[b43] Misery, Cornac Cursed Antimagic Winner

[belmarduk]

http://te4.org/characters/8415/tome/ef9 ... 52371f901a

This is my first winner!

I've been playing Cursed since the rampage tree was introduced because I like the tree a lot. It's super fun to me - the attack speed boost and defense increase make you destroy casters. The build has some flaws (mostly in what you do when the rampage falls off) and I have had a lot of them end in dreadfell or the prides because I just didn't find the right gear or didn't build defensively enough.

Early I didn't have high hopes. I found a girdle of calm waters and eden's at the start, but those were the only usable early artefacts I found. I was stuck using a green ego iron battleaxe up until I finished the maze, too. But the game really opened up in the second tier dungeons. The maze netted me a stralite battleaxe that I used until dreadfell, and I found a robe of Spydre at some point in the tier 2s that I wore until I made it to the east.

Good loot for me just fell into my lap once I made it to the east. I found gaping maw and the cursed plate armor off the same boss. Tons of mindpower items and items with relevant stat boosts. Once I finished with the west guardians and headed back to the east, the prides were a joke, as I'd picked up predator at this point and had huge boosts to hunting orcs. As long as I stayed mobile and didn't let myself get surrounded with rampage down, I never had any trouble. (a couple close calls in the necro pride, though, as armored skeleton warriors turned out to be my toughest foe)

High Peak gave me one of my two deaths (the other was getting overconfident in vor armory) when a cursed orc berserker managed to two shot me, but otherwise none of the elites were difficult. I took a cue from my first death and popped eden + rampage + movement infusion to close the distance as soon as they came on screen and nuked them down as quickly as possible.

By the last fight my resists were high enough and my damage was high enough that it wasn't very hard. I let the archmage pound the paladin while I killed the corruptor and once the corruptor was dead the archmage was cake. Overall, a very satisfying win after more than a year of trying.



Breakdown of my character build:

At the start I dumped a lot of points into strength. I got strength to 28 (for the first point in Tenacity) and focused on just dumping points into rampage until I maxed it. I got armor mastery to four points and left it alone while I worked on maxing relentless, weapon mastery and combat accuracy. Once I got the rampage tree to 5/5/1 I switched to gloom, taking it from 1/0/0/0 to 5/5/1/1 and then maxed tenacity. At this point I went 5/5/1/5 in Gloom, got a point into every talent in Slaughter and maxed Stalk.

I went anti-magic around the time I finished the tier 2 dungeons and did Urkis so I could get the Fungal tree. My final point build for that ended up being 5/1/4/1. The regen effect from heals is a liability (if you don't catch it you might die because you can't use your good regen infusions) so I left it as a one point wonder and focused on reducing the turn penalty for using a regen infusion as much as possible. Given how much my regen was healing for at endgame, it was basically a direct heal every turn. Once fungal is finished you are free to spend generics pretty much however you want. I maxed armor mastery, as I'd just found the cursed massive armor, and then used the rest of the points to fill out Seethe and Grim Resolve.

On the class side, I picked up Predator at around level 30 or 35. I was just about to go into dreadfell (I was farportal farming prior) and figured it'd be helpful to have, since I didn't have anything I was going to get huge gains out of left to spend class points on. I'm glad I made this decision, because it massively increased my damage output and survivability in the prides later on. It helped a bit in dreadfell, and I'd had an OK point investment for the ambush. I flagged an orc at the start and with each one I killed the fight got a little easier. In the end I bowled through it and didn't change targets for my predator for the rest of the game.

For prodigies I took flexible combat and fast as lightning. Fast as lightning is probably a little too gimmicky to be useful but I wasn't qualifiying for much else. One of the other cunning tree prodigies probably would have been useful if either my weapon or gloves was using the right damage types. Flexible Combat's damage boost is TREMENDOUS with this build, and the new glove ego procs are immensely helpful, so you will want to have nice gloves all the time after level 40. I spent 8k gold having some crafted because Gloves was easily the worst luck I had - I was stuck wearing a blue ego pair of iron gloves until after I returned to the west.



For stats, I got willpower, con and strength all to 30 base, and then maxed Strength, followed by will. I got Con to 40 and then spent the remaining points in cunning to increase crit, as I wasn't having any issues with health. I probably got a lot more survivability out of the extra mindpower and critical strike chance.

[HousePet]

Very similar to my current character. This is quite encouraging.

[Frumple]

Yeah, is nice going. It's inspired me to do something blatantly derivative. I noticed you were actually using <8 talent trees and went... "Hey. I wonder what that'd be like with corrupted strength? And not antimagic " Ate an early death due to incaution (early melee adventurer starts are somewhat hilariously frustrating, due to the incredibly poor choice that would be spending a cat point on combat training. Have fun killing prox with an ACC of 7 ), but it's doing better now that it's actually got some accuracy.

We'll see how it goes, heh.