- Onslaught sucks bad. Kill things instead.
- Battle cry isn't really that important, since every character has an infinite source of the best gap closer in the game: ducking around a corner out of LOS. Maybe worth 1 point as a just in case button.
- Shattering Impact isn't interesting. It's a large extra source of damage (in an area, too) and will wreck things. The stamina drain isn't even that debilitating, since Bloodbath is nearly recovering that much per turn, anyway. That said, zerker doesn't have great need of the area damage given dance & cleave.
1/1/5/1
Ignore this tree. You definitely don't have the class points to spare, but if you do, there's nothing worth your interest here.
- Shattering shout is overshadowed by cleave/death dance. Proj shatter is hardly relevant.
- Second Wind is for people without bloodbath/relentless fury.
- Battle Shout is the only reason you may want to take this tree - 25% health is great - but why not just take a heroism infusion with that category point instead?
- Battle Cry is for people without Berserker's Strength and Perfect Strike. Disabling evasion is slightly barely useful and that's about the only thing interesting about it.
1/1/1/5
Now this is interesting. This is a defensive tree, and with it you can pump your disabling ability pretty well. Normal high danger enemies like rare/boss patchworks are much less dangerous if you can pierce their 100% racial stun immunity or extend a silence/disarm until they're dead. I'm not certain that this tree is really worth the investment, but it certainly isn't bad.
- Dirty Fighting is half the reason you're here. Pull an enemy's stun immunity down 50% for 4 turns? Remember Stunning Blow is a double attack - this means you're looking at a 3 in 4 chance to stun a 100% immune enemy! CD of 10 is not bad, but keep in mind it multiplies enemy stun res by 0.5, it doesn't subtract by 50%. Enemy with 30% res will have 15% afterwards, not 0. Note, however, this sad and painful truth: Enemies with >100% resistance will crap on your stun attempts regardless.
- Backstab is nice, but the chances of you applying extra effects is pretty low. We ain't dual wielders. The damage bonus isn't strong enough to be attractive, but this is an OK place to dump spare points.
- Pocket Sand I mean Blinding Powder gives you a third way to disable an enemy on demand, just in case Stun and Confuse weren't sufficient. The uptime isn't especially great even at 5/5, but is just fine since you'd be using this only occasionally as a backup tool when stun/confuse isn't enough.
- Twist the Knife extends negative effects and rips off positive ones, attached to an attack with middling power. With this, your stun, confuse, blind, and possibly silence uptime get a major upgrade, and this can extend other useful debuffs like slow, cripple, armor corrosion, etc. I shouldn't even have to mention how good pulling down positive effects is. Great and definitely worth 5/5'ing if you open this tree. Applying an 8 turn disarm or silence is usually enough to render helpless just about anything long enough to guarantee an easy kill.
Generic Trees
Combat Training
- 5/5 Thick Skin. Put points in as you are able, stockpile CON gear if necessary.
- 3+ Heavy Armor. Fatigue's not a concern, but protection from dangerous melee rares/bosses is.
- 0+ Combat Accuracy. Float points as necessary.
- 5/5 Weapon Mastery. You can see how much damage it provides in your character screen; it's good but not colossal. Keep it maxed unless you have higher priorities for generics.
Early 1/4/0/0, 1~2/4/1+/1 Late
- Vitality heals pretty strongly if you pump CON and stacks with other sources of regen. This is actually pretty good since our general lack of reliable defenses outside of Unstoppable force us to endure & heal through most damage, but it's not especially strong if you aren't attaining high CON & Healmod. Debuff reduction is nice too, but you've likely got better areas to drop generics in.
- Unflinching Resolve is god tier, unless you manage to amass very high immunity to everything it removes (which one of my berserker managed just before going east). Bring it to 4 immediately, maybe floating points instead if you acquire extreme immunities.
- Daunting Presence is a bit underrated, in my opinion. It's effectively a massive boost to all saves scaling off our physical power (which is big and juicy), and for characters that manage to get high saves elsewhere you could 4+/5 this and just save against most effects instead of build for immunities. A dorf with this is looking at roughly a swing of about 100 raw value in his favor in all power vs save checks which is hilariously huge, and that's even before other talents or gear. However, if you're not going to go all-in on saves, consider 0/5 or 1/5. Reducing enemy power also hits their damage a bit but it's not notable enough to warrant investment on its own.
- Adrenaline Surge is not very useful for Zerker since you just don't run out of stamina. Worth a point late, as a 'just in case' button and stun/talent disruption bait, but it's easy to go the whole game and not miss it. Doesn't combine with Never Stop Running at all.
1/5/1+/0 or 1/5/1+/5
- Heightened Senses is convenient but not worth generics. Float an extra point here if you REALLY need the detection.
- Device Mastery is generally considered super strong, but that's dependant on your luck with charms and artifacts with useful powers. You can put this off until you've got some useful items. It combines very strongly with Swift Hands and is a mandatory 5/5 if you take that prodigy.
- Track is a contender for best ability in the game in my opinion, but that assumes you're playing on a difficulty above Normal. Knowing where dangerous rares and randbosses are ahead of time (and what they are and can do) is perhaps the most powerful defensive tool you can possess. Even on Normal, spotting story bosses is worth at least one point. That said, you can skip it if you've got another source of tracking (clairvoyance, escort reward).
- Danger Sense is great if you're going for saves instead of immunities (take 5/5 in this case), but 'meh' otherwise. Two opportunities to roll saves vs debuffs is busted if your saves are high relative to enemy power. Crit damage reduction is appreciated.
There's always the question of if you even want to go antimagic to begin with. Races whose racials are spells are no good. Otherwise, you mostly are concerned with two things: The point investment to make good use of Antimagic (both in generics and WIL/Mindpower), as well as the opportunity cost of losing access to all arcane-powered equipment. You'll be forced to pass up on quite a lot of good gear if you take Antimagic - lots of very nice standard artifacts are arcane-powered. Keep in mind that spellhunts, guardian totem, dissipation rune can be used by normal characters (remember that spellhunts will throw a fit if you have arcane abilities even from escorts) so you still have good options to shut down arcane casters without actually running full antimagic.
Early 1/1/1/1, 3/1+/1+/1+
- Resolve is handy, and retaining resistances to three elements means it's pretty likely that you'll be protected from the big dangerous element in an extended fight.
- Antimagic zone's silence is as good at 1 as it is at 5. Going full manaburn is pretty fun, although some bosses are packing seriously huge mana pools or ways to get around resources loss.
- Antimagic shield is great, but Zerker can't lower equilibrium easily. Leave at 1 unless you're going heavy in Fungus.
- Manaclash's best effect (unlocked when completing a certain quest) is the sustain removal which is as good at 1 as it is at 5. The manaburn can get pretty nutty if you pump it, but as mentioned above it's not quite as reliable as you might hope.
My own antimagic zerker left fungus for really late (lv42 I think) - it's not a critical tree nowadays but is very convenient once fully running. Keep in mind that Fungus really wants you to be pumping WIL/Mindpower and will be weak if you neglect it. If you're pumping WIL & Mindpower, this category can make up for the loss of an inscription slot IF you were going to use two regens - Fungal Growth can obsolete a second regen infusion depending on your stats & infusion luck.
1+/4+/1+/1
- Max life is always good. Wild Growth helps mitigate the loss of a normal character's access to chant of fortitude via escort. Mixing max health bonus with high regen from the rest of the tree is a strong pairing. The life regen is ok - between it and Bloodbath (and possibly Vitality), your in-combat regen is pretty high, even before accounting for your healmod. You can get hilarious regen if you find a good variety of healmod + regen gear. Being Antimagic, you miss out on a lot of good equipment egos and will probably wear quite a bit of this stuff anyway.
- Fungal Growth makes your regen infusions ultra good. A strong 12cd regen infusion can carry all your healing by reaching 100% uptime, if you find one. This is the main draw of fungus for zerker, in my opinion - your healing is more or less inexhaustible. Note: You get an extra turn of regen on regen infusions every 20% that the tooltip shows. Extra turn if >20%, another if >40%, etc.
- Ancestral Life is a lot different than it used to be. Now, you get benefits only from strong non-regen healing, which we don't have much of. Healing infusions, healing charms, sudden growth(?), all of these will grant a portion of a free turn if you can heal a decent amount with them. It does work well with Unstoppable, acting effectively as a one or two turn extension in best case scenarios.
- Sudden Growth is a strong source of instant healing so long as you've got some kind of regen active. Most likely you don't need this and will be strapped for generic points. 1 or 2 points is pretty close to a full heal if it crits, assuming high healmod and a strong active regen.
Keep locked. Alternatively, 1/0/0/0 or 1/1/1/1
- Waters of life: AKA the "i hate enemy oozemancers/corrupters" button. Not super useful.
- Elemental Harmony isn't particularly notable.
- One With Nature: It's legitimately a good ability, but its main purpose is to protect you from long-term pressure. Fungus has that mostly covered already.
- Healing Nexus: Doesn't appear to check against a save, it just hits for free. We don't need the healing ourselves (you're generally either at full health or about to full heal from an ability), although depriving enemies of their healing is okay. If you want it, 1 point ought to be fine. Goodness knows randboss bulwarks and the like with Vitality can be near impossible to kill through their healing sometimes.
Keep locked. Alternatively, 5/0/0/0
- Blood Splash is the only reason you're here. It can crit and is affected by heal mod. For undead, this is a pretty powerful draw and I highly recommend. For others, just stick with regen infusions.
- The other abilities require you to have high spellpower and/or beat spell saves and therefore suck.
I played a zerker that unlocked this early, and was really pleasantly surprised by how useful it is. Lacerating Strikes is nice and Scoundrel's Strategies is really excellent.
2/5/1+/1
If you do get a thief escort, you probably just want to grab the Lacerating Strikes directly, but you could take the tree and pump it.
- Lacerating Strikes gives you extreme bleed uptime which is deceptively powerful when facing high-health targets, and will really put Bloody Butcher to use. 2 seems a good breakpoint but extra points here aren't wasted unless you took 3+ in deathdance.
- Scoundrel's Strategies negates the danger of crits (you know that thing that kills you) on anything you attack by pulling crit mult down big time, and massive spike damage is always a huge concern in ToME. The talent most worth 5/5ing in this tree and I underestimated how useful it is. Enemies hit by you can easily have a sub-100% crit multiplier (not that this reduces crit damage below baseline, unfortunately). It can obsolete the need to seek out crit shrug or incoming crit reduction elsewhere.
- Misdirection is like having a second Unflinching Resolve and pretty much just as good. It cleanses more types of effects and does so before they even hit you, although with lower reliability than Unflinching. The utility of applying an enemy's effects right to them is hard to parse, but seeing a counterstrike go up on an enemy is an "oh BABY" moment.
- Fumble is less that practical in general. Few enemies live long enough to fail talents.
You'll have to ask someone that's familiar with tinkers. If somebody posts some good info I'll add it here.
Other
Notable Escort Rewards:
- Lacerating Strikes from Thief is good synergy with Bloody Butcher, as mentioned.
- Dreamwalk! It isn't very reliable as far as landing where you want, but it's a teleportation-type escape (requires LOS) that can pull you out of a situation where you're trapped in a hallway and about to die. For antimagic people it's one of the few non-arcane teleports left ever since psychoportation torques got obliterated. It's a bit better if you can push it above Lv1 via two+ escorts or Adept.
- Pumping Vitality, Unflinching Resolve, Heightened Senses, or Track from escort rewards basically counts as extra generics. This is more or less valuable depending on how much your racials/antimagic are eating into your budget.
- Disarm is reliable (your phys power is maximum) and a strong disable against weapon users. Enemies immune to disarm are pretty rare. A nice bonus if you can get it.
- Resonance Field is instant, conversion takes a turn. Both can crit off your mindcrit. They don't provide a lot of protection/healing even with pumped WIL & superpower, though.
- Skate is...okay...if you can deal with the colossal knockback immunity reduction. It's just not that impactful at one point.
- Chants scales with spellpower which sucks, but Fortitude provides valuable max life and a decent amount even at garbo spellpower.
- For most everyone else, just snag the most relevant stat you can get.
- If you're one of those people who runs Choose Your Escorts, consider just getting 9 Warriors and taking STR from each for that true Berserker experience.
Prodigies
Can't decide, and just wanna go smash things without thinking too much? Go ICCTW + Draconic Body. ICCTW + PES if you're antimagic.
- I can carry the world: A standard first pick. The damage bonus is juicy at 25, and passable later on. The fatigue loss/encumbrance nice extras. Although 50 STR is very impactful at 25, it's less so at endgame. Combos well with some of the other prodigies that key off STR, like PES/Superpower.
- Superpower: If you're going full STR/WIL antimagic/fungus, you can take this instead of ICCTW. You get less damage, but it'll jack up your fungus effectiveness and you can consider WIL ⅓rd as good as STR as far as determining damage bonuses from gear.
- Legacy of the Naloren: This is kind of like taking ICCTW again. In my opinion, Zerker damage is already acceptable with just ICCTW and doubling down on offensive prodigies is unnecessary. Get some utility or defense as your second. That said, you really do get some heavy power which has a notable benefit, see below.
- Never Stop Running: I really like this one. Tons of perfect-accuracy on-demand 'teleports' is incredibly valuable. It gives you scouting ability, escape ability, maneuverability, free turns, and the ability to trivialize otherwise brutal encounters. With stamina being plentiful and NSR on a 8cd, you are basically impossible to keep down outside of instakills or pins. My personal recommendation for second prodigy if you're undead who should probably consider it mandatory. Reset a losing battle at any time at almost no cost, scout into whatever rooms you like safely, skip entire rooms, skip entire floors, you name it.
- Attack/Shenanigan Prodigies: Massive Blow/You Shall Be My Weapon/Steamroller/Windblade/etc. If you're on normal difficulty, consider these as your second, just for how fun they are. 350% damage (or more) is crazy high, especially if you've taken ICCTW first. Expect to outright obliterate anything that isn't running super high armor/resistance. Windblade is basically a second 5/5 deathdance button.
- Pain Enhancement System. Well liked by a lot of players. When it procs, you're looking at a pretty major boost to, uh, just about everything. It's kind of hard parse just how good this is unless you try it yourself; depending on gear you can get well over 100STR and that's going to translate to pretty crazy bonuses all over the place. On a minor side note, if you're running fungus, the double boost to your max HP from CON and WIL (wild growth) is pretty substantial.
- Eye of the Tiger. I feel that this is an OK pick, as Zerker can get very high crit rates dependant on difficulty (one of my zerkers ended at something like 109% before berserker's rage). You can deliberately throw few CD talents at an enemy to kinda sorta game the cooldown effect, for example by only stunning blow/warshouts to debilitate more often, or death dances/massiveblows/etc to push damage, or just enjoy the boost to talent usability in general.
- Windtouched Speed: Take never stop running or eye of the tiger instead, imo. Might be fun to stack this + Relentless Fury + Blinding Speed + whatever other speed you can find and finishing battles within Unstoppable duration.
- Defensive Prodigies: Cauterize, Spine of the World, Draconic Will, Draconic Body etc. Kind of boring but also very practical choices for 2nd prodigy.
- Swift Hands: Much less frustrating than its past version. It grants you four 'item use' slots letting you activate items without wearing them. There are some really good utility artifacts that suck to wear, like Far-Hand, Eden's Guile, Broken Hourglass, and torques/wands/etc. There's a lot of neat tricks that this gives you so it's worth considering.
- Adept: +1.5 globally to all talent levels is interesting for three reasons. First, it'll generally provide some useful incremental bonus to all your critical 5/5 talents. Second, it allows you to hit breakpoints much more easily (no need for 3 points into deathdance for its secondary effect), effectively giving you a couple extra talent points, and lastly it improves 'external' talents like escort rewards and talents granted by equipment. Disarm at Lv1 is nice, Disarm at Lv2.5 is nicer. This can give you a wide variety of pretty usable talents outside the norm.
- Arcane Might: Lets you pump your weapon damage similar to how ICCTW does, except it has the potential to do even better should you manage to push MAG over 100. The Physpower bonus is of little use since Zerk has so much anyway, and odds are you have major Phys Crit already and low Spellcrit to take advantage of.
- Fungal Blood: An oddball pick but fits zerker reasonably well. Every infusion provides a small healing boost as well as totally clearing magic debuffs. If you're running major max life & healmod, the healing this provides starts getting fairly dramatic. Needs testing, but the instant healing from FB should provide a bit of free turn every hit if you've taken Fungus for Ancestral Life.
General Tips
So how do I build?
- Always max STR, it's your damage.
- DEX isn't that important to us beyond ACC and crit shrugoff - not a lot of talents scale with it.
- CON is the source of scaling for a couple of talents (notably unflinching, and less importantly vitality & relentless). Healmod and maxlife are useful if you're relying heavy on healing which you are.
- MAG is useless, ignore. If you're intending on some kind of staff wielding Arcane Might madman, you probably didn't need to read this guide.
- WIL is mostly useless unless you go Antimagic/Fungus and/or take Superpower. Stamina's not concerning enough that we want WIL for it.
- CUN is crit, and therefore sexy and handsome. Boosts very few talents, Track being the notable one.
For non-core stats, keep an eye out for life, armor, important status immunities - survival is more important than anything. Secondary importance: strength, physical resist penetration, crit chance, crit multiplier, heal mod, life regen (especially valuable earlygame), accuracy. Given that we're a brute force melee class, you need to pump your Damage+Armor penetration to beat armor, as well as physical resistance penetration to beat physical resistance. Keeping strength maxed, and up to date weapon, and Sunder Armor is usually enough to overcome most armor, but you'll definitely want to keep an eye out for sources of physical resistance penetration. In general, hold onto anything with unusually high armor pen 'just in case', since Bloody Butcher's penetration bonus is so unreliable.
Anticrit stuff seems more reliable since the crit changes in 1.6.7, but not a major concern on Normal. Egos like '-of the dragon' body armor, 'undeterred-' boots, rings '-of perseverance' are all pretty convenient sources of multiple immunities you can usually find in shops. Remember you can make rings at angolwen if you're not antimagic, and it's pretty easy to make a good 30% stun resist ring - all you need is a T3 ring and a piece of quartz. You only need ~50% for berserker rage to make you totally immune (remember that it doesn't provide immunities if you can't see any enemies! get dat blind immunity too)
On weapons you basically are just going to wear the best thing you've got that has sufficiently high damage. I especially like crippling for pushing up crit and keeping enemy speeds down. Anytime you find a weapon with heavy APR and/or phys penetration, keep it to deal with any high-armor targets.
As far as inscriptions go, one each of regen, wild, movement, heroism will cover most of your needs, with one more of your choosing. Looking through the vault, few use Healing, although I personally like it for its instant usage and poison/wound clear; remember that deep wound/poison are the most common forms of healing reduction; it even removes Sedated sleep. If you're Fungus & pump Ancestral Life, it provides a tiny bit of a free turn if you have a sufficiently strong heal.
If you a skellington, shield(replace with good stormshield later if you're playing above normal) & shatter afflictions are necessary.
Of your remaining slots, it's preference between...Blink/Teleport, as you might need one of since the lack of movement infusions cripples your escape ability.
Biting gale - it reduces stun immunity (practical!) and can incapacitate an entire crowd with no phys save check. Unlike Dirty Fighting it appears to just pull enemy stun imm down by subtracting -50%.
Acid wave rune's Disarm doesn't synergize as well as Biting Gale does, but lets you completely dunk on melee enemies regardless of their stun immunity. This mixes well with Dirty Fighting as you can extend the disarm's uptime. Melee opponents are often the most dangerous so this is a worth considering.
For distributing points early on, put a point in everything you will use and pump the good stuff, first of which is stunning blow. Float points into your choice (fast metabolism or warshout are both good), then sink those points into stuff at lv8+, like sunder armor. Most of your talents can stay at 1/5 for a long time: Cleave, DeathDance, Execution, Rush, etc. Things to prioritize are Stunning Blow, Sunder Armor, Blinding Speed, Bloodbath, Unstoppable. Once that stuff is at appropriate levels, spend points as suits your needs.
Your category points will likely follow the pattern of: Inscription, Bloodthirst, Inscription, Your Choice. Cornacs can wiggle another 'your choice' into the first slot.
So how does Zerker wanna fight?
Usual combat tips in ToME apply. Don't fight more than 1v1 against rare+ enemies if you can, always have an escape plan even if that escape is nothing more than popping a movement infusion to duck around a corner and get some distance. If you start losing a fight and notice you already blew your blink runes/movement infusions on the approach...then you're boned. Having two escapes is better than one.
Against regular old enemies, just bump them to death.
Against rares, you can get through most battles just keeping them stunned, then bumping them down. Things that escape or resist stun can usually be confused. Just keep an eye out for unusually dangerous traits or talents (massive weapon damage+penetration, talents like Inner Demons, etc). Generally speaking, open with a stun then sunder armor.
Anything more dangerous, and you'll have to do some threat evaluation and make a plan. Mages typically need to be dissipated/manaclashed first, then can be silenced with antimagic zone/mindblast (if it sticks) and burned down quickly. In fact, anything without high armor and high physical resist is only a few turns away from death, you just need to know what they can do to you in that time and prepare for it. Berserker is all about disabling the enemy just long enough to murderize them, be it from stun, confuse, silence, whatever. This is why melee classes with high weapon damage are dangerous; they're often stun resistant and armored and therefore too durable to slay before they can bring the pain. High level bulwarks, annihilators, skirmishers, and sawbutcher bosses are the most frustrating enemies for zerker. Expect that you will need to retreat & reengage several times until you get a favorable battle.
To handle dangerous story bosses, the setup is pretty standard. Once you're on their floor (Tempest 2, Dreadfell 9, Prides etc) make heavy use of Track to locate the boss and take out everything nearby that target without alerting them - beware enemies that teleport & flee which can warn other enemies. If the boss is sufficiently dangerous, dig some zigzag corridors through the level to retreat or fight through. Get as close as you can to the boss, equip specialized gear and precast whatever useful effects you've got, and either step into view to engage or use something to get their attention from around the corner (tentacle totem, egg sac spiders, artifact talent like devouring flame). Aggroing from behind a corner with minions is usually a lot safer as bosses love to open with their major cooldowns, and wasting those before engaging is a winning strategy.
Spellcaster bosses are made much less dangerous by stripping their magical sustains, and they're even more puny if silenced. If you can do both of those, they are basically 100% dead no problem. Melee bosses are rougher since you can't just shut them down. They're often disable resistant, reasonably armored/resistant, have regen/vitality, and are frequently dangerous enough that you don't just wanna slug it out. The better your damage+armor penetration vs their armor, the less problem you're going to have. There's not a whole lot to say here - keep some useful anti-melee gear around if you find it. You can usually win these fights without special attention.
Zerker tricks!
If you know an enemy's right around the corner, you can step in with cleave to get some opening damage in. You can also stand behind a corner (one tile behind where you can peek the corner) and cleave-step in when an enemy turns that corner. This is a common opener.
An enemy that fires a projectile next to you (but it hasn't hit you when your turn started) made a mistake. Use fearless cleave to dodge around the projectile and attack at the same time.
Enemies that stepped away from you in melee made a mistake. Use fearless cleave to close in and attack at the same time.
Enemies that summon adds in melee made a mistake. Use fearless cleave/deathdance to attack everyone at the same time.
Fearless Cleave might as well replace your bump in the lategame. With stam regen like crazy from bloodbath/gear/combat vet, it doesn't do much harm to your reserves. This is the main reason you may want to pump points into Cleave.
Don't open with Rush, let enemies close in on you themselves by ducking behind a corner, and use rush as a closer if you're knocked away. It's safer than attracting adds you didn't notice up ahead, anyway.
Execution, being a guaranteed crit, is a reasonably good means of deliberately getting a Bloodbath charge at a moment's notice which also refreshes the entire duration. You can also use it to start a fight by guaranteeing(sorta, crit shrug is a thing) an on-crit effect like weapon cripple although that's less practical.
You can precharge Bloodbath by hitting yourself.
If you have only one/two things on cooldown, a quick execute kill on a scrub enemy will reliably reduce those talent's CD by 2, which gives you a bit of flexibility in your abilities. I used this extensively with Bone Shield early game. Works with infusions too.
Track + Never Stop Running means all the scouting movement you want since time isn't passing while you're going. With sufficient max stamina, it's easy to sidestep entire floors on the prides and such, stopping behind corners and recovering stamina before continuing to the goal.
Never Stop Running lets you dodge High Peak bosses super safely; aggro them with a tentacle totem or egg spiders, then use Track to know when to move in. They'll never even know you were there.
I've just confirmed this, but Adrenaline Surge + Never Stop Running doesn't give you preposterous 'teleport' range by allowing you to move instantly at the cost of HP/tile. It just don't work.
Did I mention I like Never Stop Running? You can easily drain enough stamina to get Relentless Fury up prior to battle, if you want to be super aggressive.
Biting Gale Rune - Like Dirty Fighting, lets you stun normally stun immune enemies. Stunning blow is two strikes, so a 75% chance to stun a normally 100% immune enemy! It's excellent, since a stunned enemy is a significantly less dangerous enemy. Doubles as an escape since it tends to freeze dudes long enough to duck around the corner.
Mortal Terror can potentially earn you free turns. If you know there's no random damage source present that will break it, you can easily step away from a dazed enemy (useful to avoid retaliation breaking daze) and use charms/artifact powers/heal and know that your enemy can't do much of anything to hurt you even if he's casting.
Berserker's Rage is kind of like a third eye; it can warn you of an enemy nearby that's stealthed or outside light radius. I wouldn't rely on it, though, just a bonus warning of sorts.
Heroism Infusions get bonus duration the lower your life is - Use it at the end turn of Unstoppable (when you're probably at 1 life) for a colossal duration boost and safety coming out of the effect.
Orcs are common in lategame, and have an instant status removal on hand. They'll pop it in response to stun or confuse typically, so you can warshout at them ahead of time then stun in melee after they've used it to wipe the confuse.
Ancestral Life from the Fungus tree works off of Unstoppable's Heal, so if you're going antimagic, you can reliably get a free turn out of it.
Mortal Terror's ability to daze things like crazy gives you a ton of safety. It slices their offensive ability as bad as Stun does while also wrecking their power; if you're pumping saves, anything they try to apply during a daze turn ain't landing. Plus, you can actually take a step back from dazed melee enemies to get a 'free turn' of regen/CD reduction etc - they're immobile.
Unstoppable's main point of danger is the moment when it ends - you really want to have racked up kills to top off after. If you find yourself about to die from DOT post-unstoppable because you have no kill heals prepped, try summoning some spiders/bears from the relevant items and kill them - they count! Summon spider & dance is two turns for a 40% health (before heal mod) boost, which just might save your bacon.
Unstoppable has good synergy with Heroism - If at the end of Unstoppable's Duration, you're still in danger...pop that Heroism on the last turn. Since you're sitting at the lowest possible life, Heroism will get the full 100% duration & 100% Neg Life bonus, which for a good infusion is generally going to be in the -1,500 health @18turn range. This gives you a lot more time to turn the fight around.
What are Zerkers afraid of?
As mentioned already, a stunned enemy is a lot less dangerous - sure they can apply debuffs etc, but they'll be throwing their heavy hitters at half damage. And you can, with certain talents/runes, get around stun resistance or throw confusion instead. So what's there to fear?
Enemies can stun you, which means that they'll live longer and naturally come out of stun before Stunning Blow comes off CD (remember that being stunned slows cooldown by half!).
Enemies can throw off the stun in various ways - Lategame, expect to see every dangerous enemy in the Prides use their racials to escape your stun, heal up, and throw an attack all at once. Lucky for us, Stunning Blow's CD is low. Alternatively, you can throw a different disable to bait out the cleanse, THEN throw Stunning Blow - Rush is a reasonable choice for that.
Evasive targets can dodge both stunning blow strikes, avoiding needing to make a stun check to begin with. This is one reason to keep Precise Strikes/Perfect Accuracy in mind.
Talent failure is a thing. Not much you can do here but cleanse or try to play around it.
Lots of status effects are gonna ruin your chance to throw a stunning hit where you need it. Disarm, confuse, whatever. Try to pump up your important immunities or, boost your saves into the stratosphere, or have cleanses on hand.
Lastly, you will occasionally come across guys with so much damage it doesn't even matter much that they are stunned. Usually a result of massive weapon damage + huge APR + a method of throwing multiple attacks at once. If this comes with stun/confuse immunity, so much the worse. Engage carefully.
Hinted at above, Zerker is trash at dealing with three things: Healing spam, very high armor, extreme phys resistance. Together, it's a nightmare to deal with.
Phys resistance you can pierce...if you can bleed the enemy. Many enemies have bleed immunity as a racial. Dreadfell is especially awful. You're mostly out of luck here unless you gets lots from gear.
Early game, armor's not a huge problem thanks to Sunder. Carry a weapon with high armor pen and whatever else you've got (tooth of the mouth is handy early on). Between sunder, tooth, and a shearing weapon etc, you can take most armor users throughout the midgame to zero. However, Sunder falls off once you find enemies reaching armor values of 120+. Dropping armor by 30 is puny; you need more sources of armor pen. It's much less of an issue on Normal, though.
You actually can't deal with healing at all. Get a stingin' totem, bleeding charm or anything. Unfortunately, I found enemies were typically bleed/poison immune or shrugged off the effect anyway. Ditto with the Rod of Entropy - we don't have spellpower to force the effect to stick.
With all this in mind, Grushnak Pride is incredibly awful. Keep anti armor equipment on hand, the elemental fury ring, or pendant of sun & moon, any of those can help you bypass juggernaut spamming bulwarks or other super high phys res enemies. Insane Grushnak can get >160 armor; not hard for Zerk to punch through, but rough considering the phys res and recovery stacked on top.
Fortunately, by the time your sheet damage starts rising into the mid-high 200s or so, your sheer damage will be enough to power through most healing and armor, and after this point all you'll really worry about is extreme phys res.
This considerations are your main reason for considering going with two offensive prodigies; with high damage from dual offense prodigies none of this really matters since you will just rip through even these durable targets. I'm not certain if it's worth giving up a valuable utility/defensive prodigy for that benefit since just one will work...
Lastly...yes, you're super good at killing things once you've got in their face and disabled...but any strong enemy that's free to act will quickly tear you apart. A zerker needs to be fighting on his own terms. That's a simple enough problem to fix, though - retreat and reengage whenever things aren't going your way, and the sooner the better. Ensure that no fight is fair, and wreck things.