ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Title says it all. Is it possible?

1) yes, you can buy the shoot talent. But you're going to deal no damage.
2) I don't think shadow combat procs on ranged shots, but I can't remember.
4) most likely not viable, but it's not like I've tried it.
3) why?

Because i've been thinking about making that class ranged. If bows won't work, do you think slings would? Still didn't try playing with any ranged physical attack character yet, and since i've been feeling the shadowblade to be very fragile and unforgiving when it comes to mistakes, I felt that doing him ranged would help me more than melee.

The best way to know would be to try it.

I recommend picking up the 'Nulltweaks' addon.
It changes weapon mastery talents a bit, the most noticable change being it makes a generic weapon mastery that boosts ALL weapon damage. (And gloves/shield damage, as a side-note.)

Ok, thanks for the answers. Guess I'll just try it then and see if it works.

WARNING: Some of the discussion here is spoiler-ish in that it talks very openly about damage calculations and how to optimize them for this combination. If you do not want to know the details of the inner workings of the damage calculations of the game, then don't read any further.

My favourite thing in this game is making strange builds, so I applaud you. Having said that, I don't think this is viable into the end game. The main problem is that because you don't have bow/sling mastery you will not be able to produce the same kind of damage. I can't give a concise overview of the damage system, but have a look at the wiki: http://te4.org/wiki/Combat_Damage. However, I still think it would be fun to play, so you should try anyway!

I played around with some numbers and basically an archer with bow mastery of 5 will do about 2x the damage compared to a shadowblade with bow mastery of 0 (edited). At 20 strength it is about 2.5x the damage and at 70 strength it is about 1.7x the damage (because physical power is scaled so you can catch up a bit by stacking strength). You should invest in strength to a certain degree because you lack the physical power bonus. You get 1:1 physical power to stength up to 20 points. Up to 40 points you get 1:2. I wouldn't go above 40. But even then, you just aren't going to scale damage like an archer would.

The moral of the story is that if you want to do similar kinds of damage, you will have to find ammo with flat bonuses to damage vs higher powered damage. In other words, a +15 damage is going to serve you far better than ammo with 150% power.

For strategy, I think you should try for a kind of hybrid player like a poor man's TW. Note: this is not going to be easier to play than straight up SB, but like I said, it will probably be fun. Although it is tempting to go for the synergies in the cunning trees and slings, I would go for your first idea of bow. This will give you physical power to somewhat make up for the lack of bow mastery and also boost your dual wield damage capability. Since you need both dex and strength, I think skeleton is probably the ideal race for this kind of character. Failing that, I think I would go Shalore or Yeek to get the global speed modifiers (which you will need swapping weapons). At level 30 you will almost certainly need the prodigy that allows you to swap without using a turn (the wiki has gone down and I can't remember what it is called). If you are supremely lucky you will find a "warden's" bow that will allow you to switch to your bow without taking a turn.

One very useful ranged attack that doesn't involve a bow is illuminate in the Phantasm tree. I would max that as soon as is feasible.

Because positioning and speed will be critical on this character, I would get blinding speed as quickly as you can. At level 10 I would also grab the temporal tree and work towards essense of speed. Of course max out your phase door ASAP. Probability travel is probably another very interesting option for giving you space. You also need to be able to close gaps when you decide to go melee. Rush and shadow step is obvious, but I would also go shopping for whatever items you can find (cloak of the void stalker is common and very handy).

Finally, for melee I would stick with dual daggers and up your dagger mastery. The thinking is to stay ranged as long as possible, and then finish everybody off with melee. If you manage to find a warden's bow, one thing you can consider is getting a good phase door rune. Even though it is uncontrolled, it probably doesn't matter all that much to you because you won't care if you are in melee or bow range.

After typing all this, I've gotten interested in trying it myself, so please reply with the progress you make!

You can play a Shadowblade ranged with Channel Staff too. You might want to check out this build: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=42310

That looks like a very interesting build. I may try it later.

I ran up a skeleton "poor man's TW" up to level 15 so far. It is indeed very fun to play. As with the channel staff build, bathe in light is crazily good. I stupidly did not take the tree (just one point in it since I figured I didn't have enough generic points to spare) and I'm hoping to find another escort. I managed to get Surefire dropped from Bill and bought arrows with +26 damage in Last Hope (quite a lucky find). Because bows are 70% dex and 50% strength, I've actually been doing more damage with the bow than the daggers until I hit level 14 or so.

The bow is surprisingly useful at low levels. Weaken the mob with illuminate. Fire arrows until the mob comes within striking range. Phase door. Then keep firing until the mob gets to you again (or you run out of arrows). Turn on a shield rune (takes no time) to absorb the first hit. Switch to daggers and clean up.

Once I got time shield, it is even better because it heals with the absorbed damage, so the turn you take a hit on isn't wasted.

The bathe in light is nice when you find yourself surprised with attackers near you (or are being attacked by spell casters). Phase door, shield, bathe in light and then start firing. When you feel like it, swap weapons, rush and flurry. With the skeleton you have tons of shielding: shield rune, time shield and racial, so I've barely taken any damage so far in the game.

So far, I haven't actually needed speed as much as I thought I would. SB has lots of mobility, so finding space to switch between bow and daggers has been easy. Resigning myself to get whacked once and always having a shield up for that occasion has helped a lot.

Going with strength is interesting too. Since I'm spending a lot of time with the bow, I've decided to wear plate armour. So not only do I have stupid defense, but also stupid armour as well. Coupled with the huge numbers of shields this character may have potential after all. It is probably almost as tanky as a bulwark. Time will tell if it can deal enough damage for the late game (I suspect no). Also, even with the good shields, I'm worried about magic (and various debuffs). Not quite sure what I will do when I get to that part of the game...

Sorry to post so much in this thread... I finally got to level 20 so I could get another inscription. Ha ha ha ha ha! Phase door runes are *highly* underrated! With flexible range you can start out with a bow, use a phase door rune, scarf up the defence bonus *and* the ridiculous resist all bonus (28% with my character!), then you have a choice: if you end up close to someone, pop blinding speed and switch to daggers -- or if you end up far away nail them with arrows. I also have Eden's Guile (I always laugh at his mocking note -- I've got your boots, mate!). Lots of speed on tap.

After I hit 40 strength, I started to up cunning in order to get shadow step. I found a nice sling and shot which was giving me about 100 damage per turn at around level 18 (more than the bow) and 40% blindness. I then found a bow with 40% gloom and arrows that have a flat +40 damage modifier (quite a lot of which is burst). One of the interesting things about playing this character is that you have flexibility to choose the best weapon you can find. You also have the strength to carry it around with you.

So far I've died once in the bear scape. I got slept, surrounded, manaclashed and then stunned. I just ran out of escape options. Apart from that, I don't think I've even had any close calls. The bow has surprisingly pulled me out of some pretty hairy situations. One of the very nice things about having the mixed range is being able to split my resources. At one point I'm using the bow until I run out of arrows. Then I'm using mana. Then I'm using stamina. Even if I get manaclashed I've got a ton of options to hold out until my mana rune comes off cool down. Because I'm using my stamina sparingly, I've never gotten down below about 1/3 stamina. The end result is that I've had absolutely no trouble maintaining plate armour.

All the tier 2 dungeons are done. Killed Urkis. Lake Nur is next. I keep forgetting that skeletons don't have to breathe so I was looking for something "of the deep" . After that I will do the ruined dungeon and halfling complex before hitting Dreadfell. Based on how the character performed in bearscape (I find bear scape quite difficult usually), I think there will be no problem. I'm still doubtfull of the ability to keep carrying on with the ranged stuff into the East, but we'll see...

If you want to do a ranged shadowblade its possible, but you need to use stealth + staff.

Stealth for auto-crits with extra crit mult and staff because channel staff is a spell and avoids all extra problems having to do with breaking stealth or crit mult fall off. This also allows you to use Illimunate as an AOE nuke(and charm mastery if you have the right stuff).

Its actually a very strong build in general for Normal and NM, but not necessarily stronger than super fast glass cannon melee SB.

This is a range 8 build from start to finish unlike bow which starts at tange 6 and can goto 10. I believe that bows and slings will actually be rather crappy with stealth due to the crit fall off. Spells do not have this problem and actually keep stealth better the farther you are away.

Edit: oh missed that someone linked my guide to that. Anyway the key point is that you need to use spells.

Having tried it now, I believe you I have to say the bow build was great fun, but as expected you hit a lack of damage wall at around level 27-28. I entered Dreadfall a bit late (level 26) which meant that I got a level 40 master and it was a pretty tricky fight. I died once. I also died once in the dark crypt due to my own stupidity (it's only the second time I used a skeleton and I had assumed that immunity to disease included magical disease). After Dreadfall I just got slaughtered. The problem is that even if you are dealing 100 pts per shot on the bow, if you have 5 or more opponents each with 500 hp, you are just going to take too long to deal with them. The on_hit bug with bows (mentioned in the general thread) meant that it severely limited the debuffs I could apply with the bow too.

I was dearly hoping I could hang on to level 30 because I wanted to actually try the "I can carry the world" prodigy. My back of the envelope calculations told me that the 40 extra strength would increase damage appreciably (several hundred points in flurry). It would also allow me to continue to wear the plate armour and save the stamina cost (as stamina had gotten tight). But I still don't think I could have limped along much further.

Some interesting take aways:

- phase door runes for ranged characters along with some "out of phase" gear is crazily powerful. I was getting +30 def, 40% resist all and 44% reduction in new debufs for 5 turns. The cooldown on the rune was 8. Imagine an ogre archmage or TW and you are talking some serious defensive spam here. I wanted to try to combine this with displacement shield, but didn't really get a chance. I think you have good potential to have pretty close to 100% defence for 5 turns or more -- as well as repositioning.

- In teleport disallowed vaults (lake nur for instance), phase door rune does not teleport you, but you still get the out of phase buffs!!!! Which means +30 def, 40% resist all, 44% reduction in new debufs 5 turns out of 8 (infusion saturation notwithstanding).

- Time shield also gives you ~50% new debuf protection. With skeleton's 50% racial, time shield reduction and out of phase reduction, you should be pretty much near impervious to all debuffs. In practice I couldn't maintain it all the time, but generally once I got the hang of it I could be surrounded by blood mages and barely have any debufs on me.

- I had conveyance's phase door, void stalker cloak, phase door rune, shadow step and one point in teleport. I could have used more The out of phase buffs are really powerful (especially the debuff reduction). At the end I was pretty much constantly out of phase. Depending on my opponents I might lead off with a phase door (controlled or not). There is practically no downside when you are full strength. Either you teleport into a place where you can kill stuff (and you are ridiculously protected) or you can't (which means that by the time you can your teleports have cooled down again). It's a bit boring running around all over the place, but it's pretty powerful.

- Time shield is awesome for skeletons which lack general healing. I often got down to 50% hp, put up time shield and intentionally got hit just to get the healing. It's a rather cheap tactic: timeshield, rush/void stalker cloak teleport to an opponent away from the main melee, let him wail on you while you range attack everyone else, phase door rune once the timeshield is down and you are starting to heal, shield rune to protect you if there happens to be anyone near by.

Anyway, super fun up until level 30. After that I couldn't make it work. There may be ways to make it work, but mine wasn't one of them