Tanking Madness - Partially Tested Build

[cctobias]

Tanking Madness - Partially Tested Build

The following is a build I created and have tested up to the Prides in Madness whose main purpose is to straight up tank Madness in melee without relying solely on shielding. This build is not unkillable, it has one major weakness: magic effect removals. Things that have Disperse Magic, like Dreadlords, have to die fast. You can deal with them, but you have to be smart and on the ball. Certain status conditions that prevent healing are also problematic but the build in general can remove them.


I will warn people right here this Tanking regime is pretty much overkill for Insane and for your own enjoyment you should consider weakening/altering the defense if played on Insane.

This build has some leeway in choices once the baseline defense and offense elements are satisfied. About 2 cat points worth.


The Elements of Tanking in Madness

At first tanking in Madness may seem a fairly straight forward, have enough defense to not die. And if you are using a shielding based approach such as what is available to Archmages it, to some extent, is just that simple. Ramp up a 15k set of shields and take the hits.

When you are not using a vast reservoir of shields and mostly working off your own health things become a bit more complex as we must consider the character of various hits and what can and cannot be used to counter them. After various playtesting I have come to the following broad set of categories of types of dangerous attacks you may run into.

First there is a broad division between physical attack of melee/archers and other sources of damage. This division is very important because of armor. Armor can potentially completely nullify attacks and make crit do nothing. It can be very powerful.

Large Single Melee Hits (Something with base DAM over 800 or so)

This category does not occur on many things but is still somewhat common due to summoners and summoner rare+s. The main source of these are summoned warhounds which can have a base DAM of over 1300. It is not practically feasible to get enough armor to make a high end summoned warhound not do a lot of damage. Even with 300 armor they will still hit for 1000 damage.

Melee Abilities with Many Hits (Flurry, frenzy, etc)

This category is pretty common. It can be from a dual wielder rare+ or from a 2H rare+. One of the big problems with these abilities is that a rare+ can also have a signifcant numbers of procs. They may have a weapon with 1 or more procs they can often be a shadow blade and running the darkness proc. At the high end of madness you can see DW type things with 200 or so DAM and a 2H thing with about 400 or so base DAM. For both of these cases it is feasiable to get enough armor to either nullify or substanially mitigate the damage. The 2H hander case is generally less dangerous on the proc end but harder to completely nullify with armor and the DW case is the reverse more procs but easier to have the armor to make it "safe". These hits also have other conisderations such as applying poison etc. It is possible for a hit of this type to damage you something on the order of 18 times in a "hit" for something like a Flurry with 2 procs on it. If the proc damage mounts up to a significant amount of damage, which it often can your build will need some way to augment an armor defense. It is important to note that most things in Madness that can Flurry will have high Lethality and therefore over 70% crit and larger crit mult. Making armor nullification of the physical damage pretty important.

Large Single Hits from Non-armor involving sources

This is a very broad category that involves most spells and things like ritch flamespitters. It is pretty easy to get hit for some kind of spell-like damage for 1000 or so damage. Ritch flamespitters eventually get to this level. You will wind up running into various spellcasters who will crit to this level. You will often be spellshocked so resistances will not be a great defense. In general something like two of these hits in one turn will kill you or come close. You can even be one shotted.


In order to tank Madness you must be able to deal with each of these types of damage sources. Each of these three categories is capable of killing you in one or two hits. How large these hits can actually be is highly variable due to the order in which various protections are calculated. Even though a very nasty flurry can concievably be mostly nullfied by excellent armor such that maybe you only take 200 damage to health. That same flurry could take 3000 off of a damage shield of some sort. Similarly the usage of shield block can be great or problematic. A warhound can still hit VERY hard through both high armor and a good shield block(1300-300-300=600). But Eternal Guard + armor/block combo can work great against a flurry.


The Elements of Defense

The main elements of this build consist of overalpping layers of defense meant to deal with 1 or 2 of the three categories above combined with some overall healing to smooth things out.

High Armor

My current playtest character has 315 armor. This is achieved via using massive armor, good but not extremely focused armor equipment and talents; Hardened Core, Matter Weaving, Defensive Posture and Reshape wep/arm. The talens are quite key for achieveing this number. The non-Hardened Core talents give 100 raw armor in total. Hardened Core itself give a 60% increase in armor os its about 120 armor when you consider equipment. Thus these talents are giving 220 or so armor. As can be seen from the above discussion or hit categories this is enough armor to nullify most melee or substantially mitigate even very high 2H damage (400). But is still a far cry from stopping a warhound.

Sacrifice Shield

This is a key part of the defense. Possibly the most key. Certainly it will not work without it, but it is not sufficient for true tanking. Sacrifice shield with high spellpower can last 29 turns and will give the equivalent of Ghoul resilience (the combat log will actually call it resilience) but stop hits cold that take more than 16% of your life. This will help to counter both categories of Large hits. This will not give good protection againt the Many Hit category, but we have High Armor to help with that. This effect can still be overwhelmed under concetrated fire. 5-6 serious hits will bring to very close to death (more hits with Heroism infusion maybe 12 or so).

Shield Based Talents

Even with armor and sacrifice shield you are not truly a full on tank due to the issue of getting overwhelmed by many attackers and possibly being chipped away to death by procs. There are three shield (as in what you wear not cast) based talents we use to mitigate this to a very significant degree. Shield of Light, Blood shield (demon seed on shield slot) and Osmosis Shield.

Blood shield will give you straight up damage soak which can helps with procs, roughly a damage soak of 40 or so.

Shield of Light heals on every single damage hit, which is great for procs but with enough Heal mod and Crit/mult can even heal for a significant dent in resilience hits (over 100 damage heals). SoL has the weakness that it consimes Light resources and can run out.

Osmosis Shield is similar to Shield of Light but is on a time delayed effect. The healing does not take effect the round it happened and is spread out some. However it does not share the resource problems of Shield of Light. Osmosis Shield can heal hits of about 100 (a bit more depending on talents and shield block value)

Vampiric Hits
Suffuse Life will give you 8% life steall on any and all damage you do. If you hit for decent damage, say 2k, you will get 160 healing which combined with armor/sac shield is actually a lot.



When all of these elements are combined and not stopped (i.e. you don't have a huge healing debuff) the buid can essentially tank multiple rare+s in the open for many turns, perhaps forever.

Consider a character with 1000 hp (this is low but in the neighborhood of a level 50 char and easy to do the math). A sacrifice shield resilience hit will hit for 160 damage to health. High end SoL will heal you for 100 damage immediately after that hit. These two things alone mean you would need to have about 18 warhounds hitting you all at once in one turn to kill you. Add on Osmosis Shield and within about 2-3 turns, you will actually stay at full life each turn rather than lose life slowly as Osmosis shield makes up the difference and you would actually be at roughly +40 net positive per hit from warhounds that would otherwise hit for about 800 damage.

So even surrounded by 9 warhounds this build should be able to not only survive for a while but actually stay at full health after turn 2 or 3.

A second possible problematic situation. A devastating flurry. A creature with 300 base Dam MH and OffH with flurry and lethality can do something on the order of 800x6=4800 (assuming all crit) then addon some procs for say 2 procs at 40 each for 80x6=480. So a flurry for over 5k damage is not unreasonable. For this build the combination of 315 armor + blood shield makes this hit do nothing. However those base flurry hits alone + the procs when not having armor would be enough to come close to killing you in one attack. Blood shield would help some but you could easily still take 600 or 800 damage or so and be close enough to death that some other mob would finish you. Certainly a Heroism infusion would help here. But for the purposes of illustrating why armor is an important part of the layered defense this should be sufficient and why running blood shield is useful even if its done before your sacrifice shield on large hits.

Add on vampiric hits onto all of this and you essentially can tank massive amount of things as long as you keep everything going


Conditions

You have to deal with conditions. This is done with a combination of immunities and condition removals.

Immunities
Of course ideally you would just be immune to everything you can. And should get as many as you possibly can. 50% Stun and cut immunity can be gotten from matter weaving. I have gotten 100% blind from equipment and tend to get high confusion resist. You should be able to max stun immunity Alot of this depends on equipment. Poison immunity is highly desirable but hard to get and for this reason I consider Indiscernable anatomy to be a potentially very good ancillary talent choice. For the most with about 4 100% immunities and some infusion coverage your other condition removal are sufficient.

Removal
This build has multiple condition removal that remove multiple conditions. Note the duration reduction on the Dimensional shift is too low to be a great use in Madness where debuffs can easily have duration of 20, but is great on lower difficulties.

Cleansing Fire (from Imp demon seed on body slot)
At level 5 this removes 5 conditions of any condition type and does so instantly. It costs 10% of your life but Osmosis Shield will trigger for it and your other extra healing makes this a non-issue. This is your most crucial removal and can relieve massive pressure

Areyn's Removal Talent
This can reduce the duration on many things so its great in conjunction with Cleansing fire but due to the high duration on Madness it won't get rid of everything. The two together can make a character loaded down with 10 conditions bright and shiny new in no time.

Providence
Will take off multiple conditions a great ability but does take time. Not great for immediate needs, but still can takes off huge amounts of pressure

Realign
Removes multiple physicals and heals. Great ability from level 1 to level 50.

Crusade
Takes off 1 debuff fairly often, nice to reduce some pressure but not key.

Movement Infusion/Healing infusion
These are not strictly required, although I would kind of say movement is, but the pinning immunity on movement can be good and the poison/wound removal on heal infusion can be very nice due to those being the main heal debuffs.

Wild Infusion
I use one for backup removal.

Wildfire
Wildfire is an optional choice for this build. You can take it to enhance flame bolts and due to your defense you can reliably stand in your own wildfire to remove conditions. My testing seems to indicate that it is not really necessary for conditions but it can help some.


When all of this is combined together you still get conditions but rather than completely debilitating they are very manageable even with huge amount coming your way. You have to be smart though, and make sure you keep something in reserves for the nasty heal debuff things.

Prodigies
Must take Hidden resources and do so at 30

I have taken Flexible combat as the second as its a large damage boost for this setup, but a number of other possibilities exist.

Offense

The offense of this build is very simple. You use two staves and a shield (tk wield staff). You put two demon seeds on your staves. Intially you use two Imps for flame bolts and later on you get the most damage with a level 5 Flame bolt and level 5 corrosive cone.

Flame bolt works quite well in the pre-east Madness areas. The talent itself is a little peculiar in the way it works and bears some explanation. A level 5 flame bolts will proc I believe 45% of the time and up to 5 bolts. However the number of bolts is NOT random. You will proc as many bolts as there are targets in range, up to X bolts. So if you line 5 things up in a corridor you will hit the first guy with 5 bolts when the talent procs, since it attemtps to send a flame bolts at each of the 5 guys, but the lead guy in in the way. When he is dead you will hit the next guy with 4, etc. Flame bolts is actually a rather good aoe and can kill single targets fast when there are other thing around but on single isolated guys will do one bolt on each proc.

You can get flame bolts to hit for about 1000-1200 damage with large armounts of +fire and crit (about 300% crit mult + 100% fire and 100 spellpower). Flame bolts can crit and count as spell crits.

Corrosive cone proc on crits and hits harder than flame bolts. You can get hits for around 3k damage with it with similar crit numbers. Since it procs on crit and 100% crit is certainly attainable it winds up being considerably more damage. It will proc about twice as much and do about twice as much damage. HOWEVER in Madness some things have huge armor skill which can give them over 100% crit reduction and unless you get something like 200% crit you won't crit them at all and are stuck with staff damage and flame bolt damage.

My testing on the dummies in the fortress using Essence of speed + flexible combat + the above setup (about +60% fire/acid and 100% crit with 315% mult) gives me a figure of 26k per turn damage using bump attacks.

Your staff with good procs can do over 1k per hit about 800 on the base hit and with high accuracy somethig like 400 damage in procs depending. You want to cultivate good res pen however you can. Good staves can get good res pen.


Utility
You must take conveyance. For one its simply a great line, but even more importantly you will need to make space for summoning to recast sacrifice shield

Secondly although we leverage Matter for excellent armor and immunities it also give you an AMAZING digging ability which is dust to dust + disintegate. Probably the best digging in the game. This is Uber. Use it.


Core Build

Corruption/Doom Shield
3(5)/5/0/0

Corruption/Demonic Pact
5/5/1/5

Spell/Necrotic Minions
3/1(need this for corridors)/0/0

Spell/Advanced necro min
1/1/5/0

Chronomancy/Matter
1/5/1/2

Celestial/ Guardian
5/1/1/1

Celestial Light (removes conditions but needed for resources fo SoL)
1/4/1/5

Combat Training
0(resistances are pointless)/5/5/0/0

Spell /Conveyance
5/5/0/0

Spell/Staff combat
1/5/2/0

Psi/Finer energy manip
5(or 3)/5/0/0



Optional Talent Lines
Temporal - essence of speed also time shield is a nice back up save your ass if I am dispelled talent.

Spacetime Weaving - 5 in dim step. Not necessary buts its nice to have it

Wildfire - you can use this to remove things from enemies, but disintegrate can do that too. The Res pen is nice, but if you are using corrosive cone you want acid too. Also can relieve some conditions on yourself.

Ooze - mainly for indiscernible anatomy, you don't care about the crit part but poinson Imm is very helpful, the wound Imm with Matter makes you 100% without equipment. These two together take out most heal debuff except the necromancer ones. Disease is decent but not a big deal and blindess imm is great although my playtest character is using summertide shield and doesn't need it.

Or more infusions especially Heroism.


Dealing with Magic Removal

Magic removal is incredibly dangerous for you, but there are some things to keep in mind. You have layered defenses so you shouldn't necessarily just die immediately. You run many effects and usually they can't disperse everything. You have a very competent short term defense from Light and possible Temporal and you have conveyance. Unless you are going against a really really unfortunate randboss/unique you should have enough offense to kill a rare+ or dreadmaster or blinkwyrm if you do it right.


Edit: One of the playtests I did was to clear the room of death in Vor Armory. I was teleported into the middle of vault with by one of the OP wyrms which I think was a corruptor most of the smaller dragon types were alive and all OP wyrms alive (lvl 150 uniques) I tanked the whole room for 20 something turns until my sacrifice shield was running low at which point I PD'd away and resummooned then continued to tank/kill the 5 OP wyrms left. Corrosive cones and flame bolts basically cleared everything except the OP wyrms. This is obviously NOT good tactics, I had the capability to not be taking shots from many many wyrms breath weapons and the smart play is to leave immediately but I purposely did not do this. Give that PD would refresh twice before sacrifice shield was over staying in the room can't even be justified by wanting to save it. This drained my shield of light about 50% through the encounter, but I was still able to tank the 5 remaining OP wyrms, with the other layers of defense.

[zemdu]

That's intense. Very nicely thought out. Adventurers really allow for some crazy synergy and stacking.

Time for me to now continue trying to win nightmare with a normal class

[Effigy]

Looks like a nice build. I was trying to do something like this with my own Madness build, but it seems like this setup is more efficient.

[cctobias]

Looks like a nice build. I was trying to do something like this with my own Madness build, but it seems like this setup is more efficient.

In my first iteration I was running in Mandess with this build but not having shield of light/Guardian. It still did OK in the early game, but the many hits+ procs were hurting quite a lot and essentially putting too much downward pressure on me when other things were around.

I started over and re-added SoL (because I had messed in Insane with having SoL) and it made the early game considerably more managable. So even just one thing can really change your experience and I think people will find this build somewhat avoids the issue of Madness being super hard in T2 and then getting a bit easier later on. Its a pretty consistently good build even in T2, although dealing with the Weirdling Beast is problematic early on.

Part of the reason its decent in T2 is you can get a non-permanent Sac shield going by 18-20 for rough things and resting some. Strangely its actually matures for full stuff a bit later than some other startegies because you need high spellpower for high duration but at the same time its still quite useful right out of the box. Other reason being that the high armor works out pretty well against a number of things that are traditionally quite dangerous in OF.

[Effigy]

Do you take Hidden Resources mainly for Sacrifice cost? Or are there other resource issues?

I've tried a few runs with this build on Madness. The first couple ended up dying in late T1, mainly due to some mistakes on my part. I could have kept going since it was Adventure mode, but if I get more than a couple deaths in the early game I usually just reroll. Currently on the third run and it's going quite well so far. I'll have to see what happens in the T2 meat grinder. Overall I think it's an excellent build that starts strong and has all the bases covered by endgame.

EDIT: Latest run ended at level 26. I got to Daikara, but it was pretty rough so I decided to try Nur instead. Lost my last life to a room full of assorted horrors. Several of those deaths were avoidable if I had run away earlier or scouted better. I didn't have Sacrifice going yet because it takes 6+ class points to get running and I didn't have Hidden Resources, but it might have saved me if I had squeezed it in. I'll probably try another run in the near future.

[cctobias]

Do you take Hidden Resources mainly for Sacrifice cost? Or are there other resource issues?

I've tried a few runs with this build on Madness. The first couple ended up dying in late T1, mainly due to some mistakes on my part. I could have kept going since it was Adventure mode, but if I get more than a couple deaths in the early game I usually just reroll. Currently on the third run and it's going quite well so far. I'll have to see what happens in the T2 meat grinder. Overall I think it's an excellent build that starts strong and has all the bases covered by endgame.

EDIT: Latest run ended at level 26. I got to Daikara, but it was pretty rough so I decided to try Nur instead. Lost my last life to a room full of assorted horrors. Several of those deaths were avoidable if I had run away earlier or scouted better. I didn't have Sacrifice going yet because it takes 6+ class points to get running and I didn't have Hidden Resources, but it might have saved me if I had squeezed it in. I'll probably try another run in the near future.

Yes HR is mainly for sac shield, it has some other benefits in that you no longer need to worry about mana costs on the summons as well but I have had high mana after level 30 or so that is not really a big deal.

I would say you really really should get sacrifgice shield immediately and use it liberally. Don't worry about not having HR. I am not surprised you died when not using Sac Shield, its pretty important in T2. You can get 15 turns pretty early and while certain really crazy nasty things may take more than 15 turns 95% of things can be handled just fine in T2 by using bare bones sac shield.

There are three phases of the build:

Phase 1) you have no sac shield but have armor/damage shield/equipment shield stuff

Phase 2) you are about level 18-20 you now have sacrifice shield for about 12-15 turns. Use this whenever you see something dangerous and you should be good for most things. Make absolutely sure to phase door away if you are running low on the shield in T2 areas. Also make sure you can go somewhere to regain mana and reset CD on Sac Shield. This plays sorts of like a slower version of the Meteoric build in that you may need to rest in a cleared out OF1 during the clear of OF2 etc. During zone clears you can clear many things without using Sac Shield and should do so to save CDs, but you should use it liberally on anything remotely dangerous (any sort of tricky rare+ but usually not white mobs)

Phase 3) you have something around 23-30 turns on sac shield and have HR this will be after level 30 and the duration will depend on the amount of spellpower you have so there is some gray area/spectrum between this and phase 2. At this point you can bascially do every fight with Sac Shield up and for longer fight you can go perma with about 26 or so duration.


I would not reccomend skipping from phase 1 to phase 3. It is absolutely worth almost any sacrifice to get sacrifice shield to initiate phase 2 by level 20.

Edit: resource management is not terribly hard but fairly tricky in phase 2 due to both mana and souls. But you see great pay offs being able to go toe to toe with nasty bosses for 12 turns or so. The main problems can crop up when you have many rare+s together and may need to kill a few and zone/rest and then do it again. You can run yourself low on souls in this way. Alternatively if you try to PD/teleport around the zone you may run dangerously low on mana while letting sacrifice shield rechrage. On OF3 I had to do a pretty crazy running skirmish against a really nasty oozmeancer snake unqiue (maybe boss can't remember) and like 4 other rares. I couldn't quite zone out because of the problem of everything healing back up so I had to spread em out using PD and movement infusions and digging to pick em off, but I wound up casting sac shield I think 3 or 4 times and using zig zag corridors to get the room/space to do so. I am very certain this whole scenario would have simply killed me without sac shield and even with it the CDs and resource management was a real issue. In phase 3 you can basically, for the most part, just flat out stand there and take everything like a boss and not do the sorts of crazy stuff madness often requires but in phase 2 its a sort of combination and requires some fairly smart thinking ahead of positioning and resource management.

[Effigy]

How fast did you training the demon seed skills? I was pumping Demon Seed and Bind Demon in early T2 to get more and better seeds, which is part of the reason I had a shortage of class points for Sacrifice.

[cctobias]

How fast did you training the demon seed skills? I was pumping Demon Seed and Bind Demon in early T2 to get more and better seeds, which is part of the reason I had a shortage of class points for Sacrifice.

You can do something like the following by level 20:

Dem Pact (6)

1/5 - this open all slots but only does gives imps. IMPORTANT NOTE: you actually want to stay LOW in the seeds so you ONLY get imps for as long as possible. You the highest Flame bolts and cleansing fire you can get. The more points you put in seeds the more diluted things get. Don't put points into seeds until you have the imps you want and only when you feel the need for Blood Shield and/or corrosive cone


Doom shield (2)

1/1 - you want Osmosis shield and a good block rating and you want armored core, even with one point these are both good. You can put points into the increase these as you feel it helps.

Necro Minions (4)
1/3 - you gotta have this for sac shield

Adv nec min (4)

1/1/2 - you can only put 2 or 3 points into sac shield buy level 20 but it still quite good at this point

Matter (4)
1/1/1/1 - you want to armor and you absolutely should run disintegrate for fast digging.

Guardian (1)
1/-/- - take this at level 10 and put one point in SoL. You eventually want to get more points and you want crusade, but much like doom shield the later points can be done whenever


This is the bare bones skeleton which comes out to 21 points level 20 is what like 25? So you have some leeway to put a few into Hardened core/SoL/Osmo shield/seeds. You will probably fill out seeds by level 30, but not only do you not need to rush seeds it is actively harmful to do so since your two biggest early seeds are fire imps. You need to unlock the body slot though because you need cleansing fire as soon as you can get it.

There are about 2-4 points to mess around with and you can play around with different things depending on various factors: great shield block means Osmo shield may not need a boost, really good armor equipment you can slack on hardened core (and vice versa) etc. Or if you already got some level 4 imps maybe you put 2 points into seeds to get Blood Shield.

Absolutely DO NOT GO TO 5 in seeds until after 30 or even later. 5 in seeds only gives you corrosive cone and you can swap that in later and you need a good enough Flame bolts imps before you can split two different seeds on weapons.

Edit: it took me a restart after a trial run to realize the keeping seeds low trick. Rushing seeds early can really mess you up. However when to get to 3 points for Blood Shield is a much trickier thing. I think I had 3 in seeds by level 20 if I remember right. But while Blood Shield helps and is probably most useful in T2 it is also something can be done without, whereas Sac Shield cannot be done without. It seems conceivable to me that Blood Shield could be delayed until 25 or even 30, but it is possible to go extremely lean and have Blood Shield and Sac Shield together. Really you want to take stock of the 4 defense categories I listed and just shore up whatever is weak or your particular run. You have to have Sac Shield but if your amor is like below 100-150 in T2 then bump armor (hardened core gives most returns usually) instead of bumping seeds and going for Blood shield. Keep an eye on the raw DAM you see in enemies character sheets and shoot to have matching armor, that is more important than Blood Shield and if you are comfortable there then you can choose whether you want to boost your heal or get some dam prevention from blood shield.

In the end I would reccomend not going to 3 points in seeds until you have at least one level 4 Flame bolt seed and one level 4 fire cleansing seed. Since 7 is the max you only need one level 4 FB. Once you have that then weigh out your best options based upon whether you feel Blood shield (probably something around damage soak of 20 for that level ) is worthwhile. Blood Shield is mostly for procs and you may be doing fine with Osmo and SoL already there. You want it later on and it helps early on but its just one factor.

[Unmaker]

I have a significant variation on this build I call Philosophical Ghoul or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Solipsism

(Yes, Solipsism – stop laughing and keep reading.) All numbers are approximate. Long post, but each idea has it’s own separate paragraph.

Pun refs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove

1. The Tanking Madness build takes care of high-damage attacks by using flat_damage_cap (the variable that sets the maximum damage to a percentage of the character’s Life).
a. flat_damage_cap can be obtained through Sacrifice (15%), Suncloak (65%), Grinding Shield (66%), or Ghoul (50%).
b. A flat_damage_cap of 15% costs the Tanking Madness build 2 Categories, 11 Category points, a Prodigy (to ensure you can cast it with low Mana), and about 1/5th of the combat time (to disengage, recast, and reengage). This is still by far the best flat_damage_cap in the game.
c. The problem with the core build’s flat_damage_cap it is dispellable by a number of methods, primarily antimagic.
d. The problems with the other flat_damage_caps are: percentages are too high (all), they are also dispellable (except Ghoul), and Suncloak cannot be kept up continuously except through a lot of additional abilities.
e. If the character has percentage damage reduction (% DR) along with flat_damage_cap, then the flat_damage_cap is essentially lowered by the %DR. Example: With Ghoul + Reality Smearing, the flat_damage_cap is essentially (50%)*(1-30%)=35%.
f. Ultimately, the best option would be an undispellable flat_damage_cap that was also fairly low, so start with Ghoul (the only undispellable flat_damage_cap available) and add % DR.
g. If we can get the effective flat_damage_cap down to around 20% or lower that should be good enough to survive. There are a lot of %DR options in the game, but they all have limitations. Nevertheless, by stacking a few with different limitations, there should be enough redundancy to survive.

2. With flat_damage_cap in place, lower Life (within limits) is more defensible than higher Life!
a. Since flat_damage_cap is a percentage of max life, you die in the same number of large hits no matter what your life is. E.g., at 1000 Life and 20% flat_damage_cap, you die in 5 hits, but the same applies if you have 500 Life – same 5 hits.
b. But a lot of your defenses are flat DR, i.e., they take off fixed amounts no matter what your life is. This includes: armor, % DR that has damage caps, Blood Shield, Osmosis, etc.
c. For a character with flat_damage_cap and fixed DR, lower Life is better! E.g., at 1000 Life, 20% flat_damage_cap, and 100 fixed DR, you take (1000*20%-100)=100 Life per attack; but with 500 Life, 20% DR, and 100 fixed DR you take (500*20%-100)=0 Life per attack.
d. Practically, characters will have both % DR and fixed DR. Survivability doesn’t vary with fixed DR, but increases with lower Life for flat DR, so with a combination of % and fixed DR, survivability increases with lower Life.
e. There is exactly one ability in the game that lowers Life: Solipsism. As it happens, it also serves as % DR because a portion of every attack transfers to Psi instead.

3. But global speed loss = death!
a. The Ghoul already has -20% global speed. Full Solipsism means up to -50% global speed. -70% global speed is an excellent recipe for a frustrating death.
b. The Ghoul already has two Talents that can negate the speed malus. Lanterns of corpselight have exactly the same effect on a Ghoul as Retch does; if you have a lantern of corpselight, you can effectively negate the speed malus all the time because of overlapping durations of effect. Both also give heal-over-time. Ghoul problem (mostly) solved.
c. As long as Psi doesn’t go below 50% of max, there is no speed malus for Solipsism. You can make sure it doesn’t:
i. Don’t buy abilities that use Psi.
ii. Push the (max Psi)/(max Life) ratio as high as possible. This is done by buying at least one Talent point in all Solipsism categories and not having Con-increasing Talents or gear.
iii. Keeping the Solipsism level low, since it controls the % transferred.
iv. Having talents that increase Psi.
v. Avoiding attacks that drain Psi. I don’t actually know of any that do.
vi. Combinations of the above; ideally all of the above.
d. If you push (max Psi)/(max Life) ratio as high as possible, at peak you end with about 580 Life and about 360 Psi (with some assumptions thrown in). So, by the time you get to very low life, you want to take no more than 360*50% or 180 Psi damage. But Solipsism also lowers Psi damage, so the real effect is lower. At max Solipsism, (56% transfer)*(46% reduction)*(580 Life)=149 Psi damage. So you can max Solipsism and still stay >50% max Psi! Note: Because of level scaling on the % reduction, maxing Solipsism early is a death sentence; you have to increase it slowly over leveling.

Conclusion: By making a Ghoul with Solipsism and stacking some % and flat DR on top, plus the rest of the Tanking Madness build (minus the Sacrifice line), it should be possible.

I am currently at level 22 with approximately this build and it looks viable. I am going to restart because I messed up some of the build, but it is a solid proof of concept. (This is also the fourth variation in Tanking Madness I have tried - nice build - and so far it is the best.)

Here it is:
• 1/3/3/0 Ghoul
• 0/5/0/3/1/0 Combat Training
• 4/4/2/0 Doom Shield
• 5/5/1/5 Demonic Pact
• 2/1/5/1 Solipsism
• 1/5/1/2 Matter
• 3/3/3/0 Absorption
• 2/2/1/2 Feedback
• 1/1/2/2 Spacetime Weaving
• 10: 4/1/4/1 Rot
• 20: 3/1/2/1 Guardian
• Corrupted HotSQ: 2/1/1/3 Vile Life
• 24: Ethereal Form
• 36/Wyrm Bile: 3/1/1/3 Energy; 1/4/1/0 Finer Energy Manipulations

Lots of build notes:
• Follow the leveling guide for Tanking Madness except as noted below.
• Magic, then Cunning and Willpower as necessary. This is a tricky balance; you will need items that boost CUN, and WIL to get the talents you need early. You will need STR items to wear the best armor and shields.
• I prefer a melee weapon build over a staff-as-weapon build. I find the debuffs that you can get from weapons to be more useful than the raw spellpower and % damage increase you get from staves. Personal choice; the Staff Combat line doesn’t cost an extra category to buy.
• Antimagic is now an irritation, not ‘time to GTFO’. The same for many talent-removing abilities. Several core defenses (e.g., Ghoul flat_damage_cap, Ethereal Form, Solipsism, and item armor) cannot be dispelled at all (OK, you can lose Ethereal, but it isn't technically a dispel). You no longer use Mana at all (unless you pick up something like Stone Touch from the Alchemist escort) and other defenses like Absorption and Resonance Field are not affected by antimagic. And there is so much redundancy that you have to be stripped of many sustains and abilities before you are in serious trouble.
• Shoot for 1/1/1/1 Solipsism as early as possible. Do not raise the first Talent until mid-level. Raise Clarity (gives global speed) as soon as you can.
• Shoot for 1/1/1/0 Absorption as early as possible. Everything else is a late-level buy. Do not buy Forcefield! This is normally the real reason to take the Category, but with this build, it is a slow-fast death (fast death by being slow).
• Taking Feedback over Finer Energy Manipulation (FEM) first is a hard choice because you lose your first heal (but gain temporary regeneration). The reason to do it is that Feedback has broader utility early compared to Finer Energy Manipulation.
• Taking Spacetime Weaving over Conveyance is my choice. I find it has broader utility and costs less to get to an effective level. Also, you no longer need Teleport or Phase Door to zip out of combat and reestablish Sacrifice.
• Rot before Guardian is another hard choice. Rot has broader utility and includes both a heal and a heal-over-time, so it isn’t a bad tradeoff. Reverse if you like.
• You will run out of Positive for Shield of Light. It doesn’t appear to be a deadly problem. Use Brandish and Feedback/Conversion to regain Positive.
• Ethereal form gives % DR and also gives you the damage penetration you need. Look for equipment for the rest.
• The Flux Category at first looks like a massive advantage with this build, but your Paradox will skyrocket, which blocks out the active uses of Matter and Spacetime Weaving. I also had the problem where enemies would clone me and the clones would use Chronomancy despite having Paradox in the thousands, resulting in more clones and major anomalies. Levels get really interesting with several of your clones running around trashing the place.
• Absorption isn’t that powerful at first. One alternative is to put it at level 20 (and swap Feedback and FEM so you have a TK weapon immediately).
• There are several good to excellent possible final prodigies; I have no recommendation there.
• My only real regret is that undead cannot take Ooze. It would be the absolute best category both for % DR and for broad utility.

The redundancies:

Category / ## / Notes
Flat Damage Reductions
Absorption (Category) / 100 / per attack; not all types at once
Osmosis Shield / 125 / per attack
Armor / 200 / per attack; physical only
Retribution / 350 / per use (damage shield)
Blood Shield / 45 / per attack
Energy Decomposition / 50 / per attack

% Damage Reductions
Solipsism / 28% / partial transfer to Psi
Resonance Field / 50% / caps at 400/use; 10 turns
Infestation / 16% / not active w. >4 worms
Ethereal Form / 25% / can be eroded

Healing / / Solipsism redirects part of healing to Psi
Osmosis Shield / 125 / assuming one max hit; over 3 turns
Biofeedback / 1 to 7 / regeneration as Feedback pool drains
Retch / 60 / per turn for 10 turns
Infestation (on worm death) / 25 / per worm for 5 turns
Infestation (blight affinity) / 15% / blight attacks are rare
Conversion / 360 / plus vim, stamina, mana, positive
Worm Walk / 250 / plus vim; requires a worm
Shield of Light / 20 / per attack; uses 2 Positive
Suffuse Life / 160 / assuming 2000 damage
Blood Splash / 30 / 15/turn/crit; 15/turn/kill
Realign / 200 / plus 1 physical effect

Remove Enemy Buffs
Disintegration / 28% / 1 physical or magical /hit/turn
Entropy / 4 / 1/turn
Worm Rot / 5 / 1 physical/turn
Healing Inversion / ? / turns heals to blight damage

Remove Self Debuffs
Osmosis Shield / 60% / 1 physical/turn
Dimensional Shift / 0.1 / 2 turns for 1 debuff per teleport
Retch / 18% / 1 physical/turn
Crusade / 1 / any
Fiery Cleansing / 5 / any
Vile Transplant / 3 / physical or magical; requires melee target
Realign / 1 / physical

Effect Resistances
Poison / 80% / ghoul
Bleed (Cuts) / 150% / ghoul; Matter Weaving
Stun / 100% / ghoul; Matter Weaving
Fear / 100% / ghoul

(Looooong post, will it go through...)

[Effigy]

Nice concept! I've also been thinking about Ghoul + Solipsism after playing Ghoul PM, but I didn't have a fully-developed build yet. I like how you've worked that concept into this old build. I had a few thoughts as I was browsing this:
1. Ethereal Form is a cool prodigy, but I have some doubts about using it on a Madness melee build. On Insane you can get 90+ defense with it so you should be able to get it considerably higher with Madness gear, but I suspect a lot of the melee enemies you fight will have higher accuracy. I'm just worried that the buff will get stripped too fast to be worth taking over other prodigies like Flexible Combat.
2. Have you considered taking Celestial/Light to restore positive energy for Guardian? The extra healing would help keep your psi up and Bathe in Light is always great.
3. It's worth considering The Untouchable armor. You'll end up with less armor/hardiness, although you'll still be able to get quite a bit from buffs and good randarts. The Untouchable should be triggering very often though with the reduced health from Solipsism, so I think the tradeoff is probably worth it.
4. If you're using regular melee weapons, you can consider taking Chronomancy/Temporal Guardian instead of Psionic/FEM. Strength of Purpose converts your Strength damage on weapons to Magic before Beyond the Flesh, so you don't actually need Resonant Focus. SoP also counts as your weapons mastery, so you save generic points on that. The category has other good stuff as well.

[visage]

Here it is:

Could you talk a bit more over why 1/4/1/0 in FEM is worth a category point and six generic points?

What other sources of flat damage reduction did you consider and reject? Did you consider taking Avoidance?

1. Ethereal Form is a cool prodigy, but I have some doubts about using it on a Madness melee build. On Insane you can get 90+ defense with it so you should be able to get it considerably higher with Madness gear, but I suspect a lot of the melee enemies you fight will have higher accuracy. I'm just worried that the buff will get stripped too fast to be worth taking over other prodigies like Flexible Combat.

I have similar concerns about trying to use Ethereal Form in Madness... especially on a build that's not stacking other sources of defense and evasion. Unmaker -- how much of the time in melee combat are you actually getting the EF bonuses other than the defense?

EDIT:

Ah, I see you're only at lvl22 and haven't taken it yet. I suspect EF is not going to be useful in practice.

I also suspect Feedback and Guardian aren't going to stand up at higher levels, but I look forward to hearing how they perform in practice -- solipsistic ghouls presumably change a lot about how the endgame plays.

Also, what's your plan for stacking up enough spellpower to actually land your dispels like Entropy and Worm Rot?

[Unmaker]

1. Ethereal Form is a cool prodigy, but I have some doubts about using it on a Madness melee build. On Insane you can get 90+ defense with it so you should be able to get it considerably higher with Madness gear, but I suspect a lot of the melee enemies you fight will have higher accuracy. I'm just worried that the buff will get stripped too fast to be worth taking over other prodigies like Flexible Combat.

I suspect EF is not going to be useful in practice.

Yeah, in the Madness orc prides I have seen characters with 100-140 Accuracy, so this is a valid concern. But most have far lower than that. I will find out. Ethereal form is mostly used in this build for the all-damage-penetration since the character by default does physical, light, blight, and darkness damage and will usually use fire or acid too. So having 25% all-pen increases overall damage a lot (unless you are always being stripped of Ethereal Form). And Ethereal Form gets stripped from melee hits only; most spellcasters will still be trying to cast spells when you are meleeing with them, so they aren't a concern.

2. Have you considered taking Celestial/Light to restore positive energy for Guardian? The extra healing would help keep your psi up and Bathe in Light is always great.

Yes. I am going to see if running out of Positive is that big a deal at higher levels; if it is, FEM becomes Light.

3. It's worth considering The Untouchable armor. You'll end up with less armor/hardiness, although you'll still be able to get quite a bit from buffs and good randarts. The Untouchable should be triggering very often though with the reduced health from Solipsism, so I think the tradeoff is probably worth it.

If I pick it up I will try it. It is essentially another 580*20%*130%=150 flat damage reduction against all attacks, so it is potentially quite powerful.

4. If you're using regular melee weapons, you can consider taking Chronomancy/Temporal Guardian instead of Psionic/FEM. Strength of Purpose converts your Strength damage on weapons to Magic before Beyond the Flesh, so you don't actually need Resonant Focus. SoP also counts as your weapons mastery, so you save generic points on that. The category has other good stuff as well.

Nice category, I forgot about it. But Class Talent points and Category points are very tight, so I would have to drop something else important and it would have to be taken at the start.

Could you talk a bit more over why 1/4/1/0 in FEM is worth a category point and six generic points?

It's a lot more important if you take it at the beginning rather than later. However, even later, 25 or so accuracy and armor are fairly significant. That's the one I will probably swap out for Demonic Strength. Demonic Strength has Surge of Power, which allows you to survive at negative Life, and this character build becomes even more resilient if it can survive under 0 Life.

What other sources of flat damage reduction did you consider and reject? Did you consider taking Avoidance?

Ooze: As noted, it would be the best if not prohibited.
Force of Will/Rejection: Nice on its own but none of the other Talents are really useful. In the current build, almost every Talent in the Categories that provide % DR are useful in some way.
Avoidance: Low flat reduction, plus eats an inscription slot. Early on, I usually have to run shield/shield/shatter afflictions (which is also sort of a shield) in order to survive when multiple enemies manage to gang up on me at once.
Mobility/Trained Reactions: DEX-based; useless in this build.
Antimagic/Resolve: Limited coverage; pure suicide in this build.
Flux: As stated. Fantastic in concept, but spending several hundred turns dodging your clones and cleaning up dimensional breaches is no fun. And it happened several times.

I also suspect Feedback and Guardian aren't going to stand up at higher levels, but I look forward to hearing how they perform in practice -- solipsistic ghouls presumably change a lot about how the endgame plays.

Feedback: How useful Resonance Field is depends on what order it is applied in; if it is third or more to be applied, the damage/turn cap is high enough to useful for quite a while. And at 10 turns long, 0 turn activation, and 15 turn cooldown, you can keep it up for most of combat. Also useful for emergency defense. Conversion is the real goal: I have had my Vim run out, dropping my Osmosis Shield, too many times at lower levels, even trying to conserve. And short of actually killing something or getting hit (demon seeds), Conversion is one of the few ways to get an emergency Vim supply.
Guardian: It appears to be important in covering the early levels until Blood Shield ramps up. If you take it late, it may indeed be less important. Still, three of four Talents are useful.

Also, what's your plan for stacking up enough spellpower to actually land your dispels like Entropy and Worm Rot?

A good point, but I look at it another way:
1) You will be in tier 4 with even halfway decent equipment. At that point, your +30 Spellpower staff only gives +7.5 effective. Even if you stack items, you will probably only get +30 effective.
2) For Accuracy/Defense; Physical Power/Save; Spellpower/Save; and Mindpower/Save, Madness enemies tend to come in two types: either they specialize in those areas, in which case you will never stack enough to beat them; or they don't, in which case you can probably overcome them.
Based on that, the actual proportion of enemies that you can affect doesn't vary much unless you can find a +100 Spellpower item or something. And if you do, 2 points in Staff Combat (or if you got a friendly Alchemist and already took Staff Mastery, 0 points) is cheap and you can switch builds. So if you get an Alchemist, Staff Mastery first, Stone Touch second.

Thank you both for the feedback - I am still refining the build and will probably have to run several times to really figure out some of these.

[visage]

Incidentally, I've found that Agility can be quite good as a layer of defense on Earthen Power builds; it may be worth trying here.

Out of curiosity, where does most of your damage come from with this build?

[Unmaker]

Philosophical Ghoul Level 20 Notes

Build
• 1/1/1/0 Doom Shield
• 1/5/0/0 Demonic Pact
• 2/1/1/1 Solipsism
• 1/1/1/2 Matter
• 1/1/1/0 Absorption
• 0/3/0/1/1/0/0 Combat Training
• 1/2/2/0 Ghoul
• 1/2/1/1 Feedback
• 1/1/2/2 Spacetime Weaving
• 1/1/1/0 Rot
• 1/1/1/0 Guardian

Notes
1. Should have said this in the above, but to get Temporal damage, look for gloves or weapons. The ability to auto-strip the enemy’s magical buffs while melee’ing is very valuable.
2. Feedback versus FEM
a. Doing without a heal in the first 11 levels is definitely a pain. But, if you have to heal in combat to survive, you should probably be running anyway.
b. Biofeedback is useless: the extra regeneration is negligible at Talent level 1 and by the time an extra point in the Talent would do any good, you have plenty of other healing. Look for a healing/regen item.
c. Resonance Field is moderately useful – it is down the stack a bit with respect to damage, so you can put it up and expect it to last nearly all of the combat. Instant activation, too. A decent Talent and one of the earliest ways to get good % DR.
d. Conversion is useful, not so much for the healing (note above) as for the emergency Vim and Stamina supply (Demon Seed uses both).
e. Judgement for Feedback versus FEM: A toss-up, basically. Different enough in effect that it probably comes down to playstyle.
3. Solipsism
a. Psi damage from Solipsism is even more conservative than expected; you can (and should) raise Solipsism relatively early – non-dispellable % DR is what this build is about.
4. Rot
a. Infestation is insanely good, even at 1 point. The combination of % DR, heal-over-time, damage-over-time, and enemy distraction makes it a 1-point-wonder.
i. The worm cap (5) is not limited to Talent level like Bloated Oozes and Mucus Oozes are.
ii. The check to split does not appear to be the last check in damage calculations. The character got lots of Carrion Worm Masses created even when taking no damage on hits.
iii. They are crap in combat, but they will distract enemies and their purpose is to die anyway.
iv. The blight pool heal-over-time and damage-over-time stack indefinitely! At one time I had 9 HoT stacks on me at once. Due to the way the Carrion Worm Masses disperse when created, your character will get the most stacks and enemies will get less, but it is still a serious source of both damage and healing.
b. Worm Walk is mostly useless on its own (too inaccurate), but, as noted above, you will have worms out for almost all of the combat, and the dispersal actually helps you – the ability to disengage/move, heal, and restore Vim all at once is very useful. And Worm Walk is perfectly accurate when targeting a Carrion Worm Mass.
c. Pestilent Blight doesn’t trigger much at level 1. Still a good buy though.
d. Rot at Level 10 instead of Guardian is a good buy IMO for this reason.
5. Absorption is actually a good early defense. I got 14 flat physical DR from the first point, which is much better than early armor options and really blunts the Half-Finished Bone Giant’s physical attacks and Bone Throw.

Conclusion: Solid through Level 20…

[Unmaker]

Philosophical Ghoul Level 30 Notes

The character is probably dead, despite running in Adventure mode, but the build still looks good. Basically, I made three mistakes:

1. Effigy and visage were completely right about Ethereal Form - unless you go with a build with at least decent Defense, Ethereal Form gets eroded too fast. I still think it is workable, but:
a. Keep Heavy Armor Training at 2 and push Light Armor Training up to 2+. The all-damage-reduction that comes with light armor these days helps the build, too.
b. Look for +DEX and +Defense items.
c. Drop Feedback and starting with FEM (to make up for the armor loss). Maybe never take Feedback.
d. Spend some points on DEX instead of maxing WIL. Solipsism doesn't scale on WIL anyway and the extra Defense should help. This is a 'maybe' because it lowers maximum Psi. Balance carefully.
e. It is really too bad you can't fit the Ambush Category in - spellpower converted to Defense and other goodies would be perfect.

2. From level 20 to 30, I tried to max out Demonic Pact. So except for item and stat gains, the character didn't get any extra defenses. Bad idea - I should have used those levels to push up the basic defenses, 1-2 points in all defense options. Now I am fighting enemies that I regularly have to run away from and probably won't survive to shore up the defenses. Still haven't found Blood Shield either.

3. I was doing well, got overconfident, and entered the Temporal Rift. Until maxing out defenses, a lot of this build's survivability comes from combat positioning. Which is ~!@#$%^&*()_+ impossible when all of the time elementals have teleport or swap attacks. First death: Why won't these things stop bouncing me around? Second death: I can deal with this... Third death: I can run away... New rule: Temporal Rift counts as higher level than its nominal level for purposes of when I enter it.

I am taking a break from Philosophical Ghoul but my next character will probably be something in the Tanking Madness line - I still feel like it is a good base build with lots of options and I haven't won Madness yet.