ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Edit: Fix'd, not abusable anymore.

My bad if this is already known, but I've never heard anyone talk about this.


Dark Empathy is mostly known for its ability to keep your skeleton mages from boring holes through the back of your head with lasers.
But it has another effect that frequently gets overlooked. It passes a percentage of your saves and resists to all your minions.

As it turns out, there's a quirk with that resistance pass. It doesn't check your final, capped, resistance value, but rather your unmodified total. And nonplayer characters are not limited to maximum resistance of 70%.
Dark Empathy, if 5/5'd with an amulet of perfection and/or a category mastery point boost, and a lot of spellpower, can pass well over 100% of your resistance to minions.
A lot of people know by now that phase door runes get a buttload of res all, and it stacks with pain suppression from wilds.

And most importantly, created minions receive that resistance on creation, and it doesn't change thereafter. Same deal with SW clones, and probably all other summons.
Double most importantly, enemies killed with animus purge receive this bonus as well.

The first image is below, taken from my lv 43 nonlich necromancer with awful gear who has no idea what he's doing. He animus purge'd a summoner rare, and I summoned a warhound through him.
The second is from a dev mode character, leveled to 50, wearing +Spellpower fixedarts in every slot, at something like 2.03 necrotic mastery from amulet/cat point, and using spellsurge to pump spellpower higher. Just to demonstrate the still-attainable-but-unreasonable upper limit you can get here.


Unoptimized Lv43



Near ideal dev mode Lv50




Pre-edit: Just a moment ago I animus'd this guy with that same character.




Edit: Turns out that stacking spellsurge is sufficient to get spellpower high enough to make Dark Empathy incredible. This is my live character, not the dev mode guy.

Nice

omg. the possibilities are endless....

i guess it will get nerfed now

Unlikely, since they tend to decay away anyway.

The most powerful and relevant thing here is that husks created from animus purge can be given >100 res all with a little difficulty. Those guys don't decay period, even if you turn Necrotic Aura off or have it dispelled. And those husks get stronger with difficulty, since you get a buffet of ever more powerful rares to choose from and guys like summoner rares are super threatening. That champion of urh'rok in the OP cleared the room of death solo; I opened the door, walked around the corner, and waited a few hundred turns.
On Normal, purge will be less relevant, but on the other hand having such durable skeletons makes them genuinely useful even if their damage is poor. Clearing the first pride, I only lost two minions.

Decay is not irrelevant, but neither a major factor. Between spell cooldown improvements or 5/5 aura, you can have Nec Aura dispelled and still rescue your minions, even in battle.

jenx wrote:omg. the possibilities are endless....

i guess it will get nerfed now

I wouldn't be surprised to see empathy changed to pass only the percentage of your max 70% resistance (or 85% as lich, not that they could get it that high). Right now, I am pulling 146% res all on minions with the appropriate rituals, though doing so on husks is harder thanks to whatever's up with out of phase.


Overall this is pretty strong stuff - I was literally going to suicide that character because he is such a mess, has no lives left, and no hope of winning. Since then, he's cleared the armory and a few prides with no real danger and I think I have a legit shot at a win now.

Could this make Necromancer S-Tier now?

Micbran wrote:Could this make Necromancer S-Tier now?

no one has the patience to deal with sacrifice shield in order to find out, sadly

all orcs have respen too so they'll eventually kill the husks, not to mention enemies with specialised respen skills like AM/AB/ooze

Nice find!