First Insane win - Thalore Berserker [1.1.5]

[Thomas]

Crazy Tom the level 50 Thalore Berserker

Hi guys ^^

All that time playing Berserker paid off! haha.

After winning 4 Nightmare runs using 2h weapons on various classes (wyrmic, shadowblade, marauder, sun pally), I thought I'd go back to my favorite, the zerker, and try my hand at insane again.

One thing you may notice if you could be bothered looking at my build... I didn't get track, or any of that tree. I made the choice to go dirty fighting instead. I found that seeing enemies wasn't the problem, it was killing them. Cripple helped a lot with that; combined with blinding speed, it gives you 100+% combat speed over your crippled opponent, which is awesome (also it hits hard). If I got myself in a bad situation, I had shields, heroism, movement, psychoport, wanderers rest, giant leap, and unstoppable, which were all more than enough to escape to safety.

For prodigies I went windblade (henceforth known as WINblade) and giant leap. Winblade is amazing- the damage and range alone is fantastic, add in the disarm and wow! Yes it works with 2h weapons! Giant leap is really great too.. can be used as an escape, or a second rush-type skill that does some pretty powerful aoe damage. Oh yeah, and both these abilities work with...

Greater weapon focus. This skill won me the game. It's so powerful. Needs a nerf! I had it on a ring, and thanks to charm mastery, I could keep it up all but 1 turn (or use it and still have psychoport when I needed it). I would usually open all rare/elite+ fights by popping GWF, heroism, shield, blinding speed, perfect strike, wrath of the woods, then giant leaping in, followed by winblade. If GWF procs, and with some crits, that's 12k+ aoe burst from that alone. I'd usually pop unstoppable after the winblade, then after using my other powerful abilities (cripple, stunning blow, death dance) I'd just bail (movement or psychoport) to safety and rest until my cooldowns were back up. Against hard bosses (e.g slime tunnels), I'd usually leave 2 turns on unstoppable before using the movement infusion to get out, saving relentless pursuit and regen to clear all debuffs and get a bit of heal as the unstoppable duration expired. heroism would still be up, so this always prevented lame deaths (like dying to a 50 dmg burning tick lol). Heroism and unstoppable are great together, unstoppable doesn't drop you below 1hp, so you still have the heroism buffer when it expires (which was about 1k hp for me). I kept my wild purely for blinds, cripples and disarms (especially disarms which were lasting for 12 seconds)- I was immune to most other effects. I can attribute my confusion resistance to a randart ring I got from the merchant... with 99% confusion resist! lolwat.

I was actually meant to go Shalore, but since I always play Cornac, I didn't even realise I was the wrong elf race until about lvl 12, and by then I'd had such a good start, I just stuck with it! Thalore racials are nice anyway.

The run was intense, but a lot of fun.

Cheers!

[bpat]

Looks like you beat me to winning Insane, congratulations! Out of curiosity, why didn't you get Warshout? I find it to be one of the best control abilities Berserkers have.

[Thomas]

Thanks!

I agree, warshout is great, but the way I was playing, it wasn't worth the turn. Literally I would pop all my cooldowns, leap in, do all my damage, get out and reset. Winblade took care of big trash groups. I was floating some points in it earlier, but then it wasn't landing against some of the harder enemies/bosses, so I just stopped bothering with it. It is an awesome skill though, just not this run ^^

[Mankeli]

Congrats, that's impressive!

windblade (henceforth known as WINblade)

Word.

[Doctornull]

Wow, that's an impressive accomplishment!

At what level did you go in for Dirty Fighting?

Also I notice one of your escorts died to damage from Crazy Tom Was that a Death Dance misfire, or something else?

Cheers!

[Thomas]

Thanks!

In this run I went dirty fighting at 20. I didn't want to have to wait until 36 or wyrm bile for the extra cat pt, because I wanted cripple to beat some of the tougher bosses. With regard to my madness run though, I picked up the extra rune/infusion slot at 20 instead of picking up dirty fighting because you level much faster and I'll probably be 36 before I even hit the master- if I ever make it that far. May be regretting that a bit though, dirty fighting is really strong for 1v1 fighting (which is basically all you want on the higher difficulties), and on Madness the regular bosses are way easier than some of the random ones that spawn -_-

Oh yeah, the escort in Reknor.. if I recall correctly, I killed him with winblade haha. The 4x4 range on it still surprises me sometimes when reaching over diagonal tiles! I think Aeryn also suffered the same fate -_-

[Furey]

How do you survive the early dungeons with melee? I've beaten the game several times on nightmare on various casters, but can't seem the survive the first named mobs you find. Any tips there? I love melee characters, but survival is ... elusive.

[Saka]

awesome!!!!!! keep up the zerker good work, incoming winblade nerf X_X

would like to see some more awesome zerker shenanigans in the future!

[anathema]

shit i just had my first normal win today, dont even wanna think about insane

well done man, congrats!