For those of you outside the elitist circles I am a retired three times Madness winner. If you use the international competitive standards, only my Possessor win counts, but nevertheless my wins are:
- [1.2.3] Wildfire Archmage: blazeit420 (https://te4.org/characters/126735/tome/ ... 346a8ce5a5)
- [1.4.2] Dual-staff Arcane Blade: SHIBARIXMEX (https://te4.org/characters/126735/tome/ ... 3f986a0a6c)
- [1.5.5] Possessor: p2w (https://te4.org/characters/126735/tome/ ... 128055e44f)
I’m going to be covering Archmage and what made it great, the nerfs that followed and why I think you can still win Madness.
Archmage
What made Wildfire Archmage the best class?
Archmage was a Madness win waiting to happen. My win came ahead of nerfs to Marauder/Berserker which were able to dish out a lot of damage and use Unstoppable to remain immortal during combat. Archmage had the next best thing: the ability to remain almost immortal.
Shields are just a number
Archmage has access to several types of damage shields, which all stack and were doubled in power by using Aegis:
- Temporal Shield – A strong early game shield that lowered negative effect durations with a long duration.
- Displacement Shield – This has never been good. Back then it used to trigger last in the chain of shields meaning you had to expose your health pool. Nowadays it is still bad due to the mana cost being quite high.
- Disruption Shield – The way this used to work was that damage you took would be converted to mana at a rate of 0.15. If you went beyond your max mana it would break. This meant you had to pre drain mana and manually manage it. A hassle but not too material for Madness. Of course, this meant that with around 1,000 empty mana you would get EHP of around 6.5k. Heroism was a great way to generate empty mana as it increased your WIL and also gave some -HP.
- Arcane Shield – This sustain converts any heals you receive into a short duration damage shield. The obvious combination here is with Arcane Reconstruction which heals for around 800 and would generate a shield of 400… Doesn’t sound that great right.
What about status effects?
Having massive EHP is meaningless if you can get perma stunned/locked out by status effects. Wildfire Archmage had a few ways to deal with this:
- Movement Infusion – Stun was the most common and dangerous status effect. Movement infusions gave you immunity for a few turns which allowed you to circumvent the most threatening effect in the game.
- Cleansing Flames – 50% chance every turn to remove a negative effect from you. In combination with Blastwave in a Stone Wall you could quite easily cleanse effects. There is nothing that compares to this other than immunity to status effects…
- Draconic Will – 15 turn cd with a 5 turn duration that could be extended and cd reduced. It completely removes a significant aspect of the game. Quite often these sorts of abilities are broken and this is no exception.
You know you have to actually kill stuff?
This is ultimately the biggest shortfall of Archmage – it takes forever to kill anything (50 hours to be precise). There are a few ways to give yourself an advantage:
- Corner sniping – Using zig zag tunnels you can aim your Fireflash and Inferno diagonally hitting things even if they can’t see you. Do I need to explain why this is good?
- Cleansing Flames – Vitality used to be a huge issue because it scaled off max HP. This was the only way to remove it.
- Disperse Magic – Removing Blurred Mortality or other EHP sustains was a good way to deal effective damage.
- Wildfire – Being able to focus everything into fire made things not as bad.
What about positioning?
Often overlooked but where your enemies are is probably uniquely important to Madness. If you know where enemies are you can easily corner snipe or recover accordingly:
- Zig zag tunnels – Using Pulverizing Auger you can dig into walls and create zig zag tunnels. You will develop a compulsive disorder if you don’t already have one. Yes, I did turn maps into zipper embroidery. In an ideal world you would face every enemy in the game one to one with the ability to rest in between. The zig zag tunnels allow you to mostly force that condition. Like Draconic Will it allows you to warp/ignore core game mechanics.
- Movement Infusion – In addition to immunity you can use this to traverse zig zag tunnels quickly and effectively. It also allows you to get a clean Stone Wall off as enemies will keep the tile you are trying to block open.
- Arcane Eye – You can tag this on to any creature (including yourself) for a free spy service. Using it on yourself is a good way to bypass stealth. Again, ignoring game mechanics is generally strong.
- Vision – This let’s you know where to place Arcane Eye and speeds up zig zag tunnelling, so you don’t accidentally dig into another room. Archmage has wall hacks basically.
All the above was supported further by spell cd reduction from Quicken Spells (30%) and the two spell cd egos from pickaxe and boots (20%) – bringing your spell cd to 50% overall.
Shalore also played a role by adding exactly what we wanted the most, spell crit chance and mod and Timeless to extend effects and decrease cds/status effects.
Disperse Magic had a low 7 turn cd which allowed you to remove all the annoying sustains such as Essence of Speed or others.
Stone Wall had the perfect duration allowing for rotations of 15 turns of cd and 5 turns of active combat lining up perfectly with Draconic Will, Bathe in Light and Arcane Reconstruction.
Archmage also didn’t really rely on any Artifacts, just aiming for the above and you were good to go.
What about the other Archmages?
The other types of Archmage either relied on applying status effects to be good (Ice/Storm), which is almost impossible on Madness due to high enemy saves, or just did not match the power/versatility of Wildfire (Arcane/Stone).
Present day
Nothing lasts forever. Most of the above has effectively been dismantled either directly or indirectly.
General mechanics
Some might say these are what made Madness truly great:
- Drowning – At the start of the game you could visit Last Hope (I made an addon to do this automatically) to drown boss/elite citizens. You would get their exp and their items (these were Tier 5), which smoothed out the early game. This has been completely removed, you now start out with some more exp but no items to get you going.
- Point scumming – You used to be able to respec your abilities at any point, which meant, with enough dedication you could float the last few points in between using active skills to treat all of them as being 5/5. This was, as you can imagine, incredibly tedious. Nowadays you can only respect 4-5 turns after engaging in combat so there are some limited applications with Stone Wall if you feel adventurous.
- Stair dancing – It was possible to go up stairs at any point. This didn’t really matter for Archmage but it meant you could kill an enemy quickly and then retreat safely and redo all your buffs.
- AI improvements – Enemies will cast Disperse/Corrupted Negation more frequently.
There are two ways to win a game: winning it and getting everything you used to win nerfed:
- Disperse Magic – Used to be 7 turns of cd now it’s 25. Obviously not being able to use this as frequently sucks. A new rune was added so everyone has access to this.
- Movement Infusion – No longer grants stun immunity. This is probably not a big deal for Archmage but I imagine this severely hurt other classes. You still need this to make effective use of the zig zag tunnels.
- Heroism Infusion – Severely nerfed and no longer grants stats. This was great to stack with other shields and to use the empty mana for Disruption Shield.
- Draconic Will – Now has a fixed cooldown and cannot be extended. Again, this is probably something that hurts other classes more as the duration/cd still match up fine with Stone Wall.
- Timeless – Now has a fixed cooldown and so does not benefit from being reset with Metaflow or the spell cd reductions. This was a significant nerf. It’s still somewhat good but not as broken as it used to be. It was never essential for the build but added an extra layer of security.
- Disruption Shield – This has been “fixed”, and I mean that in the pet sense. Now you will lose mana instead of gaining it and the amount it can absorb generally is considerably reduced. It is probably only a bit better than Temporal Shield. To make matters worse this marks the beginning of Archmage’s mana problems. It is almost impossible to sustain expensive spells at the risk of reducing your EHP significantly. This change has probably gutted the class than any other.
- Stone Wall – Used to be 40 cd now it’s 60. You will need to use Stone Wrap if you want to reliably use Stone Walls.
- Bathe in Light – This spell became infamous to the point that Anorithil escorts had to be removed. Amusingly the first “round” of nerfs ended up buffing the heal mod this gave, making it even stronger. Either way it is now no longer accessible, which really begs the question: what are you even spending your generics on now?
A short Arcane Blade intermission
My second win involved abusing the changes to the spell procs available to AB. Pulverizing Auger is a beam spell which benefits from the accuracy bonus present on staffs (and short staffs), effectively converting any accuracy you have above defence into a bonus to your Pulverizing Auger triggers. Add to this the Mercy proc (which is physical damage as a % of missing HP), in addition to the Physical damage bonus from AB and you have one of, if not the, highest damage dealer in the game.
This class shone bright but not for long:
- Staff accuracy bonus – Was nerfed into oblivion – you now have to use shields which will not benefit you spell damage.
- Earthrunes hat ego – You used to be able to get level 1 Stone Wall on wizard hats. AB needed this along with Stone Wrap to effectively chain shields and abilities as they do not have access to Metaflow. Without this you are unable to sustain the short bursts of high shields.
- Burrow mindstar ego – You used to be able to use this with a Movement Infusion to quickly zig zag tunnels. You can still use Pulverizing Auger, I guess. It is now removed, enjoy more tedium and if you are not AB, AM or Archmage good luck making zig zag tunnels.
- Disruption glove ego – This was also removed. I guess you can waste an Inscription slot for this instead now.
- Evasion – You could get a nice 30%+ attack evasion. This was significant as melee attacks tended to do the most damage. This has since been replaced with an irrelevant ability.
- Dirty Fighting – Minor one but this used to be a free hit/opener which was nice.
How can I pay money to win the game?
Possessor remains untouched from what I can tell. The abuses here are:
- Bathe in Light – Use projection and cast this/cancel it to cast this all the time.
- Shade – Make the Shade copy you and you double up on everything.
How can I win the game and still pay money but not with Possessor?
It is possible to win with Archmage in 1.6. I have neither the will nor time to do a full run but having tested the final fight I am relatively confident it is doable. In short:
- Ghoul is now Tier S – You can take a max 50% of HP in any damage instance and this is applied before shields (rather than after as it used to). This means that you can get to significantly high damage negation instances such that you can survive a few turns. Being a Ghoul sucks though as you don’t have access to Movement Infusion – this kills the zig zag.
- Technomancer – With a small donation you can access Embers of Rage and win the game. We are only really using this to pick up spider bots to add around 10 instances of damage avoidance. Oh, and we also get access to rocket boots which solves our Movement Infusion issue. The other tinkers are nice, but I would not bother investing further points. There is also a bug with rocket boots that lets you use them at no steam, but I don’t promote exploits.
- Stormshields – These are good to stack more instances; you could probably run two.
- Lowering your mana requirements – You will probably need to run two mana runes. Inferno is dropped as it is too mana intensive and you will have to make concessions in either Cleansing Flames and/or Burning Wake. Your damage will be lower but with Madness HP being nerfed this shouldn’t be too bad.
- Charm Mastery – All these free generics mean we can pick up this skill (and Track). Use this with Stone Wrap to reclaim the former glory of Stone Walls.