Ideal Alchemist Builds ?

[Frumple]

Channel staff -- staves in general, but channel staff especially -- doesn't need the additional modifier. Channel is insta-hit and ignores armor, which is a freakishly huge advantage over other normal attacks (melee bumps and shooting). Adding another 30% modifier -- and remember, the other normal-ish ranged attack, shoot, is only 70/50, for 120%, but doesn't insta-hit with infinite APR -- would be too much.

Re: those questions: Yes, staff mastery improves channel staff damage. I've pretty sure even physical power kit boosts will do that. Channel staff is essentially a ranged bump attack with some extra stuff (the auto-hit and APR) added.

Additional levels of imbue allow you to imbue higher tier gems into armor.

[Hedrachi]

- Does staff master affect the ranged staff damage (i.e. does it combine with channel staff). Or is it just for melee
- What is the point in levelling "imbue item". There is no information in the description about why you should add to it.

Staff Mastery ups Channel Staff, yeah.

Imbue Item should always be at the level of gems you can get from extract gems on the gear that's dropping, after you've gotten staff mastery 5/5 and extract gems to the level the gems are at too. Imbue Item means "give that armor the extra effects listed in the gems under 'When used to imbue an item'" ... so, imbue your Robe of the Archmage with 5/5 imbue item, and you can imbue it with a diamond for +5 to everything except luck. At 1/5 though, you're only able to imbue things with tier-1 gems like agate, citrine, etc. In general it's what you choose from alchy escorts when you're not an alchy yourself. Should always try to have it be at the level of gear you're seeing getting dropped.

Edit: Apologies to Frumple for repeating anything he said, didn't see that this thread had another page until just now. Heh.

[Nevuk]

Hmm, I know that plain Voratun rings/amulets are relatively rare, but if you get 2 rings and 1 amulet I'm wondering how useful it would be to get +40% resist all on an alchemist?

Mainly wondering if that makes up for the sacrifice of the three ring slots and armor imbue. (This is assuming that you meet the absolute essentials like 100% stun resist without using them).

Edit:
Extreme sidenote but the orc lore in the east really makes me want to play orc wyrmics. Too bad orcs aren't playable (yet?)

One more question - how does the ai weighting work? Is it the highest ones that are given priority?

[Hedrachi]

Hmm, I know that plain Voratun rings/amulets are relatively rare, but if you get 2 rings and 1 amulet I'm wondering how useful it would be to get +40% resist all on an alchemist?

Imbue Item should really be renamed "Imbue Armour" because it doesn't let you imbue rings a la jewelers. Having said that and since this is the spoiler forum, you could get +60% resist all for anybody with two un-egoed rings and an un-egoed amulet once a quest in the East is done. (and with 6 pearls, but I doubt if anybody except an alchy could get that thanks to the distribution of other gems from that tier) But, not too sure how beneficial this would be since rings and amulets can give things which might be better than having 60% resist all.

[Frumple]

Ah... nah, getting six pearls... I doubt that'd be too hard, at least by the time most of the non-high peak content is done. My current 'zerker, who only has extract gem at 1/5, has nine pearls, and that's with imbuing one into an old set of armor. Lowest amount of 5th tier gems is moonstone on this critter, at three, with highest being bloodstone at fourteen.

60% resist all would be pretty huge, as getting that last 10% from con wouldn't be much of an issue. Taking only a third damage from everything is a pretty hefty effect.

[Hedrachi]

Heh.. guess you're right. Only saw one on the half-dozen or so characters (none alchemists or with stone alchemy unlocked), so assumed they were as rare as diamonds (again, only one). But have only been able to clear out one Pride so far (and Eruan/scar) so guess with more dungeons explored it'd raise the number.

[kazak 2]

Bulbom's big knocker is what I was using when I found it. Not really sure why it is, but it does do arcane damage with channel staff. I think the reason why it is weaker than it appears is low spellpower - and spellpower increases channel staff damage. The arcane damage was the main attraction to it for me.

Hmmm... Where do you see that channel staff improves with spellpower? I thought about that, but the talent description doesn't mention anything so I just assumed it didn't. Also, because Bolbum is doing arcane instead of physical, I'm assuming it's not getting the +physical damage modifier bonus. It's maybe not a big deal, but I was a bit disappointed when I got Telerion and found it completely outclassed Bolbum. I assumed the Big Knocker would at least kill it on Channel Staff damage.

And on stats, again, I haven't put ANY points into Wil and mana isn't a problem at all. Alchemist talents don't cost much and you're not sustain-crazy like archmages, so with decent equipment you shouldn't need to worry about it. I don't even think my guy has a manasurge rune. I use firestorm in big fights, but it already has a long duration and so doesn't require multiple casts. Haven't used body of fire (doesn't really seem worthwhile), but bombs and channel staff far outshine the damage from Heat.

[Frumple]

Channel staff doesn't increase strength with spellpower. The code specifically calls for weapon damage, though it does crit off of spellcrit.

Code: Select all

		-- Compute damage
		local dam = self:combatDamage(combat)
		local damrange = self:combatDamageRange(combat)
		dam = rng.range(dam, dam * damrange)
		dam = self:spellCrit(dam)
		dam = dam * t.getDamageMod(self, t)

The reason it might seem like it, though, is because staves scale with magic, which increases spellpower. It'd look like it was spellpower doing the increase, when it's in fact magic and SP has nothing to do with it. Magic and physical power boosting kit would increase channel staff damage, though. EDIT: I think. I'm double checking the code, now. -- Code double checked. It definitely scales from magic and has nothing to do with SP. Can never quite be sure with how often T4 lies about that...

[lukep]

Body of Fire can be very nice for playing against the AI's emphasis on dodging projectiles, making one on one fights laughably easy, as the elite/boss spends every turn dodging (unless this was fixed in the last few betas).

[Nevuk]

Channel staff doesn't increase strength with spellpower. The code specifically calls for weapon damage, though it does crit off of spellcrit.

Code: Select all

		-- Compute damage
		local dam = self:combatDamage(combat)
		local damrange = self:combatDamageRange(combat)
		dam = rng.range(dam, dam * damrange)
		dam = self:spellCrit(dam)
		dam = dam * t.getDamageMod(self, t)

The reason it might seem like it, though, is because staves scale with magic, which increases spellpower. It'd look like it was spellpower doing the increase, when it's in fact magic and SP has nothing to do with it. Magic and physical power boosting kit would increase channel staff damage, though. EDIT: I think. I'm double checking the code, now. -- Code double checked. It definitely scales from magic and has nothing to do with SP. Can never quite be sure with how often T4 lies about that...

That's odd. Throw bomb does, though, doesn't it? I think it's noticeably weaker when I equipped the big knocker (something like 100 less damage per bomb on average from 12vs29-31 spellpower on the staff. Still not sure if the better burst damage for bombs would be worth swapping out the staff for throwing a bomb.

I guess it just seems like channel staff does.

[Nevuk]

Probably going to edit this into the OP.

Update
Ok, my next alchemist just died at level 44, considerably further than all the others have gotten. I gave up 2-3 deaths pretty pointlessly - once to save Limmir (when I only had a single stralite amulet and a much better artifact amulet with 100% blind/confuse resist and then found an 80% silence resist), and another to holding down right in the old forest or something like that, another to fighting radiant horrors in a vault (I should've just run, no point to this at all really - they drop nothing and the xp isn't very good).

I realize I may have been able to live actually by swapping out to penitence and using it to remove the 6 diseases that killed me. Strange to be infected to death by an elite orc fighter. I could also have swapped to the golem and had him use rune of the rift (which is how I used it - if I let him use it manually he always used it on the wrong people and left it on cd for when I really needed it).

http://te4.org/characters/3802/tome/e0a ... 25900d6212

Golem Portal, had I put a single point in would also have saved me (as what killed me was being called to battle multiple times while my golem sat on the edge of the fight - and using invoke golem would only have gotten me killed faster). I think I'll get this next time, there's really no reason NOT to do so, as a single point in golem power/resilience is relatively worthless. Alchemists have a small issue of one point wonders - with invoke golem being the worst. A single point in it is amazing but further points don't level up anything worthwhile (invoking the golem purely for higher attack damage is actually bad, as it leaves it on cd for when you would actually want it if they teleport him or you away. If leveling it up lowered the CD it would be nice).

Further Weaknesses
I would actually say their biggest weakness now are long CDs. Archmages have a billion useful damage spells, so even though only a few are on cd they almost always have something up while alchemists are only ever guaranteed to have channel staff up - and their utility spells are the worst for this. Invoke golem is 20 turns, Supercharge at level 5 is 18 (leveling it up only lowers the cd from 23-18), refit is 18, and their bread and butter of throw bomb is 4. This is really low for a combat spell. But until very late in the game this is their only source of damage - their burst damage is for sure far higher than a mage, but there are 3 turns in between them doing aoe damage. They don't get access to any other aoe damage until firestorm, and honestly firestorm is incredibly weak in comparison to say fireflash or even corrosive vapor.

The other issue with them is the balancing of class skills relative to each other. As it stands, there are some of these skills that are amazing while the majority are almost pointless.
Tier list for abilities
Just recapping, this is basically a tier list for where their abilities fall -
Tier 1 - Throw Bomb, Infusions, Explosion Expert, Protection are all amazing
(An in-tier list for infusions - Acid/Lightning,Fire,Frost. Why? Freeze is amazing early but rapidly everything starts resisting it so it becomes just a weaker fire with no dot and no crowd effect. Blinds/Dazes never seem to reach 100% on everyone so are better for crowd control. Fire is amazing early and does the most damage with no effects (it's good vs wrathroot and rantha). Lightning is bad because of Urkis, but so is Acid for wretchlings). Next time I won't even put a point into cold and instead max Lightning/Fire (I just like lightning, acid is perfectly viable. Maybe a little more viable actually)

Tier 1.5 - Supercharge is almost amazing (the long cd), same for Channel Staff (I think if channel staff did use spellpower it would be a ridiculously awesome to the point of being broken spell)

Tier 2 -Then there are 1-2 point wonders of Invoke Golem and Gem Portal (not reducing the CD for leveling once again makes them really poor choices to level. 2 points in Gem portal typically takes you from 15-25 squares, and it's unlikely for this to not be enough). Golem Portal probably falls here as well, but is actually useful to level. Same goes for Runic Golem.

Tier 3 - Imbue/Extract, Staff Mastery, Gem Golem, Lifetap. These all feel perfectly balanced - the Gem system for the alchemists is really well done. The Golem's Strength abilities fall here as well, as does the golem himself.
(Extract could be very broken if gold was more useful. But it's not.)

Tier 3.5 - Firestorm/Body of Fire. Not useless, but not very good. Smoke Bomb goes here too, but this is likely stylistic - it certainly can be useful at times, but I've never found it worth leveling or using.

Tier 4 - Useful in a broad sense in that they are helpful, but not good enough to be worth taking unless everything above it is maxed.
Golem Resilience - The Armor/HP bonus is good early on but conversely makes resting a massive pain until runic golem. After Runic Golem it's not a particularly good skill as it only adds a flat 200 hp and 11-12 armor (can't recall specifics). Making these scaling %s would probably make it a decent ability, but the whole premise of it is a bit off right now.(Say 10/15/20/25/30% increase to armor/hp values - but even this wouldn't make me personally level it until very very late). As it is currently, leveling supercharge golem is almost always going to result in your golem being alive for longer if you use it to heal, or alive for more turns in general if you revive him after death.

Tier 4.5 - Almost never useful abilities, may need tweaks-
Defensive Posture- Maybe useful if a person is maxing defense, but as it doesn't scale with dexterity (to the best of my knowledge) it is basically a flat bonus to defense in return for some very bad tradeoffs - lower channel staff damage and significant sustain cost until later in the game (80 mana isn't much at level 30, sure, but at level 8? Especially when alchemists don't level willpower). It's also annoying because the disadvantage in staff damage go up when you level it (not the case with precise strikes for instance). With some number tweaks it could be at least somewhat useful.

Golem Power- The Golem from maxing strength will already have a somewhat OK attack damage/hit, and the point of the golem isn't damage anyways. The golem is always eventually going to do very little damage. So leveling this ability if you want something done from it must be done early, and then regretted for the rest of the game.

Possible tweaks - If the ability gave him a 72% increase to stats it might be worth taking, but 72% flat damage increase falls off extremely rapidly. It could alternatively reduce the CD on his abilities by 1 per point - as even with 5 taken off of his abilities they still have fairly long CDs of 5/10. (This latter one still wouldn't make me take it except for lowering taunt CD much later on)

Tier 5 - These are generally completely useless and should never be leveled, probably need remade -
Shockwave Bomb (does low damage, doesn't knock back the majority of the time, and has its effect replicated by a specific thrown gem anyways. Maybe I'm missing something about it? The tooltip suggests that it gets stronger with stronger gems, but that doesn't seem to be the case and the 'special effects' are the same as from throw bomb)

Heat (does less damage than a single dot tick on a fire throw bomb (even at level 5!)

Blunt Thrust - This doesn't seem to go with anything an alchemist has. Alchemists aren't going to be leveling dexterity so are unlikely to hit it, and are better off throwing a lightning bomb and dazing a dozen people. It also takes magic to unlock, which would increase the damage but make it less likely to hit. Even at level 12 dazing isn't very good. Even if this were a guaranteed stun that went through stun resistance I don't know that I would level it.

As for Stone Touch - I don't know where to place it, it seems ok on other classes but I don't really think it works well for alchemists (for the same reason as Blunt Thrust).
Some skill suggestions
Mainly healing the golem is a little strange currently.

I want to suggest splitting supercharge into two skills - one with the revive, one with the healing component. The revive would apply the level of the healing component on use but wouldn't level it, while leveling the heal would work in the same way supercharge does currently while the golem is alive but with a lowered CD on skill increase. (Not much - but something between 15-12 turns might be ok. Note that this isn't an instantaneous heal so it should remain balanced). It's also a little strange currently that refit golem revives with 15 gems used while supercharge uses none - so the revival skill could cost gems.

The heal could remain Supercharge, the revival called Instant Gem Crush or something.

Not really sure where to place these, other than to say maybe runic golem and golem resilience can be combined (which would probably be a decent solution to the weakness of Resilience in general anyways).

Just to recap as to skills which should probably be scrapped or heavily remade - Blunt Thrust, Golem Power, Shockwave Bomb, Stone Touch.

Skills which require tweaking to be useful - Golem Resilience, Defensive Posture, Heat (still not a big fan of this one even if it did do decent damage, it's just boring and even with infusions won't apply their effects)

Next
I think I'm going to try this on roguelike or nightmare now. Probably with a dwarf, although I think they're not ideal, they do give several spots to put generic points into. (Power is money capping is what makes them not ideal, I had 4800 gold just sitting around on my lvl 44 alchemist, but all gold past a certain amount isn't going to help really).

Also, the final tier gem I like using for bombs is diamond, +30% bomb damage is quite good. Garnet's +5% max hp per cast may still be better, though.

Another bug mentioned earlier
Also, body of flame does indeed make 1v1 fights bug out but alchemists rarely have issues with those anyways and the damage is pitiful.

[Aquillion]

It's also a little strange currently that refit golem revives with 15 gems used while supercharge uses none - so the revival skill could cost gems.

Noooooo. The gem cost to revive the golem is a bad thing -- it makes it more frustrating to use the golem in general. Yes, sure, gems are never a tight resource, but having to worry about keeping an NPC alive (and therefore worry about its AI) and being penalized with even a symbolic long-term loss when it dies is incredibly frustrating.

Currently learning Supercharge makes the entire Alchemist class much, much more fun overall. I would rather not see it changed -- don't fix what isn't broken. Yes, it's very powerful, but it fits into the class as a whole and isn't game-breaking.

[Frumple]

Re: Stone touch. It's fine on alchies if it's leveled to tlvl 3, iirc, at which point it starts beaming. However, the reason stone touch is fairly crappy is because most of the stuff you really want to use it on are just flat out immune. It has a niche use for increasing acid damage against chaff, though, and has that nice synergy with acid infusion. Barring the number of things immune to acid damage (and penetration equipment can help mitigate that), acid infusion is definitely the best infusion. Blind is very powerful.

All bomb damage, both shockwave and normal, increase with higher tier gems. It's usually pretty hard to notice because you're increasing gem tier sequentially, but if you toss a tier 1 gem and then swap over to tier 5, it's pretty easy to spot. Incidentally, refit golem also heals more with higher tier gems, though that effect could probably stand to be increased further (and scale with something. Anything.).

Golem resilience literally just increases the golem's health and armor training talents by a point. Golem power does the same thing for weapon combat and mastery. Resilience would be worth investing in primarily for the hardiness bonus, really. As for the healing issue, well, that's what verdant and/or eyal egos are for Good candidates for golem armor, anyway. Power's worth it more for the accuracy than anything else.

For shockwave bombs, the knockback chance is spellpower vs physical save. Any knockback resistance is going to be taken into account, of course.

The third and fourth tier staff combat talents are almost always more useful for other classes that pick it up and are trying odd staff builds (AB, TW, Sunpa).

Rest of it seems pretty spot on, heh.

E: Definitely no gem on supercharge. For refit, would rather see the gem cost for rebuilding removed and the time to rebuild increased a bit in compensation.

[Nevuk]

I would rather see the gem cost on refit removed entirely than have it added to supercharge. It's just annoying. However, it's inconsistent to have one skill which requires it and another which doesn't. (and to top it off refit is so much weaker than supercharge as a revival skill - if anything supercharge should have them while refit doesn't. but I agree that it's not something I would want. Gem management isn't bad at all, except for when you spend 15 gems every time the golem dies). Also, I wasn't saying to make the supercharge skill any weaker, just to allow you to also have a spell which lets you cast the heal component without having to waste the revival component's cd.


I didn't realize that Resilience/Power basically increased armor/weapon training.. but the thing is that even with that they're still non-scaling class abilities, which are very rare in this game. What I mean by this is that armor/weapon training are generic skills which are a flat increase (aside from the hardiness bonus- which isn't listed and is impossible to verify without code diving, and I agree makes resilience much better).

Class talents usually are talents that scale with a stat (and exceptions tend to be things like mage's spellpower bonus which is an additional multiplicative bonus). To make those two talents worse; even at the point in the game when these flat bonuses would be good the other skills that scale would still be even better.

Another way to look at is that a class point in either of those two skills is worse than a generic point, as it's a generic skill on a normal character while this is a class skill that only applies to like 20% of your character's damage and 40-50% of their hp). Yes, it is 2 generic points for the price of 1 class point ... but it's hard to say if that's a good conversion in general, and in this specific case where it only applies to the golem I think it's easy to make the argument that the two skills are underpowered.

If you look at the alchemist winners, the most recent one maxed resilience and power but ignored the heat tree entirely, but I think this has more to do with how bad a lot of alchemist class skills are than with this being the best way to approach it.


Oh, and about healing - I had a golem with sanguine shield, of eyal armor, and runic golem 5. So he had +15 hp/turn. Eventually he started dying rapidly anyways and all this meant was that I rested fewer turns after reviving him. I swapped out his armor for of the thronesman which took him down to 5 hp/turn even with shield and runic 5 - still not sure if this was a good trade (about 17 armor for 10 hp/turn).

edit :
One note about stone touch, that's a bit broader and can probably be applied to a lot more classes and trees:
The fundamental issue with it is that it's a 4th tier ability that loses effectiveness as the game goes on.

I'm going to make a comparison to one of my favorite rpg systems, Dota, now, just to illustrate a point (but it's fairly simple so stick with this). In dota every hero (think of them as a class) has 3 abilities available from level 1 and a 4th ability that is available at level 6 (known as each hero's 'ultimate' ability). The majority of heroes who have stuns or crowd control abilities have them available from level 1 - the reason is because after a certain point in the game magic immunity becomes very common, and a stun on an ult leaves a fairly small timing window as to when it can even be used (If rushed, magic immunity can be reached about level 9-10). The exceptions are aoe stuns OR stuns which go through magic immunity (or in a single special case [enigma] both, but it disables the caster as well, and if he is disabled the disable ends. This is just a sidenote). To see how this applies to tome, just swap out magic immunity for 100% stun resist.

Stone Touch is an ability which could be considered extremely good if it were just earlier in the tree. If for example, it swapped places with heat (or golem power), it could be a viable alternative to throw bomb at early levels even (although granted only on Cornacs currently). The same thing even goes for blunt thrust - neither of these abilities are completely useless, it's just that by the time they are available they're starting to massively taper off.

Freeze is an example of a well placed spell here - even though eventually almost everything has 100% stun resist, it is given to you early enough that it's still worth dumping 5 points into it (in addition it always does really nice damage, while stone touch does not).

[darkgod]

I have improved golem power, golem resilience, refit heal, and some others.
Golem melee talents now are usable in melee