ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So, this is a guide for how I won nightmare on Orc: Embers of rage with a shooting adventurer. I'm a reasonably bad player, barely able to beat normal on the main campaign, and hadn't at the time actually beat Orc: Embers of rage at all. Also, I played this on a laptop with a cracked screen and without a numpad. For the most part, I only moved in straight directions and tried to avoid using the trackpad.

Race: Whitehoof (needed)
Class: Adventurer (needed)

Instructions:
The build resolves around shooting stuff with your 3 guns using the 'shoot' button. Occasionally you need to reposition yourself using the instant-move from chronomancy, however the wast majority of the time your shields will be enough. I put mostly everything else on autocast so it's less work. I also use 'auto-accept current target' so I literally only have to hit '1' to fire. On the rare occasions I had to target something else than the nearest creature I moused over it to change target before firing.
At the start, head straight back to orc town to buy the 'shoot talent' (yup, you don't start with it). Buy physics/chemistry and 'combat training' as soon as possible also. Head to yeti lair for the first level ups. Don't forget to visit Kaltor after both Vaparous Emporium and the docks to look for general gear and bullets, aswell as t4+ gems for telekinetic wielding early game. The ice bullets are really good, if you can find.
For added lazyness, put 'Rune: heat beam' at autocast when enemy visible. Same for 'beyond the flesh' and 'Kinetic Shield'. 'Weapon folding' should be on autocast 'when no enemy visible'

Inscriptions:
1. Shield (on autocast when enemy adjacant)
2. Steam Reactor
3. Medical implant
4. Medical implant
5. At level 10: Shield (also on autocast when enemy adjacant as it won't cast if there is other shield active)

Statpoints:
Dexterity > Cunning > Constitution (feel free to mix up it during levelling)

Talent trees and skill points (roughly in order of importance)

Generics: Chronomancy: Spacetime weaving (1+,0,0,0)
Instant move for initial 5 range. Teleport next to a corner and walk around to disappear from view when in difficult situations. It's just ****** awesome. I never missed having a bigger range.

Generics: Race / Whitehooves (5, 4+,0+,0+):
This is what makes this build. The +10 to strength and +10 magic from the first talent along with a telekinetically wielded gem solves all your stat dependencies. The extra movement is golden when you're moving backwards to reload bullets and the flat damage reduction is awesome (especially for those horrible times when you get hit by a ton of stuff when rounding a corner)

Generics: Corruption / Demonic strength (1, 1+, 4, 3+)
Second talent is a great 'crap-i-need-healing-now' early game. Extra damage from third talent is massive. The damage reduction from the final talent is huge, but with the talent maxed in endgame I started having trouble with it draining all my vim (and thus losing the benefit of the third talent). On my attempts at insane I switched out this for Spells / Aegis (3+,5,0,0). For nightmare I'd rather keep this though.

Generics: Technique / Combat training (5,1/5,0+,0,0): buy in town
If you manage to buy a good lategame light armour at Kaltos, consider using the points here for tinkering instead. If playing at insane instead of nightmare, strongly consider putting points in accuracy. Vaults and some random bosses are really difficult without pumping accuracy.
Generics: Steamtech / Physics (1+,0+,0+,0+): buy in town
Generics: Steamtech / Chemistry (2+,0+,0+,0+): buy in town
Use as you want depending on what you find and need at the moment. You are basically looking for passive bonuses and mostly everything else is useless. I found explosive shell to be my favourite shell late game. As you're covered by shields most the time, I used second skin as the body-tinker for the regen. For Weapon modifiers I switched around, but the armour penetration + crit-rate remained a good choice throughout.

Class: Steamtech / Gunner training (5,0+,0,0):
Get dexterity to 18 as soon as possible and buy the first talent point here. Before that, you will only be able to fire the mainhand gun! Max as soon as possible. Double shot is nice enough once you have spare points and more than enough steam.

Class: Chronomancy / Temporal Combat (5,1+,5,0)
First talent gives a much needed early game damage boost and a good chunk of extra speed. Max it early. Second talent is nice to fire off if disarmed or otherwise lacking in usefull things to do. Third talent is a good for 'making random stuff happen automatically when I shoot at enemies'.

Class: Psionic / Absorption (3+,3+,0,0)
When starting put one point there when you start to get telekinetic slot. Wield an additional gun here, but swap out for gems at level up if needed (for additional strength/magic). If times are though and you actually need to flee, remember that you can deactivate these talents for a damage shield after talent point 3 (I used this only once though).

Class: Spells / Temporal (1,5,1,5)
Time shield is awesome and gives a nice regen after it breaks. I put this on autocast 'when enemies in sight' so it's used as often as possible. Not the most efficent use, but it's good enough. The global speed buff from the final talent is awesome. Don't starting putting points here until your mana is at 300 (don't worry about it, it will happen by itself around the right time)

Class: Inscription
Your final category point should be used on an inscription

Class : Inscription (at level 10)
Your level 10 category point should also be used on an inscription (you still have more than enough good places for classpoints)

Class: Steam / Furnace (at level 20) (5,5,1+,1+)
At this point you should have found bigger generators, so steam should be no problem. First talent is awesome physical/fire damage and penetration increase. Second talent gives massive flat damagereduction that fades fairly fast with repeat use. Third and fourth talent is automatic reset when it 10 charges. I never found the damage to be noteworthy, however automatic venting is nice. Chronomancy / Stasis is a worthy contender here for the addional time shield. I use this on insane.

Class: I don't know (at level 36)
I got poison here on my first playthrough, thinking that a bit of random poison spread would be a nice addition. However, as it turns out, guns don't work with poison. 'Corruption / Shadow Flame' is awesome if you have the teleporting light which spreads fearfire (I forgot the name). I guess 'steamteach: Bullet Mastery' for the third talent 'Percussive Bullets' could be usefull for the knockback effect also. It didn't really matter, as I was winning easily anyways.

Yeti rewards: not too important. I grabbed 3xchant of fortitude and resolve.

Gear: Bullets are first priority. Range on your guns is really important, and should be preferred over damage most of the time. Saves and immunities are first priority on general gear, as avoiding status effects is first priority. Generally just use the best overall equipment you find though. 'Fearfire' cloak is a pretty nice, and often for sale at Kaltos.

Out of curiosity, have you tried this with Psytech Gunnery instead of Gunner Training? You'd need to pump Will insted of Con, but otherwise that'd mean you get two shots and two mindstar hits per attack, rather than three shots.

That might mean more ammo trouble than you'd like, but it also means that you get 4 hits per attack instead of three, and that two of those hits trigger on-melee-hit abilities (including Dismember). That expands your options for your excess category point -- look at what you can get from Torture, for example.

Another thing to consider would be to add the hilarity of Mental Tyranny and Punishments/Madness. The trio of that, Torture, and Weapon Manifold is quite silly, at least as far as Nightmare.

Important note! While you have your TK-slot charged with a weapon in it, you get the str->will, dex->cun thign with all weapons. This means...
- Dex unimportant except as unlock (defense isn't good enough to be worth it by itself... is it?)
- The mindslayer generic tree that improves your grip effect as its fourth skill is suddenly much more important, as it affects all of your weapons. Its earlier skills are also nonterrible Also lets you consider whether psi/absorb is really worth it. It's not as good as it used to be.

No, all you need to do is be a gunslinger and get awesome toss plus a good movement infusion. Use awesome toss, then the movement infusion, and you shoot each time you move, so you can attack like 10 times a turn.

Might as well exploit the bug while you still can, I guess. Mindslayers remember that nonsense fondly. Actually seem to remember that interaction getting movement infusions themselves nerfed back in the day, heh

Definitely would recommend psyshot over gunnery, though. Ammo really isn't that big of a deal if you keep a hold of decent capacity shot, particularly considering you're using 2/3rds the ammo to hit an extra time. The extra versatility that doing half your attacks as melee brings is pretty substantial. You can use poisons if you want to, with that, ferex, or take advantage of demonic strength's tier 1 talent (I think. Didn't keep an eye on it, so need to test to make sure), or leverage that delicious on-melee kit slow. All sorts of stuff. Roughest bit to it is you then probably need some degree of willpower to hit mindstar stat reqs, but that isn't that big of a deal when you don't really have to invest in dex in exchange. Well, that and you're no longer scaling primarily/almost entirely off cun.

Vis a vis the swapping absorption for finer energy manip, to get resonating focus... trying it now, heh. Immediate thing you notice is that doing that leaves you with a lot of generic trees, and not many class ones. By the time you've got your store bought cats, you end up with three class trees (of which you're probably going to put meaningful points in all of five of the talents) and seven generic. Most the latter are going to be pretty empty, too, investment wise, but... still. Not too sure what to think on that front. Other problem with it is the rest of the tree's... kinda' useless. Realign ain't bad, exactly, but the other two do very little for you, regardless as to if you go gunnery or psyshot.

... will say, though, poking this a little immediately jogged my memory that I was thinking of trying a ranged arcane combat build. Just double checked, and it's entirely possible to trigger AC procs off a psyshot mindstar hit. Fiddly bit if yer modeling it after this'un is figuring out how to shift in those two extra cats. Maybe replace temporal combat or furnace (to pick up AC and something for it to spit out), and push something back to the 20/36 cat level. Though that's a lot easier if you're using one of the AC tweak addons, since one of 'em opens up AC to triggering tinker granted talents (viral needlegun, ferex). Can skimp on the non AC tree and still have something for it to proc, heh.