Raising Vim

[Senteth]

Hi there! I've been playing Tome 4 for a few months now, (even pulled off an ultimate win in Tome 2 back in the day) and finally decided to give corruptors a try. My question is, how do you raise Vim? Is it only by leveling up and\or equipping Vox? I've looked at characters in the vault, and even at lvl 50 there's a good deal of discrepancy between the final Vim score, with most topping off at around 126 Vim, but others getting higher Vim scores, with the highest being 276 Vim with Resheph the Shalore Curruptor. (which leads me to believe that there's another way to raise Vim beyond merely leveling up, otherwise all level 50 corruptors would have identical amounts of Vim unless they were wearing Vox)

I ask because it looks like you need a minimum of 180 Vim to sustain both flame Of Urh'Rok and fearscape at the same time, and it looks like most corruptors never gain enough Vim to use this combo.

[Goblinz]

you gain 4 vim per level. That and a few rare artifacts are the only way to increase max vim. The discrepancies you see in the vault are due to sustains

[kazak]

Yeah, what Goblinz said.

I'm currently running a lvl 50 yeek corruptor (http://te4.org/characters/1022/tome/ddb ... 6ddb502cd3) and my vim is showing at 126. That's with 3 vim sustains running--blood fury, dark ritual, and flame of uhr rok. Without equipping vox, that leaves 36 vim to play around with while I'm burning things up in fearscape.

Incidentally, it wasn't until the late 40's that I was able to run flame of uhr rok and fearscape without first deactivating my other sustains. I did have the 180 available though sometime around Daikara. A nice thing is that you can cast those sustains regardless of how empty your vim pool is--you can fearscape someone even if you're at 0/180 vim, for instance.

[jenx]

I thought willpower raised it slowly, but maybe I'm wrong

[rangerjeff]

trying out my first Reaver now, wondering the same thing. Bone Shield with 150 sustain is pretty, well, unsustainable if I want to have Vim for anything else. not cool.

[Senteth]

Ah, so that's what was going on. I had just assumed the character dumps showed their absolute Vim, rather than adjusting for sustains. That helps clear everything up nicely. Thanks!

[Zonk]

As of now, only Vox(world artifact)can raise max Vim(by 50). And the cool sustains are amazingly expensive, unfortunately...

[jotwebe]

trying out my first Reaver now, wondering the same thing. Bone Shield with 150 sustain is pretty, well, unsustainable if I want to have Vim for anything else. not cool.

I think Bone Shield is intended for mid-late game, and you're not supposed to run around with it up all the time. Remember that sustains reduce your resource max temporarily, but don't necessarily cost any. So one way to use Bone Shield is to put it up when you have low vim anyway...

[bricks]

Yes, Bone Shield is like a free, albeit underwhelming shield for when you are at low Vim. An interesting concept, but it doesn't feel quite right currently, since it tends to only delay death for a turn. I still tend to put a few points in it with my Reavers, considering how few other defensive options you have. It'd be stellar if the Vim cost was touched up a bit, the "bones" a little more resilient (either not trigger on low damage or have some minimum damage needed to break), and the use-speed instant. Or any combination of those. It'd also be nice if there was a regenerative capacity to it, so a Reaver that was light on Vim use could sustain it more frequently. Something like "Every turn there is a 50% chance of a bone regenerating, up to a max of X. This costs 30 Vim, and will not trigger if not enough Vim is available." The sustain could even start with fewer bones and have a much smaller sustain cost (to account for the regeneration cost).