ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I found GrayStillPlays' Throwing Knives Stealth Rogue intriguing, and got to thinking about what an adventurer could do with stealth that a rogue could not.

Some general notes on stealth adventurers:

• One thing that's weird about a stealth adventurer compared to most other adventurers -- you don't want to have Beyond the Flesh active with a melee weapon in your TK slot, because the BtF attacks break stealth. So, either you want something else in that slot (usually a gem), or you want BtF off... and since the latter has implications for which stats you're focusing on, you basically want to make that decision near the beginning of your game. (As opposed to waiting to see if you find a weapon with, say, 40+% all-pen on it.)
• Most actions break stealth, so you're generally focusing on instants, passives, sustains, and inscriptions. (Beware: Blink runes break stealth. There may be others, but that's the only non-instant rune/infusion that I've noticed lacking the no_break_stealth tag.)
• Virtually all of your attacks that can crit will do so even in the very beginning of the game. This makes abilities like Raze and Arcane Destruction more useful than normal. (The combination of always critting and leaning heavily on inscriptions suggests that Ogres are likely to be better than normal even without Ogrewielding... especially if running Raze. Drem are also particularly useful because you generally want to squeeze in a bunch of stealth-breaking nukes during Shadow Dance, and Frenzy means you can use each that you have twice.)
• GrayStillPlays took Armor of Shadows partially for the extra passive stealth. If you have a plan that really wants that prodigy for something else, you can get a comparable amount of stealth from Cursed/Predator. The catch is that the Predator category does not give you Hate as a resource and Savage Hunter only triggers if you have Hate. ...so if you want stealth from Predator you'll need to take another Cursed category. Shadows is probably the best option, but I kept on being annoyed at them blocking my shots so I ended up settling on Endless Hunt (Stalk is useful, and I assume Surge is as well).

The first approach I came up with for playing with stealth was taking GrayStillPlays' basic "stealth + throwing knives + poison" approach and adding additional hits (and therefore poison applications) to it. Tentacles jumped out at me as the obvious option here, and they are indeed pretty good -- every throwing knife hit is accompanied by a tentacle attack, and your tentacles also do a cleave attack within melee range of yourself, all without breaking stealth. Fan of Knives at point-blank range is particularly exciting with tentacle cleave. Tentacles also give you two additional AoE melee attacks, though they both break stealth so you'll generally want to use them while Shadow Dance is up. Given that tentacles do darkness damage and use magic, there're some obvious potentially nice synergies: Undead Drake, Shadow Magic, Ambush, DoomElf. None of those synergies are necessary, though investing in them may allow you to dump Poisons and the attendant need to take Mystical Cunning as a prodigy. Side note for this (and for GrayStillPlays' original build): throwing knives, like arrows and bullets, reload on movement... so having a movement infusion is exceptionally handy. Also of note, you'll want some actual defensive tools beyond inscriptions, defense, and stealth -- Flux, Mobility, and Scoundrel are all good on that front; I'm wary of running Ooze because I don't want my oozes drawing AoE attacks, but perhaps my fear there is overblown. (As for other sources of extra attacks: Earthen Power for some reason didn't work, and I haven't tested Celestial/Guardian yet.)

The second, and perhaps more hilarious, approach that I've identified is using Artillery. For this to work, you need a gun in either of your mainhand or TK slots. Having Rocket Pods turned on means you can continue to dish out damage while running away (though sadly it doesn't include the Awesome Toss behavior of firing every move regardless of move speed). Given that Rocket Pods count as gun attacks, you can use Psytech Gunnery to add a melee attack to them if you have a mindstar in your offhand. Looking for synergies, once Rocket Pods are getting a melee attack I'm personally tempted to add Torture to this for the (now-)ranged AoE burn-based stun; however, if you're going that route you probably want to hold off on taking Torture until you've got your mindstar mastery from Zigur. Also of note: Mechanical Arms do not break stealth, so you can add those to this build (or run them without Artillery, for that matter). One downside of Artillery: Rocket Pods drain a lot of steam; six per turn plus two per rocket fired.

That's what I've come up with so far. What other options are there?

You're right in that a lot of actions-on-hit will break stealth. Arcane combat procs being the most notable. I expect that with the right set-up you could extend Shadow Dance for a very long time (say via Snap, Timeless, etc) and not worry about breaking stealth.

ed: Might be worthwhile to check if knives can apply diseases from Reaver's skills.

tabs wrote:You're right in that a lot of actions-on-hit will break stealth. Arcane combat procs being the most notable.

Oh, yeah, I'd intended to mention Arcane Combat not being compatible with stealth. Thanks for pointing that out!

tabs wrote:I expect that with the right set-up you could extend Shadow Dance for a very long time (say via Snap, Timeless, etc) and not worry about breaking stealth.

Now there's a fascinating idea to explore.... At Talent Level 5, Shadow Dance has a 5-turn duration and 15-turn cooldown. There should be a build that can make something exciting happen there.

tabs wrote:ed: Might be worthwhile to check if knives can apply diseases from Reaver's skills.

I assume that they would be able to, but I expect it'd be really annoying to have to burn Shadow Dance when casting Epidemic on the many disease-immune enemies. Is there another way around disease immunity?

Uh, is there any actual point to picking up mindstar mastery of you're using psytech gunnery? The description for the psyshot thing says it doesn't work with the mastery sustain. Haven't ever actually tested it to see if there's an interaction, though...

Frumple wrote:Uh, is there any actual point to picking up mindstar mastery of you're using psytech gunnery? The description for the psyshot thing says it doesn't work with the mastery sustain.

The Psyshot description is correct -- it will not trigger if you have the Psiblade sustain turned on. However, the passive effects of Psiblades still work: +30 power and +XX% damage.

Huh. That can't be a small boost with the psychic passive's stupidly high multiplier involved. I had assumed it didn't function at all, with the psyshot passive effect overwriting the mastery entirely. I've been missing out

Oh, and in the "more entertaining than effective" category we also have Earthen Vines. They'll rarely do more against a dangerous enemy than interrupt its movement for a turn here or there, but they still amuse me greatly with stealth.

A quick look through the sourcecode makes it seem like virtually nothing not already native to Rogue/Shadowblade has the no_break_stealth property. Thus, looks like the two options for a stealth adventurer are:
1. Stacking passive effects on throwing knives, like Poisons, Shadow Combat, Ruin, or Raze.
2. Trying to extend Shadow Dance and get your free crits while you can.

tabs wrote:A quick look through the sourcecode makes it seem like virtually nothing not already native to Rogue/Shadowblade has the no_break_stealth property. Thus, looks like the two options for a stealth adventurer are:
1. Stacking passive effects on throwing knives, like Poisons, Shadow Combat, Ruin, or Raze.
2. Trying to extend Shadow Dance and get your free crits while you can.

Well, Mechanical Arms and Rocket Pods both maintain stealth, so it's entirely possible that there are other relevant effects that don't count as actions and therefore don't break stealth. Next up on my testing queue are assorted sustains: Body of Fire, Thunderstorm, Corona, etc. (I've done a ridiculous Corona-based adventurer in the past, powered by Raze; that's unlikely to work here because I don't think you'll be able to generate real amounts of positive/negative energy...)

visage wrote:The second, and perhaps more hilarious, approach that I've identified is using Artillery.

This turns out to be surprisingly viable. You can focus pretty heavily on nature damage, between poison and mindstars. The ability to dish out uninterrupted damage at range 10 while running away or simply dodging projectiles is awfully nice.

It does take a lot of category points, though: Artillery, Psytech Gunnery, Stealth, Poison, FEM/Absorption, and getting enough steam generation. That doesn't leave many left for defensive abilities beyond stealth. ...and, assuming that you really want more stealth than you'll get from the base category and gear, you're either spending two more category points on Predator and a Hate-enabler, or you're spending a prodigy on Armor of Shadows. Fortunately, you don't actually need Throwing Knives in this build...

One thing that I discovered the hard way, and was quite disappointing: Unstoppable Nature, which gives 50% nature penetration, only works when you have the psi blades sustain up... which means it doesn't work with Psytech Gunnery.

Don't wyrmics have some nature pen stuff? Could swear there's some more talent sources for that somewhere or another.

ed: Ignore me, I can't read.

Frumple wrote:Don't wyrmics have some nature pen stuff?

Yeah, Chromatic Fury gives them 18% penetration for physical, fire, cold, lightning, acid, nature, blight, and darkness. I don't think they get nature penetration from anything else, though.

I think my experiments in this area are winding down, so some final thoughts:

Tentacles: Doing a build with tentacles and throwing knives means splitting your damage across three damage types with very little in the way of synergy (physical, darkness, nature), so I'd strongly consider running Ethereal Form for the resistance penetration. You could also easily dig deeper into the darkness damage with Undead Drake (which really benefits from all-crits-all-the-time) or Shadow Magic, especially if you drop poison.

Artillery: I don't think you need to supplement the offense of this approach with throwing knives or with mechanical arms; being able to passively dish out long-range damage from stealth is pretty good, especially when your poison can reduce enemy healmod by 80+%. However, note that the proc damage being halved with Rocket Pods carries over onto the proc damage associated with your mindstar hits. One key advantage to the artillery approach is that your attacks pass through allies, so you can use Ooze and/or Shadows (or, heck, Temporal Hounds) without any annoyance from shot-blocking.

Mechanical Arms: The range on these is short enough that I recommend using them as an addition to a throwing knives build, rather as the entire source of the build's damage. Side note: the mechanical arms will trigger the quickdraw knives, which can be a nice source of additional damage.

Mystical Cunning and Anti-Magic: You can take Mystical Cunning after having gone Anti-Magic. However, Mystical Cunning teaches you a spell, so you cannot go Anti-Magic after taking Mystical Cunning.

This seems a novel idea. Did anyone determine the 'best' Adventurer Stealth build yet?

Especially a ranged focused one?