A guide for technomancer in madness difficulty (1.7.4)

[yutio888]

Successful Runs
An example ghoul archmage run: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... eWp1_APVOY
CharacterSheet: https://te4.org/characters/101395/tome/ ... 7c13284875

There are some of other several successful runs, which are not played in English:
https://te4.org/characters/101395/tome/ ... 6a02ebeb9b
https://te4.org/characters/101395/tome/ ... 7c77e9c2de

Why choose the occult technomancer?

1. Metaphasic Spin provides a lot of stats: ~60 spellpower, ~12% spell crit and ~5 mana regen. Besides, it provides a new equipment slot for steamsaw.
2. Arcane Dynamo also provides ~50 spellpower at max steam(note that Metaphasic Spin costs 10 max steam).
3. Free unlock of Physics and free points in this talent tree. Enough to make most important tinkers. Mana coil is extremely powerful, providing another 5 mana regen and 25% chance to trigger Lightning.
4. Reality Breach has very high damage output, applies Congeal Time to enemies (reduce global speed & projectile speed), and also destroys all projectiles on path, protecting you from Archers , Skirmishers, Corruptors, Gunslingers, Annihilators...

Escorts

It is recommended to use Select Escorts addon to gain Precognition in tier 1 zone, otherwise you might want to restart the game several times to get it. It might be possible to go without tracking talent, but I would not try this.

It is even possible to unlock Survival or Chronomancy tree for track, and not abuse the Select Escorts addon, but I haven't try yet.

You may also want Stone Alchemy or Chants, but it is ok to run without these trees.

Recommended Races

Orge and Ghoul. Cornac is ok but less powerful.

Orge can use Writ Large to double the cooldown speed of runes, mostly for Stormshield Rune, and Writ Large is affected by spell cooldown reduction, which is crazy. In late game when you have 60% spell cooldown reduction, Writ Large will have 10 cd and 10 dur.

Ghoul can cap any damage at 50% of your max life, making all shields much more durable.

Cornac can have more class points to use Spiderbot Shield, but is somewhat weaker than these two races.

Stats

Mag > Wil > Cun/ Dex/ Con

Mag for spellpower, Wil for max mana, Cun for spell crit, Dex for crit shrug and Con for max life & healing factor.

Defenses

Invisible

Invisiblity is very powerful in current version. Most monsters do not have see invisible, and randbosses cannot learn Heightened Senses now. There are only a few classes that may provide see invisible: Shadowblade, Cursed, Temporal Warden, Archmage, Anorithil and Annihilator. Therefore, invisibility is a solid defense tool for most monsters. Many talents requiring target will be very likely to hit empty ground, and weapon attacks will have an additional 2/3 chance to miss.

Mirror Image

Mirror Image is an extremely tanky unit which constantly taunting others. It can never take more than 1 damage per creature per turn, and can last very long. Besides, it can also duplicate your spells (if you target at the monster), and even Disperse Magic can be dupilcated. Note that if you don't want to waste the life of Mirror Image, cast your spell while targeting ground or wall.

Damage Shields

Archmage have many shields: Time Shield, Disruption Shield, Displacement Shield and Arcane Shield. Arcane Shield can provide 3k~5k shield at end game. Other shields cannot crit, but have longer duration, cannot be affected by damage shield penetrate, and serves as a backup defense. If you're Ghoul, then all the shield will become significantly more durable.

Stormshield Rune

This is one of the most powerful defenses for Archmage, especially if you're Orge. The lowest cooldown of stormshield is 12, and this will be reduced by spell cooldown reduction. With ~60% cdr and Writ Large, you'll have 3 cd stormshields, which is just crazy.

Dig

Archmage can use Pulverizing Auger to dig walls, within a few turns it will make a part of solid walls into a maze. It is very hard for an Archmage to be surrounded by foes in a map with many diggable tiles. In sandworm lair you may even use sand to bury foes.

Note: you can use Probability Travel to pass through walls, which means you'll have great mobility in your digged area.

Stone Wall

The traditional defense talent, Stone Wall, although has been greatly nerfed, can still serve as an emergency button. Most monster do not have the ability to destroy walls or pass through walls. With ~60% cdr and ~144 spellpower, Stone Wall will have 24 dur and 24 cd. It is possible to reach that high spellpower in end game.

Note: Galen's Flowing Robe can be abused to refresh Stone Wall, you just need to cast short cd beams inside the wall and let the 10% chance to trigger.

Disable

Archmage's normal disable talents are somewhat similar: stun, blind, freeze, knockback, all checking physical save and need to pass immunity. Congeal Time checks spell save, but has short range and slow speed, and is fully overlapped by Reality Breach. Aether Beam has silence, but comes with 25% trigger chance and is very unreliable.

Time Prison and Stone Wall can be used as single target disable talent, and passes immunity check. Stone Wall even passes saves, but it might be a waste to use Stone Wall this way except final boss fight.

It is highly recommended to have a cap of sanctity circle, it provides silence immunity and applies silence to foes (spellpower vs mental save). Besides, Stone Touch is also very powerful.

Rune of Acid Wave and Biting Gale can also disable enemies, work better if you're Ogre.

Attack

Archmage has many damaging spells, almost every class tree provides some damage. It is important to learn corner snipe talents, in early game you should choose Fireflash or Glacial Vapour. They can deal damage without seeing the enemies, making it much more safer.

Energy Alteration makes it easy to unify damage type, thus Archmage can make full use of all types of damage spells and the damage inc/respen stats in all equipment.

Mana Coil provides 25% chance to trigger lv 5 lightning, which is actually lv 6.5. Telos's Staff (Bottom Half) can also attach Mana Coil, providing another 25% proc chance, and is possible to trigger twice. Note that spell on-hit is triggered by damage instances, and Energy Alteration with less than 100% rate will double your damage instances. Thunderstorm can also trigger spell, and is worth sustaining.

In madness, some enemies may have extremely high crit shrug, and there are several ways to bypass this attribute:

1. Map effects and debuffs bypass crit shrug
2. Projectile that takes longer time than your turn to fly bypasses crit shrug
3. Arcane Amplification Drone bypasses crit shrug

Talent Choices

Core Class Talents:

1. Time 1, 2-4, 1, 3-5 Time Shield is good, and Essence of Speed is still important.
2. Phantasm 1/3, 1, 1, 2-4 Invisibility and Mirror Image should be learnt as soon as possible.
3. Meta 3, 5, 1-4, 0/4 Spellcraft should be learnt as soon as possible after unlock at lv 20.
4. Stone 2-4, 1, 1, 1/4/5 Dig is important.
5. Arcane 1/3, 1, 1, 5 Start to Learn Disruption Shield after you've enough mana.
6. Air 1, 1, 1/4/5, 1 ThunderStorm triggers spell on-hit.
7. Water 1, 1-3, 0/1, 0-3 Water takes few points and provides good damage & control in early-mid game. This can be replaced with Fire, which costs much more points and deals more damage.
8. Occult 2-5, 4/5, 0, 0 Learn these all at lv 25.

Core Generic Talents:

1. Divination 4, 1-5, 1-5, 0
2. Aegis 4/5, 4, 1/2, 1-5 Feel free to put all your left points into this tree to make your shield more powerful.
3. Conveyance 4, 1/4, 1-5, 5 If you unlock Stone Alchemy, then Probability Travel just need 1 point.
4. Heavy Armour Training 1
5. Physics 1

Useful Talents:
Metaflow: can be used after being dispersed, or try refresh important talents

Fireflash: good for corner snipe, and can be used before Arcane Amplification Drone to increase the burst damage Metaphasic Echoes: can be used to remove Rampage.

Aether Avatar & Pure Aether: can greatly reduce the cooldown of disruption shield, provide 70% arcane respen & ~35% arcane inc, ~33% max mana and cleanse 4 physical & magical debuffs.

Cleasning Flame: 50% chance to cleanses debuffs and removes buff from enemy each turn. Spiderbot Shield: Better than usual shield and stormshield, but has longer cooldown and very costy.

Stone Touch: stoned is one of the most powerful debuff if successfully applied.

Gem Portal: pass wall, very short cooldown

Prodigy

The second prodigy can be Arcane Amplification Drone, Aether Permeation or Cauterize.

Arcane Amplification Drone greatly increases your damage output, and bypasses crit shrug. You need to stack arcane respen to use AAD, and you may abuse this with Time Prison.

Aether Permeation protects you from Disperse Magic and provides you 40 spell power.

Cauterize is a lifesaver.

Runes, Infusions and Unlocks

Must Have: manasurge rune

Early Game: manasurge, shatter affliction, movement

I'd recommend you to unlock another infusion slot in lv 10, and choose a shield/stormshield. Or if you cannot find a good one, biting gale/acid wave is nice too.

At lv 20, it is recommended to unlock Meta, and learn Spellcraft to lv 5.

At lv 34, you may unlock another infusion slot and choose a shield/stormshield.

The last category point can be used to unlock Terrene, Aether, Wildfire or Stone Alchemy.

It is possible to unlock Stone Alchemy in lv 10, because Stone Touch is very good in early game, especially if you're Cornac.

If you're Orge, you can choose to unlock the sixth slot instead of talent tree.

If you do not have full silence immune and have found physical & mental wild, it's ok to replace shatter affliction.

Acid Wave Rune can be used to counter Cursed, and sometimes it's better than a normal shield rune.

Example Build Order

Ghoul Ver.

level	class	generic
1	2 Dig, 2 Illuminate, 1 Ice Shards	1 Ghoul, 1 Arcane Reconstruction, 1 Phase Door
2	1 Illuminate	Skip
3	Skip	Skip
4	1 Glacial Vapour, 1 Phantasmal Shield	1 Ghoulish Leap, 1 Teleport
5	2 Glacial Vapour(float)	1 Ghoulish Leap
6	1 Glacial Vapour(float)	1 Ghoulish Leap
7	Skip	1 Phase Door
8	1 Invisibility, 1 Tidal Wave	1 Retch
9	1 Glacial Vapour(float)	1 Phase Door
10	1 Congeal Time, 1 Time Shield
Arena		1 Phase Door, 1 Arcane Eye
11	Skip	1 Ghoulish Leap
12	1 Mirror Image, 1 Shivgoroth Form	1 Ghoulish Leap(float)
13	remove 2 Glacial Vapour, 1 Time Prison, 2 Essense of Speed	1 Shielding
14	1 Essense of Speed	remove 1 Ghoulish Leap, 1 Displacement Shield, 1 Probability Travel
15	1 Mirror Image, 1 Glacial Vapour(float)
16	1 Glacial Vapour(float)	1 Displacement Shield(float)
17	1 Time Shield	1 Displacement Shield(float)
18	Skip	1 Displacement Shield(float)
19	Skip	remove 1 Displacement Shield, 1 Keen Senses, 1 Vision
20	remove 2 Glacial Vapour, 1 Disperse Magic, 5 Spellcraft
21	1 Glacial Vapour(float)	remove 2 Displacement Shield, 3 Arcane Eye
22	1 Glacial Vapour(float)	Heavy Armour Training
Heart of Sandworm Queen	Skip	1 Arcane Shield
23	Skip	1 Aegis
24	Skip	1 Displacement Shield(float)
25	remove 3 Glacial Vapour, 4 Metaphasic Spin, 4 Reality Breach	remove 1 Displacement Shield, 1 Smith
26	1 Glacial Vapour(float)	1 Displacement Shield(float)
27	1 Glacial Vapour(float)	1 Displacement Shield(float)
28	remove 1 Glacial Vapour, 2 Disperse Magic	remove 2 Displacement Shield, 3 Shielding
29	1 Glacial Vapour(float)	1 Displacement Shield(float)
30	2 Time Shield

The following order are more dependent of your equipment and luck. If you've found some spell trigger item, or Mana Coil, then you may want Thunderstorm and Energy Alteration first. Otherwise you might take Stone Wall or Disruption Shield first.

Item

Must have: spell cooldown reduction

Before lv 25, you should find as much mana regen as possible. Spellpower, max mana/hp, damage inc is also welcomed.

After lv 25, you don't need mana regen on item any more. Find silence immune, global speed, spellpower, spellpower when crit, spell crit, crit mult, damage inc/respen, teleport effects, max mana, healing factor, crit shrug(Cornac).

Remember, if you are wielding one-hand staff in mainhand, you can equip steamsaw in offhand, as well as dagger, mindstar and Telos's Staff (Bottom Half). I prefer Telos's Staff(Bottom Half) because this saves a lot of money and can attach Mana Coil.

Due to Energy Alteration, if you're not planning to use Arcane Amplification Drone, you should keep item with the following elememts inc/respen: Fire, Cold, Lightning, Arcane, Physical, Light. They should be stored in your fortress. Note that weapons have some perfect egos that provide good stats and elemental respen, such as blazebringer, stormbringer, etc.

You should stack some lightning inc/respen, because Mana Coil triggers Lightning, and sometimes triggered spell is not affected by Energy Alteration.

Keep a hat of sanctity, and Pendant of the Sun and Moons.

Galen's Flowing Robe is extremely powerful, you can use this to refresh important talents with long cooldown, like Stone Wall.

It's worth noting that an imbued staff will change its spell if you change other egos on it, and a staff imbued with Suncloak is almost autowin for Archmage.

Go to https://te4.org/wiki/Ego to check the ego list before using Font of Sacrifice.

Tinker

Staff: Mana Coil
Other Weapon: Empty, or Crystal Edge if you want
Head: Focus Lens , +2 sight increases the stable teleport range of Phase Door
Cloak: Grounding Straps
Glove: Fatal Attractor or Iron Hand
Belt: Deflection Field, Back Support or Alchemist's Helper
Feet: Kinetic Stabiliser

How to play

Normal Tactics

1. Dig walls before combat and lure monsters in
2. Kite monsters and try keep out of talent range, using talents that hit out of sight, knocking back is also good
3. Invisibility and Mirror Image to reduce attack if in sight
4. Disable: use Flameshock to stun, Ice Shards & Glacial Vapour to freeze, Illuminate to blind, Stone Touch to stone, Hat of sanctity to silence the foes, use Disperse Magic, Cleansing Flames or Metaphasic Echoes to remove buff & sustains.
5. Defense: Stormshield, arcane shield, time shield, displacement shield... Use all the shields to protect you from damage.
6. Use Stone Wall to recover. You may continue to dig inside the walls, and sometimes monsters decide to attack each other if you are not in sight. Time Prison is also good in 1v1 combat.
7. Escape: Use Phase Door/Teleport to escape from the crowd, use stair/rod of recall to escape the dungeon. Note you should be very careful about using Teleport.

Remember to activate manasurge rune, especially in early game and after you've learnt Disruption Shield.

Resource and Buff Management

You should handle with your resources and buffs.

Before lv 25, you must keep an eye on your mana pool.

After lv 25, you do not need to care too much about mana, but steam becomes another problem. You need to cast spell out of combat to keep your steam pool full, besides you also want to keep your Spellsurge buff as well as many other buffs: Invisibility, Precognition, Stormshield, Time Shield, Arcane Eye, Out of Phase, Shivgoroth Form, Energy Alteration, Arcane Shield, etc.

In late game, you should be very careful, and before you do any action, check for your stormshield, disruption shield, arcane shield or spiderbot shield. You must have shields before you make any non-instant action in an uncleared zone, to prepare for an enemy sudden comes into your sight, e.g. teleported Archmage/Arcane blade/Shadowblade, rampaging Cursed, lightning speed Wrymics etc. Because Precognition has limited tracking radius, and the hunted effect has a different range calculation. It only checks for x-diff and y-diff of your position and the monster's position, effectively check a square of grids around you, and the corner of the square is probably not revealed by Precognition.

Enemy Classes

Classes with silence

Before you have enough silence immune, you should be careful about these classes: Sawbutcher, Brawler, Doombringer, Shadowblade, Anorithil, Oozemancer.

Doombringer's Fiery Grasp and Brawler's Grapple also checks pin immune, which can be gained by Feather Wind.

Sawbutcher's Explosive Saw is bleeding effect, and can be removed by tools with cleanse ego.

Shadowblade's Shadow Grasp is dangerous, dealing much damage, pull/silence/daze. Be careful and try use Mirror Image.

Anorithil's Circle of Sanctity has short radius, and can use movement to get out of the circle.

Oozemancer's Antimagic Zone only silences for 3 turns.

Classes with disperse

Archmage, Corruptor, Paradox Mage, Cultist of Entropy, Oozemancer, Brawler and Sawbutcher may disperse your sustain or magical buff.

Archamge is the most dangerous, Disperse Magic ignores save and can remove a lot of sustain.

Use hat of sanctity to silence the mages. Paradox Mage's Entropy is a debuff and can be cleansed.

Oozemancer's Acid Fire is a map effect and only remove 1 magical sustain or buff per turn. Just move outside.

Brawler and Sawbutcher need to be close to you and hit you to disperse, and the number of removal is quite limited, usually not a threat.

Classes with terrain change

Wrymic and The Writhing One can totally change your digged tunnels. The Writhing One's Overgrowth can be dispersed, and Wrymic's Burrow cannot be dispersed by Disperse Magic, but can by Metaphasic Echoes. Try to kill them as fast as possible.

Classes with see invisible

Shadowblade, Cursed, Temporal Warden, Annihilator, Archmage and Anorithil may have talents of see invisible.

Shadowblade and Archmage have Keen Sense, and Anorithil has Hymns of Detection, they can be dispersed.

Temporal Warden's Vigilance and Annihilator's Hypervision Goggles is tier 3 and less likely to appear. Besides their arrows and shots can be destroyed by Reality Breach.

Cursed is dangerous. Be careful about the Cursed. Blindside may even hit you outside the walls.

Extra Tips

If you target Ice shards at your Mirror Image, you'll fire a shot. Sometimes you can use this trick to fire two ice shards at enemy.

Heart of Gloom's boss may have dangerous shadows, and you can wait ~3k turns until they dissipate and the boss runs out of hate.

In Sandworm Lair you can bury enemies in the sand.

Reknor is diggable.

Vor Armoury floor 2 is dangerous, but the monsters inside have In Vault status, and you should lure them part by part. You may even use movement infusion and stone wall to sneak inside after you lure the most foes out.

Gorbat Pride is very dangerous, you cannot dig walls and there are Blinkwyrms that have Disperse Magic. Do it only before High Peak. When enemies are all around you, it is not too dangerous to Teleport yourself away from the crowd.

In High Peak you can stone wall yourself near the stair, and wait until the stair is empty, then use movement infusion & probability travel to go to the stair.

The final boss fight is easy if you have >130 spellpower. You can cast Time Prison and Stone Wall on the reaver, who usually have ~110 spell save, then use Circle of Sanctity on hat to silence the mage and Rune of Dissipation + Mirror Image + Disperse Magic to remove all the sustains. You can use Phase Door and Teleport to close all the portals. After killing the mage, you'll start a slow fight with the reaver, who usually has 100% crit shrug and ~110k life. It's not too dangerous, because you can still cast Time Prison and wait for cooldown if you're in danger.

It's still very dangerous to play with madness, have fun!

[Just a dood]

Besides the beginning and end, the text for the guide is really small for some reason

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[yutio888]

Besides the beginning and end, the text for the guide is really small for some reason
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Text size adjusted.

[Tradewind_Rider]

Hi!

Congratulations for winning madness with Archmage, and not just once but even three times, each time with a different race.

First, a part of your guide is unfortunately still “unreadable”, so very small...

I also played a bit with Archmage formerly and I played with Occult Technomancer too, and my experience is different.
At early-mid game, I found Archmage is very vulnerable. At the late-game with full late-game items of course Archmage is very strong,
the problem is: how to reach that point (and how to handle some crazy areas).

So, several questions came into my mind when I checked a bit your gameplay and checked your character.

I am not that experienced Archmage player, so please excuse me if my questions are lame or my calculations are wrong.


1., First question is about your zone-order progression:

Just right after you cleared Dreadfell and Reknor (what are enemy level ~50 zones), instead of continue the progression normally
(so instead of going to the Unremarkable Cave, what is an enemy level ~67 zone):

You just went into the Ancient Elven Ruins, what is an enemy level ~117 zone.
More interestingly, you easily cleared the Elven Ruins, and you also killed the Greater Mummy Lord.

For me, this is totally incredible!

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZXExT4 ... Y&index=17


E.g. with my Fallen, I failed to kill the Greater Mummy Lord when I arrived back from the East,
after I first used the Font of Sacrifice and already killed 7/9 Backup Guardians.

The Greater Mummy Lord is an incredibly hard enemy. It is level ~117 but it is an Archmage, Bulwark with very annoying talents.
So it is as strong (if not stronger) as a High Peak Stair Guardian. This means, you could also clear High Peak, and you did not went into the East yet.

What do you think, what enabled you to easily clear an enemy level ~117 zone and kill the Mummy Lord, just after clearing Reknor?

This is a guide, so do you recommend for other people to do the same? Clear the Elven Ruins after Reknor?


2., Second question is about the Total Playtime:

You won with your ghoul archmage at ~27 hours of total gameplay. This is extremely quick.

E.g. I am playing with an Anorithil just right now, and I just cleared the 4 Tier2 zones (SWL, Old Forest, Daikara, Maze) and some optional zones
(Halfling Complex, Hidden Compound, Lake of Nur, Ruined Dungeon, Golem Graveyard, Tempest Peak, Last Hope Graveyard, Spellblaze) at ~27 hours of total gameplay.
I did not even entered into Dreadfell yet.

With my Paradox Mage, it took ~ 57 hours to win the game.
With my Temporal Warden, it took ~ 55 hours to win the game.
With my Fallen, it took ~100 hours to win the game (ok, I did several Far/Strange Portals for items and gold with Fallen).

What do you think, what enabled you to win the game so quickly?


3., Third question is about your itemization:

I have noticed, you had to be very lucky with your item drops.

E.g. you have very high amount of maximum mana, even at the early stages.

At the beginning of part 8, what is clearing the Ruined Halfling Complex (you just cleared the SWL and Old Forest before this from Tier2 zones): you are level 24.

You have 417 max mana and you are sustaining 7 spells.

Spellcraft: 80 mana sustain cost
Shielding: 40 mana
Arcane Shield: 50 mana
Phantasmal Shield: 30 mana
Keen Senses: 40 mana
Essence of Speed: 120 mana
Probability Travel: 100 mana

Image_1_mana-min.png (74.13 KiB) Viewed 24715 times

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbXjJYe ... OY&index=8

At 00:01:10.

So this means, you have a total of: 417 + 460 (the sustain costs) = 877 max mana.

A ghoul Archmage at level 24 (54 magic, 44 willpower) has 431 max mana.
So without +max mana on items, you could not even sustain all of your 7 sustains.

877 – 431 = 446. This means, you had totally +446 max mana on your items.
After clearing Tier1 zones and 2 of the Tier2 zones.

Do you consider having +446 max mana from items after clearing 2 Tier2 zones as normal, or is it hard to get at this point?

What would you sustain if you do not find any or just few +max mana from items at this stage (so with your 417 max mana only)?


At character level 34, just before you enter into Spellblaze or Dreadfell, you have:

Image_2_spellp-min.png (131.88 KiB) Viewed 24715 times

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo11DDC ... Y&index=12

At 00:55:50.

119 effective spellpower
77% spell crit chance
60% spell cooldown
190% crit multiplier
79% lightning damage modifier
394 extra max mana from items

For me, these seems late-game stats.
Before Spellblaze, before Dreadfell.

119 effective spellpower means 414 raw spellpower.
Arcane Dynamo gives you 51, and a Tier4-5 Steamsaw gives you another 51.

But that is still 312 raw spellpower (102 effective), without being Occult Technomancer.

And you also had a really high spell crit chance, +40% crit multi, high damage modifier, +10% spell cooldown reduction and very high max mana too, from items.

Before Dreadfell I usually have 65-85 effective spellpower (spellsurge included) with a spellcaster (and I am going for highest spellpower).

How much the build is relying on powerful items?


4., Fourth question is about the build and “how to play”:

I have noticed: you are auto-exploring.

It’s a bit strange to me, because my experience with auto-explore: it is total suicide on madness.
But you have 3 different madness wins, so I guess, I am missing something here.

I did not watched through your videos, but I have noticed:

E.g. at part 8 (Ruined Halfling Complex) at 52:10 you almost died after auto-exploring into a rare Cursed skeleton.
You were at -44 life from 639 when auto-explore ended.

According to my experience, some enemies later can have even 400+% global speed and high movement/attack speeds also,
so even if you are a ghoul you can be one-turn-killed if you are auto-exploring.
They sense you and they can move next to you (e.g. 3400+% movement speed or Phase Door/Blindside) and then they can act several times before you.

What is your opinion about auto-exploring? This is a guide, so do you suggest for other people to use auto-explore on madness?


I have also noticed, you are keep using a level 1 (uncontrolled) Teleport through the whole game.

Part 1 (Trollmire): at 13:55

Your life went down to 120/296 and you teleported randomly.

Then you are kept using uncontrolled Phase Door & Teleport multiple times.
Then you are auto-resting, while enemies chasing you.


Part 22: at 4:00

When you entered into High Peak, you also started with a random Teleport.

What is your opinion about a level 1 Teleport talent, why do you use it? How reliable is it? Why did not leveled it up?


About the build:

I checked your ghoul Archmage, and it seems you did not spent your last category point at all.

Furthermore, you spent one of your inscription slot on Rune of Dissipation, what is in my opinion unnecessary on Archmage.

You are also not using any Stormshield Rune at all.

What is your opinion about category points on Archmage? The last one is irrelevant?

You also did not unlocked any advanced elemental tree, are they weak?

You did not used any Stormshield Rune, because you found them weak on Archmage?


You did not learned and did not used Metaflow at all. According to my experience, resetting your spells’ cooldowns is very useful.

Why? You found Metaflow weak / unnecessary?


You chose Occult Technomancy, but you did not learned Ethereal Steam and Metaphasic Echoes.

Why? You found these talents weak / unnecessary?


I have noticed, you start sustaining Essence of Speed really early, meanwhile you just learn and sustain Feather Wind relatively lately (and also just at tlevel 1).

Your sustain order is:

1., Phantasmal Shield (from part 1: Trollmire)
2., Essence of Speed (from part 2: Norgos Lair)
3., Probability Travel (from part 3: Kor’Pul)
4., Shielding (from end part 3: Rhaloren Camp)
5., Keen Senses (from part 5: Heart of the Gloom)
6., Spellcraft (from end part 5: from char level 20)
7., Arcane Shield (from part 7: from Old Forest)
8., Metaphasic Spin (from part 8: Ruined Halfling Complex)
9., Feather Wind level 1 (from end part 10: after Maze)
10., Thunderstorm level 1 (from end part 10: after Maze)
11., Energy Alteration (from end part 10: after Maze)
12., Arcane Power (from end part 13: Spellblaze)
13., Disruption Shield level 2 (from end part 13: Spellblaze)


Why was Phantasmal Shield the most important sustain for you?

At that early, it just gives a very few% chance to ignore damage instances.


Why was Essence of Speed (120 mana sustain cost) is the second most important sustain for you?

Why was Keen Senses more important than Arcane Shielding or Feather Wind?

Why did you sustain Feather Wind only after the Tier2 zones and just at level 1?

Ghoul has 50% stun/freeze immunity, but it was not important for you to cap it early, for only a 10 mana sustain cost?

Having 100% pin immunity and levitation (full pin immunity) was irrelevant for you?

You did not care about an early Grapple, Garrote or Fiery Grasp (these are pin effects and silences you)?

You could not use Wild Infusion to clear and you used a Stinging Totem early (no Clear Mind Torque).


Shielding and Arcane Shield was not that important early?


Disruption Shield was too weak for the early game?


You are just leveled up Invisibility to level 1 and Mirror Image at level 2.

You found a level 3 or 4 Mirror Image unnecessary? It was that overpowered even at level 2?


What was your strategy when you were Mana Clashed or Anti-Magic Zone, Acid Fire deleted your mana?


You are also using Elemental Fury ring from very early stages, through the whole game. This, I found really interesting.

What was the idea behind using Elemental Fury? Why was it good through the whole game?


Also, why did you found Arcane Amplification Drone that good? It has just a 30% uptime, no?


Sorry for a lot of questions, I know it’s many and thanks in advance for the answers.

[yutio888]

Hi!

Congratulations for winning madness with Archmage, and not just once but even three times, each time with a different race.

First, a part of your guide is unfortunately still “unreadable”, so very small...

I also played a bit with Archmage formerly and I played with Occult Technomancer too, and my experience is different.
At early-mid game, I found Archmage is very vulnerable. At the late-game with full late-game items of course Archmage is very strong,
the problem is: how to reach that point (and how to handle some crazy areas).

So, several questions came into my mind when I checked a bit your gameplay and checked your character.

I am not that experienced Archmage player, so please excuse me if my questions are lame or my calculations are wrong.


1., First question is about your zone-order progression:

Just right after you cleared Dreadfell and Reknor (what are enemy level ~50 zones), instead of continue the progression normally
(so instead of going to the Unremarkable Cave, what is an enemy level ~67 zone):

You just went into the Ancient Elven Ruins, what is an enemy level ~117 zone.
More interestingly, you easily cleared the Elven Ruins, and you also killed the Greater Mummy Lord.

For me, this is totally incredible!

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZXExT4 ... Y&index=17


E.g. with my Fallen, I failed to kill the Greater Mummy Lord when I arrived back from the East,
after I first used the Font of Sacrifice and already killed 7/9 Backup Guardians.

The Greater Mummy Lord is an incredibly hard enemy. It is level ~117 but it is an Archmage, Bulwark with very annoying talents.
So it is as strong (if not stronger) as a High Peak Stair Guardian. This means, you could also clear High Peak, and you did not went into the East yet.

What do you think, what enabled you to easily clear an enemy level ~117 zone and kill the Mummy Lord, just after clearing Reknor?

This is a guide, so do you recommend for other people to do the same? Clear the Elven Ruins after Reknor?


2., Second question is about the Total Playtime:

You won with your ghoul archmage at ~27 hours of total gameplay. This is extremely quick.

E.g. I am playing with an Anorithil just right now, and I just cleared the 4 Tier2 zones (SWL, Old Forest, Daikara, Maze) and some optional zones
(Halfling Complex, Hidden Compound, Lake of Nur, Ruined Dungeon, Golem Graveyard, Tempest Peak, Last Hope Graveyard, Spellblaze) at ~27 hours of total gameplay.
I did not even entered into Dreadfell yet.

With my Paradox Mage, it took ~ 57 hours to win the game.
With my Temporal Warden, it took ~ 55 hours to win the game.
With my Fallen, it took ~100 hours to win the game (ok, I did several Far/Strange Portals for items and gold with Fallen).

What do you think, what enabled you to win the game so quickly?


3., Third question is about your itemization:

I have noticed, you had to be very lucky with your item drops.

E.g. you have very high amount of maximum mana, even at the early stages.

At the beginning of part 8, what is clearing the Ruined Halfling Complex (you just cleared the SWL and Old Forest before this from Tier2 zones): you are level 24.

You have 417 max mana and you are sustaining 7 spells.

Spellcraft: 80 mana sustain cost
Shielding: 40 mana
Arcane Shield: 50 mana
Phantasmal Shield: 30 mana
Keen Senses: 40 mana
Essence of Speed: 120 mana
Probability Travel: 100 mana

Image_1_mana-min.png

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbXjJYe ... OY&index=8

At 00:01:10.

So this means, you have a total of: 417 + 460 (the sustain costs) = 877 max mana.

A ghoul Archmage at level 24 (54 magic, 44 willpower) has 431 max mana.
So without +max mana on items, you could not even sustain all of your 7 sustains.

877 – 431 = 446. This means, you had totally +446 max mana on your items.
After clearing Tier1 zones and 2 of the Tier2 zones.

Do you consider having +446 max mana from items after clearing 2 Tier2 zones as normal, or is it hard to get at this point?

What would you sustain if you do not find any or just few +max mana from items at this stage (so with your 417 max mana only)?


At character level 34, just before you enter into Spellblaze or Dreadfell, you have:

Image_2_spellp-min.png

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo11DDC ... Y&index=12

At 00:55:50.

119 effective spellpower
77% spell crit chance
60% spell cooldown
190% crit multiplier
79% lightning damage modifier
394 extra max mana from items

For me, these seems late-game stats.
Before Spellblaze, before Dreadfell.

119 effective spellpower means 414 raw spellpower.
Arcane Dynamo gives you 51, and a Tier4-5 Steamsaw gives you another 51.

But that is still 312 raw spellpower (102 effective), without being Occult Technomancer.

And you also had a really high spell crit chance, +40% crit multi, high damage modifier, +10% spell cooldown reduction and very high max mana too, from items.

Before Dreadfell I usually have 65-85 effective spellpower (spellsurge included) with a spellcaster (and I am going for highest spellpower).

How much the build is relying on powerful items?


4., Fourth question is about the build and “how to play”:

I have noticed: you are auto-exploring.

It’s a bit strange to me, because my experience with auto-explore: it is total suicide on madness.
But you have 3 different madness wins, so I guess, I am missing something here.

I did not watched through your videos, but I have noticed:

E.g. at part 8 (Ruined Halfling Complex) at 52:10 you almost died after auto-exploring into a rare Cursed skeleton.
You were at -44 life from 639 when auto-explore ended.

According to my experience, some enemies later can have even 400+% global speed and high movement/attack speeds also,
so even if you are a ghoul you can be one-turn-killed if you are auto-exploring.
They sense you and they can move next to you (e.g. 3400+% movement speed or Phase Door/Blindside) and then they can act several times before you.

What is your opinion about auto-exploring? This is a guide, so do you suggest for other people to use auto-explore on madness?


I have also noticed, you are keep using a level 1 (uncontrolled) Teleport through the whole game.

Part 1 (Trollmire): at 13:55

Your life went down to 120/296 and you teleported randomly.

Then you are kept using uncontrolled Phase Door & Teleport multiple times.
Then you are auto-resting, while enemies chasing you.


Part 22: at 4:00

When you entered into High Peak, you also started with a random Teleport.

What is your opinion about a level 1 Teleport talent, why do you use it? How reliable is it? Why did not leveled it up?


About the build:

I checked your ghoul Archmage, and it seems you did not spent your last category point at all.

Furthermore, you spent one of your inscription slot on Rune of Dissipation, what is in my opinion unnecessary on Archmage.

You are also not using any Stormshield Rune at all.

What is your opinion about category points on Archmage? The last one is irrelevant?

You also did not unlocked any advanced elemental tree, are they weak?

You did not used any Stormshield Rune, because you found them weak on Archmage?


You did not learned and did not used Metaflow at all. According to my experience, resetting your spells’ cooldowns is very useful.

Why? You found Metaflow weak / unnecessary?


You chose Occult Technomancy, but you did not learned Ethereal Steam and Metaphasic Echoes.

Why? You found these talents weak / unnecessary?


I have noticed, you start sustaining Essence of Speed really early, meanwhile you just learn and sustain Feather Wind relatively lately (and also just at tlevel 1).

Your sustain order is:

1., Phantasmal Shield (from part 1: Trollmire)
2., Essence of Speed (from part 2: Norgos Lair)
3., Probability Travel (from part 3: Kor’Pul)
4., Shielding (from end part 3: Rhaloren Camp)
5., Keen Senses (from part 5: Heart of the Gloom)
6., Spellcraft (from end part 5: from char level 20)
7., Arcane Shield (from part 7: from Old Forest)
8., Metaphasic Spin (from part 8: Ruined Halfling Complex)
9., Feather Wind level 1 (from end part 10: after Maze)
10., Thunderstorm level 1 (from end part 10: after Maze)
11., Energy Alteration (from end part 10: after Maze)
12., Arcane Power (from end part 13: Spellblaze)
13., Disruption Shield level 2 (from end part 13: Spellblaze)


Why was Phantasmal Shield the most important sustain for you?

At that early, it just gives a very few% chance to ignore damage instances.


Why was Essence of Speed (120 mana sustain cost) is the second most important sustain for you?

Why was Keen Senses more important than Arcane Shielding or Feather Wind?

Why did you sustain Feather Wind only after the Tier2 zones and just at level 1?

Ghoul has 50% stun/freeze immunity, but it was not important for you to cap it early, for only a 10 mana sustain cost?

Having 100% pin immunity and levitation (full pin immunity) was irrelevant for you?

You did not care about an early Grapple, Garrote or Fiery Grasp (these are pin effects and silences you)?

You could not use Wild Infusion to clear and you used a Stinging Totem early (no Clear Mind Torque).


Shielding and Arcane Shield was not that important early?


Disruption Shield was too weak for the early game?


You are just leveled up Invisibility to level 1 and Mirror Image at level 2.

You found a level 3 or 4 Mirror Image unnecessary? It was that overpowered even at level 2?


What was your strategy when you were Mana Clashed or Anti-Magic Zone, Acid Fire deleted your mana?


You are also using Elemental Fury ring from very early stages, through the whole game. This, I found really interesting.

What was the idea behind using Elemental Fury? Why was it good through the whole game?


Also, why did you found Arcane Amplification Drone that good? It has just a 30% uptime, no?


Sorry for a lot of questions, I know it’s many and thanks in advance for the answers.

Sorry for the poor text size, I'm still trying to adjust but I'm not familiar with the bbs code.

Maybe I should have made it clear that the video is not a main part of this guide, and I made some test and challenge in this run: for example, obviously I saved a lot of points in this run, to test if I could win without some useful talents and test if they are really necessary.

1.
Before I did enter Ancient Elven Ruins, I actually just hope to beat some randbosses and get some tier 5 items, and decide to retreat once I found extremely dangrous randbosses.

Greater Mummy Lord is not that dangrous for archmage in this run, because it didn't have Disperse Magic, didn't have high global/attack/movement speed and have almost no real threat. His spell damage is greately limited by Ghoul, and archmage can disperse its magical sustains & buffs. It is very durable and often teleport & heal, but with enough damage it's possible to kill.

And Greater Mummy Lord is weaker than many randbosses with same level, because the talent choices and talent levels of fixed bosses and randbosses gaining extra class are handled very differently.

Other rares and randbosses may be actually more dangerous, but I didn't face real dangerous ones this run. If I tracked/ arcane eyed something that is really dangerous, I would escape right away.

Also, there is not recommend to do that zone in this guide.

2.
Actually the former two runs took ~45 hrs if you could check these url which are in Chinese though (https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1EZ4y1S75t/)(https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13M4y1w7ad/). This ghoul run is extremely fast mostly because I have better luck with equipment, and I have been familiar with the combos and need less time to decide talent usage.

3. (Edited for not consideing Spellcraft)
In lv 25, If I have less max mana, I'll choose Spellcraft > Metaphasic Spin > Essence of Speed > Probability Travel > Shielding for Ghoul, and remove Essence of Speed for other races if really needed. Although I must say max mana and willpower is widely appeared on egos & random artifact powers, it's hard to get ~400 max mana at that stage, but it's very likely to get 100-200 or so.

Note that Metaphasic Spin costs 40 mana, Spellcraft costs 80 mana, Probability Travel costs 100 mana and Shielding costs 40 mana, these costs 300 in total and I'll have at 131 mana which is enough.

For ghoul race I'd recommend put more willpower if didn't find enough max mana item. If not item for max mana & willpower at all, sustaining Essence of Speed will leave for ~10 mana, which is unacceptable by any means, and should put at least 10 more willpower in earlier levels, and consider removing Shielding or Probability Travel in such extreme bad luck. It's also possible to not learn Essence of Speed at all and learn Feather Wind for movement speed instead, but this will be very dangerous in mid game.

My former runs have less stats, for example, just before dreadfell, with full steam and spellsurge, my cornac run reaches ~100 spellpower and orge run reaches ~103 spellpower, has only ~50% damage inc and 50~60% spell crit. Maybe spell crit is a bit high, but occult provides ~10 crit and Keen Sense provide ~7 if can sustain, and 30~40% crit rate is ok I guess.

Note that online event dungeons like bearscape and santascape can drop tier 4-5 items, and are much easier than dreadfell. If I really have bad equipment I'd go for these dungeons, and my cornac/orge runs did that before dreadfell.

And technomancer does have an additional equipment slot for most one-hand weapons & steamsaws, which means it can use more types of items than other mages. A randart one-hand weapon can provide ~30 spellpower by random artifact power, which is very good in mid game. Note that you can convert a low tier one-hand weapon into a high tier steamsaw.

I can't say how much this guide is based on items, because stormshield rune/Mana Coil/spell cooldown reduction/... are relied heavily on items, but Invisibility, Mirror Image, Dig, Probability Travel are not. So it's still possible to go without very good items.

4.

Auto Explore
I do not recommend auto exploring in this guide. But in my run I did auto explore, like in tier 1 zones before having tracking methods, or after I've cleared almost every part of the dungeon. The video records my mistakes, and the Halfling Ruin part is a severe mistake. I want to touch 'p' to open level up dialog, but mistouch 'o', the default auto explore key in my keybind. If I died at that point, I'd need to restart a new run.

By the way, it's almost impossible to have that high global speed in Halfling Ruins, due to the level limitation.

Teleport
As for teleport, there are some cases I'd use it:

a. After triggered Hunted! effects for some turns, and the most randbosses are around me within 15 radius, and the zone is of medium size so I tracked most area. Then if I cannot dig in this zone, or unluckily being quickly surrounded, I'll consider using teleport to kite the crowd of randbosses.

b. Before I get more reliable talents like Invisibility, sometimes I will teleport when facing more than one rares and feeling in danger, because Phase Door is extremely expensive in early game and only provides <=10 distance which sometimes not enough to regen 30 mana cost, and if I really died, it's ok to restart that early.

c. In high peak to search for/go near the staircase. Note This is not recommended, just my own choices. And I do use Time Stop as well as many defenses before teleport.

d. In a mostly cleared zone with only 1-2 bosses left in sight.

Teleport in lv 4 is better than lv 1, because it can be used to teleport monster away. But is still unreliable because it has ~35% fail rate to teleport out of sight (ridiculous for a long distance teleport), so the real usage of lv4 teleport is almost the same as lv1, except teleporting an enemy, and Time Prison works more stable for temporarily removing a single boss.

Category Point
The last category point on Archmage is not that important. As I said in this guide, Terrene, Aether, Wildfire or Stone Alchemy are ok to unlock.

I've tried Stone Alchemy + Aether in my cornac run, tried Terrene in my orge run, and unlock nothing in my ghoul run. They all have good reason to unlock, and not necessary to win.

As for advanced elemental trees, many of them are useless. Aether is ok, because t1 & t2 bypasses crit shrug and deals damage, t3 provides stats, remove debuffs and makes cd of Disruption Shield much shorter. Wildfire is worse than Aether because it only remove debuffs & buffs. Storm and Ice is even worse, they take many points, provide little damage, and the daze/freeze control is not reliable in madness. Earth is terrible, because Body of Stone works terribly with Spellcraft. Besides, in madness you can gain sufficient respen from randarts, and there is no need to sustain respen talent unless you're using Arcane Amplification Drone and cannot gain enough arcane respen.

I forget to list Terrene talents in the main part of the guide. In general, they have good damage & control & defense, but need many many points & steams & casts to work. Stone Alchemy is also good, because it does not costs class points and provides shorter cd passwall & stone touch.

Talent Choices
Metaflow is not a weak talent. Note that a talent not listed in core talents does not mean it is weak, just not necessary to win. Because this provides no new ability and costs one turn to cast, and the long fixed cooldown makes it not a part of normal talent cycle. So it's an emergency talent less reliable than Stone Wall, because you usually have some buff spells in cooldown(Arcane Eye, Precognition, Invisibility, Shivgroth Form...), and the real important talents are sometimes not refreshed after cast. Besides, Archmage has already relatively short cooldown, and can use Probability Travel + Dig in most maps to waiting for cooldowns. I do recommend to at least float into Metaflow before Gorbat Pride to counter blinkwyrms' Disperse Magic though, which I forget to mention and should add to the guide later. And also my cornac/ogre runs go beyond dreadfell without Metaflow too.

Ethereal Steam is a weird talent, it has great potential with a lot of foes in sight, but also has many drawbacks: needs to use Reality Breach first and need those foes still in sight to activate, costs some steam which is hard to regenerate, is very likely to reduce its own cooldown first. And there is a similar issue with Metaflow: talents that do not need to reduce cd may disrupt this, like Arcane Eye, Precognition, Invisibility... I'd add this to useful talents part later, but I don't think this is necessary.

Metaphasic Echoes is actually very good in theory, I didn't learn this in my run because I used to thought this need to check accuracy vs defense. I've already put this into useful talents part, but I haven't really used this in combat so I didn't put into core talents.

Phantasmal Shield is not an important sustain, it's just needed to learn Invisibility and Mirror Image. It's worth sustaining in early game because of its free aoe damage, not the chance to avoid damage. Besides, the free dazzled debuff is good in early game too, reduces 10% damage for 5 turns and applies spellshocked.

Keen Sense is not important too, just needed to learn Vision. And it does provide spell crit and see inv & stealth, which is ok to sustain if having enough max mana.

Essence of Speed is more important to Ghoul, and less important to Cornac and Orge.

Feather Wind usually costs 6/7 points for immunity, and this is somewhat too much in early game in this build for Ghoul, because Ghoul need Essence of Speed more. For other races it might be ok to learn, but still not really that necessary.

Note that in this run, Feather Wind is a passby of Thunderstorm. Because I've found spell trigger item and Thunderstorm is good to trigger spell, and so is Energy Alteration. Then I choose Disruption Shield over Feather Wind.

Immunity for stun for ghoul is not very necessary, and I've already learned Shivgroth Form, and archmages hardly got stunned due to Mirror Image and Invisibility. I've tried gem imbued rings for my other runs to stack some stun immune in mid game though.

Immunity for pin is very good, another reason for other races to learn, but ghoul can leap to remove Grapple and Garrote, and Invisibility/Mirror Image also protects you from these effects if enemy cannot hit you in the right tile. So is Fiery Grasp. Fiery Grasp is dangerous, but doombringer is not too dangerous, because this class cannot see invisible, and is very likely to use Fiery Grasp on Mirror Image. And Probability Travel is usable even when pinned. Explosive Saw is also worth noting, and enemies often use this on Mirror Image too. Besides, you can always try to deal damage by Glacial Vapour/Fireflash in early-mid game to reduce the chance of getting disabled.

Normal silence usually have short duration, like anorithil's circle, oozemancer's Antimagic Zone and shadowblade's Shadow Grasp, they have a fixed duration of 2/3, and using Clear Mind torque costs 1 turn. I'd rather use Ghoulish Leap/Movement infusion/Probability Travel to handle with normal silence debuff or just wait with precast Invisibility/Mirror Image. If foes come with long dur silence then I'll consider swap torque of clear mind. Probability Travel is also usable in silence.

Shielding is good only after you've find good shield rune/put enough points into shield talent, otherwise I'd more likely to float into Displacement Shield in early game.

Arcane Shielding is of little use in early and mid game, because Arcane Reconstruction has long cooldown, and you'll need to put a lot of points to get a big heal shield. Also you'll need extremely good equipment to stack spell crit rate, crit mult and healing factor for bigger shield, as well as spell cooldown reduction to make Arcane Reconstruction faster. This is very hard before Font of Sacrifice. I just sustain this because I really get good equipment in this run and can afford the 50 mana cost.

Disruption Shield costs 8 points and works not that great in early-mid game. Because of poor mana regen rate and poor max mana you'll not be able to sustain disruption shield in early-mid game. This breaks immediately after you takes hit with less than 50% mana. The original 30 cd is also too much even with Spellcraft.

Mirror Image lv3-5 is ok, lv 2 is just the necessary min level for most cases in my runs.

Mana Clash
Occult provides ~5 mana regen, and Mana Coil provides 5 either. Then with a 1200% manasurge rune you'll have 10.5 * 13 = 136.5 mana regen each turn. After you move outside the antimagic zone this is enough to cover all talents except Disruption Shield.

Elemental Fury
Elemental Fury is good in early game, because I lack respen and cold damage is resisted by many monster type. Elemental Fury is good in mid game, because it greatly increases the trigger chance of spell on-hit.

Elemental Fury becomes less desirable in end game, but I didn't remember finding a better ring to replace and I didn't have enough money to craft gem imbued randart rings.

Arcane Amplification Drone
Arcane Amplification Drone is very good: it bypasses crit shrug and inherits your respen, it increases your chance of triggering Lighting(Mana Coil), it makes many spell hit foes out of sight and hit larger area. Then it actually can provide much more than 130% bonus in combat, and technomancer can have really high burst damage with Arcane Amplification Done, enough to kill some rares even in Prides within 3 turns. It can also protects you from rush and projectiles if properly placed, in diged tunnels it can occupy the front tile and protects you from many forms of attack.

Note that casting Time Prison on Arcane Amplification Drone will effectively increase its duration, but it's not necessary to use this trick.

Stormshield Rune
As I mentioned in the guide, stormshield rune is extremely powerful for archmage, especially for orge. However, I didn't remember finding a good enough rune to replace my normal shield rune in this ghoul run until very late, and I decided to test if it is ok not to use stormshield rune for ghoul to win.

Rune of Dissipation
I only swap my last rune to Rune of Dissipation just before final boss fight, so it will be faster to remove all sustains of the archmage boss. I didn't use Rune of Dissipation at other times, since Mirror Image + Disperse Magic is enough.

[Tradewind_Rider]

Sorry for the poor text size

No problem

Maybe I should have made it clear that the video is not a main part of this guide

Yes, definately. Playing on madness heavily depends on HOW YOU PLAY.
Not just on the build itself. How you actually play, is really really important.

Now, i know you do not recommend auto-exploring on madness and you do not recommend clearing the Ancient Elven Ruins after Reknor.
Becasue you did it in your play, I thought you think it's recommended.

I made some test and challenge in this run: for example, obviously I saved a lot of points in this run, to test if I could win without some useful talents and test if they are really necessary.

It's very interesting to read: you actually made challenge runs on madness with Archmage, and still easily win.

Yes, i saw, you did not spent: 15 class points, 7 generic points, 1 category points at all.

You also went into level ~117 zone really early, after you cleared level ~50 zone. This is incredibly challenging.

You did not used Stormshield Runes at all, for me this is also counts as a challenge.

(Btw, auto-exploring is also counts as a challenge for me, on madness )


I played with Occult Technomancer in 1.6.7 before and I also won with it, but I used a mechanism
that I treated as an "abuse", becasue with Hat of Arcane Understanding, I had 0 turn cooldown Disruption Shield.
So, my Ghoul Technomage was quite invulerable...

(I asked for a mechanism change after this, so this is why arcane_cooldown_divide is changed now from 1.7.1)

My experience was quite different with my mage in 1.6.7, maybe I should try it again in 1.7.4

Before I did enter Ancient Elven Ruins, I actually just hope to beat some randbosses and get some tier 5 items, and decide to retreat once I found extremely dangrous randbosses.

I have to say, this is totally unnecessary.

You already found a Tier5 crazy powerful wizardstaff in the Sandworm Lair (that gave you 70 spellpower and some more good stats too).
Tier5 items can start dropping even in Tier2 zones (e.g. chests, sacks), but Tier5 items start reliably dropping from Dreadfell, Reknor.
So in Dreadfell, Reknor there are already some Tier5 randarts/rares and of course Tier5 items keeps dropping in Unremarkable Cave, Vor Armoury, ...

So you were wrong in this, it's unnecessary to go into the Ancient Elven Ruins for Tier5 items, after Reknor.

Greater Mummy Lord is not that dangrous for archmage in this run, because it didn't have Disperse Magic, didn't have high global/attack/movement speed and have almost no real threat.

Please, do not take as an offense, but you are also incorrect with this statement.

Greater Mummy CAN HAVE Disperse Magic, and it has MULTIPLE Global Speed buffs.

An example for the Mummy Lord:

Mummy_A.png (187.58 KiB) Viewed 24623 times

The Mummy Lord also has some fixed talents:

https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... cs.lua#L69

So it always have Blinding Speed and Grace of the Eternals, what are Global Speed buffs.

I watched your fight with the Mummy Lord, and for me it seems you were incredibly lucky there.


At 00:19:57 or 00:20:05, you can see the Greater Mummy Lord, at Nort-West from you, close.
You did not noticed it and you did not inspected it.

At 00:24:30 , the Greater Mummy Lord Phase Doors next to you.

You cast a Mirror Image to distract it, but after ~3 turns, the Mirror Image was slain.

It has Heightened Senses, Keen Senses and it has Perfect Accuracy, so it totally ignores you invisibility
(in multiple ways: it can see you, but even if it could not see you, it has blind_fight from Perfect Accuracy).

After this, when you casts another Mirror Image, the Mirror Image lasts only for 2 turns (dies very quickly).

Then the Mummy Lord tagerts you and it has the Speed effect, so it has ~250% global speed.
At 00:26:16


At 00:45:38 you INSPECTING fianlly the Greater Mummy Lord!

But you are fighting with it for 19 minutes at this point.
And up to this point, you had no clue if the dude has Disperse Magic or not...

Or any other dangerous talents.


These are the talents of YOUR Mummy Lord:

Mummy_B.png (238.93 KiB) Viewed 24623 times

You can see, it has:

Heightened Senses (it ignores your invisibility fully)
Perfect Strike (to also ignore your invisibility in combat)

Grace of the Eternals (Speed effect, for +50% global speed bonus, 12 turn cooldown with 6 turn duration)
Blinding Speed (another Speed effect, for +150% global speed bonus)
Essence of Speed level 32 sustain (for a sustained +50-60% global speed bonus, stacks with Speed effect)
Congeal Time level 27 (to slow you down by ~45-50%)

Displacement Shield (so you can kill yourself, it ignores Flat Damage Cap)

Time Prison (level 35)!
So any time, you could have been Time Prisoned for 20+ turns and that means, you are very likely dead.
Dude will place like 10 damaging area effect below you and other enemies will also swarm you.

You had only 58 spellsave.


Btw, you are writing in your guide "enemies cannot have Heightened Senses now" and as you see in your own
Mummy Lord, this is incorrect. Any enemy can have Heightened Senses, they just have a low chance to have it.

Also, several enemy basetypes has a fixed see_invisible value, just from their basetype.
(E.g. ghosts have 80 see_invisible, but skeletons, golems, crystals, ghouls, some horrors, mummies, shadows, vampires, wights all have some)

So that is why i asked, why are you just using a level 1 Invisibility only.
At 100 spellpower, this is grants you ~32 invisibility, so some basetypes can still see you.
E.g.: Dreadfell is full with undeads.

And of course, becasue you are Hunted, invisibility is just mainly nice against weapon users.

Elemental Fury
Elemental Fury is good in early game, because I lack respen and cold damage is resisted by many monster type. Elemental Fury is good in mid game, because it greatly increases the trigger chance of spell on-hit.

This is interesting to read. I thought, using Elemental Fury is just a straight damage nerf.
Especially at the late-game, because it's way easier to cumulate extra damage modifier and resistance penetration from items for a single element.
Also, several talents on enemies are flat damage reductors (Psionic Shield sustains on mindslyers, Anti-magic Shield, Brawlers Striking Stance, Automated Cloak Tessalion, so on ...)

Cumulating damage modifiers and res pen for 4 separate elements will result in way lower damage output.
And your highest damaging talent (Reality Breach) is already dealing a split damage (arcane + temporal) becasue you did not have Aether Avatar.
So the damage was split into 8 instances then - i guess.

I will also try this ring later, becasue I am a bit confused now on this topic.


Btw, as I saw, you continously damaging your own Mirror Image too with you talents.
Especially with Reality Breach, becasue you cannot target it for shorter length.
I guess that is why your Mirror Image died sometimes after 2-3 turns against the Greater Mummy Lord.
It would be really hard / impossible to always position perfectly, to ignore your Mirror Image - i guess.

[yutio888]

Sorry for the poor text size

No problem

Maybe I should have made it clear that the video is not a main part of this guide

Yes, definately. Playing on madness heavily depends on HOW YOU PLAY.
Not just on the build itself. How you actually play, is really really important.

Now, i know you do not recommend auto-exploring on madness and you do not recommend clearing the Ancient Elven Ruins after Reknor.
Becasue you did it in your play, I thought you think it's recommended.

I made some test and challenge in this run: for example, obviously I saved a lot of points in this run, to test if I could win without some useful talents and test if they are really necessary.

It's very interesting to read: you actually made challenge runs on madness with Archmage, and still easily win.

Yes, i saw, you did not spent: 15 class points, 7 generic points, 1 category points at all.

You also went into level ~117 zone really early, after you cleared level ~50 zone. This is incredibly challenging.

You did not used Stormshield Runes at all, for me this is also counts as a challenge.

(Btw, auto-exploring is also counts as a challenge for me, on madness )


I played with Occult Technomancer in 1.6.7 before and I also won with it, but I used a mechanism
that I treated as an "abuse", becasue with Hat of Arcane Understanding, I had 0 turn cooldown Disruption Shield.
So, my Ghoul Technomage was quite invulerable...

(I asked for a mechanism change after this, so this is why arcane_cooldown_divide is changed now from 1.7.1)

My experience was quite different with my mage in 1.6.7, maybe I should try it again in 1.7.4

Before I did enter Ancient Elven Ruins, I actually just hope to beat some randbosses and get some tier 5 items, and decide to retreat once I found extremely dangrous randbosses.

I have to say, this is totally unnecessary.

You already found a Tier5 crazy powerful wizardstaff in the Sandworm Lair (that gave you 70 spellpower and some more good stats too).
Tier5 items can start dropping even in Tier2 zones (e.g. chests, sacks), but Tier5 items start reliably dropping from Dreadfell, Reknor.
So in Dreadfell, Reknor there are already some Tier5 randarts/rares and of course Tier5 items keeps dropping in Unremarkable Cave, Vor Armoury, ...

So you were wrong in this, it's unnecessary to go into the Ancient Elven Ruins for Tier5 items, after Reknor.

Greater Mummy Lord is not that dangrous for archmage in this run, because it didn't have Disperse Magic, didn't have high global/attack/movement speed and have almost no real threat.

Please, do not take as an offense, but you are also incorrect with this statement.

Greater Mummy CAN HAVE Disperse Magic, and it has MULTIPLE Global Speed buffs.

An example for the Mummy Lord:

Mummy_A.png


The Mummy Lord also has some fixed talents:

https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... cs.lua#L69

So it always have Blinding Speed and Grace of the Eternals, what are Global Speed buffs.

I watched your fight with the Mummy Lord, and for me it seems you were incredibly lucky there.


At 00:19:57 or 00:20:05, you can see the Greater Mummy Lord, at Nort-West from you, close.
You did not noticed it and you did not inspected it.

At 00:24:30 , the Greater Mummy Lord Phase Doors next to you.

You cast a Mirror Image to distract it, but after ~3 turns, the Mirror Image was slain.

It has Heightened Senses, Keen Senses and it has Perfect Accuracy, so it totally ignores you invisibility
(in multiple ways: it can see you, but even if it could not see you, it has blind_fight from Perfect Accuracy).

After this, when you casts another Mirror Image, the Mirror Image lasts only for 2 turns (dies very quickly).

Then the Mummy Lord tagerts you and it has the Speed effect, so it has ~250% global speed.
At 00:26:16


At 00:45:38 you INSPECTING fianlly the Greater Mummy Lord!

But you are fighting with it for 19 minutes at this point.
And up to this point, you had no clue if the dude has Disperse Magic or not...

Or any other dangerous talents.


These are the talents of YOUR Mummy Lord:

Mummy_B.png


You can see, it has:

Heightened Senses (it ignores your invisibility fully)
Perfect Strike (to also ignore your invisibility in combat)

Grace of the Eternals (Speed effect, for +50% global speed bonus, 12 turn cooldown with 6 turn duration)
Blinding Speed (another Speed effect, for +150% global speed bonus)
Essence of Speed level 32 sustain (for a sustained +50-60% global speed bonus, stacks with Speed effect)
Congeal Time level 27 (to slow you down by ~45-50%)

Displacement Shield (so you can kill yourself, it ignores Flat Damage Cap)

Time Prison (level 35)!
So any time, you could have been Time Prisoned for 20+ turns and that means, you are very likely dead.
Dude will place like 10 damaging area effect below you and other enemies will also swarm you.

You had only 58 spellsave.


Btw, you are writing in your guide "enemies cannot have Heightened Senses now" and as you see in your own
Mummy Lord, this is incorrect. Any enemy can have Heightened Senses, they just have a low chance to have it.

Also, several enemy basetypes has a fixed see_invisible value, just from their basetype.
(E.g. ghosts have 80 see_invisible, but skeletons, golems, crystals, ghouls, some horrors, mummies, shadows, vampires, wights all have some)

So that is why i asked, why are you just using a level 1 Invisibility only.
At 100 spellpower, this is grants you ~32 invisibility, so some basetypes can still see you.
E.g.: Dreadfell is full with undeads.

And of course, becasue you are Hunted, invisibility is just mainly nice against weapon users.

Elemental Fury
Elemental Fury is good in early game, because I lack respen and cold damage is resisted by many monster type. Elemental Fury is good in mid game, because it greatly increases the trigger chance of spell on-hit.

This is interesting to read. I thought, using Elemental Fury is just a straight damage nerf.
Especially at the late-game, because it's way easier to cumulate extra damage modifier and resistance penetration from items for a single element.
Also, several talents on enemies are flat damage reductors (Psionic Shield sustains on mindslyers, Anti-magic Shield, Brawlers Striking Stance, Automated Cloak Tessalion, so on ...)

Cumulating damage modifiers and res pen for 4 separate elements will result in way lower damage output.
And your highest damaging talent (Reality Breach) is already dealing a split damage (arcane + temporal) becasue you did not have Aether Avatar.
So the damage was split into 8 instances then - i guess.

I will also try this ring later, becasue I am a bit confused now on this topic.


Btw, as I saw, you continously damaging your own Mirror Image too with you talents.
Especially with Reality Breach, becasue you cannot target it for shorter length.
I guess that is why your Mirror Image died sometimes after 2-3 turns against the Greater Mummy Lord.
It would be really hard / impossible to always position perfectly, to ignore your Mirror Image - i guess.

I agree that it is unnecessary to go to Elven Ruins after Reknor, and too challenging to go to floor 3 to fight with the Lord right now.

It is a mistake that I didn't recognize and check its talents immediately. There are some clues about his talents: at first sight in 24:07, he did not have Spellcraft sustained, and I thought he was unlikely to have Disperse Magic. He didn't use Greater Weapon Focus against Mirror Image in the first few turns, which means he was very unlikely to have it, because gwf is instant and of extremely high priority in combat. Not 100% sure, and I should be more careful about this. As a bulwark he may rush & assault & shield slam/timeless + another assault with 250% speed in a single turn, which bursts 7 big instances of damage. At that time I have 848 max life, then I'll roughly need 424 * 7 ~= 2k9 shield, and with 150% speed I'll need 424 * 4 ~= 1k7 shield. Note that he has Precise Strikes sustained reducing 10% attack speed, Arcane Amplification Drone blocks rush, Disruption Shield can use mana to take damage, I can leap or retch to increase speed, Mirror Image usually can absorb several random weapon talents, and ​consider the cooldown of Blinding Speed, Timeless and other weapon talents, it is not that dangerous to fight him alone. Besides, Congeal Time is range 6, 500% projectile speed, takes time to cast and additional time to fly, and can be destroyed by Reality Breach. Displacement shield can be dispersed, or wasted on Mirror Image, and has a long cooldown, and need me to deal enough damage exceeding my shield to kill myself.

Time Prison is very dangerous indeed, and is the main reason I should not challenge, since there are many uncleared areas, and some rares are close. With arcane power he has 63 spell power vs 58 spell save, ~39% success rate and ~30 dur; without arcane power he has 52 spell power vs 58 spell save, ~12% success rate and ~20 dur (note that time prison checks spell save twice). Time Prison is extremely dangerous for stormshield users, because stormshields are easily consumed during Time Prison. For ghoul archmage this is less dangerous, because damage shields will remain until the time prison ends.

Invisibility
My statement is "randbosses cannot learn Heightened Senses now", and Greater Mummy Lord is a fixed boss. The whole Cunning/Survival tree is banned in randbosses in 1.7.2 or so, and you may check class/GameState.lua#applyRandomClass function, line#2222 for detail. Fixed bosses are not affected, and are likely to have high see invisible.

Normal monster types with innate see invisible are listed below:
1. bone giant 20
2. golems 30
3. crystals 25
4. ghost 80
5. ghoul 2
6. undead horrors 2
7. normal horrors: worms that walk 100, luminous horror 10, radiant horror 20, parasitic horror 20, mass of parasitic leeches 20, searing horror 20, ravaging entropic rip 20, bursting entropic shard 20, nethergate 20, netherworm mass 20, giant netherworm 20, fearful symmetry 20
8. lich 100
9. mummies 4
10. shades and shadows 80
11. skeleton 2
12. spiders 18
13. vampire 5
14. wight 7
15. tentacle tree 20

The formula of see invisible is extremely strange, see class/interface/Combat.lua#checkHitOld function, line#276. And here is an estimation:

see inv	inv	chance
2	31	3.8%
4	31	6.7%
7	31	10.8%
20	31	28%
80	31	86%
2	66	1.4%
4	66	2.8%
7	66	4.8%
20	66	11%
80	66	71%

Talent level of invisibility matters more for horrors and spiders, and zones full of horrors/spiders (Lake of Nur/Ardhungol/Book of Horror) may worth the talent points. Undeads with 2/4 see inv have a small chance to see, and it's reasonable to put more talent points to reduce the chance. Golems mainly exist in golem graveyard and crystals mainly exist in cave and old forest. So it may worth the points in Lake of Nur, Complex Halfling Ruins, Dreadfell, Rak'shor Pride, Ardhungol, Book of Horror and Golem Graveyard, and may not worth the points in other zones. I still think lv 1 invisibility is enough most of the time, and consider floating in these zones; though it is ok to put more points and reduce the chance of high see inv enemies actually seeing you.

Hunted! doesn't mean enemies can see you directly and constantly, especially if you're invisible. The Hunted! status just activate the monsters nearby and set you as their target, and they'll quickly lost your exact position and try guess where you are. They may search in wrong direction or circle around, they may cast beam spells targeting 1 tile besides you, and invisibility has some use against casters in a more subtle way.

Elemental Fury
As for Elemental Fury, if I'm not using it in late game, I'll still need to stack lightning dam inc & respen as well as another element, because a large part of damage comes from Mana Coil's Lightning, and the left part of damage is unified by Energy Alteration. I'll also need some arcane respen to use Arcane Amplification Drone. So it'll not be a great loss for using Elemental Fury, since it provides 4 types pf dam inc & respen. Note that triggered Lightnings are usually not affected by any means of damage convert, including Elemental Fury, Pendant of the Sun and Moons, Energy Alteration... I can still focus on lightning dam inc and do not loss too much damage. The triggered Lightnings do have small chance to deal non-lightning damage and the behavior here is very strange and confusing indeed. Besides, the elemental respen are relatively easy to gain from weapon, egos like blazebringer, stormbringer and elemental provides a lot of extra elemental respen as well as other useful stats, so it is slightly easier for technomancer to use Elemental Fury, because of the additional weapon slot.

As for flat damage reduction, Psionic shields are not exactly flat damage reduction, since it has a max ratio. I do encounter some enemies with flat damage reduction, like brawler/gunslinger/skirmishers/oozemancers with related talents. Gunslingers and skirmishers are relatively less dangerous, because their projectiles can be slowed & destroyed by Reality Breach, so it's usually ok to be slower. It is also worth noting again that, the triggered Lightning will not be spilt into several damages. So it is possible to kill these enemies even with Elemental Fury. Besides, it's possible to swap rings to fight these guys, at the cost of 1 turn.

Mirror Image
Mirror Image is weak against group. Mirror Image is often damaged by Reality Breach. Other beam spells are less likely to hit, but is still possible. And if you target a spell at an enemy, the hp of Mirror Image will decrease too, no matter where it is. So it is actually pretty good to level up Mirror Image to gain additional hp.

[Tradewind_Rider]

Yes, you were incredibly lucky with the Mummy Lord.
As i see, the dude was ~19-20 tiles from you where you spawned.

It only arrived close to you (with Teleport, otherwise it would have arrived directly next to you) after ~5 minutes of play,
so i guess it tried to Phase Door next to you, it just triggered the 35% fail chance, so it was teleported randomly away from you first.

In worst case scenario: the dude triggers the Hunter!, activates his Blinding Speed and Phase Doors directly
next to you and Disperses you and Assaults you with GWF or Time Prisons you.
So it is like an instadeath. Dude could have 310% global speed.

Time Prison is extremely dangerous for stormshield users, because stormshields are easily consumed during Time Prison. For ghoul archmage this is less dangerous, because damage shields will remain until the time prison ends.

Time Prison is very dangerous for anyone. You can be Dispersed, Corrupted Negationed, Combo Kicked, Disintegrated, ... under Time Prison,
so all of your sustains & beneficial effects can be removed.

You can be Mana-Clashed / Arcane Resource burned (even when an enemy has a on_melee_hit resource burn).

Enemies can place numerous damaging map effects under you, and before you can act finally, you take: 12 x 600 damage...

Invisibility
My statement is "randbosses cannot learn Heightened Senses now", and Greater Mummy Lord is a fixed boss. The whole Cunning/Survival tree is banned in randbosses in 1.7.2 or so, and you may check class/GameState.lua#applyRandomClass function, line#2222 for detail. Fixed bosses are not affected, and are likely to have high see invisible.

Excuse me, but i am a little bit confused now. Can you show me, where is the Cunning Survival tree banned from enemies?

My problem is e.g.: Randboss Orc Summoner and Rare Naga Summoner dudes are disagree with you.

Senses_1.png (143.31 KiB) Viewed 24540 times

Senses_2.png (162.1 KiB) Viewed 24540 times

As far as i know, any enemy can have Heightened Senses, they just have a low chance to have it.

Hunted! doesn't mean enemies can see you directly and constantly, especially if you're invisible. The Hunted! status just activate the monsters nearby and set you as their target, and they'll quickly lost your exact position and try guess where you are. They may search in wrong direction or circle around, they may cast beam spells targeting 1 tile besides you, and invisibility has some use against casters in a more subtle way.

Yes, Hunter! will set you as their target, but they do not lose your location, becasue you are not moving in most cases at all.
So, this would be true, if you would be continously on a move.
But in most cases, you are holding a position, e.g. when you are fighting at the Pride Entrances.
You are in the same tile for 20-30 turns or more.

Enemies have damaging AoE talents with range & radius ~13-15.
Just check e.g. a level 50 Fireflash.
They do not care if they know your exact position or not, becasue the Fireflash will affect your whole screen.

If i am testing the effectiveness of a 300 power Greater Invisibility on madness (in dev-mode), I am dieing at every second turn at the Pride Entrances.


Btw, i checked your Gorbat Pride video and i have another question (mainly about depending on luck):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8i3FSDT420


First level of Gorbat:


You enter at 00:02:50, there is the fixed random boss and also a rare enemy.

You do not inspect any of them, you do not even put the mouse cursor over them,
so I do not know what classes those enemies have.
You start fighting with them, without knowing their class(es).

You do not use Mirror Image, or Invisible.


At 00:03:29, enemies triggered the Hunter, becasue a Blinkwyrm Phase Doored next to you.

You only had your Essence of Speed (no retch, no leap) and you are a ghoul.
You had a 113.5 % global speed, and 100% spell speed.

Blinkwyrms has a level ~37 Essence of Speed, so a +68% global speed buff and they have a base 140% global speed.

https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... ke.lua#L82

So, all the Blinkwyrms have 208.3 % global speed, possibly more, if they are having a class.


You silenced it with the Circle of Sanctity, you are lucky, it did not dispersed you
before the Sanctity effect applied the silence.

There are 2 rare enemies teleported / arrived close to you (due to Hunter triggered).
You did not inspected any of them, instead you kept acting & acting.


Bit later another rare enemy arrives, you also do not check that
(not just not inspecting, but you do not even put the mouse over them,
so I do not know what enemies are you fighting against).

Any of them can be an Archmage / Shadowblade / Corruptor / Cultist of Entropy / Rogue / Archer / Skirmisher
to fully disable you and then you are dead.

Rogues, Archers, Skirmishers can have Silence that bypasses Silence Immunity.
So even if you have 100-200% Silence immunity, you will be:

- Silenced
- Mana Clashed
- Disperse Magic-ed

All these from 1 action: from a Primed Purging Trap.


You keep shooting your beams at them.


At 00:05:23, as i see an Orc Mage-Hunter arrives and also a unique Wyrm.

Instead of putting the mouse over it/them to see, what class it has,
you placing down an AAD and shoot a Reality Breach.

You are not using Mirror Image, so the dudes are targeting you.

At 00:05:29, you put the mouse over that one, so i can know what enemy it is:
a Unique Mindslyer Storm Wyrm.


Then you are casting an Arcane Eye and checking some enemies that are currently
cannot hit you, and then you are casting some instant spells, and

You keep shooting beams...

You are NOT invisible, you do NOT have a Mirror Image.
And you shoot a beam, and you were not mana-clased.


Why do you not just not inspecting enemies, but also
do not even putting the mouse over them to know what class(es) they have?

Knowing your enemies is not that important?

I am continously checking my enemies and i am continously ispecting those
enemies that can have something that is dangerous for me.
According to my experience, this is really important to do on madness.


Then a Brawler, CoE randboss arrives and you do not activated Invisibility
and you do not activated Mirror Image. You keep shooting it.
At 00:06:36, it is directly next to you.
And instead of inspecting it, you shoot a beam to it.
It could have had knockback immunity to ignore your knockback from Reality Breach.

Brawlers can deactivate your sustains (Combo Kick).
CoE can clean all your beneficial temporary effects (Switch).


After this, at 00:06:51, there is a rare orc archer Archmage enemy arrived,
you put the mouse over it. It has Spellcraft & Energy alteration sustains,
so very likely it can have Disperse Magic too, but it can have e.g. Time Prison too.

Instead of casting Mirror Image,
you are casting Arcane Reconstruction, just for the damage shield.
(You were full on life and already had Temporal Shield)

Negating a potential threat is not that important?



Second Level of Gorbat:

At 00:21:08, you are entering to the second level.

There is the fixed Randboss there and also a rare Temporal Warden.
(i just know it is a TW, becasue there is a dog next to it)

And again:

Without putting the mouse over any of these enemies
(not even inspecting, just at least knowing what class the randboss had)

You are placing the AAD to the north, and shooting Reality Breach to the north-west.
At the rare TW and on the normal dudes in the corner.

Then you casts an Illuminate.
Then you casts a Chain Lightning.


And then, for 0.3 seconds your mouse is over te randboss, so if i
am stopping the video precisely, i can figure out, it is an Arcane Blade.
I had to make 3 tries to stop the video there, so it took me ~10 seconds to do this.
There is no way, you could check this in-game.

This randboss could be an Archmage, Shadowblade, so on...
So you could have been immediately Time Prisoned for 20+ turns,
and got Dispersed + Mana-Clashed + any Shield effect removed while you are in Time Prison.

The randboss could have been a Rogue, Archer, Skirmisher with a primed Purging Trap,
and that is a radius 2 AoE. Invisibility does not matter, it's AoE, but it could have had Heightened Senses too.
It's an instadeath for you.


I do not understand:
How are you fighting against enemies if you do not even put the mouse over them?
In many cases, you do not know what are you fighting against.

[smithfield]

(sorry to interject into this very interesting discussion, but ...)

Fortune Favors the Bold!

[yutio888]

Yes, you were incredibly lucky with the Mummy Lord.
As i see, the dude was ~19-20 tiles from you where you spawned.

It only arrived close to you (with Teleport, otherwise it would have arrived directly next to you) after ~5 minutes of play,
so i guess it tried to Phase Door next to you, it just triggered the 35% fail chance, so it was teleported randomly away from you first.

In worst case scenario: the dude triggers the Hunter!, activates his Blinding Speed and Phase Doors directly
next to you and Disperses you and Assaults you with GWF or Time Prisons you.
So it is like an instadeath. Dude could have 310% global speed.

Time Prison is extremely dangerous for stormshield users, because stormshields are easily consumed during Time Prison. For ghoul archmage this is less dangerous, because damage shields will remain until the time prison ends.

Time Prison is very dangerous for anyone. You can be Dispersed, Corrupted Negationed, Combo Kicked, Disintegrated, ... under Time Prison,
so all of your sustains & beneficial effects can be removed.

You can be Mana-Clashed / Arcane Resource burned (even when an enemy has a on_melee_hit resource burn).

Enemies can place numerous damaging map effects under you, and before you can act finally, you take: 12 x 600 damage...

Invisibility
My statement is "randbosses cannot learn Heightened Senses now", and Greater Mummy Lord is a fixed boss. The whole Cunning/Survival tree is banned in randbosses in 1.7.2 or so, and you may check class/GameState.lua#applyRandomClass function, line#2222 for detail. Fixed bosses are not affected, and are likely to have high see invisible.

Excuse me, but i am a little bit confused now. Can you show me, where is the Cunning Survival tree banned from enemies?

My problem is e.g.: Randboss Orc Summoner and Rare Naga Summoner dudes are disagree with you.

Senses_1.png

Senses_2.png


As far as i know, any enemy can have Heightened Senses, they just have a low chance to have it.

Hunted! doesn't mean enemies can see you directly and constantly, especially if you're invisible. The Hunted! status just activate the monsters nearby and set you as their target, and they'll quickly lost your exact position and try guess where you are. They may search in wrong direction or circle around, they may cast beam spells targeting 1 tile besides you, and invisibility has some use against casters in a more subtle way.

Yes, Hunter! will set you as their target, but they do not lose your location, becasue you are not moving in most cases at all.
So, this would be true, if you would be continously on a move.
But in most cases, you are holding a position, e.g. when you are fighting at the Pride Entrances.
You are in the same tile for 20-30 turns or more.

Enemies have damaging AoE talents with range & radius ~13-15.
Just check e.g. a level 50 Fireflash.
They do not care if they know your exact position or not, becasue the Fireflash will affect your whole screen.

If i am testing the effectiveness of a 300 power Greater Invisibility on madness (in dev-mode), I am dieing at every second turn at the Pride Entrances.


Btw, i checked your Gorbat Pride video and i have another question (mainly about depending on luck):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8i3FSDT420


First level of Gorbat:


You enter at 00:02:50, there is the fixed random boss and also a rare enemy.

You do not inspect any of them, you do not even put the mouse cursor over them,
so I do not know what classes those enemies have.
You start fighting with them, without knowing their class(es).

You do not use Mirror Image, or Invisible.


At 00:03:29, enemies triggered the Hunter, becasue a Blinkwyrm Phase Doored next to you.

You only had your Essence of Speed (no retch, no leap) and you are a ghoul.
You had a 113.5 % global speed, and 100% spell speed.

Blinkwyrms has a level ~37 Essence of Speed, so a +68% global speed buff and they have a base 140% global speed.

https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... ke.lua#L82

So, all the Blinkwyrms have 208.3 % global speed, possibly more, if they are having a class.


You silenced it with the Circle of Sanctity, you are lucky, it did not dispersed you
before the Sanctity effect applied the silence.

There are 2 rare enemies teleported / arrived close to you (due to Hunter triggered).
You did not inspected any of them, instead you kept acting & acting.


Bit later another rare enemy arrives, you also do not check that
(not just not inspecting, but you do not even put the mouse over them,
so I do not know what enemies are you fighting against).

Any of them can be an Archmage / Shadowblade / Corruptor / Cultist of Entropy / Rogue / Archer / Skirmisher
to fully disable you and then you are dead.

Rogues, Archers, Skirmishers can have Silence that bypasses Silence Immunity.
So even if you have 100-200% Silence immunity, you will be:

- Silenced
- Mana Clashed
- Disperse Magic-ed

All these from 1 action: from a Primed Purging Trap.


You keep shooting your beams at them.


At 00:05:23, as i see an Orc Mage-Hunter arrives and also a unique Wyrm.

Instead of putting the mouse over it/them to see, what class it has,
you placing down an AAD and shoot a Reality Breach.

You are not using Mirror Image, so the dudes are targeting you.

At 00:05:29, you put the mouse over that one, so i can know what enemy it is:
a Unique Mindslyer Storm Wyrm.


Then you are casting an Arcane Eye and checking some enemies that are currently
cannot hit you, and then you are casting some instant spells, and

You keep shooting beams...

You are NOT invisible, you do NOT have a Mirror Image.
And you shoot a beam, and you were not mana-clased.


Why do you not just not inspecting enemies, but also
do not even putting the mouse over them to know what class(es) they have?

Knowing your enemies is not that important?

I am continously checking my enemies and i am continously ispecting those
enemies that can have something that is dangerous for me.
According to my experience, this is really important to do on madness.


Then a Brawler, CoE randboss arrives and you do not activated Invisibility
and you do not activated Mirror Image. You keep shooting it.
At 00:06:36, it is directly next to you.
And instead of inspecting it, you shoot a beam to it.
It could have had knockback immunity to ignore your knockback from Reality Breach.

Brawlers can deactivate your sustains (Combo Kick).
CoE can clean all your beneficial temporary effects (Switch).


After this, at 00:06:51, there is a rare orc archer Archmage enemy arrived,
you put the mouse over it. It has Spellcraft & Energy alteration sustains,
so very likely it can have Disperse Magic too, but it can have e.g. Time Prison too.

Instead of casting Mirror Image,
you are casting Arcane Reconstruction, just for the damage shield.
(You were full on life and already had Temporal Shield)

Negating a potential threat is not that important?



Second Level of Gorbat:

At 00:21:08, you are entering to the second level.

There is the fixed Randboss there and also a rare Temporal Warden.
(i just know it is a TW, becasue there is a dog next to it)

And again:

Without putting the mouse over any of these enemies
(not even inspecting, just at least knowing what class the randboss had)

You are placing the AAD to the north, and shooting Reality Breach to the north-west.
At the rare TW and on the normal dudes in the corner.

Then you casts an Illuminate.
Then you casts a Chain Lightning.


And then, for 0.3 seconds your mouse is over te randboss, so if i
am stopping the video precisely, i can figure out, it is an Arcane Blade.
I had to make 3 tries to stop the video there, so it took me ~10 seconds to do this.
There is no way, you could check this in-game.

This randboss could be an Archmage, Shadowblade, so on...
So you could have been immediately Time Prisoned for 20+ turns,
and got Dispersed + Mana-Clashed + any Shield effect removed while you are in Time Prison.

The randboss could have been a Rogue, Archer, Skirmisher with a primed Purging Trap,
and that is a radius 2 AoE. Invisibility does not matter, it's AoE, but it could have had Heightened Senses too.
It's an instadeath for you.


I do not understand:
How are you fighting against enemies if you do not even put the mouse over them?
In many cases, you do not know what are you fighting against.

The difficulty of madness & insane has been decreased from 1.6 to 1.7.4 due to several subtle changes:

You cannot be dispersed by most means when you're in Time Prison in 1.7.4, and you can try with Time Prison + Disperse Magic, or other combos in debug mode or using adventurer. You can also check https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... .lua#L7291 for detail. In short, now it is impossible for many disperse talents to work against invulnerable targets.

The talent choices of randbosses is reworked in 1.7.2 to be based on talent trees, and in 1.7.4 the average counts of talent trees a randboss can learn is lowered, which decreases the difficulty of the game. (see https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... .lua#L2044 for detail, note this is a very complicated function).

Here is an example of how many talent trees can a rare/unique/boss learn from a single class: (Note that focus trees will have 66% chance to get 4 talents, and 34% to get 3 talents, and shallow trees will have 60% chance for 2 talents and 40% chance for 1 talents. And the counts of talent trees is rounded down.)

type	level	focus tree(min)	focus tree (max)	shallow tree(min)	shallow tree(max)
rare	30	1.764852927	2.682676439	1.641918359	2.082826513
unique	30	1.580131556	2.318033989	1.828329103	2.344274837
boss	30	1.616413256	2.669693846	1.65	2.2
rare	50	2.017349497	3.238168894	1.780659966	2.377652429
unique	50	1.737587202	2.78113883	1.953651849	2.666533326
boss	50	1.763826214	3.189974874	1.769574275	2.507476708
rare	80	2.307669683	3.876873303	1.938186021	2.712395295
unique	80	1.911161023	3.291650066	2.093969696	3.027350647
boss	80	1.931197648	3.78069758	1.906217783	2.858845727

Now randboss will first learn the starting talents of a class, and roll several talent trees from the class. And in https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... .lua#L2214, if Cunning/Survival tree or Technique/Combat-Training tree is selected, it will skip and reroll, which effectively means they are banned. I do forget summoner has Heightened Senses as starting talents, so randbosses with summoner class will have high see invisible. Besides, rogue sapper is born with Heightened Senses. I'll add this to guide later.

By the way, Thick Skin is removed too, which means randbosses now have less chance to get high resist all. Combat Accuracy is not in the starting talents of several weapon classes like Sun Paladin, and you'll find Sun Paladin rares having less accuracy.

Many dangerous talents have less chance to appear compared to 1.6, like Disperse Magic, Corrupted Negation, Blinding Speed, etc... "random_boss_rarity" attribute is added in their definition.

AI do lost your exact position if they cannot see you directly, even if you do not change position. In fact, AI always know your exact position in code, they just pretend to estimate your position with errors when you're out of sight or invisible. The errors start with 3 radius (unseen for 1 turn) and increases with the turns unseen, up to 10. You may check https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... I.lua#L237 for detail.

In this run I'm playing in a way more based on luck, but this build is not very based on luck. Even if I'm doing mistakes and being careless occasionally, I still have some chance to win. I've just recorded two test plays in Gorbat Pride (https://youtu.be/Ox_VH3JHDGk and https://youtu.be/txQK3iiFOtc), playing in an extremely dangerous way, checking no talents info of enemies, fighting in blinded status, autoexploring many times, not putting too much attention on buffs and shields, and using teleport in uncleared levels. The first run I cleared most of the zone but fails to kill the boss and dies due to my carelessness, and the second succeeds. I get silenced, dispersed, mana clashed, and time prisoned, it is really dangerous indeed, and many times I'm really near death, so I'll never recommend playing this way. I think an experienced insane player can have significantly better success rate than me if playing this build with more concentration, and that's why I share this build.

And I must say, it'll be significantly easier and safer to fight in Gorbat Pride if choosing Aether Permeation instead of Arcane Amplification Drone, which I did in my ogre run and worked well. It'll also be much safer to check every randbosses in every zone, constantly using every magical buff to reduce the potential loss of disperse magic, using arcane eye with stair to check corners of the map, etc. I'll add this to the guide later.

I'm being more careful in my previous successful runs, and that also partly explains why I'm using significantly less time to win in this run. However, my first cornac win in madness might be even luckier than this run: it was the first time I go to prides in madness in 1.7.4, and I didn't realized the difficulty of Gorbat Pride and went there very early, and got dispersed at the entrance with 2 blinkwyrms suddenly phase door inside. What I did to survive is Time Stop + Teleport + Movement Infusion + Stone Wall, and then I kept teleporting in the whole level and kiting many randbosses, barely managed to kill them. And in the final boss fight, I did not close the portals fast enough and get confused by some undeads, failed to action for 1 or 2 turns until my disruption shields broke leaving me very low hp, very lucky indeed to survive.

There is another important thing I mentioned in this guide, that the area of Hunted! is a square, and the 23 range Precognition fails to reveal the corners of the square, so there is always a very small chance that some randbosses hide in the corner, with extremely high speed & other dangerous talents to give this build an instant death in High Peak or Prides. Therefore, it might be good to backup another source of track, since the range of two different kinds of tracking effects will stack together.

I have died to unrevealed randboss once in madness and have not died from Primed Purging Traps yet, and I'll also add this information to the guide. Maybe it is because a randboss must first learn Primed Trap which is tier 4, and prime the purging trap with only ~6.6% chance, so I didn't meet these guys yet.

Btw, it is possible to recognize the class and some talents from the particle effects of an enemy, which is a rather useless skill for careful players, and I do not recommend using it because when you're not concentrated, it is very likely that you cannot recognize it.

I shall add this to guide, that Mirror Image is not very reliable in the entrance of pride at first turn, since it'll be randomly placed near one enemy and only taunts in 4 radius.

Then the main part of the guide might need a little bit rework to contain the key information of the previous discussion, which might be done in this weekend.

[Tradewind_Rider]

You cannot be dispersed by most means when you're in Time Prison in 1.7.4, and you can try with Time Prison + Disperse Magic, or other combos in debug mode or using adventurer. You can also check https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... .lua#L7291 for detail. In short, now it is impossible for many disperse talents to work against invulnerable targets.

Thanks for this information, I am not aware of all of the recent changes.

Still, there are multiple talents that can remove your effects, even while you are Time Prisoned. Several talents are not :dispel, but instead :removeEffect.


Some examples:

1., Twist the Knife: if you have any magical debuff, this talent will remove that many magical effects from you. 7 classes have this talent from the total 33 classes.

2., Disintegration: Paradox Mage have this (and btw, PMs can also Time Prison you).

3., Sunder Armour: several enemy basetypes have this talent, including some very common ones too: Champion of Urh’Rok, Naga Myrmidon, MINOTAUR (even summoned ones), ORC SOLDIER.

Sunder Armour can remove ANY shield effect from you, even Time Shield / Temporal Shield, or Stormshield. And this is a :removeEffect, so it even removes them under Time Prison.

4., Shattering Blow: same as Sunder Armour, Berserkers have this.

5., Switch: Cultists have this talent. It basically removes all your beneficial effects (except Temporal Shield) and it has only a 7 turn cooldown. Under Time Prison, it will just set all of your effects’ durations to 0, because after the duration reduction, it is a :dispel effect. (So, you will lose all your effects anyway).


So, 10 classes from the 33 and some very common basetypes can still remove your effects even under Time Prison.

You can be also Mana Clashed, Acid Fired, Anti Magic Zoned or just Arcane Resource burned from attacks, so all your mana can be also deleted.

Btw, these 10 classes (and basetypes) can also remove your effects and Shields, if you are not Time Prisoned.

Mindslayers can remove any non-other shield effect from you with Impale (but this is a :dispel effect, so it’s not working under Time Prison).


If a Writhing One is rolling Overgrowth, you can be immediately dead, especially if the dude
has extra global speed / movement speed (even just from a Movement Infusion).
You will be quaked away totally randomly, even 20-30 tiles away sometimes per turn.

Overgrowth is destroying also your Stone Walls, while you are inside, by "quaking" them and placing them (and you) randomly.
So activating Stone Wall when you are in danger is totally unsafe, if a Writhing One is inside your Hunted radius or already targeting you.


Arcane Blade, Shadowblades, Archmages have Displacement Shield, and Paradox Mage can also trigger it. This is a hit, so bypasses resilience.

Paradox Mages, Temporal Wardens have Webs of Fate even with ~45% damage displacement.
If you do not inspect them and just keep dealing damage, you can be easily in a bad situation.

Paradox Mages can teleport you, even if you have 100% teleport immunity.

Paradox Mages can also Time Prison you, not just Archmages, Shadowblades.

With Shadow's Path, a Doomed can nuke you even through walls, and this is multiple damage instances (per shadow).

Anorithils, Solipsists can clone you, and this can be very bad because your clone can disperse you.


Wyrmics, Reavers, Corruptors, Doombringers, Cursed, Doomed can apply very high cooldown increase effect on you.
E.g. Burning Hex can reach ~300+% in late-game, so x4 all your cooldowns.
You do not consider having all your talents’ cooldowns multiplied with 3-4 dangerous?

Having even 1 of these effects can be lethal if you cannot clear it for a few turns.

Your only detrimental effect management is 1 or 2 Shatter Afflictions Rune.
This is very few on madness.
In your guide, you are suggesting to use only 1 Shatter Afflictions Rune.

When you get a 50% Confusion for 15 turns, you are clearing it with Shatter. Then you get a Burning Hex...


You are using Circle of Sanctity.
Psyshots have Psionic Mirror, so they can Silence you for 3 turns by giving you the effect.
This is bypassing silence immunity totally.


Do you aware: any Chronomancer enemy can have the Speed Control tree (except Time Stop)? These talents have no random_boss_rarity.

(I will use eff. level 40 talents now, these are not end-game levels on enemies)

Haste is giving 96% global speed bonus for 7-10 turns, with a 24 turn cooldown.

Celerity is giving 96% x 3 = 288% movement speed bonus passively.

Time Dilation is giving 48% x 3 = 144% attack, mind and spell speed bonus passively.

So Speed Control tree synergies well with every other class that a unique/randboss enemy rolls, it gives ALL speeds.

Any boss/unique who rolls Temporal Warden or Paradox Mage, can have 200% global speed AND 388% movement speed
AND 244% action speeds (so ~40% of a turn action speeds).

What do you think, what can a Temporal Warden + Cursed or a TW + Bulwark do?
Several classes have multiple multi-attack talents, the Shield Offense tree is very common.

They can deal even ~9000 damage to you in 1 turn AFTER RESILIENCE.

And I did not added Blinding Speed so far because it has random_boss_rarity.


Do you aware: Mindslayers have Skate for movement speed and Quick as Thought for Global speed buff?

Skate is giving 255% movement speed bonus.

Quick as Thought gives 161% Global speed bonus!
Yes, Quick as Thought is even crazier than Blinding Speed, and it do not have any restriction at all.

Furthermore, it is stacking with Blinding Speed (Speed) and Haste (Haste) effects!

TW + Mindslayer Blinkwyrm with 480% global speed, 630% movement speed (passively) and 244% all action speeds? No random_boss_rarity talents are included.

These enemies can easily kill you in 1-2 turns, if you are unaware of them and you are careless.

AI do lost your exact position if they cannot see you directly, even if you do not change position. In fact, AI always know your exact position in code, they just pretend to estimate your position with errors when you're out of sight or invisible. The errors start with 3 radius (unseen for 1 turn) and increases with the turns unseen, up to 10. You may check https://git.net-core.org/tome/t-engine4 ... I.lua#L237 for detail.

Some thoughts about Invisibility against casters:

Archmage has 24 damage dealing talents.

6 is a direct targeting spell (like Arcane Vortex, Freeze)
4 is a beam, so they can also miss with these.
2 is a smaller radius map effect AoE (Aether Beam, Aether Breach)

12 are huge radius AoE talents.

So, 50% of their damaging talents has a crazy huge radius.

Examples:

Flameshock, Mudslide: Radius 21 cones
Inferno is range 10 and radius 5 AoE
Fireflash is range 7 and a radius 17 AoE
Blastwave is radius 19 AoE, around the caster
Earthquake is range 10 and radius 11 AoE
Glacial Vapour is range 8 and radius 3 AoE
Tidal Wave is radius 10 AoE, around the caster
Frozen Ground is radius 19 AoE, around the caster
Shatter is "just" radius 10 AoE, around the caster
Nova is radius 14 AoE, around the caster
Illuminate is radius 23 AoE, around the caster

So, many of the spell/mindcaster enemies do not really care about
not knowing your exact location, just with a radius 3 error.

They have damage talents with radius 19 AoE, around the caster.
Radius 19+ AoE around the caster is like your full screen?

It does not even matter if they target the Fireflash into your opposite direction, becasue it has radius 17 AoE.

Btw, this also means: Mirror Image (and generally Taunting) is not effective against many classes.
Yes, they will target the Mirror Image with the radius 17 AoE Fireflash ...
But you are standing 4-6 tiles away from it.


Furthermore, most of the times, you are standing in a tunnel.
Or in a smaller area, like the Pride entrances.

So enemy will target you with a radius 3 error … in a 1-wide tunnel … with his range 21 cone … What do you guess: will it hit you?


I am playing with Anorithil for a while, and enemies just simply targeting me even with single target talents, while I am invisible and they have zero see_invisible…

In this run I'm playing in a way more based on luck, but this build is not very based on luck. Even if I'm doing mistakes and being careless occasionally, I still have some chance to win. I've just recorded two test plays in Gorbat Pride (https://youtu.be/Ox_VH3JHDGk and https://youtu.be/txQK3iiFOtc), playing in an extremely dangerous way, checking no talents info of enemies, fighting in blinded status, autoexploring many times, not putting too much attention on buffs and shields, and using teleport in uncleared levels. The first run I cleared most of the zone but fails to kill the boss and dies due to my carelessness, and the second succeeds.

This is really interesting to read. As far as i saw, you are continuously very lucky.

Not just with inventory, but with enemies too.

You are clearing Tier2 zones extremely quickly, before level 25, so you are not a Technomancer yet.

E.g.: you cleared the Sandworm Lair under ~52 minutes and you cleared the Old Forest under 40 minutes!

With my Anorithil, I cleared the Sandworm Lair under ~3 hours and 15 minutes and the Old forest under ~3 hours and 45 minutes!

At this early, there is not that huge difference between these classes according to damage output.

You have absolutely no real enemies.

I am continuously fighting with really tanky and crazy enemies, even from the very beginning.
If you are interested in any enemies / fights, I can send you the link(s).

enemy_1.png (199.13 KiB) Viewed 24256 times

The dude was at the Rhaloren Camp, so in a Tier1 zone (I was level 16 here with my Sun Paladin).

It has: 9300 max life, Second Life, Timeless, Flash of the Blade, Wave of Power, Precise Strikes, Perfect Strike, Blinding Speed, Assault. It also has 122 weapon damage.

Btw, the dude has 3 different talents with random_boss_rarity.
And at this same level, there were 3 more totally crazy unique / boss too.


At the Tier2 zones, I am continuously fighting with these kind of enemies:

enemy_2.png (116.46 KiB) Viewed 24256 times

You can see, both enemies have Precise Strikes and Blinding Speed (random_boss_rarity ...).

The Rogue, Summoner Bee had a 200% base global speed and extra global speed bonus from Speed effect, multi-attack talents, full Scoundrel tree, Grappling Hook, Smoke Screen (potential AoE silence) and crazy summons.

The Oozemancer, Summoner was also really crazy and I had to fight with it and with the Sandworm Queen together, at the same time.


I am continuously fighting with multiple Randboss / Unique Ruin Banshees, Dreadmasters in Dreadfell, I have met with Blinkwyrm in Dreadfell.

I was just Disperse Magiced in Dreadfell by a rare Archmage skeleton.


So, to make my point clear: 1.7.4 madness is winnable with MANY of the classes.

Even with an Alchemist.

Fixed bosses are not the real issue, and in ToME, random rare+ enemies and most things (items, inscriptions, map layouts & initial enemy placements...) are totally randomized.

But, the issue with most of the classes is: you have to be very very lucky continuously.

And because there are numerous zones and there are 1400+ rare+ enemies in the game,
- according to my experience - you cannot be continuously very very lucky.

If I am playing with an Alchemist and I am crazy lucky, like you: I am finding only those Randbosses/Uniques that are not that dangerous (e.g. Alchemist, Brawler wolf with staff), I am finding very strong items very early, I am finding good Shielding Runes early, a bit later good Stormshield Runes, so on … so I will just win the game.

You are saying, you have never met with an enemy with Purging Trap.

You have 3 madness wins, so you have killed around ~4500 rare+ enemies on madness only on these 3 runs. 3 classes can have Traps from the 33, so that means: 409 enemies could have Traps (Rogue, Archer, Skirmisher) from these 4500, on average. (Btw, MORE, because bosses / uniques have multiple classes)
How many Rogue, Archer, Skirmisher will have Traps? ~33% of them? Let’s say: only 20%. (I think, I said a low number, I guess it’s actually more)
409 x 0.2 = 81.
You are saying, these enemies only have a 6.6% chance to have Purging Trap: 81 x 0.066 = 5.3

So with average luck, you should have meet with ~5-6 of these dudes, so far.

Many dangerous talents have less chance to appear compared to 1.6, like Disperse Magic, Corrupted Negation, Blinding Speed, etc... "random_boss_rarity" attribute is added in their definition.

This is true, but i can prove you with ~140 hours of video evidence, where I am inspecting enemies in 1.7.4: very high amount of enemies have random_boss_rarity talents.

Let’s just check 1 video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vScmrVzS1fg

At 00:04:38, you can see the “tooltip window” of the rare ghoul archer.
It has Precise Strikes.

At 00:35:07, you can see I am inspecting a rare Rogue time elemental.
The rare Rogue has: Rush, Perfect Strike, Blinding Speed.
Can you tell me: what is the chance to have 3 of this random_boss_rarity talents?

At 00:38:19, you can see the tooltip window of a rare Doombringer elemental.
It has Precise Strikes.


Ok, i am really interested in this one:

From 01:29:39 to 01:30:10, I am fighting with a Demonologist with ZERO see_invisible.
You can see, I was invisible with 26 power and the dude has 0 see_invisible.
I am Jumpgated to my first Jumpgate, then I Jumpgate to my second Jumpgate, so I was not stationary.

And after I Jumpgated the second time, the dude FEARSCAPED me, while I was invisible all the time.

Fearscape is a directly targeted talent, so it has to target the exact same tile where I am.

Can you explain me: how could the dude Fearscaped me, with zero see_invisible while I was invisible (26 power) and I was teleported two times, so I was not stationary?

You are saying, enemies have an error of radius 3 at first turn, then an increasing error radius for targeting invisible actors.
It Fearscaped me just after my second teleport.


At 01:31:34, you can see the tooltip window of a rare Berserker wolf.
It has Precise Strikes.

At 01:43:40, you can see the talents of a unique Rogue, Berserker.
It has Rush.

At 01:49:30, you can see the talents of a rare Naga Berserker.
It has Rush.

At 01:54:28, you can see the talents of a rare Brawler elemental.
It has: Rush, Precise Strikes and Perfect Strike.

At 02:36:48, you can see the talents of a randboss Bulwark, Gunslinger.
It has Rush and Precise Strikes.

At 03:04:05, you can see the talents of a unique Sawbutcher, Doombringer.
It has: Precise Strikes and Perfect Strike.


Fun:

At 02:58:21, you can see I am inspecting a rare Skirmisher.
The dude is anti-magic follower, because it has Purging Trap (Primed btw).

From 03:06:57, you can see how I got a Primed Purging Trap into my face.

The Skirmisher was Blinded and Confused (50%) and still throw in onto me.
I had 174% silence immunity totally, but still, I was:

Silenced for 7 turns, Dispersed, and Arcane Resource Burned.

And this is just one of my plays, just a 3 hours and 20 minutes of play.


I can accept that: you can play totally carelessly, you can auto-explore while you are also doing challenge run with your Archmages on madness. And you do not even checking the enemies at all. Ok.

But my personal experience is totally the opposite.

I am playing only on madness from 1.5.9 – 1.5.10 (apart from my East only Anorithil).
I have totally 200+ hours of play on 1.7.4 madness (~140 hours of this is recorded).


I just got a 7 turn long Silence with Disperse Magic into my face in Reknor, that bypasses Silence immunity and it’s a radius 2 AoE, and it is also a Disperse Magic.
What would happen with your Archmage if you got this at any of the Pride entrances, while you are fighting with several enemies? Or basically, anywhere at the late-game?
Instant death?

However, my first cornac win in madness might be even luckier than this run: it was the first time I go to prides in madness in 1.7.4, and I didn't realized the difficulty of Gorbat Pride and went there very early, and got dispersed at the entrance with 2 blinkwyrms suddenly phase door inside. What I did to survive is Time Stop + Teleport + Movement Infusion + Stone Wall, and then I kept teleporting in the whole level and kiting many randbosses, barely managed to kill them. And in the final boss fight, I did not close the portals fast enough and get confused by some undeads, failed to action for 1 or 2 turns until my disruption shields broke leaving me very low hp, very lucky indeed to survive.

Congratulations for winning madness with your first mage that managed to reach the East.
So, as you described: you were also very very lucky with your other Archmages too.

I checked your Archmage characters:

You have this 3 Archmage wins on madness that you linked in your guide.

But I can only see 5 deaths with Archmages on madness.

All deaths are below character level 15.
This 37.5% winrate on madness is extremely good.
Grat!

What makes this Archmage build unkillable on madness after it reaches character level 15?

It seems, this Archmage is definitely stronger than a Possessor.

[IckyThingBane]

For those unable to penetrate the walls of text above, the tl;dr is

TWR: You're cheating somehow.
Y: Git gud.

[centipedesexdoll]

It's pretty telling that this guy has a stack of madness win, is only using addons for picking escort, and has video evidence that he's not cheating for affinity or damage cap or whatever that wouldn't show up on the vault.
And tradewind has .... nothing.