Explain to me how to play this game.

[mikekchar]

This gives me a good opportunity to thank you for producing those videos! I kept getting stuck at around level 20 or so and couldn't get past. Watching the let's learn series up to tempest peak got me completely unstuck The next 4 out of 5 characters got through Dredfell I would definitely encourage you, Death from Above, to have a look. The fight in Lake Nur was especially instructive for me. The videos are quite long so you can watch them in double speed.

[Death From Above]

Thanks for the advice. I'll keep playing, keep trying to learn.

[Furey]

So assuming you are attempting hi peak:

1. Use gauntlets of dispersion on Elander. If you don't have Gauntlets, skip this step, and make sure you find some on your next game.

2. You speak of the Paladin you have to kill, so I'm assuming you did not complete the charred scar quest. If you had completed that quest, she would not fight you, and actually join you in the final fight to help. Make sure you complete it on your next game.

3. Since you have no Paladin ally, you cannot face both of these bosses. Of the two, Elandar is much more dangerous, and must die first. Use your rod of spydric poison on Argoniel to keep him locked in place. If you didn't get the rod of spydric poison from the spider caves, put that on your list to get for next game.

4. Immediately use a movement infusion to run to the northwest portal and use the Orb of Destruction to close it. If you don't have a movement infusion in your slot, add that to the list of things you need to do on your next game.

5. Close that portal, throw a bane of confusion on Elandar (he is busy killing your minions)

6. Use phase door to move to the northeasternmost portal. Close that with the orb of dragons. By now, all your minions are dead. Use highborns bloom, empower your spell with whatever that power is that does it, and summon more minions to distract elandar. Reapply rod of spydric poison on Argoniel when he pops out. Throw your 3 or 4 spells at Elander, and run away again out of LoS. Use phase door to close the south eastern portal. Drop all your spells on Elander again. Reuse gauntlets of dispersion and rod of spydric poison if necessary.

7. Use manasurge rune, as you are out of mana now. Run to southwestern portal and close it.

8. Continue to circle the battlefield using phase door and movement infusions to stay OUT OF LINE OF SIGHT. Cast your spells around corners. Whittle them down. When you see Argoniel, use rod of spydric poison and flee. When you see Elander, use bane of confusion and gauntlets of dispersion, cast a few spells at him, and flee.

9. Continue to use blocking terrain, spydric poison, and gauntlets of dispersion. If you don't have these things, and don't have the paladin to help you, and have crap gear, you will probably want to restart the game and ask for advice before getting to hi peak.

Hope this helps.

[Death From Above]

2. You speak of the Paladin you have to kill, so I'm assuming you did not complete the charred scar quest. If you had completed that quest, she would not fight you, and actually join you in the final fight to help. Make sure you complete it on your next game.

No offense, but it's not like I failed it on purpose. "Next time win" is not really advice. My conclusion on that part was, in hindsight, I really needed to do some teleporting to actually get where you need to be fast enough because if you actually stop to kill everything, well, good luck. Next time I am going to try avoiding fights to actually get there in time.

The rest of it makes sense though, thanks.

[spastic]

I actually don't think you can teleport ahead in that zone. I failed that quest when I was a lich because I had no movement speed or movement infusion or any way to go faster, and I normally have no problem with the quest.

Also, you won't be able to use infusions as a lich. There are several items that give you a boost to movement speed, they would be very useful if you're going to be undead there.

[Effigy]

You can't teleport forward in the Charred Scar. You can use Movement infusions or enemy-targeted skills like Rush and Shadowstep. I failed it the first time because I didn't realize it was a timed zone, but since then I haven't had any issues with it. Just focus on moving forward and kill enemies as quickly as possible.

[Furey]

2. You speak of the Paladin you have to kill, so I'm assuming you did not complete the charred scar quest. If you had completed that quest, she would not fight you, and actually join you in the final fight to help. Make sure you complete it on your next game.

No offense, but it's not like I failed it on purpose. "Next time win" is not really advice. My conclusion on that part was, in hindsight, I really needed to do some teleporting to actually get where you need to be fast enough because if you actually stop to kill everything, well, good luck. Next time I am going to try avoiding fights to actually get there in time.

The rest of it makes sense though, thanks.

I didn't know if you had failed it or skipped it, as it is technically an optional quest. Since there is zero way to undo it, I thought "make sure you complete it next game" was relevant advice. I did not intend to offend, and was merely trying to show the key things to help give you success next game, rather than beating your head against a final fight for which you might not be prepared.

[Death From Above]

I'm legit curious. What percentage of characters that you guys play would you roughly say you keep alive to level 20, assuming you play either adventure or roguelike full time?

My failure rate is at least 95%. That's probably being quite kind to myself. I've never even made it to the east in the proper game.

[0player]

I'm legit curious. What percentage of characters that you guys play would you roughly say you keep alive to level 20, assuming you play either adventure or roguelike full time?

My failure rate is at least 95%. That's probably being quite kind to myself. I've never even made it to the east in the proper game.

Uh... I play on Normal Adventure, because I'm bad at this game, and I can safely say that if I'm not utterly screwing up my levelup order (I tend to on new classes), I reliably make it to level 20 100% of the time, with 0 to 2 deaths, usually. Then I proceed to die to Mark of the Spellblaze or Dark Crypt.
It wasn't always this way, of course, I used to die on tier 2 a lot. So I tend to shop for good infusions and at least one piece of good equipment before I even attempt my tier 2 now (which is usually Old Forest). The first time I approached lake nur, I was level 15 and managed to do it by some dumb luck: I never do so now. Nur is usually done by me right before Urkis.
Urkis is easier than Daikara, because everything in that dungeon deals the same type of damage which is not uncommon for lowly egos to have resists for. As long as this tempest meanie isn't able to stun you (dodge his Shock, he likes to open with it, and get some stun immunity), he is almost powerless against a well-equipped character.
But the best advice I can give is "sell gems, get mad cash". Seriously. Nothing, no other mechanic in the game, had helped me as much as not forgetting to sell damn gems!

[jotwebe]

http://te4.org/user/4384/characters?page=0

There's some arena characters in there... I'd say 50%, less if I try out weird things like yeek wyrmics or ghoul doomed, more if I pick a strong class. The new Sun Pally and Doombringer I won on my first play. Used to be I rarely made it past Daikara and if I did, died in the Melinda quest, because I insisted on doing that.

There's several "why do I keep dying" threads around, you can do a forum search and get advice that's usually still pretty relevant (though it's amusing that since the introduction of Dex granting crit protection the meta changed from "always buy Con" to "never buy Con").

[donkatsu]

Theoretically I think I could get 100% of characters to level 20 on Insane with no deaths if I never autoexplored and I inspected every rare. In practice, I autoexplore and mash buttons early on and manage about a 50% survival rate, but I think this method produces winners faster simply because the increased play speed makes up for the death rate. If you count intentional suicides because I'm startscumming for basic things like a movement infusion, a half-decent shielding rune, etc, then drop it down to about 10%.

When I started, my failure rate was like 90%. Everything I made died in Scintillating Caves and reaching Dreadfell was a huge novelty. I had beaten Nethack, ADOM, and Crawl, so I wasn't even new to the roguelike genre; ToME is just hard if you don't know what you're doing.

[mikekchar]

I *really* suck at this game. My profile says I have played for 34 days 13 hours and 11 minutes. I got to east just recently. Of course I mostly play crazily for fun, seeing if I can try to emulate characters from popular fiction (mostly I can't!). I only started to play seriously to win a while ago. However, I can pretty easily get to level 20 if I concentrate. On normal adventure I think I have nearly 100% chance for certain characters (and probably 30-40% for others). On roguelike, you could cut that by 3 maybe... Like everybody else, my chances to get to level 20 when I first started was about 0%.

Remember that dying is part of the game. You have to level up *you* as well as your character. The reason why you are getting advice like "in your next game blah, blah, blah" is because that's how you play rogue likes. It's all about sitting there and thinking... what could I do better next time. That's why explore mode is not suggested because it allows you to get to a place where your skills are not able to cope. Even advice like "you should succeed in that quest next time" is really good advice because it is telling you that you need to level yourself up to be able to do that part (there are lots of things in the game that you don't need to be able to do, but can if you want).

I think once you get into the swing of approaching the game like that, you will find that it will go much more smoothly for you. Instead of trying to get to the next part of the plot, try to figure out how to get more powerful. In this game, items are useful but tactics are everything. I think you can easily be 10x more effective just by applying the right tactics -- you can even double or triple your damage output, for instance. These are thing things that are waiting for you to discover

[Death From Above]

Some of this advice (and a bit of experience) must be helping because I've actually made it to the east in Adventure Mode for the first time, with the new Temporal Warden.

I've had two deaths, so it wouldn't work as a roguelike run, but certainly progress. One of those was pretty early on. I want to say in The Maze, though it might have been even earlier. One of those gold chests that spits out two rare enemies that had some weird skill combo, but I honestly don't remember the details now. Second death was the boss of the Mark of the Spellblaze. I wasn't surprised by that one; Fearscape was always likely to be a problem for me, haven't really done well dealing with it in the past.

I think another thing that is super important is actually understanding and working out the order to do the non-essential side zones especially. I see a lot of deaths in the global chat log that are "level 12 character in a level 20 zone" or something of that nature. Actually figuring out when to do what zone has been really helpful, and cuts a lot of the difficulty off things like, say, the lower levels of Dreadfell (especially once I worked out to do about two thirds of Dreadfell, go do a couple other things, then come back for the lower levels). I've been pretty cautious about making sure to do X thing in Y order and it certainly helps a lot.