ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I present the following to you for your consideration.

- Steamtech/Psytech Gunnery: psyshot adds the mindstar attack on to every steamgun shot you make. This counts as a melee attack, and it gets whatever advantages you may have stacked on our melee attack.
- Telekinetic Grasp/Beyond the Flesh with a steamgun is going to trigger a shoot action off of that steamgun for every shot (bow, sling, or steamgun) you fire with your mainhand weapons. It also does not care about whether the weapon is one-handed or two-handed. Delightfully, it turns steamguns from a dex/cunning weapon into a weapon where cunning is very nearly the only stat that matters. (Str still contributes to physpower, which does add.) It also gives you access to midwielding gems, which can be really handy for emp-boosting your stats so you can qualify for skills and gear that might require, say, dex. Admittedly, this can get expensive in bullets.
- Finer Energy Manipulations is a nice, efficient little tree for gaining TK grasp and Beyond the Flash with. It gives you the unlock, it gives you a nice heal that comes packaged with physical cure, and it cranks the numbers up.
- Steamtech/Artillery offers a sustain that, if you have the steam income to pay for it, will happily fire off two half-powered steamgun shoot actions every turn at enemies within 6

So, with the core set here, you get two autofiring rockets per turn (as long as there's two hostile targets within 6 to fire at). Each of them carries two half-power steamgun shots (one per steamgun) as fire damage and two half-power mindstar hits. Each of those hits counts as a standard ranged/melee hit, and will take advantage of anything appropriate you might stack on it. No bullets are expended, and the individual shots don't cost any steam above and beyond the base upkeep cost. Also, rockets are party-friendly. Dex is entirely unnecessary (other than temporarily, to grab the appropriate skills and equip the gear).

Then there's the smorgasboard of things you could add on.

- If you happen to acquire the Tinkerer's twinblaster, you get two shots from hand per shoot action... which means two shots from Beyond the Flesh as well, so now your rockets are firing *4* bullets (and mindstar hits) each. The twinblaster only has a range of 4, but the rockets don't care. Rockets still don't cost bullets.
- If you happen to get one of those silly two-handed multihitting unique steamguns for your mindwield slot, then it'll happily add that to the rocket effects as well (with associated mindstar hits)... and if you have the twinblaster, it'll do it *twice*. Rockets *still* don't cost bullets. Similarly, if you get another one of those low-level steamguns with really short range... well, the range on the rockets is 6 no matter what you do.
- If you grab Chemistry and Physics (which you should), then it looks like shell effects also trigger once per shot, and they pay for the entire bullet cost of the shoot action.

Now, if you look at this, and you decide that your enemies simply are not melting fast enough, there's still more you can do. Some is... more useful than others.

- Flexible Combat: I'm not saying that it's *necessarily* as much raw damage as some of the other options, but it does work off of your projected mindstar hits. More to the point, with the rockets and at least one shot-enhancing unique steamgun, you're putting out a *lot* of attacks... which translates to a lot of chances to trigger those "15% chance of" effects or whatever, and some of those can have a really interesting impact on the flow of battle. If you have a mage-based enemy that you really, really hate, then Spellhunt Remnants will happily do terrible things to their resource pools... and do it while you're busy doing other things.

- I suspect that some of the Arcane Blade shenanigans might be entertaining Dual-wield does cut down the chance of triggering Arcane Combat by 50%, and it would only apply to the mindstar hits, but you're still potentially putting out quite a lot of attacks per round to trigger it with. I've not investigated it myself, because... well, mostly I can't play a Cunning/Will primary character and *not* want to go antimagic.

- Similarly, I suppose that you could do some wacky things with Demon Seeds? I've heard that three-weapon demon seed builds can get kind if silly with their on-hit effects, and this one can get a flatly ridiculous number of on-hit effects.

- Psionic/Projection *wants* to be good for this, but the damage is just too anemic.

- Cursed/Punishments is basically three dead skills and then a capstone that could be highly entertaining. I've not tried it myself, but if you set your mindstar to mind damage, then you're potentially dealing a *lot* of little chips worth of mind damage... which means a lot of chances to spread the Madness. Your mindpower is going to be pretty solid too (especially if you do decide to go with Superpower and pushing Strength

- Cunning/Poison kind of wants to be good? It's in your favorite stat, it's an on-hit that runs off of both melee and ranged...there's a lot to like there. Not sure it is, though. It caps out on the damage stacking pretty quickly, and things tend to die fast enough that you don't get many ticks. Cunning/Scoundrel has similar issues. Still, as a way to do things like prevent enemy healing (or provide some healing of your own) it might work. I've actually invested int his tree, but it's a bit hard to see how much benefit it's having.

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Random notes:
- This one is weak for the first few levels. You cant' get artillery until 10, you don't start with shoot, and you won't want to invest in dex enough to get artillery or your mastery skill (or equip your gear) honestly.
- By the midlevels, you're doing things like running through dungeons and just watching stuff die around you, or melting half of the monsters in a pit with a single use of your shell tinker, and the only real danger is that it's *really* easy to get overconfident and let your guard down, and you still have an upper range of 6, which means that you can most certainly die from stuff that stays out of that range and hits you hard. You're also kind of weak to having your sustains dropped, and disarm can be a problem until you get Iron Grip.
- Generics are a lot tighter than class skills. Once you get artillery to 5/5/0/0, and get Psytech Gunnery to 5/0/0/0... your core skills are done. You don't actually need any other class skills to boost your attack power. Honestly, figuring out "What the heck do I do with the rest of my class skills, anyway?" is a significant part of the build.

posting now because darnit, I already lost the post once and I don't want to lose it again.

I think the mindstar hit doesn't count as dual wielding for the purposes of Arcane Combat. Also, I think Earthen Missiles doesn't count as an on-hit for the purposes of Rocket Pod's 50% penalty. So you get up to 4 full damage, full chance Earthen Missile casts a turn.

If you're not going Arcane Combat, wouldn't Gunner Training be preferable to Psytech Gunnery? 3 guns vs 2 guns + mindstar.

I tried playing something like this (got bored quickly), and as Cornac you start with 12 dex, so if you put your starting points in dex at level 2 you can already put a point in Psyshot and have a comfortable time.

K2Grey wrote: ↑Sun Oct 24, 2021 10:06 am If you're not going Arcane Combat, wouldn't Gunner Training be preferable to Psytech Gunnery? 3 guns vs 2 guns + mindstar.

That's 3 guns vs 2 (gun + mindstar)s. So Psytech Gunnery is still better.

For some reason, I thought you weren't maxing willpower (I had the Arcane Combat build in mind), so I discounted the mindstar damage. Still, you would like to prioritize physical damage and respen first, and then fire, and it'd be hard to get damage boost and pen for a 3rd element. I suppose you could take Hypervision Goggles for the 50% res pen against anything. Or if you give up Antimagic, you could sustain Energy Alteration. But still, you can't have the Psiblades sustain activated along with Psytech Gunnery, so I think the 1 gun would still do more than the 2 mindstars.

I tried playing this Psytech Gunnery + Finer Energy Manipulations + Artillery + Magical Combat + Stone build today, and after T2s at level 29 it does about 3.5k against the training dummy, which is pretty insane. I had range 9 steamguns equipped.

Afterwards I used free respec to take out the points from Arcane Combat and Stone and put them into Artillery (5/5/5/0). This did about 1.6k for the first 5 rounds of combat, until Lock On expired. I had all my stat points invested in Mag instead of Wil, though, and no points in Psiblades so the actual damage of a build without Magical Combat and Stone would be higher.

K2Grey wrote: ↑Sun Oct 24, 2021 10:06 am I think the mindstar hit doesn't count as dual wielding for the purposes of Arcane Combat. Also, I think Earthen Missiles doesn't count as an on-hit for the purposes of Rocket Pod's 50% penalty. So you get up to 4 full damage, full chance Earthen Missile casts a turn.

If you're not going Arcane Combat, wouldn't Gunner Training be preferable to Psytech Gunnery? 3 guns vs 2 guns + mindstar.

I tried playing something like this (got bored quickly), and as Cornac you start with 12 dex, so if you put your starting points in dex at level 2 you can already put a point in Psyshot and have a comfortable time.

I suspect that Gunner Training is effectively 4 guns (the mindwield gun should fire once per other shot you make). With the Twinblaster, though, it's not 2 and 2. It's 4 and 4. Also, psitech means that you have melee on-hits to play with, which can be nice even without the big arcane beatstick of them all. Also, if you're not going arcane combat, you probably *are* going antimagic, and so you have reason to want to invest in Will anyway. For arcane combat, though... that's an awful lot of on-spellhits to exploit, I'd think. Not sure it's actually worth it to dig too deep there, but still tempting.

I refuse to invest in dump stats, and for this build, dex is a dump stat. It might be a bit silly, but it's my silly.

K2Grey wrote: ↑Sun Oct 24, 2021 11:21 pm For some reason, I thought you weren't maxing willpower (I had the Arcane Combat build in mind), so I discounted the mindstar damage. Still, you would like to prioritize physical damage and respen first, and then fire, and it'd be hard to get damage boost and pen for a 3rd element. I suppose you could take Hypervision Goggles for the 50% res pen against anything. Or if you give up Antimagic, you could sustain Energy Alteration. But still, you can't have the Psiblades sustain activated along with Psytech Gunnery, so I think the 1 gun would still do more than the 2 mindstars.

I tried playing this Psytech Gunnery + Finer Energy Manipulations + Artillery + Magical Combat + Stone build today, and after T2s at level 29 it does about 3.5k against the training dummy, which is pretty insane. I had range 9 steamguns equipped.

Afterwards I used free respec to take out the points from Arcane Combat and Stone and put them into Artillery (5/5/5/0). This did about 1.6k for the first 5 rounds of combat, until Lock On expired. I had all my stat points invested in Mag instead of Wil, though, and no points in Psiblades so the actual damage of a build without Magical Combat and Stone would be higher.

With the base build, you actually want to focus on the fire first - the rockets are firing constantly, and the steamguns not so much. Also, steamgun damage varies by ammo sometimes. "no points in Psiblades" isn't a thing, though - it straight-up doesn't work with psitech gunnery... which you mentioned earlier in the piece? Psitech gunnery has its own fairly significant mindstar damage boost, though.

Personally, I don't intend to bother with taking rockets past 5/5/0/0 regardless. They're fantastic as autodamage, but I don't care for the active parts of that tree.

Sorry, I haven't actually played Psyshot before and missed that Psytech Gunnery gives a big boost to mindstar damage to compensate for the lack of Psiblades.

I finished a game with this and got up to 16k damage per turn vs the dummy with defensive gear on. Flexible Combat would have increased damage a ton, however I took defensive prodigies instead.

An issue with the Arcane Combat build is that enemies with alot of flat DR are a problem, particular Mindslayer+Butcher bosses, or Mindslayers with Kinetic Shield+Transcendent Telekinesis. Since Earthen Missiles will make up the bulk of the damage in T2s, and each Earthen Missiles is in turn divided into 3 damage instances, so flat DR really hurts. Skipping Arcane Combat and putting more stat and talent points into gun and mindstar damage would probably work out better vs those guys. I also had some mana problems in Reknor.

So, I have a correction to make. It appears that rocketry range is based on equipped weapon, rather than just being hard-set to 6. As such, there's less ability to exploit the otherwise overpowered steamguns with particularly short range. Twinblaster is still good, due to the "doubling the number of attacks" thing, but going with short-range uniques in your mindwield slot is not necessarily so much the plan, unless you're quite good at mobility.

A few more bits I've discovered...

- Steamtech sustains work just fine even if you on't have enough steam to sustain them all. It'll just mean that your steam is down at 0, and you'll never be able to shoot a gun or swing a saw or use any activated actions that cost steam. That's ptoentially workable for this build, though, especially as an in-between place while you try to find the right inscriptions to fix the issue. It makes things like Furnace pretty plausible.

- If you *are* going pure-sustain, and not bothering with attack actions... then permastealth is suddenly an option. Permastealth and rocket launchers - two great tastes that go great together.

Huh, apparently I didn't notice this thread any of the previous times you've updated it.

Some comments:

Rockets won't fire if you don't have the steam -- they consume steam per shot on top of the sustain steam drain. (My favorite no-generator steam-sustain hack is to mainhand a steamsaw with tentacles and run Battlefield Management for all of the lovely sustains.)

Permastealth Rockets are really quite good. ...and every hit from stealth is a crit, so if you're running Predator (which you generally should with this) you're always generating miasma and even more stealth. Endless Hunt generates the Hate you need for miasma, a chunk of extra melee damage, defense, and extra movement speed. (Magical Combat procs will break stealth, though.)

Poison isn't terrible, but it takes a lot of investment to be good and the base artillery package is already pretty expensive.

In my experience, the most powerful artillery build is to go perma-stealth, and then to get the ammo that procs Psionic Assault effects. Set your mindstar to Mind damage, and run Madness from Punishments. Madness will disable enemies and reduce give them something in the vicinity of -90% to Mind resistance. I've had this fare decently on Madness. (I've seen claims that Projection is good with this, but haven't really tried that myself.)

Dread is a solid addition to Artillery, since you've got an offhand mindstar, and Mechanical Arms also don't break stealth.

visage wrote: ↑Sun Dec 04, 2022 12:30 am Huh, apparently I didn't notice this thread any of the previous times you've updated it.

Some comments:

Rockets won't fire if you don't have the steam -- they consume steam per shot on top of the sustain steam drain. (My favorite no-generator steam-sustain hack is to mainhand a steamsaw with tentacles and run Battlefield Management for all of the lovely sustains.)

I promise you, they do not. I currently have a character with this build who has a steam regen of -6.8. They cannot fire their guns normally, but the rockets work just fine.

Dread is a solid addition to Artillery, since you've got an offhand mindstar, and Mechanical Arms also don't break stealth.

Dread seems kind of meh to me, really. It doesn't take advantage of any of the core synergy cheese, and the engagement envelope is significantly shorter than the rockets. It's just a few extra mindstar hits, when my standard rockets are spitting out way, way more than that.

Sirrocco wrote: ↑Sun Dec 04, 2022 9:51 am

visage wrote: ↑Sun Dec 04, 2022 12:30 amRockets won't fire if you don't have the steam -- they consume steam per shot on top of the sustain steam drain.

I promise you, they do not. I currently have a character with this build who has a steam regen of -6.8. They cannot fire their guns normally, but the rockets work just fine.

I stand corrected! (I thought I'd tested that, but either I'm wrong about that or it's changed since my tests.)