ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I recently won insane / roguelike with an archmage and then doomed. I then tried to play marauder and it seems impossible to win unless the RNG with gear and bosses are HEAVILY in your favor.

My last run just ended in reknor because two bulwark randbosses spawned next to each other with 150+ armor. My character was only level 35 with about 34 armor penetration. I had a corroding weapon and tried using tooth of the mouth for 15 more armor pen but I could not do any damage.

When trying to escape or find stairs to next level, they kept using call to battle talent which pulls you through walls and across the zone. I could not disarm or stun them because they would immediately clear the effects either through unflinching resolve or some other means, one was a skeleton, so its racial gave very short duration debuffs.

I was able to damage one of them down to 50% health over 50 or so turns, but vitality kicked in regening to full.

I had to skip a randboss in dreadfell on level 4 and again on level 7 for the same reason, randboss had insane armor. In fact, there was a bulwark randboss in the scintillating caves I could not damage at level 12, came back at level 30, and took 30 or so turns to kill him. The worst is bulwark/cursed with repel. The repel chance is so high level that you cannot hit with melee attacks.

I won in version 1.5 with a poisonless rogue and in 1.5 melee were amazing. Coming back after awhile it seems like melee can't do any damage and continually run into impossible randbosses. I did not have to skip anything on the doomed or archmage, in fact, the melee bosses were only a speed bump.

I usually don't play melee classes because the stat spread and various gear requirements are too much. For example, you need str for dmg. dex for acurracy, willpower for stamina, and con for health. Your gear also needs phys power, accuracy, armor or defense which conflicts with res pen, crit mult, and +dmg. This makes melee extremely weak most of the game.

Is it possible to actually have 100+ armor pen at level 35 or do you have to go 5/5 in device mastery and pray the RNG gives you items you can use? Or is it necessary to unlock poisons or to win now?

I am looking for some general tips on winning on insane with a melee.

I think I figured out the problem and will answer my dumb question.

TLDR Turn off Embers of Rage

What was killing my attempts to win is extremely poor itemization. Melee classes require a minimum of good weapons to be playable. It seems that with the Embers of Rage dlc enabled, a lot of rares and uniques spawn as tinker classes which drop unusable loot for the AoA classes - steamsaws, guns. etc. This bad loot replaces any usuable loot an AoA class can use. It seems like 1/3 to 1/2 of all rares, uniques. and ranbosses spawn as tinker classes, which pollutes the loot with a bunch of unusable stuff.

When I won with my doomed and archmage I also noticed the extremely poor quality loot generated throughout the entire game. My doomed had 2 or 3 tier 1 items with +mindpower at the end because almost none were generated throughout the game.

I came to the realization of bad loot from EoR causing itemization problems by switching to a temporal warden - no hounds. My first three attempts met the same fate as my marauder, bad loot creating situations where I could not damage a boss. For example, a brawler bone giant rare in the halfling ruins was generated with 60% phys res and a large flat damage reduction that ate all of the damage procs.

I switched off Embers of Rage and had the best run of loot I have ever had twice in a row with the temporal warden. The first run I died to playing carelessly but the second was an easy insane/roguelike win - again no hounds.

I then switched back to marauder, and again one of the best loot runs again. I died playing carelessly.

I remember in version 1.5, when last I played, you would only see 4 or 5 tinker bosses the whole game. I think somewhere along the line, the EoR stuff was drastically increased in the AoA campaign which reallly hurts the classes that depend on gear to win by polluting the loot with stuff that is completely unusable.