ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So I saw a while back someone knocking around the idea of abusing the hell out of skill interactions *cough Timeless cough* to make certain statuses last forever, but it never went anywhere. He could only get 15 turns of status increase every 17 turns.

Well, I decided that wasn't good enough, so I decided to make it work.

What you will need to make this build work:
Spell/Meta at X/X/5/5
Chronomancy/Temporal Combat at X/5/X/X
Race/Shalore at X/X/X/5
Items totalling -20% Spell CD increase (using two -10% items, not sure how they stack)
Hidden Resources (because Metaflow is expensive)

What I recommend if you decide to abuse this:
Technique/Bloodthirst X/X/X/5
Draconic Will

The basic tactic is exactly what you'd expect. Activate Quicken Spells and never turn it off, then Invigorate, to get the CD halving effect, then Timeless, then Metaflow and Timeless again. At this point, Metaflow and Timeless should have the same CD, 18. Skip turns until Timeless and Metaflow have a CD of 2. Activate Unstoppable. This will take a turn, putting Timeless and Metaflow off CD. Activate Hidden Resources and Draconic Will, then Timeless-Metaflow-Timeless. Repeat ad nauseum.

Note that putting Metaflow and Timeless on autocast does not work. It casts them a bit out of order, so pretty soon you lose all the buffs. In addition, this build gives a pretty narrow margin for error. You cannot, with only -20% CD on spells, stack duration infinitely. If you can aquire a little more spell CD, stack up the durations arbritrarily high.

In conclusion, for a prodigy, 2 cat points, 26 class points, and 2 spell CD- items, you will permenantly halve all cooldowns and extend all positive buffs of 5 duration or more forever.

For one extra prodigy, one extra cat point, and 8 extra class points, you'll also gain permenant status debuff immunity and immunity to death.

Let me know if anyone actually pulls this off in game-I used semi godmode to gain all this.

Note: Draconic Will will no longer work with this at 1.3. It's changing to status type other, which Timeless does not effect.

Edit: Did a little more testing. Total spell cooldown reduction needs to be 50%, and everything stacks additively. So 30% from Quicken Spells and 20% from 2 -10% items, or 30% from spell CD reduction items and 20% or more from Quicken Spells.

Got spell CD to 60% reduction (I believe the max. Zemekkys' Broken Hourglass, spellbinding boots, quickening pickaxe, Quicken Spells) and abritrarily high status durations work. Take enough time manually readying yourself and Draconic Will, Hidden Resources, Unstoppable, and Invigorate can have durations in the triple digits.

However, even with 60% CD reduction, autocasting does not work. This build cannot be done automatically, you must manually tend to your infinite buffs.

o.O

Are you Tomisgo's long-lost twin?

Who's Tomisgo?

Red wrote:Who's Tomisgo?

Someone who likes to "utilize" *cough*exploit*cough* ToME quirks.

Considering this can only be pulled off an Adventurers, I don't think it's a huge issue. Sure, it breaks the game to hell and back by a little past level 30 and makes literally the only thing in the game that can harm you talents that can remove magical sustains at level 42, but Adventurers are specifically stated as not being balanced.

I actually did check over the mage and chronomancer classes to see if a real class could abuse the game like this, but no other class can get both the Meta tree and Invigorate.

For extra fun, I did some testing with Stone.

The spell CD reduction from items, Quicken Spells, and Body of Stone gives Earthen Missiles no CD. Because of hidden resources, you can chain this spell forever. So for the best build with this abuse at its core, you'll want as much spell speed, global speed, physical damage, crit chance/multiplier, and on spell hit/crit procs as possible.

Themuffinthief said he had a build with infinite Unstoppable. I think its possible, but personally I am quite sure it would be a really boring run so I have not really tried to figure it out. He was doing it mainly to just see what madness did in the higher levels I think, but even so without a build with really good damage going to the East in Madness is a huge slog due to HP inflation.

It may not be possible anymore with Timeless and chronomancy changes, not sure. But I believe it was possible in 1.2.3

The build I used works in 1.25.

In addition, I did some testing with stone and it gives, with Body of Stone, zero CD Earthen Missiles. That should get you some pretty decent damage, since you have every single equip slot available for increasing damage except amulet, boots, and tool.

That being said, it probably would be boring. Tedious too, since you absolutely must manually work the Timless-Metaflow-Timeless abuse. Fun little experiment, though.

Red wrote:The build I used works in 1.25.

In addition, I did some testing with stone and it gives, with Body of Stone, zero CD Earthen Missiles. That should get you some pretty decent damage, since you have every single equip slot available for increasing damage except amulet, boots, and tool.

That being said, it probably would be boring. Tedious too, since you absolutely must manually work the Timless-Metaflow-Timeless abuse. Fun little experiment, though.

Well I have gotten EM to do 3600 per proc on a brawling Arcane Combat build. So EM can hit decently hard, but of course that build is gonna put out like triple the actual EM spells due to firing off many EM per round (in addition to actual fist hits). And that is end game damage.

I think Themuffintheif ran into the problem many Adventurers have in Madness though, they may have a perfectly fine idea that will work ..... once they get to level 25 or so. But the hardest part of Madness is getting to that point.

But yeah on Insanity I am fairly sure the whole thing and using EM as main damage would work. Well, maybe, EM alone would kind of suck until you can get the CD down nice and low and again that is into the mid-20s since it needs timeless.

I would hazard a guess that most really strong syngeries wind up either requiring a talent that is at 22 or just need so many things together that they functionally don't get enough points until mid-20s and thus they almost all suffer from a late bloomer syndrome.

However I think you can actually repurpose the adventurer build I used in madness to this build. You would need to shift around 9 or so class points and swap a skill line. I think you would lose about a +80% damage addition (one way or another) by doing so, probably also lose some movement speed. But I think you could do that and have the start be fairly similar. You would basically have to take out absorption or battle tactics, either way you lose a lot of damage. And if you take out absorption you basically need to cannibalize some class points (probably disperse magic and step up) to get the extra points into the spell CD and the 5 in temporal. I think you would need a couple from something else too. Taking out battle tactics could make it work, but man reducing your number of melee hits by 70% ouch. The build takes that much later though so its basically the same start and you can choose between mostly completely invulnerable or doing a lot more damage and moving super fast. Also with high Mana on Spell crit (probably about you would pay for metaflow. It wouldn't have lasting invulnerability until it got wyrm bile though.

I dunno its an option, but really you gotta think about the timing with adventurer builds. By the time you get to being uber you kind of already are I mean on madness the Corrupted sandworm is like 310k hp I think.

Anyway I guess what I am saying is I think you can make this work in a build that has been shown to be able to get through the first part of madness and you can at a very late point have an interesting choice that makes sense; huge damage(with good defense) vs huge defense (with good offense). But I kind of doubt you can get it or any really nasty good syngery online for the tier 2 section of Madness which is the part most people splatter on. And any build that is decently balanced in defense and offense for 10-25 on Madness probably gets this whole shebang online in maybe like the level 45 neighborhood? This is pure speculation of course. I am using Madness here as it presents an interesting counterpoint to obviously OP things. Of course you could destroy Nightmare with this.

I just have this suspicion that high end adventurer builds are actually almost vaguely resembling "balanced" on Madness in that you can get some super powered gimmicks working late, but you still gotta get through Old Forest and the evil bee/midge rares+ and I don't know of any super powered gimmicks on adventurers that can get online that early to make a playable build that can continue or even do that and get the gimmick working by level 36 ( I grant this seems vaguely possible). Maybe using some kind of magey type thing with auger and zig zag tunnels I dunno, but you probably wind up with gimp damage or just making a silly wildfire almost AM thing.

Of course you also need the items too which is probably going to be fairly hard to find pre-36 unless you use vault. I kind of rushed to the wierdling on my madness run as I had some stuff I really wanted to use and well, it was rough, had to use a targeted teleport to get past a boss, almost couldn't kill a unique guarding stairs to wierdling, made a crazy amount of zig zag tunnnels, etc. I dunno its a problem that always keeps coming back on adventurers. You can make a guy, who by end game should be so good only Madness makes sense to play it on. But they invariably have a whole lot of trouble getting to this magic level ~30 inflection point to make it all work.

Hey, actual effective tactics! I didn't have any of those!

I really did this as an experiment-I had no idea how to make this work in game at all early on, and wasn't even sure if it'd be possible.

The basic build can go online at 30-Hidden Resources, maxed out Timeless, the Meta skills and enough points in Unstoppable to get a duration of 5 will allow you to become immune to death and resource failure forever. The only issues would be needing a lot of class points and a few certain randarts, but I'm pretty sure you can at least drop one point from Unstoppable and Metaflow.

42 is when you can truly make this build work. Like I said, it needs two prodigies, so that'll get you any extra points you need, any randarts, and total status immunity. Though if you can get sufficient extra mana from other places, you could get all you need at 30, though Manaclash or manaburning items will murder you.

The only reason I ever see doing this build is ID. Since this build is literally invulnerable (its only Kryptonite is magical sustain removal, so Combo Kick, Corrupted Negation, and Disperse Magic are your only threats) you can go as high as you want in ID without any fear. And honestly, that'd be pretty cool on an Adventurer. Because you keep on getting class, generic, and cat points you could steadily get everything in the game.

Red wrote: The only reason I ever see doing this build is ID. Since this build is literally invulnerable (its only Kryptonite is magical sustain removal, so Combo Kick, Corrupted Negation, and Disperse Magic are your only threats) you can go as high as you want in ID without any fear. And honestly, that'd be pretty cool on an Adventurer. Because you keep on getting class, generic, and cat points you could steadily get everything in the game.

At that point I'm not sure why you wouldn't just use dev mode, or edit the savegame to give yourself 99999 of all 3 (class, generic, cat) types of points. (I guess what I'm trying to get at here is once you've made yourself virtually invulnerable, there's not really much fun to be had fighting)

To "legitimately" earn all the ID achievements.

Beyond that, silly as it might be, I find some fun in making small numbers really big numbers or reduce enemies' big numbers to small numbers, even when it's gotten so repetitive that that's basically all it is. Not for long, and any game that only has that I'll ditch within the hour, but it's a choice that I occassionally have fun with.

Honestly though, I just made this because I wanted to see if I could. I remember reading a thread a while back where someone failed at making Timeless work forever, so I decided to take that as a challenge rather than a statement on futility. If there are any other "impossible" tricks to pull off, I'll be a lot more likely to try figuring out how to abuse the game and make it work than I am to actually use a trick like this.

If draconic will duration does not increased with timeless, run this build make no sense.

To make it more invulnerable right now (1.2.5) I suggest to use Celestial/Sun tree: Suncloak( 30+ reduse cooldown, 40+ spellspeed, its all based on spellpower) instead quicken spells (ofc + cooldown reduce items to achieve needed value of cooldown reduction, and use Suncloak+Quicken Spells before get this items) for prevent sustain removal braking chain (because no sustains reduse our cooldown and draconic will prevent increase it from debuff). Hidden resource like said in posts above allowed us cast metaflow (probably Tele/phase door for increase clear speed) without any worrying of mana drain/regain.

But exist one sadly true: recently i have died while unstoppable+draconic will (not sure about 100% had dr. will (only 95%) but unstoppable sure 100%) from rare who used Quantum Spike. Maybe Cctobias add it in he`s guide.

UPD: with quicken spells 30% & Suncloak 35% & invigorate it is possible to autocast timeless+metaflow. But autoexplore still be imposible because no hp regen. therefore we stand still and tried to regen hp which don`t come until unstoppable expire. but unstoppable never expire...

UPD 2: There are at least 2 talents, which remove buffs (not sustains): Cleansing Flames and Dissolving Acid. In this way we potentially can get situation, where 1 rare dispell unstoppable, then second 1shotted us.

St_ranger_er wrote:UPD: with quicken spells 30% & Suncloak 35% & invigorate it is possible to autocast timeless+metaflow. But autoexplore still be imposible because no hp regen. therefore we stand still and tried to regen hp which don`t come until unstoppable expire. but unstoppable never expire...

You can disable rest function on auto-explore. It's somewhere in the options.

Ah, Suncloak would make a good addition.

One big error there, Draconic Will is extended in 1.25. Though if you didn't have it up, you could get Unstoppable taken down by any buff removal and then die just as easy as anyone else.

And I wrote the guide here. Cctobias suggested how to make it practical to actually win with it, but dear sweet god would that be boring after the first floor of invulnerability. I won't be updating the OP, since this really was just proof-of-concept.

That being said, a spellspeed spell CD Stone build... Hm...