A Pile of Steaming Ooze – a Tinker Oozemancer Guide for 1.5
Posted: Tue May 09, 2017 3:32 pm
This guide is out of date for 1.6 and will not be further updated.
- Most notably, Ancestral Life has been deeply weakened for Oozemancers, such that Fungal Blood is no longer a strong prodigy and your Prodigy choices are much narrower. Skip the whole discussion about that, run Superpower and Windtouched Speed.
- Also, Mind Parasite is likely to be of vastly greater importance in this game build given that Oozemancers have relatively low damage and enemy durability and self-healing have increased significantly. Insidious Poison off of Spores will often be insufficient and also many opponents are poison-immune, but high levels of Mind Parasite will give you a chance to knock out enemy's teleport and self-heal options and will likely prove necessary on the toughest opponents.
-----
This guide is about maximizing the deep synergies between Oozemancer and Tinkers. I recommend the Select First Escort mod as a way to guarantee Tinker access, but save-scumming is always an option if you're not into mods.
This guide blatantly borrows (steals? and if so, sorry!) bpat's guide formatting. It's clear and helps me stay reasonably concise.
My deathless Insane win (note that he went to the Infinite Dungeon after playing through the core game, so he has a few more stats and generics than might be expected from the core game - in particular, the 2nd point of Resolve is from the Antimagic Potion in the ID, not a build choice I recommend). https://te4.org/characters/4806/tome/64 ... b6f2264ce9
Why Tinkers?
Natively, Oozemancers can soak a huge amount of damage, have solid summons baked into other attacks, and excellent utility riders (poisons, resource destruction, magical sustain destruction, etc) on many of their attacks. On the downside, they also have relatively poor status clears (only Oozewalk) and modest overall damage output, either of which can cause their progress to falter and grind to a halt.
Tinkers greatly help to shore up these weaknesses – Grounding Strap gives a huge stun/freeze resistance boost, Alchemist's Helper and dual Crystal Edges greatly improve your damage output (+25% to nature and acid, +30% critical multiplier, respectively), Crystal Plating buffs everything and Mental Stimulator buffs Cunning even more (making 100% crit significantly easier to reach), and salves give you excellent and flexible status clears while further reinforcing your durability via Unstoppable Force or Pain Suppressor. Iron Grip and Kinetic Stabilizer round out the package with situational but excellent Disarm and Teleportation immunity. For these reasons, I suspect that the Tinker Oozemancer is the strongest possible Oozemancer build at this time.
Races
Cornac is the natural choice for Tinker Oozemancers.
- Starting with an extra Inscription smooths out the early game significantly.
- The extra category point gives you enough for full inscriptions, Oozing Blades, Eyal's Fury, and Tinkers, and in particular lets you have each as they're needed and relevant. You want Tinkers ASAP so that you can start gathering plans, and you want Eyal's Fury as soon as possible but not sooner than you have the points to spare for it.
- The extra class and generic points are very welcome in this build - Oozemancers are a little light on damage, so having extra points available to top up damage past talent breakpoints is solid.
- Your generics are tight, with 13-16 points dedicated to Tinkers. Even if you wanted to forgo the additional 5 generics from Cornac, you've got little leeway to go deep into a racial tree.
Stats
Early on you're going to juggle Wil and Cun to unlock talents and max out your number of Bloated Oozes ASAP. Then Wil>Str>Cun>Con.
Category points
1: Inscription slot -> 10: Oozing Blades -> 20: Tinkers -> 36: Eyal's Fury → Wyrm: Inscription Slot.
You get Fungus unlocked for free after Tempest peak when you go back and visit Protector Myssil. While you can do the Antimagic quest, it won't give you a free point of Resolve but will give you +0.1 Antimagic mastery.
If you're concerned about having difficulty with the mechanical guardians of the Automated Tinker Teacher, you can just Slime Roots in through the wall, unlock it, use the store, hit Nature's Balance, and Slime Roots back out without ever fighting them.
Inscriptions
In the beginning you'll want Movement, Wild: Physical, Wild: Mental, and Regeneration infusions. Once you open up Frost and Water salves (Fiery usually only comes online once you can go East unless you get lucky in the Ruined Dungeon) you can drop your Wilds for Medical Injectors and start looking to replace an Injector with a Heroism infusion. Endgame I ran Regeneration, Heroism, Movement, and dual Injectors so I could run 100% uptime Pain Suppressor Salve (which has duration > cooldown with a good Injector and gives significant resist all and negative life) while still having an Injector open for status removal. I could also see an dropping an Injector for another Heroism or Regen as needed, but I didn't miss them and I like diversifying between injectors and infusions to limit saturation. You could also run a Steam Generator in place of a Movement infusion if you wanted to try subbing Rocket Boots and any of the hand-slot summons.
Prodigies
Any 2 of: Superpower, PES, Fungal Blood, Windtouched Speed. (I do not recommend Fungal Blood + Speed on Insane or higher difficulty, as you need the Mindpower.)
- Superpower is a solid baseline Prodigy for all Oozemancers. Less dramatic than PES, but it's 100% uptime, solid performance, and melee buffs (very nice with Call of the Ooze and Nature's Equilbrium) make it an uncontroversial pick. Increasing Mindpower also buffs health pools of Bloated Oozes and Antimagic Shield absorption, so it has modest defensive aspects as well.
- Pain Enhancement System, compared to Superpower, offers additional defensive buffs (hit points, saves, heal factor, crit resistance), a large spike to Mindpower, 6 turns of essentially guaranteed no EQ fail, a higher Mucus ooze cap, excellent synergies with Heroism infusions, and a good way to unlock early access to Thick Skin. Its uptime is limited, however, and so it plays well with the "DoT and run" Oozemancer strategy that you tend to use earlier in the game, and this makes it a good choice for your first prodigy. (If you're having trouble unlocking the “Size Matters” achievement by 30, try Call of the Ooze or Nature's Equilibrium after adding an Acid Groove or Crystal Edge to your Mindstars). Note also that PES snapshots off your Strength at the time it is used, so it's significantly better to fire of a Heroism Infusion then trigger PES than the reverse.
- Fungal Blood is probably the highest potential level 42 Prodigy, but it requires a significant investment in Slime Roots and Ancestral Life, Slime Mastery items, a high level of attention to your status icon bar with frequent right-click cancels of Regeneration effects, and some additional knowledge of game mechanics (such as "Healing Infusions are coded to not trigger Ancestral Life") to maximize its impact. With these in place, you can use 3 infusions with Fungal Blood after each (generating bonus time for each Regeneration infusion and Fungal Blood), reset with Slime Roots, do it again, spam your best high cooldown abilities in the 6+ free turns you've generated, then reset them and Slime Roots with Nature's Balance followed by using Slime Roots to reset your infusions one last time. Later in the fight you can still grab additional free turns, healing, & magical debuff clears each time you fire off an Infusion. When combining PES with Fungal Blood, remember the free turns you generate will not tick your PES timer down, either for duration or cooldown.
- Windtouched Speed was recommended by player number43. A solid boost to global speed, a 10% cooldown bonus that rounds down (which has it most notable effect on your already low-cooldown beam by taking them from 3 to 2), and immunity to some forms of traps. As a DPR tool it is typically inferior to a kitted out Fungal Blood, as it will take 20+ turns to generate the number of bonus actions that Slime Roots 7 allows on T1, but it doesn't require Slime Mastery items and is much, much easier to use. Given that Eye of the Tiger has a once per turn cap, Windtouched Speed is probably comparable as a means of ensuring talent access and clearly superior as a DPR boost, and it also combines much better with PES to squeeze in an extra couple of actions during PES's duration.
- A note on Defensive Prodigies: some players recommend that an Oozemancer take Spine of the World for dealing with status effects. While the critical path for an Oozemancer involves compensating for their modest damage and limited status removal, I find damage much harder to find and gear for on an Oozemancer than physical status resistances, and while there's a useful upper cap of 100% immunity to physical effects there is no useful upper limit on damage short of 1HKOing everything (and Oozemancers can't reach that on Insane regardless of gear or prodigy choices). For those reasons I don't recommend Spine of the World - if you're really concerned about status effects, I recommend freeing up the generic points to get Unstoppable Force salve instead, although be aware that you'll probably have to go East and defeat at least one Pride before it comes online.
Tinkers
Note that you can switch Tinkers at instant-speed, but it causes the item the tinker is on, as well as any usable power of the tinker itself, to go on cooldown.
Belt: Alchemist's Helper for increasing your two main damage types. Backup Fungal Web to swap in for additional healing (swap in, hit salve, swap Alchemist's Helper back on). Note that Fungal Web does not trigger a regeneration effect from the Fungus tree.
Body: Crystal Plating for maximizing stats and PES synergy once you've gotten good gems. I ran a spike attachment for significant armor boost and retailation damage until I had at least tier 3 Crystal Plating.
Cloak: Grounding Strap is king of the slot. Post-Sorcerers you can pick the flavor of resistance you like best.
Feet: I went with Kinetic Stabilizer for the phys save and teleport immunity. If you've got Steam generation from either a Steam Generator or Steam-Powered Boots, Rocket Boots are a great mobility option.
Hands: Iron Grip for Disarm immunity, as many of your key abilities get turned off without Mindstars. If you're running steam generation, consider whether Disarm immunity or another Taunting minion from Fatal Attractor is a better deal for you. Toxic Cannister has nice damage but hits your own summons too often.
Head: Mental Stimulator. You don't really need accuracy boosts and you've got tons of AoEs to flush out sneaking enemies + significant crit resistance to survive them, but every bit of crit bonus helps.
Lite: You can grab White Light Emitter if you really want to squeeze a little more damage out of your Crystal Edges, but you won't miss it if you don't.
Ammo: No.
Weapon-mindstar: Crystal Edge is king of slot, giving solid bonus damage on your melee hits given the relatively modest damage that mindstars do, but it's really there for the critical multiplier bonus, which applies to every one of your crits whether or not it has a melee component. Taking your crit multiplier from 150%->180% is a 20% damage boost on every crit-capable power you have, and hugely important for this class.
Class Skill Categories
Note that I'm listing what I think are the minimums under core - you'll want/need to dig deeper into many of these to fill in holes in your game, as determined by the gear you find and how your damage, durability, and control are balanced on account.
Slime: 2/3/1/1 early, 2/5/1/4-5 core (depending on gear), more Slime Spit if you can tolerate its quirks
Slime spit at 2 hits 3 targets for decent damage and slow, and is very helpful in the early game. However, I find its slow speed (it will only move 5 spaces in the first turn), projectile nature, and unfriendliness to allies can limit its utility once you start covering the field with Oozes. I recommend floating a second point in it until you've gotten Living Mucus and Call of the Ooze and seeing how you like it under those conditions – it is one of your few burst damage options so it's worth giving a good trial.
Poisonous Spores starts at radius 1, gaining another point of radius at 3 (radius 2) & 5 (radius 3) points invested. Some foes are immune to poison, but a surprising number that you might think would be are not (Demons, Vampires, Ghouls, and Mummies IIRC have no poison resistance). Does very solid extra crit damage and tacks on additional specific poison based riders, such as Numbing, Crippling, or Spydric, some of which can trivialize certain enemies (most notably, Spydric vs melee foes).
Acidic Skin isn't a good use of your Equilibrium until late, and while Disarming melee opponents can certainly be effective you've got better places for your points and better tools for duffing melee opponents.
Slime Roots lets you teleport without LOS and resets 1-3 talents at levels 1, 4, and 7 (achievable with Sludgegrip, Oozing Heart, or amulet) respectively. Note that it cannot reset Nature's Balance due to the latter's fixed cooldown (although Nature's Balance can reset Slime Roots), and it also cannot reset PES. It can, however, reset infusions, making Heroism → Regeneration (especially with Ancestral Life) → Slime Roots a very strong start to most battles. If you get an item that allows you to increase your Slime Mastery past 1.3, being able to reset 3 talents off a teleport is very strong (if you're not playing auto-trigger with Mucus, I recommend Pain Suppressor Salve or Unstoppable Force as your third infusion to reset).
Mucus: 4/4/4/1 early and core, max Living Mucus luxury
Mucus does many important jobs for you – damages enemies, spawns minions, lowers Equilibrium, and enables Oozewalk. Optimal play would be to trigger this manually, especially if you don't have Slime Roots 7, but lazy play with auto-trigger on sight of enemy works almost as well. The radius boost at talent level 4 should be an early priority, since it means your Mucus will start hurting melee ranged enemies without you moving. Note that you only drop Mucus once per turn, so if you increase your speed your Mucus trail will become patchy (which can give you pretty good mobility via Oozewalk).
Acid Splash is like Mucus you can throw but with an Acid AoE up front that is ally friendly, so it's your favorite thing. Radius starts at 2, goes to 3 at 4 points. Note that, as this has half the cooldown of Mucus, you may often want to include yourself in your second Acid Splash AoE in a fight in order to keep the Equilibrium-managing benefits of Mucus flowing.
Living Mucus makes your favorite thing come alive and start spitting on your enemies. In addition to the bonuses in the tooltip, additional talent levels increase Mucus Ooze hit points and the talent level of their projectile. Given that endgame you may have as many as 7 of these spamming attacks at your opponents, plus another bunch of mucus ooze attacks procced off Unstoppable Nature, it's potentially worth maxing.
Oozewalk isn't worth investing the points in to make quick, given its foibles, but at 1 point for 2 status clears and a positional shift it's a steal.
Ooze 4/1/5/2 early, 4/1/5/5 Core
Mitosis determines the maximum number of Bloated Oozes you can have, how often they'll passively spawn, and how tough they are. Starting with 1 Ooze at level 1, adding another at 2 and 4 points – get to 4 ASAP. (The 5th point increases their health and damage resistance and is can be worth grabbing at some point, but is not strictly necessary.)
Reabsorb gives you a huge 40% damage reduction and a manaburn AOE, but I find it rarely the most valuable use of your turn and a Bloated Ooze, particularly once you've gotten your last inscription and can afford to use permanent Pain Suppressor Salve for a 25-27% resist all at instant speed, duration>cooldown, and without consuming a Bloated Ooze. However, if you have max Bloated Oozes out already and Call of the Ooze is cooled down or reset, Reabsorb can be a good way to get rid of one so you can fire off your Call of the Ooze melee channel again.
Call of the Ooze, with Superpower's boost to melee, is your single most damaging talent, taunts enemies, and gets your damage splitting Bloated Oozes on the board fast. Breakpoints for Ooze numbers created by this talent at 3 and 5, but will only create numbers up to the max amounts determined by Mitosis. Max this early.
Indiscernible Anatomy is another key component of your durability – lets you turn most criticals against you into normal hits, and in conjunction with Mitosis makes you very difficult to burst down. The wound, poison, disease, and blindness resistance are pure bonus. Get to 2 points ASAP, then fill in as available.
Moss 1/0/0/0 early, luxury 1/1/4/0-2.
All moss talents start with radius 2 and gain an additional radius with 2 and 4 class points invested, and with a base duration of 4 rounds (+2 round duration at 2 talent points and another +1 duration at 3 and 4 talent points invested). Early on, when you're still doing a lot of your killing by kiting with Mucus, Grasping Moss is an easy 1 pointer than is pretty hard on melee enemies.
If you're going to make a serious investment in a Moss talent, my vote is Slippery Moss. Although it scales poorly with additional Mindpower, an instant speed ability that causes 35-38% chance for your opponent to do nothing on a turn they were going to use a talent is very strong, and I don't think there are any immunities to this condition. Although it isn't listed in the tooltip, this has a 100% chance to apply a 2 turn slippery moss debuff on opponents, which then causes the appropriate talent failure chance.
Hallucinogenic Moss is also pretty powerful, although note that there's both a chance for the area to apply it and then another chance for the confusion itself to kick in on any given turn, and many bosses are packing resistance or immunity to Confusion, so I think it's less reliable than Slippery. However, if you've gone all the way to Slippery Moss already, another 2 points for a decent confusion effect isn't an unreasonable expense. Remember, DoT = Damage over Time, which means any turn your opponent doesn't do anything is an effective DPR increase for you.
Using one Moss talent puts them all on cooldown for 3 turns, so its best to allow for at least 3 turns to pass between using a Moss talent and a talent reset ability or it's likely a number of your resets will be consumed by Moss talents. I like to throw Slippery Moss in after the Heroism->Regen->Slime Roots combo discussed above.
Oozing Blades 3/1/1/3 early, 5/1/1/5 Core more Natural Acid as needed for DPS, Mind Parasite 2 or 4 luxury
Oozebeam is the default attack you wanted Slime Spit to be. It does comparable damage as a range 10 beam, it's ally friendly, and it cools down in 3 turns compared to Slime Spit's 5. Workhorse talent.
Natural Acid is only really useful once you've gotten Acidfire, and even then it's a significant point investment for the damage improvement it offers. Nonetheless, with full stacks it increases your nature damage by up to 18% or so, and that buys it a bit of forgiveness. The nature resistance is a nice addon but nothing critical.
Mind Parasite is great on lower difficulties, but on Insane most bosses combine multiple classes worth of talents together and it's unlikely you'll knock out their killer app. However, going from 1 point to 2 increases the cooldown on the affected talents from 4 to 8, so for a small investment past the pre-req it can sometimes be worthwhile. At 4 talent points this goes from knocking out 2 talents to 3, which is significantly better but probably more class points than its worth.
Unstoppable Nature is simply required. The vast majority of your damage is nature, and you can really struggle to kill high nature resist enemies without this. Ironically some of your deadliest opponents are other Oozemancers and Zigur followers, who combine immunity caps of over 100%, significant starting nature resistance, and the Resolve talent. Killing them often requires that you switch their Resolve over to Acid, but without Unstoppable Nature you're still going to struggle to hurt them. The bonus Mucus spit is gravy – you were going to max this anyway, but more damage is always welcome.
Eyal's Wrath 1/1/5/4 core, max Eyal's Wrath to taste
Reclaim is short ranged single target damage. It's not terrible, and it doesn't require a clear line between you and the target, but it's not great, either. Max Oozebeam and invest significantly more in Slime Spit before investing more here.
Nature's Defiance is great at 1, as damage resistances are not your shortcoming. The Equilibrium reduction on being damaged by a spell is a nice complement to your Antimagic Shield.
Acidfire is the key reason to unlock this tree. It provides a large radius (4, never improves), long duration (4 at level 1, +1 duration at levels 2, 4, and 5, +2 duration at level 3), modest ongoing damage acid cloud with 3 purposes – to blind enemies, burn away their magical buffs and sustains, and proc Natural Acid. The latter two functions can make killing enemies much easier, and even though the damage isn't that great per round you benefit from another large radius AoE. Having as high a % on the magical effect destruction as possible also potentially frees up your glove slot from Spellhunt Remnants/makes not finding them less of a big deal, and being able to rip sustains off enemies is class defining.
Eyal's Wrath is similar – a large radius (radius 4 at unlock, +1 at 2nd & 4th points), long duration (4 turns at 1st point, +1 duration at 2nd, 4th, and 5th points, +2 duration at 3rd point), modestly damaging effect. This one follows you around and also burns away magical resources – you're not likely to make much of a dent in mana against higher level enemies, but Positive, Negative, and especially Vim are relatively fragile resource pools, and Eyal's Wrath, particularly following a Mana Clash, can lock enemies out of these abilities. Also helps manage Equilibrium.
Corrosive Blades – Core none, luxury none.
You don't have the class points to spend here to make this work, even if you wanted to throw a category point at it.
Generic Categories
Physics: 4/2/1/0 for Crystal Edge, Crystal Plating, Rocket Boots, Kinetic Stabilizer, Mental Stimulator, and Grounding Strap. Can go 4/2/2 for White Light Emitter if you want slightly more damage out of Crystal Edge.
Chemistry: 3/3 for Salves and Alchemist's Helper. You can go 5/3 if you want Unstoppable Force Salve - I did not need it, but if I had it to do over I probably would take it anyways, as I ran dual Injectors for maximum status security but often end fights having triggered only Pain Suppressor Salve with my Injectors.
Combat Training: 3-5 Thick Skin, 3-5 Armor Training.
Mindstar Mastery: 5/1/5/1. Try to leave a few points of Psiblades available until you've gone East, in case you find Alchemist escorts who can fill them in for you. Nature's Equilibrium will trigger Fungal Growth and Ancestral life if you don't have another Regeneration effect up (which you can cancel by right-clicking on the icon as needed), giving you an instant-speed melee attack/heal/regeneration.
Survival: 1/1/1 core, strive to get Track as early as possible as it makes corner sniping with your many AoEs much easier. More points in Device Mastery optional but very good – again, if you're planning on maxing Device Mastery be sure to leave a few points open until the East in case you get a Thief escort.
Call of the Wild: 1/1/1/4 ASAP, as Nature's Balance is extremely useful to reset your deadliest talents. Leave it at 4 as there are no benefits to going to 5. You can invest more in Nature's Touch as needed, but with high enough Mindpower even a single point can be reasonably useful, as it will trigger Fungal Growth & Ancestral Life (again, only if you don't already have another Regeneration effect).
Antimagic: 1/2-3/5/1-3. Resolve stays at 1, as Oozemancers don't have enough EQ issues to warrant 3 additional points to unlock Resolve working through AM shield. Silence 2 gives radius 8 and 4 turns effect, Silence 3 gives radius 10 and 5 turns effect – I found the former to be enough for my playstyle. Antimagic Shield is the last significant pillar of your durability, and well worth maxing. Mana Clash is fine at 1, but at 3 the Manaburn effect lasts for the entire cooldown of the skill which can be a nice upgrade.
Fungus: 2/1/1 core, 2/1/2/1 better, more luxury. 2 points in Wild Growth is the only breakpoint where you get more than +1 turn for +1 generic point. 2 points of Ancestral life at high mindpower gives you more than 100% of a turn on using a regen effect, and the equilibrium management is a welcome rider.
Gameplay
Starting out your Willpower limits your sustains, and you'll have to decide what EQ fail % you're comfortable with. Mitosis is your top priority sustain, than Antimagic, then Psiblades, with Psiblades switching before Antimagic once you've got Oozing Blades. I find seeding the battlefield with nastiness (mucus, moss, summon, poison) and then running away with a Movement infusion is pretty effective... you'll kill a lot of what's there and profoundly injure much of the rest. Once you get Track, it's a great followup to running away – see where your enemies are, how hurt they are, and whether you have corner sniping opportunities.
Once you get your full durability talents in place (Mitosis and Call of Ooze, Indiscernible Anatomy, Antimagic Shield, Ancestral Life to allow you to start battles with quick Regeneration) along with a Heroism Infusion you can stick around for fights a bit more. Be warned when you fight rares, uniques, or bosses, though – once in a great while one of them will have a particularly deadly combination of talents (usually involving GWF) and can hit you much, much harder than you're used to.
Mid-game and on, start with Heroism infusion and Regeneration (with Unstoppable Force or Pain Suppressor Salve if your Slime Roots >= 7 - if you have the choice, start with Unstoppable Force as its cooldown is much higher). Follow up with Slime Roots to reset them and achieve your optimal position. When I'm confident in my durability against enemies I typically Slime Roots into very close range to enable Mosses, Leaves Tide, Nature's Equilibrium, Silence, Slime Spit, and Mucus/Acid Splash stacking, but whenever you're facing multiple tough enemies it's always an option to retreat to a choke point where incoming damage can be limited. After Slime Roots, hit Mucus, a Moss, and Call of the Ooze, then Acid Splash to finish setting up your summons and start layering DoTs. Leaves Tide if you're feeling threatened or if you're close to enemies, and keep an eye out for Silence or Mana Clash targets. If you're feeling safe enough against a particular magical enemy that you can delay Call of the Ooze by a turn, use Mana Clash before Call of the Ooze, as your Ooze melee channel benefits from manaburn damage.
Final battle, consider whether you want to use Spellhunt Remnants or Acidfire to strip sustains, and whether you want to get a source of Steam & wear Rocket Boots to run around and close all the portals first thing.
Itemization
Generally, early game you're mostly looking for +life, as you can really stretch out whatever bonus life comes your way through Mitosis, and +Willpower, as your Equilibrium is a pretty strict limit of how many sustains you can run early on. When you can make the conversion to 100% stun resist, go for it.
Mid-game, once you're running PES and/or Superpower, + Strength is a very strong choice, and +Cunning or +mental crit until you get 100% mental crit chance is extremely valuable in conjunction with Crystal Edges.
Besides all the stuff that's normally good, I'm listing things with special synergy with Oozemancers.
Armor: Tarrasca for bonkers durability, or Kroltar set for additional AoE options and +240 life. Breath of Eyal is nice for the large amount of resists, but IMO you need something with more armor and hardiness.
Boots: Unbreakable Greaves for durability and huge strength bonus for prodigy synergy, Steam-Powered Boots for Steam generation without using up an Inscription slot.
Head: Eye of the Forest gives + nature damage and + nature resistance penetration, plus relevant stats and blindness immunity. Kroltar's Helm is good to complete the set.
Hands: Spellhunt Remnants are extremely useful for shutting down annoying sustains faster than Acidfire and have a significant mental crit bonus, while Steam-Powered Gauntlets provide all around useful stats, +all damage, and a large Crit Multiplier. Sludgegrip, the tier 1 gloves, are surprisingly good all game long due to their +0.2 Slime Mastery bonus.
Ring: Mnemonic is amazing, with helpful confusion resistance, mental effect clears, and letting you reset wild-gifts.
Weapons: For generic mindstar egos, look for Sand – Burrow can be very helpful early on at limiting how many opponents can reach you at once. Nexus of the Way is good as always. Your best Oozemancer-specific mindstar pair is Oozing Heart and Eyal's Will – both offer nature and acid +damage %, solid mindpower and mental crit, and mastery bonuses to talents you use. Oozing Heart, in particular, lets you get Slime Roots to reset 3 talents with a 5 point investment, which is definitely worth it. Eyal's Will may allow you to cap out Leave's Tide evasion without full investment, I didn't find it in my game.
Misc: Tree of Life has a handful of useful traits, including +20% nature damage. Guardian's Totem has a fun antimagic summon (just be aware you can't swap spaces with it so it), decent Will and Mindpower boosts, and category boosts to Antimagic and Fungus.
Escorts
When trying to get one's willfully suicidal escort to the portal, I find it's helpful to block them as often as possible with my body, use Track and Earth's Eyes every few steps (the latter being surprisingly useful in this one case, as often an opponent that appears nearby on Track may be blocked by a wall), and corner-snipe everything I see. If I can't reach an enemy with one of my AoEs without allowing my escort to move past me and thus likely get killed, I instead fire an Acid Splash into an open space, as the spawned Mucus Oozes will either kill the mob or at least pull it to where I can reach it. Never give your escort free reign to move on their own if you can possibly help it.
Best talents to choose from escorts.
Alchemist: Psiblades, will free up more generic points for you.
Anthoril: Conversion (will trigger regeneration effects with Fungus tree) first point, Biofeedback for additional points
Loremaster: Disarm can be okay if you've buffed Strength enough, but you probably won't be intending to stay in melee range that often. Strength bonuses are alway good with PES and Superpower.
Seer: Nature's Touch (will trigger regeneration effects with Fungus tree)
Sun Paladin: Disengage or Willpower
Temporal Explorer: Dream Walk
Thief: Device Mastery
Tinker: Location, then Last Engineer Standing
Warrior: Vitality
E: Mostly typos and removing some of my overreliance on the word "note", but also remembered to include Pain Suppressor Salve among list of Tinker benefits - it doesn't shore up a weakness, but does further compound a strength.
Drowning NPCs
I played TOME for years without knowing about this, so I'm including a section on it even though it's not Oozemancer specific.
If you start looking into the modding scene, you might find a mod called Quick Drown NPCs. "Why," hypothetical reader asks, "would I want to drown NPCs at all, much less quickly?" The answer is that, at high difficulty levels like Insane and Madness, the monsters start at a much higher level than you, and one way to get a starting equipment and XP you need is to swap places with rare and higher NPCs until they're standing in water and waiting for them to drown, at which point, free stuff and XP without ever triggering hostility! This is particularly potent in Last Hope, where unique or boss NPCs spawn most frequently. A good drowning run could start you off between level 5-7 instead of level 2 (insane) or 3 (madness), which is the difference between smashing your face into a plywood wall and smashing your face into a brick wall.
It also kinda explains why a single hero can be so effective as to save the world... the rest of these guys won't pull their faces out of water if they're drowning, except, for some reason, sometimes enemies with Infestation.
- Most notably, Ancestral Life has been deeply weakened for Oozemancers, such that Fungal Blood is no longer a strong prodigy and your Prodigy choices are much narrower. Skip the whole discussion about that, run Superpower and Windtouched Speed.
- Also, Mind Parasite is likely to be of vastly greater importance in this game build given that Oozemancers have relatively low damage and enemy durability and self-healing have increased significantly. Insidious Poison off of Spores will often be insufficient and also many opponents are poison-immune, but high levels of Mind Parasite will give you a chance to knock out enemy's teleport and self-heal options and will likely prove necessary on the toughest opponents.
-----
This guide is about maximizing the deep synergies between Oozemancer and Tinkers. I recommend the Select First Escort mod as a way to guarantee Tinker access, but save-scumming is always an option if you're not into mods.
This guide blatantly borrows (steals? and if so, sorry!) bpat's guide formatting. It's clear and helps me stay reasonably concise.
My deathless Insane win (note that he went to the Infinite Dungeon after playing through the core game, so he has a few more stats and generics than might be expected from the core game - in particular, the 2nd point of Resolve is from the Antimagic Potion in the ID, not a build choice I recommend). https://te4.org/characters/4806/tome/64 ... b6f2264ce9
Why Tinkers?
Natively, Oozemancers can soak a huge amount of damage, have solid summons baked into other attacks, and excellent utility riders (poisons, resource destruction, magical sustain destruction, etc) on many of their attacks. On the downside, they also have relatively poor status clears (only Oozewalk) and modest overall damage output, either of which can cause their progress to falter and grind to a halt.
Tinkers greatly help to shore up these weaknesses – Grounding Strap gives a huge stun/freeze resistance boost, Alchemist's Helper and dual Crystal Edges greatly improve your damage output (+25% to nature and acid, +30% critical multiplier, respectively), Crystal Plating buffs everything and Mental Stimulator buffs Cunning even more (making 100% crit significantly easier to reach), and salves give you excellent and flexible status clears while further reinforcing your durability via Unstoppable Force or Pain Suppressor. Iron Grip and Kinetic Stabilizer round out the package with situational but excellent Disarm and Teleportation immunity. For these reasons, I suspect that the Tinker Oozemancer is the strongest possible Oozemancer build at this time.
Races
Cornac is the natural choice for Tinker Oozemancers.
- Starting with an extra Inscription smooths out the early game significantly.
- The extra category point gives you enough for full inscriptions, Oozing Blades, Eyal's Fury, and Tinkers, and in particular lets you have each as they're needed and relevant. You want Tinkers ASAP so that you can start gathering plans, and you want Eyal's Fury as soon as possible but not sooner than you have the points to spare for it.
- The extra class and generic points are very welcome in this build - Oozemancers are a little light on damage, so having extra points available to top up damage past talent breakpoints is solid.
- Your generics are tight, with 13-16 points dedicated to Tinkers. Even if you wanted to forgo the additional 5 generics from Cornac, you've got little leeway to go deep into a racial tree.
Stats
Early on you're going to juggle Wil and Cun to unlock talents and max out your number of Bloated Oozes ASAP. Then Wil>Str>Cun>Con.
Category points
1: Inscription slot -> 10: Oozing Blades -> 20: Tinkers -> 36: Eyal's Fury → Wyrm: Inscription Slot.
You get Fungus unlocked for free after Tempest peak when you go back and visit Protector Myssil. While you can do the Antimagic quest, it won't give you a free point of Resolve but will give you +0.1 Antimagic mastery.
If you're concerned about having difficulty with the mechanical guardians of the Automated Tinker Teacher, you can just Slime Roots in through the wall, unlock it, use the store, hit Nature's Balance, and Slime Roots back out without ever fighting them.
Inscriptions
In the beginning you'll want Movement, Wild: Physical, Wild: Mental, and Regeneration infusions. Once you open up Frost and Water salves (Fiery usually only comes online once you can go East unless you get lucky in the Ruined Dungeon) you can drop your Wilds for Medical Injectors and start looking to replace an Injector with a Heroism infusion. Endgame I ran Regeneration, Heroism, Movement, and dual Injectors so I could run 100% uptime Pain Suppressor Salve (which has duration > cooldown with a good Injector and gives significant resist all and negative life) while still having an Injector open for status removal. I could also see an dropping an Injector for another Heroism or Regen as needed, but I didn't miss them and I like diversifying between injectors and infusions to limit saturation. You could also run a Steam Generator in place of a Movement infusion if you wanted to try subbing Rocket Boots and any of the hand-slot summons.
Prodigies
Any 2 of: Superpower, PES, Fungal Blood, Windtouched Speed. (I do not recommend Fungal Blood + Speed on Insane or higher difficulty, as you need the Mindpower.)
- Superpower is a solid baseline Prodigy for all Oozemancers. Less dramatic than PES, but it's 100% uptime, solid performance, and melee buffs (very nice with Call of the Ooze and Nature's Equilbrium) make it an uncontroversial pick. Increasing Mindpower also buffs health pools of Bloated Oozes and Antimagic Shield absorption, so it has modest defensive aspects as well.
- Pain Enhancement System, compared to Superpower, offers additional defensive buffs (hit points, saves, heal factor, crit resistance), a large spike to Mindpower, 6 turns of essentially guaranteed no EQ fail, a higher Mucus ooze cap, excellent synergies with Heroism infusions, and a good way to unlock early access to Thick Skin. Its uptime is limited, however, and so it plays well with the "DoT and run" Oozemancer strategy that you tend to use earlier in the game, and this makes it a good choice for your first prodigy. (If you're having trouble unlocking the “Size Matters” achievement by 30, try Call of the Ooze or Nature's Equilibrium after adding an Acid Groove or Crystal Edge to your Mindstars). Note also that PES snapshots off your Strength at the time it is used, so it's significantly better to fire of a Heroism Infusion then trigger PES than the reverse.
- Fungal Blood is probably the highest potential level 42 Prodigy, but it requires a significant investment in Slime Roots and Ancestral Life, Slime Mastery items, a high level of attention to your status icon bar with frequent right-click cancels of Regeneration effects, and some additional knowledge of game mechanics (such as "Healing Infusions are coded to not trigger Ancestral Life") to maximize its impact. With these in place, you can use 3 infusions with Fungal Blood after each (generating bonus time for each Regeneration infusion and Fungal Blood), reset with Slime Roots, do it again, spam your best high cooldown abilities in the 6+ free turns you've generated, then reset them and Slime Roots with Nature's Balance followed by using Slime Roots to reset your infusions one last time. Later in the fight you can still grab additional free turns, healing, & magical debuff clears each time you fire off an Infusion. When combining PES with Fungal Blood, remember the free turns you generate will not tick your PES timer down, either for duration or cooldown.
- Windtouched Speed was recommended by player number43. A solid boost to global speed, a 10% cooldown bonus that rounds down (which has it most notable effect on your already low-cooldown beam by taking them from 3 to 2), and immunity to some forms of traps. As a DPR tool it is typically inferior to a kitted out Fungal Blood, as it will take 20+ turns to generate the number of bonus actions that Slime Roots 7 allows on T1, but it doesn't require Slime Mastery items and is much, much easier to use. Given that Eye of the Tiger has a once per turn cap, Windtouched Speed is probably comparable as a means of ensuring talent access and clearly superior as a DPR boost, and it also combines much better with PES to squeeze in an extra couple of actions during PES's duration.
- A note on Defensive Prodigies: some players recommend that an Oozemancer take Spine of the World for dealing with status effects. While the critical path for an Oozemancer involves compensating for their modest damage and limited status removal, I find damage much harder to find and gear for on an Oozemancer than physical status resistances, and while there's a useful upper cap of 100% immunity to physical effects there is no useful upper limit on damage short of 1HKOing everything (and Oozemancers can't reach that on Insane regardless of gear or prodigy choices). For those reasons I don't recommend Spine of the World - if you're really concerned about status effects, I recommend freeing up the generic points to get Unstoppable Force salve instead, although be aware that you'll probably have to go East and defeat at least one Pride before it comes online.
Tinkers
Note that you can switch Tinkers at instant-speed, but it causes the item the tinker is on, as well as any usable power of the tinker itself, to go on cooldown.
Belt: Alchemist's Helper for increasing your two main damage types. Backup Fungal Web to swap in for additional healing (swap in, hit salve, swap Alchemist's Helper back on). Note that Fungal Web does not trigger a regeneration effect from the Fungus tree.
Body: Crystal Plating for maximizing stats and PES synergy once you've gotten good gems. I ran a spike attachment for significant armor boost and retailation damage until I had at least tier 3 Crystal Plating.
Cloak: Grounding Strap is king of the slot. Post-Sorcerers you can pick the flavor of resistance you like best.
Feet: I went with Kinetic Stabilizer for the phys save and teleport immunity. If you've got Steam generation from either a Steam Generator or Steam-Powered Boots, Rocket Boots are a great mobility option.
Hands: Iron Grip for Disarm immunity, as many of your key abilities get turned off without Mindstars. If you're running steam generation, consider whether Disarm immunity or another Taunting minion from Fatal Attractor is a better deal for you. Toxic Cannister has nice damage but hits your own summons too often.
Head: Mental Stimulator. You don't really need accuracy boosts and you've got tons of AoEs to flush out sneaking enemies + significant crit resistance to survive them, but every bit of crit bonus helps.
Lite: You can grab White Light Emitter if you really want to squeeze a little more damage out of your Crystal Edges, but you won't miss it if you don't.
Ammo: No.
Weapon-mindstar: Crystal Edge is king of slot, giving solid bonus damage on your melee hits given the relatively modest damage that mindstars do, but it's really there for the critical multiplier bonus, which applies to every one of your crits whether or not it has a melee component. Taking your crit multiplier from 150%->180% is a 20% damage boost on every crit-capable power you have, and hugely important for this class.
Class Skill Categories
Note that I'm listing what I think are the minimums under core - you'll want/need to dig deeper into many of these to fill in holes in your game, as determined by the gear you find and how your damage, durability, and control are balanced on account.
Slime: 2/3/1/1 early, 2/5/1/4-5 core (depending on gear), more Slime Spit if you can tolerate its quirks
Slime spit at 2 hits 3 targets for decent damage and slow, and is very helpful in the early game. However, I find its slow speed (it will only move 5 spaces in the first turn), projectile nature, and unfriendliness to allies can limit its utility once you start covering the field with Oozes. I recommend floating a second point in it until you've gotten Living Mucus and Call of the Ooze and seeing how you like it under those conditions – it is one of your few burst damage options so it's worth giving a good trial.
Poisonous Spores starts at radius 1, gaining another point of radius at 3 (radius 2) & 5 (radius 3) points invested. Some foes are immune to poison, but a surprising number that you might think would be are not (Demons, Vampires, Ghouls, and Mummies IIRC have no poison resistance). Does very solid extra crit damage and tacks on additional specific poison based riders, such as Numbing, Crippling, or Spydric, some of which can trivialize certain enemies (most notably, Spydric vs melee foes).
Acidic Skin isn't a good use of your Equilibrium until late, and while Disarming melee opponents can certainly be effective you've got better places for your points and better tools for duffing melee opponents.
Slime Roots lets you teleport without LOS and resets 1-3 talents at levels 1, 4, and 7 (achievable with Sludgegrip, Oozing Heart, or amulet) respectively. Note that it cannot reset Nature's Balance due to the latter's fixed cooldown (although Nature's Balance can reset Slime Roots), and it also cannot reset PES. It can, however, reset infusions, making Heroism → Regeneration (especially with Ancestral Life) → Slime Roots a very strong start to most battles. If you get an item that allows you to increase your Slime Mastery past 1.3, being able to reset 3 talents off a teleport is very strong (if you're not playing auto-trigger with Mucus, I recommend Pain Suppressor Salve or Unstoppable Force as your third infusion to reset).
Mucus: 4/4/4/1 early and core, max Living Mucus luxury
Mucus does many important jobs for you – damages enemies, spawns minions, lowers Equilibrium, and enables Oozewalk. Optimal play would be to trigger this manually, especially if you don't have Slime Roots 7, but lazy play with auto-trigger on sight of enemy works almost as well. The radius boost at talent level 4 should be an early priority, since it means your Mucus will start hurting melee ranged enemies without you moving. Note that you only drop Mucus once per turn, so if you increase your speed your Mucus trail will become patchy (which can give you pretty good mobility via Oozewalk).
Acid Splash is like Mucus you can throw but with an Acid AoE up front that is ally friendly, so it's your favorite thing. Radius starts at 2, goes to 3 at 4 points. Note that, as this has half the cooldown of Mucus, you may often want to include yourself in your second Acid Splash AoE in a fight in order to keep the Equilibrium-managing benefits of Mucus flowing.
Living Mucus makes your favorite thing come alive and start spitting on your enemies. In addition to the bonuses in the tooltip, additional talent levels increase Mucus Ooze hit points and the talent level of their projectile. Given that endgame you may have as many as 7 of these spamming attacks at your opponents, plus another bunch of mucus ooze attacks procced off Unstoppable Nature, it's potentially worth maxing.
Oozewalk isn't worth investing the points in to make quick, given its foibles, but at 1 point for 2 status clears and a positional shift it's a steal.
Ooze 4/1/5/2 early, 4/1/5/5 Core
Mitosis determines the maximum number of Bloated Oozes you can have, how often they'll passively spawn, and how tough they are. Starting with 1 Ooze at level 1, adding another at 2 and 4 points – get to 4 ASAP. (The 5th point increases their health and damage resistance and is can be worth grabbing at some point, but is not strictly necessary.)
Reabsorb gives you a huge 40% damage reduction and a manaburn AOE, but I find it rarely the most valuable use of your turn and a Bloated Ooze, particularly once you've gotten your last inscription and can afford to use permanent Pain Suppressor Salve for a 25-27% resist all at instant speed, duration>cooldown, and without consuming a Bloated Ooze. However, if you have max Bloated Oozes out already and Call of the Ooze is cooled down or reset, Reabsorb can be a good way to get rid of one so you can fire off your Call of the Ooze melee channel again.
Call of the Ooze, with Superpower's boost to melee, is your single most damaging talent, taunts enemies, and gets your damage splitting Bloated Oozes on the board fast. Breakpoints for Ooze numbers created by this talent at 3 and 5, but will only create numbers up to the max amounts determined by Mitosis. Max this early.
Indiscernible Anatomy is another key component of your durability – lets you turn most criticals against you into normal hits, and in conjunction with Mitosis makes you very difficult to burst down. The wound, poison, disease, and blindness resistance are pure bonus. Get to 2 points ASAP, then fill in as available.
Moss 1/0/0/0 early, luxury 1/1/4/0-2.
All moss talents start with radius 2 and gain an additional radius with 2 and 4 class points invested, and with a base duration of 4 rounds (+2 round duration at 2 talent points and another +1 duration at 3 and 4 talent points invested). Early on, when you're still doing a lot of your killing by kiting with Mucus, Grasping Moss is an easy 1 pointer than is pretty hard on melee enemies.
If you're going to make a serious investment in a Moss talent, my vote is Slippery Moss. Although it scales poorly with additional Mindpower, an instant speed ability that causes 35-38% chance for your opponent to do nothing on a turn they were going to use a talent is very strong, and I don't think there are any immunities to this condition. Although it isn't listed in the tooltip, this has a 100% chance to apply a 2 turn slippery moss debuff on opponents, which then causes the appropriate talent failure chance.
Hallucinogenic Moss is also pretty powerful, although note that there's both a chance for the area to apply it and then another chance for the confusion itself to kick in on any given turn, and many bosses are packing resistance or immunity to Confusion, so I think it's less reliable than Slippery. However, if you've gone all the way to Slippery Moss already, another 2 points for a decent confusion effect isn't an unreasonable expense. Remember, DoT = Damage over Time, which means any turn your opponent doesn't do anything is an effective DPR increase for you.
Using one Moss talent puts them all on cooldown for 3 turns, so its best to allow for at least 3 turns to pass between using a Moss talent and a talent reset ability or it's likely a number of your resets will be consumed by Moss talents. I like to throw Slippery Moss in after the Heroism->Regen->Slime Roots combo discussed above.
Oozing Blades 3/1/1/3 early, 5/1/1/5 Core more Natural Acid as needed for DPS, Mind Parasite 2 or 4 luxury
Oozebeam is the default attack you wanted Slime Spit to be. It does comparable damage as a range 10 beam, it's ally friendly, and it cools down in 3 turns compared to Slime Spit's 5. Workhorse talent.
Natural Acid is only really useful once you've gotten Acidfire, and even then it's a significant point investment for the damage improvement it offers. Nonetheless, with full stacks it increases your nature damage by up to 18% or so, and that buys it a bit of forgiveness. The nature resistance is a nice addon but nothing critical.
Mind Parasite is great on lower difficulties, but on Insane most bosses combine multiple classes worth of talents together and it's unlikely you'll knock out their killer app. However, going from 1 point to 2 increases the cooldown on the affected talents from 4 to 8, so for a small investment past the pre-req it can sometimes be worthwhile. At 4 talent points this goes from knocking out 2 talents to 3, which is significantly better but probably more class points than its worth.
Unstoppable Nature is simply required. The vast majority of your damage is nature, and you can really struggle to kill high nature resist enemies without this. Ironically some of your deadliest opponents are other Oozemancers and Zigur followers, who combine immunity caps of over 100%, significant starting nature resistance, and the Resolve talent. Killing them often requires that you switch their Resolve over to Acid, but without Unstoppable Nature you're still going to struggle to hurt them. The bonus Mucus spit is gravy – you were going to max this anyway, but more damage is always welcome.
Eyal's Wrath 1/1/5/4 core, max Eyal's Wrath to taste
Reclaim is short ranged single target damage. It's not terrible, and it doesn't require a clear line between you and the target, but it's not great, either. Max Oozebeam and invest significantly more in Slime Spit before investing more here.
Nature's Defiance is great at 1, as damage resistances are not your shortcoming. The Equilibrium reduction on being damaged by a spell is a nice complement to your Antimagic Shield.
Acidfire is the key reason to unlock this tree. It provides a large radius (4, never improves), long duration (4 at level 1, +1 duration at levels 2, 4, and 5, +2 duration at level 3), modest ongoing damage acid cloud with 3 purposes – to blind enemies, burn away their magical buffs and sustains, and proc Natural Acid. The latter two functions can make killing enemies much easier, and even though the damage isn't that great per round you benefit from another large radius AoE. Having as high a % on the magical effect destruction as possible also potentially frees up your glove slot from Spellhunt Remnants/makes not finding them less of a big deal, and being able to rip sustains off enemies is class defining.
Eyal's Wrath is similar – a large radius (radius 4 at unlock, +1 at 2nd & 4th points), long duration (4 turns at 1st point, +1 duration at 2nd, 4th, and 5th points, +2 duration at 3rd point), modestly damaging effect. This one follows you around and also burns away magical resources – you're not likely to make much of a dent in mana against higher level enemies, but Positive, Negative, and especially Vim are relatively fragile resource pools, and Eyal's Wrath, particularly following a Mana Clash, can lock enemies out of these abilities. Also helps manage Equilibrium.
Corrosive Blades – Core none, luxury none.
You don't have the class points to spend here to make this work, even if you wanted to throw a category point at it.
Generic Categories
Physics: 4/2/1/0 for Crystal Edge, Crystal Plating, Rocket Boots, Kinetic Stabilizer, Mental Stimulator, and Grounding Strap. Can go 4/2/2 for White Light Emitter if you want slightly more damage out of Crystal Edge.
Chemistry: 3/3 for Salves and Alchemist's Helper. You can go 5/3 if you want Unstoppable Force Salve - I did not need it, but if I had it to do over I probably would take it anyways, as I ran dual Injectors for maximum status security but often end fights having triggered only Pain Suppressor Salve with my Injectors.
Combat Training: 3-5 Thick Skin, 3-5 Armor Training.
Mindstar Mastery: 5/1/5/1. Try to leave a few points of Psiblades available until you've gone East, in case you find Alchemist escorts who can fill them in for you. Nature's Equilibrium will trigger Fungal Growth and Ancestral life if you don't have another Regeneration effect up (which you can cancel by right-clicking on the icon as needed), giving you an instant-speed melee attack/heal/regeneration.
Survival: 1/1/1 core, strive to get Track as early as possible as it makes corner sniping with your many AoEs much easier. More points in Device Mastery optional but very good – again, if you're planning on maxing Device Mastery be sure to leave a few points open until the East in case you get a Thief escort.
Call of the Wild: 1/1/1/4 ASAP, as Nature's Balance is extremely useful to reset your deadliest talents. Leave it at 4 as there are no benefits to going to 5. You can invest more in Nature's Touch as needed, but with high enough Mindpower even a single point can be reasonably useful, as it will trigger Fungal Growth & Ancestral Life (again, only if you don't already have another Regeneration effect).
Antimagic: 1/2-3/5/1-3. Resolve stays at 1, as Oozemancers don't have enough EQ issues to warrant 3 additional points to unlock Resolve working through AM shield. Silence 2 gives radius 8 and 4 turns effect, Silence 3 gives radius 10 and 5 turns effect – I found the former to be enough for my playstyle. Antimagic Shield is the last significant pillar of your durability, and well worth maxing. Mana Clash is fine at 1, but at 3 the Manaburn effect lasts for the entire cooldown of the skill which can be a nice upgrade.
Fungus: 2/1/1 core, 2/1/2/1 better, more luxury. 2 points in Wild Growth is the only breakpoint where you get more than +1 turn for +1 generic point. 2 points of Ancestral life at high mindpower gives you more than 100% of a turn on using a regen effect, and the equilibrium management is a welcome rider.
Gameplay
Starting out your Willpower limits your sustains, and you'll have to decide what EQ fail % you're comfortable with. Mitosis is your top priority sustain, than Antimagic, then Psiblades, with Psiblades switching before Antimagic once you've got Oozing Blades. I find seeding the battlefield with nastiness (mucus, moss, summon, poison) and then running away with a Movement infusion is pretty effective... you'll kill a lot of what's there and profoundly injure much of the rest. Once you get Track, it's a great followup to running away – see where your enemies are, how hurt they are, and whether you have corner sniping opportunities.
Once you get your full durability talents in place (Mitosis and Call of Ooze, Indiscernible Anatomy, Antimagic Shield, Ancestral Life to allow you to start battles with quick Regeneration) along with a Heroism Infusion you can stick around for fights a bit more. Be warned when you fight rares, uniques, or bosses, though – once in a great while one of them will have a particularly deadly combination of talents (usually involving GWF) and can hit you much, much harder than you're used to.
Mid-game and on, start with Heroism infusion and Regeneration (with Unstoppable Force or Pain Suppressor Salve if your Slime Roots >= 7 - if you have the choice, start with Unstoppable Force as its cooldown is much higher). Follow up with Slime Roots to reset them and achieve your optimal position. When I'm confident in my durability against enemies I typically Slime Roots into very close range to enable Mosses, Leaves Tide, Nature's Equilibrium, Silence, Slime Spit, and Mucus/Acid Splash stacking, but whenever you're facing multiple tough enemies it's always an option to retreat to a choke point where incoming damage can be limited. After Slime Roots, hit Mucus, a Moss, and Call of the Ooze, then Acid Splash to finish setting up your summons and start layering DoTs. Leaves Tide if you're feeling threatened or if you're close to enemies, and keep an eye out for Silence or Mana Clash targets. If you're feeling safe enough against a particular magical enemy that you can delay Call of the Ooze by a turn, use Mana Clash before Call of the Ooze, as your Ooze melee channel benefits from manaburn damage.
Final battle, consider whether you want to use Spellhunt Remnants or Acidfire to strip sustains, and whether you want to get a source of Steam & wear Rocket Boots to run around and close all the portals first thing.
Itemization
Generally, early game you're mostly looking for +life, as you can really stretch out whatever bonus life comes your way through Mitosis, and +Willpower, as your Equilibrium is a pretty strict limit of how many sustains you can run early on. When you can make the conversion to 100% stun resist, go for it.
Mid-game, once you're running PES and/or Superpower, + Strength is a very strong choice, and +Cunning or +mental crit until you get 100% mental crit chance is extremely valuable in conjunction with Crystal Edges.
Besides all the stuff that's normally good, I'm listing things with special synergy with Oozemancers.
Armor: Tarrasca for bonkers durability, or Kroltar set for additional AoE options and +240 life. Breath of Eyal is nice for the large amount of resists, but IMO you need something with more armor and hardiness.
Boots: Unbreakable Greaves for durability and huge strength bonus for prodigy synergy, Steam-Powered Boots for Steam generation without using up an Inscription slot.
Head: Eye of the Forest gives + nature damage and + nature resistance penetration, plus relevant stats and blindness immunity. Kroltar's Helm is good to complete the set.
Hands: Spellhunt Remnants are extremely useful for shutting down annoying sustains faster than Acidfire and have a significant mental crit bonus, while Steam-Powered Gauntlets provide all around useful stats, +all damage, and a large Crit Multiplier. Sludgegrip, the tier 1 gloves, are surprisingly good all game long due to their +0.2 Slime Mastery bonus.
Ring: Mnemonic is amazing, with helpful confusion resistance, mental effect clears, and letting you reset wild-gifts.
Weapons: For generic mindstar egos, look for Sand – Burrow can be very helpful early on at limiting how many opponents can reach you at once. Nexus of the Way is good as always. Your best Oozemancer-specific mindstar pair is Oozing Heart and Eyal's Will – both offer nature and acid +damage %, solid mindpower and mental crit, and mastery bonuses to talents you use. Oozing Heart, in particular, lets you get Slime Roots to reset 3 talents with a 5 point investment, which is definitely worth it. Eyal's Will may allow you to cap out Leave's Tide evasion without full investment, I didn't find it in my game.
Misc: Tree of Life has a handful of useful traits, including +20% nature damage. Guardian's Totem has a fun antimagic summon (just be aware you can't swap spaces with it so it), decent Will and Mindpower boosts, and category boosts to Antimagic and Fungus.
Escorts
When trying to get one's willfully suicidal escort to the portal, I find it's helpful to block them as often as possible with my body, use Track and Earth's Eyes every few steps (the latter being surprisingly useful in this one case, as often an opponent that appears nearby on Track may be blocked by a wall), and corner-snipe everything I see. If I can't reach an enemy with one of my AoEs without allowing my escort to move past me and thus likely get killed, I instead fire an Acid Splash into an open space, as the spawned Mucus Oozes will either kill the mob or at least pull it to where I can reach it. Never give your escort free reign to move on their own if you can possibly help it.
Best talents to choose from escorts.
Alchemist: Psiblades, will free up more generic points for you.
Anthoril: Conversion (will trigger regeneration effects with Fungus tree) first point, Biofeedback for additional points
Loremaster: Disarm can be okay if you've buffed Strength enough, but you probably won't be intending to stay in melee range that often. Strength bonuses are alway good with PES and Superpower.
Seer: Nature's Touch (will trigger regeneration effects with Fungus tree)
Sun Paladin: Disengage or Willpower
Temporal Explorer: Dream Walk
Thief: Device Mastery
Tinker: Location, then Last Engineer Standing
Warrior: Vitality
E: Mostly typos and removing some of my overreliance on the word "note", but also remembered to include Pain Suppressor Salve among list of Tinker benefits - it doesn't shore up a weakness, but does further compound a strength.
Drowning NPCs
I played TOME for years without knowing about this, so I'm including a section on it even though it's not Oozemancer specific.
If you start looking into the modding scene, you might find a mod called Quick Drown NPCs. "Why," hypothetical reader asks, "would I want to drown NPCs at all, much less quickly?" The answer is that, at high difficulty levels like Insane and Madness, the monsters start at a much higher level than you, and one way to get a starting equipment and XP you need is to swap places with rare and higher NPCs until they're standing in water and waiting for them to drown, at which point, free stuff and XP without ever triggering hostility! This is particularly potent in Last Hope, where unique or boss NPCs spawn most frequently. A good drowning run could start you off between level 5-7 instead of level 2 (insane) or 3 (madness), which is the difference between smashing your face into a plywood wall and smashing your face into a brick wall.
It also kinda explains why a single hero can be so effective as to save the world... the rest of these guys won't pull their faces out of water if they're drowning, except, for some reason, sometimes enemies with Infestation.
, and you of course often hit multiples with the beams. As for the beam uptime, I almost always have something good to do with my turn, even though I couldn't spare points into nature's balance.
(Frikken emojis.) The damage potential of mosses is about 2/3s of Acidfire and 1/3 of Eyal's Wrath, and of course you don't have to pick either/or but can stack moss in with Acidfire and Eyal. Beams are great AoE compared to shots, but pretty poor AoE compared to most other options. Nonetheless, it sounds like the dual Beam Windtouched Oozemancer is working well for you. I'm happy to learn more about it, so keep us updated, particularly on the fight with the Sorcerers!