ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Winning character vault

Ever since playing the reworked Necro, I knew there was great potential for a low-life Adventurer build. I've experimented with some different combinations, but so far this is my most successful version of the concept. I'll say right off that this build doesn't do the absurd damage that you see with some Adventurers, particularly the spell proc builds, but the damage is respectable. However, it's one of the tankiest builds I've played and has a pretty good toolkit for handling various situations. Plus it's just fun playing a level 50 character with ~300 life who can absorb the kind of punishment that would put most others in the grave.

Here's the general thought process behind the build:
1. To keep our max life as low as possible, we combine Blurred Mortality, Solipsism, and Yeek race. Being a Yeek isn't strictly necessary, but it does have the lowest life rating of any race. However, Solipsism cuts the life rating in half anyway, so you could certainly play something else if you wish.

2. We need a way to cap incoming damage to a percentage of our max life (i.e. "resilience"). The only ways I know of to do this are with Ghoul's first racial talent, Grinding Shield, or Suncloak; since Suncloak has a fairly low duration with a fixed cooldown, we need to choose one of the other options. Ghoul is a good option and does have a better resilience rate at 50% compared to Grinding Shield's 75%, but Ghoul can't use infusions and has high life rating. For this build I went with Grinding Shield, which means we're using steamsaws. With 300 max life and 5/5 Grinding Shield, we can't take more than 225 damage from a single hit, even if it would have dealt 5k damage to a normal character.

3. The next step is acquiring a decent amount of negative life so we can safely drop below our small max life pool. Blurred Mortality already gives ~200 neg life, and Battlefield Veteran (same category as Grinding Shield) gives a further 250 neg life. Add in Blood of Undeath plus some decent items and we have a comfortable buffer.

4. Since our max life is very low, we can abuse things that are balanced around the life total of a normal character. Infestation is a perfect example: losing 15% max life will be somewhat uncommon for a typical character, but for this build it will trigger on almost every hit, giving us consistent damage reduction and spawning hordes of carrion worms spreading blighted ground (which stacks) to heal us. Across the Veil will trigger fairly frequently. Yeek's Quickened bonus turns will trigger not when we're about to die, but fairly early in combat. Blood Vengeance will have a chance to trigger from most hits. The Untouchable will be proccing reliably. These effects add up to be a significant amount of damage reduction, healing, cooldown recovery, and more.

5. Now we add Golden Age of Necromancy to ensure that we have time to heal whenever our health goes negative. Thanks to resilience we're already immune to one-shot deaths (apart from multi-hit talents like Flurry) and now we're immune to two-shot deaths. Now our health can reliably ping-pong back and forth from negative to positive life, triggering Across the Veil for extra damage and cooldown recovery.

6. The rest of the build is designed to fill out damage and utility. Steamsaw mastery and melee attacks, Psionic/FEM for the always-great Beyond the Flesh, Vile Life for status effect removal, etc.

Here's an example of the damage reduction from the combat log: It looks like I avoided the crit that hit the worms, so the damage difference is a bit inflated here. Still, you can see that resilience alone prevented 420 damage, with further reductions from Infestation and Solipsism. What would have been over 600 damage is reduced to 91 life damage and 40 psi damage. You can also see that even the degen damage from cleansing fire is triggering Infestation on each tick. And unlike builds that rely on a large life pool or damage shield, we can maintain this damage reduction indefinitely without downtime. The only real problem situations are when we get too loaded with status effects or when our sustains get stripped.

If you don't want to use steamsaws, you could play a Ghoul and use whatever weapon you want (or even focus on spell damage). The core concept will be the same, but obviously some categories will need to be substituted. Likewise, you can play the build as described with a race other than Yeek. I just think Yeek is the strongest option here.

This is one of the rare builds that actually uses all 4 powers, so Master of Disasters is a great fit here. You could choose something else such as Flexible Combat if you prefer, but you may have difficulty getting non-physical effects to stick on tough enemies without the power boost from MoD.

Build Overview
Race
Yeek or your preference. Preferably not undead so you can use Regeneration infusion.

Stats
Willpower > Magic > Cunning > Dexterity

You'll need to put points into Strength in the early game to unlock Steamsaw Mastery, but avoid putting more points beyond that. Save +stat items and use a gem with Beyond the Flesh when you need to meet stat requirements.

Prodigies
Arcane Might
Master of Disasters

Class
Psionic/Solipsism: 2/0/0/0 early, 5/1/5/0 core
Steamtech/Butchery: 1/1/1/0 early, 5/1/1/0 core
Steamtech/Battlefield Management: 1+/5/1/5 early and core
Technique/Dual Techniques: 1/1/0/0 early, 2/2/3/3 core
Corruption/Rot: 4/1/0/0 early, 4+/1+/1+/1 core
Spell/Age of Dusk: 1/1/1/5 core
Steamtech/Automated Butchery: 3+/3/3/2 core

Generic
Race/Yeek: 1/1/1/1 early, 1/1/5/5 core
Techniques/Combat Training: 0/1/0+/2+/0/0 early, 5/1/2+/2+/0/0 core
Psionic/Finer Energy Manipulations: 1+/1/1/5 early, 3+/1+/1/5 core
Spell/Necrosis: 5/1/0/0 early, 5/4+/0/0 core
Corruption/Vile Life: 1/1/1/1+ core
Corruption/Torment: 1/1+/1/2+ core
Corruption/Hexes: 0+/0+/0+/0+ core

Category Unlocks
Level 1:
Psionic/Solipsism
Steamtech/Butchery
Steamtech/Battlefield Management
Technique/Dual Techniques
Psionic/Finer Energy Manipulations
Spell/Necrosis
+1 inscription
Level 10:
Corruption/Rot
Level 20:
Spell/Age of Dusk
Level 34:
Steamtech/Automated Butchery
Wyrm Bile:
Corruption/Torment

Corruption/Vile Life can be unlocked for free by corrupting the Heart of the Sandworm Queen on the altar in the Mark of the Spellblaze. Corruption/Hexes can be unlocked for free by destroying Zigur with the Grand Corruptor.

Inscriptions
Unlock a 4th inscription right away for your steam generator. During the early and mid game you want 1x Regeneration, 2x Shatter Afflictions, and 1x Steam Generator. You need at least 6 steam regen to support both Grinding Shield and Tempest of Metal, so you may need to run 2 Steam Generators in the early game if you get really unlucky with drops. In general, I'd wait until level 12+ before running 2 Generators though and just wait to train Tempest of Metal. Status removal is more important than the extra damage.

Before fighting the Grand Corruptor or the Master, you'll want to kill Urkis and get the Rune of Dissipation. At endgame I recommend using Regeneration, Shatter Afflictions, Rune of Dissipation, and Steam Generator.

Other Tips
While this build could certainly wear massive armor, The Untouchable is probably best-in-slot so I recommend leaving Heavy Armour Training at 1/5. You can still wear heavy armor for the early/mid game and wait to get Light Armour Training until you find something good. Worm Nest is also great since it reduces damage from the low-end while resilience reduces damage on the high-end.

For the Alchemist Quest, get the Elixir of Foundations first, then the Elixir of Focus, then whatever you want. Elixir of Precision is good, but you can still get 100% crit chance without it assuming good endgame gear. Spell crit isn't really important for this build.

Blood of Undeath is obviously a great fit for this build. I didn't end up finding it until my 3rd pride, but it's pretty common to find in T1 dungeons.

I generally side with the Assassin Lord on Insane difficulty, but it's especially good with this build because I don't think you can buy randart steamsaws from the Merchant.

There aren't that many things that can remove physical sustains, but enemies who can should be considered dangerous since you're considerably less tanky without Grinding Shield. To my knowledge, the things that can remove it are Corrupted Negation, Entropy, Combination Kick, and the Weirdling Beast's special ability. Getting your magical sustains removed is still annoying, but less of a problem.

As you might expect, your main attack buttons come from the Dual Techniques category. Once you have a couple points in Heartseeker, I recommend saving Saw Wheels as an escape tool and use Heartseeker to initiate fights. Whirlwind is pretty good as an attack, but I mainly use it to get past enemies that are blocking me.

Once you get to level 20, all your class points should go to getting Golden Age of Necromancy maxed out. You'll be quite a bit more durable after you have it. While the rest of the category is strong, we don't gain souls from killing enemies since we don't have the Soul Leech talent, so I would just leave the others at 1/5 and not use them. There are enough things to spend class points on anyway. The hardest part of the run (after the first few levels of awkward stat requirements) is getting to level 26, at which point you'll have 5/5 Golden Age and your first prodigy.

Automated Butchery is mainly taken for the first 2 talents, but the others are also good. Continuous Butchery is the boss killer and allows you to outdamage the healing/protection of some enemies that would otherwise be very annoying or even unkillable. Explosive Saw allows you to shut down casters from range, so you no longer need to rely on mindblast torque. Mow Down's steam regen may or may not be useful depending on your luck with Steam Generator drops, but the AoE brainlock combos very nicely with Master of Disasters. Tech Overload is used to reset Continuous Butchery, Explosive Saw, and/or Saw Wheels, so 2/5 is all you need there.

I unlocked Corruption/Torment last because it's not entirely needed, but the talent cooldown from Blood Vengeance has good synergy with the build and Blood Lock is handy against some enemies. You could even skip it and take a 5th inscription instead if you want, but I think Torment is worth taking.

Interesting! I've spent some time trying related builds in Madness, but I hadn't thought of including either Torment or Age of Dusk. I'll have to look into each of those some more.

Blood Vengeance would certainly be a way to get 100% uptime on Seal Fate for a build using that...

Yeah, something along these lines should be viable on Madness. Ghoul may actually be better in that case because your resilience can't be stripped and you have good poison and stun immunities, but you do lose out on Regen infusion. I believe a ghoul would end up in the 500-600 life range, but since they have 50% resilience the damage cap isn't actually that much higher, and the damage in Madness will still be proccing your %life talents reliably.

I've also played around with a ghoul build using Demented/Tentacles and Demented/Horrific Body. You can easily max out Pustulent Growth due to the 15% life trigger, which can either be used to get a large amount of all resist or maintain Defiled Blood nonstop. Since the charges are easy to gain, you could probably even do both. The main issue with that build was getting enough damage. It was good at surviving, but if you're fighting an enemy that has a bunch of damage reduction and/or healing talents it could turn into a stalemate. The steamsaw build at least has Continuous Butchery and stacking bleeds to deal with these situations. If the ghoul build were able to scale its damage higher somehow, that would be my choice for Madness. With that being said, the yeek/steamsaw version may be good enough for Madness with careful play. You'd need to retreat if your sustains gets stripped, and Saw Wheel may or may not be enough for that.

Effigy wrote:Ghoul may actually be better in that case because your resilience can't be stripped and you have good poison and stun immunities, but you do lose out on Regen infusion.

My attempts with Ghouls have had problems getting enough healing; Golden Age of Necromancy may be the answer there... assuming I can last long enough to get it online. My next build might combine that with Attenuate, both giving me a different Madness-viable damage engine and extra healing.

On a side-note, I wonder if the 1.7 changes to randboss talent point expenditure has altered the frequency of TL5+ Life in the Flames is -- if it's less common, that could help out the Seal Fate + Overheat Saws combo. I suspect, though, that if anything it's more common.

Demonic Pact + Doom Shield may be the answer for healing on a ghoul, although it may be hard to fit all the categories in. You'd have to drop Automated Butchery and maybe something else, but it's probably worth it. I know Suffuse Life is gone, but I don't know if any other changes were made to the demon seeds.

I would say Doom Shield by itself would be enough, but you need some way to recover vim, which the demon seeds usually cover. There may be a way to make it work without taking Demonic Pact, but demon seeds are good in general.

Effigy wrote:Demonic Pact + Doom Shield may be the answer for healing on a ghoul, although it may be hard to fit all the categories in. You'd have to drop Automated Butchery and maybe something else, but it's probably worth it. I know Suffuse Life is gone, but I don't know if any other changes were made to the demon seeds.

Yeah, the loss of Suffuse Life has had a lot to do with me not revisiting the well of Doom Shield on steamsaw builds much lately, but that might be worth reconsidering.

I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit on the value of Rot over other defensive choices, particularly Ooze. Mitosis has some pretty good synergy with hovering around 0 current life, so I'd offhand expect it to be excellent for Necro+Solipsism builds.

Infestation gives ~25% damage reduction on hits for which it triggers (sort of like Trained Reactions), and since your health will be low this will trigger on most hits. It also spawns carrion worms that leave a ground effect when they die that heals you and can stack from multiple worms. If you already have 5 worms, one will die when a new one spawns, so the ground will be spreading quite often. Worm Walk is situational, but it's a semi-targeted blink and heal. Worm Rot is useful for removing physical effects from enemies. Overall, I'd say it's a pretty good value for one category.

Wild-gift/Ooze is also a strong defensive category. However, vim and equilibrium don't mix, and even if I didn't take Rot I still have Vile Life and Torment. Technically I think you can use equilibrium sustains on a build with vim talents and the sustains won't be deactivated, but I believe your equilibrium goes up a lot from using vim talents, which will make it difficult to activate the Ooze sustains if they get removed. Overall, I think it's probably more trouble than it's worth to combine vim with Ooze. You also don't have the option of using wild-gifts if you decide to play a Ghoul.

Effigy wrote: If you already have 5 worms, one will die when a new one spawns, so the ground will be spreading quite often.

Oh, I hadn't realized that attempting to spawn a worm when at 5 kills an existing one. That is pretty exciting with Necro+Solipsism.

Effigy wrote:Technically I think you can use equilibrium sustains on a build with vim talents and the sustains won't be deactivated, but I believe your equilibrium goes up a lot from using vim talents

Those are both true. Did you actually use the vim-spending abilities in Torment and Vile Life very often?

(My current run in Madness is using Ooze and Physics in place of Dual Techniques and Rot and is at lvl27. I suspect Golden Age of Necromancy would be much more exciting with a solid source of passive healing, such as Rot; at the moment, the Ring of Blood is the best I've got in that category. I suspect that with Ooze instead of Rot or Doomshield, something like Flux or Agility would be a better use of a category point than Age of Dusk, but at lvl27 I don't have that much experience with GAoN yet.)

Well, I'm not 100% sure that the worms die if you already have 5, but it seems that way. In any case, they die frequently so the blighted ground is reliably available.

Ooze and/or Flux may be better than some categories I'm using. I'm not using vim talents constantly, but I do use Vile Transplant fairly frequently.

Effigy wrote:Well, I'm not 100% sure that the worms die if you already have 5, but it seems that way.

Ah, ok. Checking the code, it's just that they die frequently -- if you're at 5 carrion worms you get no benefit when hit. (For some reason, it calculates the damage reduction first, but if you're at 5 carrion worms the damage reduction is not applied.)

Ah, thanks for the info. That's definitely a downside if you're not getting the damage reduction if you have 5 worms. Still, the worms die pretty quickly so I still think it's worth using, just not as strong as I previously thought.

https://te4.org/characters/229358/tome/ ... a5e4a66bee
Thanks for the build, it's a shame ghoul cannot use wild-gifts any more, otherwise I'd really think dual-shield version of this will be so OP.

This is probably a top 3 easy run for all my adventurer builds. Never had any trouble defensively or offensively throughout the game. Room of death is the time I realize the how powerful this build is. Usually I need to be very careful luring those lvl 100 dragons one by one and play slowly, but no, this time I pretty much tanked them all and steamrolled. That damage cap makes 20-30 lvl of difference not a thing even in early mid game.

I go for the ghouls, it's an easier opening(stats match the build from the beginning). And a typical Demon seeds + Doom shield + saw build, shame that 8% life leech is removed from the seeds tree now... I build for both physical and acid damage, the final fight took about 10-15 rounds, around 3000 hp damage for a normal attack, and I didn't even see my character's hp drop at all... So that's a bit of dissappointment.

I think this is a better build than yours, as it clears the room real quick, usually in one or two hits, corrusive cones poping everywhere. Also Osmosis Shield solves the healing problem. I think I'll drop Age of Dusk and pick a life leeching or utility talent as my ultimate build.

Some thoughts:
1. don't know how Spell/Age of Dusk works, seems like I still take damage the turn that I supposed to be invinsible. So this one with 8 class points / 1 cat point is not worth it for me.
2. Adapt is so great for this build that has a thin focus and is lack of points. Lots of 1 point investment become decent at effective level 2.5, and most of the maxed talents also enjoy the boost. Blurred Mortality giving me -547 hp alone.
3. If I'm not playing ghouls, I think I'll take Ooze rather than Rot. Also that infusion that give you 1000+ negative hp, because when it ends it'll take you back to 1hp. I tested laststand, having the same effect. You can be at -600 hp and turn on last stand then turn it off, you'll be at 1 hp. That can be really powerful.
4. Having some Con is actually good for this build, because it doesn't increase positive hp much while giving your 3-4 times of negative hp. Basically as I tested, assigning 10 Con will give you 10hp and -40hp.
5. For your build it's a shame not taking Demonic strength. instant healer, more negative HP, 40-50% all damage and 80 flat damage reduction. Just perfect.

@fateriddle
Thanks, your version looks good too.

Interesting point about increasing Con for the Blurred Mortality scaling. I was under the impression that the positive to negative life scaling wasn't that favorable, but maybe I'm wrong there. I'll have to try it next time I play a low-life build.

I didn't take Demonic Strength because I didn't have a great way of sustaining the vim cost with the original build. If you're using demon seeds, then vim recovery becomes easy.