Shalore Breath Wyrmic

[lanfear]

I did this build in Nightmare. Shalore is my favorite race, so i picked it. Its racials are nothing short of awesum and the exp penalty is a bit lower than most of the races. After a rough start this was pretty strong till near the end. The summit was a bit rough and i actually got my first death there. The basis of the build is the wyrmic breath attacks. I had a lot of indecision with where to put a lot of my points. There were many possibilities, but other than the basics, none seemed to stand out. Here is the build.

http://te4.org/characters/111170/tome/8 ... 8799f35a4e

Stats:
Str - 60
Con - 60
Wil - 60
I had to meet early Willpower requirements, so some was added to Willpower at irregular intervals to meet those, i otherwise focused on keeping Strength maxed out with anything left over in Constitution. Near mid game when Strength was maxed, i started adding to Willpower along with Constitution. This entire build is based around those 3 stats and none of the rest really matter. Str directly boosts breath damage for each point, and the damage on those aren't that high so you will need all you can get. Con obviously increases your hp pool, and thus how much damage you can take, and Willpower effects your equilibrium threshold. What you add to after this is kind of fluff. Dex to boost your armor ratings, or Cun to boost crit seem decent places. I ended with 23 unspent stat points cause i didn't really see the benefit of either.

Category Points:
1st: Infusion
2nd: Wild Gift: Higher Draconic
3rd: Didn't use
4th: Didn't use
So as i played through the game, i picked up the first extra infusion slot. Thats always kinda seems a no brainer. 2nd i grabbed the Higher Draconic tree, though i didn't actually put points into it till a bit later really. 3rd and 4th i had troubles deciding and i didn't really want to make a bad choice, next thing i know i'm at the summit fighting the wizards and realized i should have just picked something. Adding .2 to any of the trees doesn't seem particularly amazing. I can say that fungus was my first choice for that, and i almost buffed it with my category point several times before canceling out of the screen. That fourth point could go to another infusion slot, or to buff your favorite breath or to buff high draconic abilities, but i couldn't really decide.

Prodigies:
1st: Cauterize
2nd: I Can Carry the World!

Usually playing through the game i tend to like 1 or 2 prodigies, but this class seemed to have 4-5 that i liked the idea of. With early game being so rough though, i was worried about getting 1 shot late game, so i went with Cauterize. This took a bit of finagling. I went to the Armory with the crazy Wyrms and in the vault room of that the floor does fire damage. I stat there regening and taking fire damage until it unlocked. This has got to be one of the best prodigies out of all of them for almost any class IMO. Though the coarse of the game, it saved my life about 10 times, most coming at the summit.
My 2nd choice was kinda hard. Though i can carry the world added 40 strength, there seemed so many other good ones. Windtouched Speed, Draconic Body, Eye of the Tiger all seemed really attractive to me. With taking Cauterize i felt that Draconic body might be a bit overkill, and my damage didn't seem very impressive, so i went with the 40 str in the end. 20% global speed adding to your 12% passive, seemed nice but not quite enough to be better than 40 str. The hardest one to pass up for me was Eye of the Tiger. Even with 6 turn cooldown breaths, each time you crit, reducing some ability by 2 seemed crazy strong especially if you are really only using infusions and breaths, there was no way it wouldn't be hugely positive to drop a breath or infusion cooldown by 2 basically every time you did an attack.

Infusions:
1. Damage Shield
2. Regeneration
3. Regeneration
4. Teleport
Optional 5. Damage Shield or Healing Infusion.

I'm not sure if changes were made to the game, but i had planned to change my Damage shield to a Healing Infusion, but i never found a good one. The best one i found healed for 98. The damage shield absorbed 800+. My bulwark is walking around with 2 that heal for 600+. I don't know if i got unlucky or things changed in the game itself, but i just kept the Damage Shield i found. If i found a better Healing Infusion i would switch to it in a heart beat, as they interact with the Fungus tree really well. This is part of why i only opened 1 infusion slot. I couldn't buy a good Healing Infusion find to save my life.
A lot of people criticize not using a Wild Infusion, but i have found them next to useless. They remove only 1 effect, and generally when i'm in trouble, its because i have like 10 effects on me. Picking 1 at RANDOM doesn't ever help me. Instead, i use teleport. If i get 15 debuffs, i teleport away. Let the turns run them out and go at it again. This combined with Timeless is pretty amazing at keeping you in the clear and safe. If you get in trouble, you use Timeless. If the trouble is really bad, teleport out and refresh Timeless. Once you get good with teleport, it'll be really hard to kill you. There is a bit of luck involved though. It could technically teleport you to a worse spot if you are in trouble, but there is a way i found to limit that. Find a teleport with a range of about 30-35. This has a good chance then to teleport you back the way you came, and if it doesn't you can pop Lightning Speed and get out of most situations. Teleports with 100 radius are a bit....unpredictable.


Class Talents: - 8 spare points to allocate where you wish
Combat Veteran: 1/1
Sand Drake: 1/1/1/5 - by the time i had spare points to add to swallow for the boosted crit, my mental crit was already at 100%
Fire Drake: 1/1/1/5
Cold Drake: 1/5/0/0
Storm Drake: 1/1/1/5
Venom Drake: 1/1/1/5
Higher Draconic: 5/5/5/5

Early game, i started with 1 point in Wing Buffet, Lightning Speed, and Acid Spray. I used Lightning Speed to run from stuff, never to engage. Until level 4, I used acid spray as my sole damage ability. I added more points, TEMPORARY points, in this as i leveled, but always removed them before adding to other stuff. At level 4, i picked up Bellowing Roar and Icy Skin. I started splitting my TEMPORARY points in Acid Spray and Bellowing Roar. I just kept Icy Skin at level 1 for awhile. Other than those, i just stored up points for level 12. At level 12, I freed up all those temporary points and picked up Fire Breath and Lightning Breath and started heading for Sand Breath. At this point, i started maxing out those 3 breaths. Once that was done i went for the Venom Breath. I tried out Ice Breath but the iceblocks it caused were a nuisance, so i dropped it. After venom breath i added to the Higher Draconic Abilties. Chromatic Fury -> Wyrmic Guile -> Venomous Breath -> Prismatic Slash. With that i had 10 points left over at 50. I put 1 point in Quick Recovery and Fast Metabolism as i was leveling, and used the TEMPORARY point trick to buff my HP regen during periods with extra points or spots that i needed more of it. So with that if you take 4 points out of Fast Metabolism, you have 8 spare class points at 50 to add Ice Breath, or buff Swallow, or Fast Metalbolism. You have the basics, so you can't really go wrong.

Generic Talents: 15 extra points to do with as you wish
Shalore - 1/5/1/5 -- Magic of the Eternals and Timeless are great. Super Great.
Combat Training: 5/5/0/0/0 -- 5 in Thick Skin and 5 in Armor Training
Call of the Wild: 1/5/0/0
Fungus: 5/1/1/1
So these are the essentials. Fungus is a really great tree. All of them could potentially be worth extra points, but Wild Growth is a must. Its where all my early game points go. After that i get a point or 3 in Armor Training so i can use what i want, and then hit up Nature's Touch which will tend to heal for 2k-ish late game. That combined with Fungal Growth is a pretty awesum combo. Don't neglect the Shalore talents as you level. Thick Skin won't see many points till mid game because of the Con requirement, but it is a must as well. Harmony tree has a few worthwhile things. Some of the late game poisons get up there in damage, but it doesn't remove them, so healing reduction or failure rates from poison effects still apply.


Gearing:
As with most classes, this is fairly important. When i looked at gear i was looking for a few things.
1. Hp Regen and Healing % boost (keep in mind that 150% healing bonus on gear is the max)
2. Str bonus
3. Mental Crit
4. Resists
Str and mental crit are needed cause they directly effect every single attack you will be using. Each breath is only modified by Str and Mental Crit, therefore those will be your primary offensive stats to search out. Because of this, i found that dual wielding mind stars was quite handy. They almost all have mental crit and resists, some with healing boost or stats.
To stay i found the healing per turn and bonus healing invaluable. Hitting 100 healing per turn late game seems to make all but bosses a joke. I used a Trollhide chestpeice of Eyal for most of the game. It added like 17 healing per turn, and 25% healing boost. That along side talents and other gear pieces i had almost 100 healing per turn later in the game. At the summit i switched armors, as it got.....rough. I switched to the Untouchable as i was getting hit so hard all the time that the 100 HPT didn't seem so awesum anymore.
Resists are resists. They seem hard to come by and sorta limited in use as getting high resists for everything seems impossible, but every little bit helps.

The Playthrough:

I had some serious issues with the first few levels. As a shalore it starts you with a Damage Shield rune. While Damage Shields aren't bad i think i would have preferred a heal over time, you will want to get some heal over time infusions as fast as possible. I dislike 2 hand weapons, and hitting anything with my weapon was out of the question. I missed 3 out of 5 swings most of the time, probably due to the starting stats of the Race/Class combo. After a few deaths prior to hitting level 4, i wasn't sure this was even going to be possible. After playing a Yeek Archmage and just rolling through the game obliterating everything in sight, this one did not go nearly as smoothly. At level 1 even normal mobs seemed quite hard, and rares... forget it.

Sooooooo....i started to think over my options. I decided I'd see if it was possible to score some early epics and levels from some of the random adventurer groups on the world map. First go at it i managed to kill 2 guys grab the loot and run (with lightning speed). I got away with some good stuff. After that i got greedy and dove back in for more.....and died. Dying that early i restarted. After a few random deaths and restarts, i managed to kill about 6 guys, end up at lvl 3 1/2, and got some loot to start with. I then proceeded with the game. This worked a lot better. So far this is one of the weakest starting classes I've played. This build doesn't even START to get rolling until 12, and starts hitting full swing around 40.
Its a long hard climb and the start is hardest of all. My screen went red so often in this game for being low on health i was starting to get used to it. Somewhere around level 24 it got a bit better, i started to feel stronger. The dark crypt was especially nasty even feeling fairly strong. After 30 and Cauterize, it felt like a reprieve. I was no longer worried about 1 shots, and my breath attacks started killing stuff fairly well. Most of the hard mobs weren't too bad, as i had 2 Flame breaths (skill and gloves). The fireshock debuff it applied is pretty awesum and helps a bit on the harder hitting mobs or large packs of ranged. Flame Breath is the skill i lead with, and it helps a lot with survival.

The summit was were it started to get hard again. The normal mobs were not really anything different or a great challenge, but the floor bosses were another story. Each of them had over 20k hp, and even with 100% crit rate on my Breath attacks, it was alot of HP to contend with. On top of that most had some pretty brutal abilities. I found a 2 handed orc with 19k hp that took a bit of doing to drop to 0, at zero each time he would "surge with positive energy" and be full again. After I "killed" him 5 times only to have him full heal, i had to lead him away and moved on. Then i fought an invisible ranged Naga. She hit like a truck and debuffed the crap out of me, left me dazed and stunned for like 30 turns till i Teleported away then got the jump on her with Sand breath and Flame breath. After that i fought a Boss Champion of Ruh'hok or whatever. This guy knocked me back, pulled me in, disarmed me, hit super hard and healed like a maniac. He proc'd my Cauterize 3 times before i finally got him. Next was a 22k hp Dreadmaster, that kept spawning little ghosts, removing my healing infusions, running away invisible through walls, and putting these 2 nasty hexes on me doing fire damage and increasing cooldown length by like 12. Last but not least i fought a Shadowy Demon guy, that was a fire mage. It took me to the fearscape so there was no running away. The fire did quite high damage, but more importantly it dispelled my infusions. After an intense battle he killed me, and on Resurrection, i used Lightning Speed and went to the stairs. None of these things would have been that bad if it wasn't for the insane health pools and the self healing they had. I think next time i will bring an Insidious poison rune or some healing reduction/buff removal for them. I only crit for like 1300 on most attacks, though i crit 100% of the time, it just didn't seem like enough. So prepare accordingly.

As this was my first Wyrmic, i kept doubting my choices. I ended the game with 23 unused stat points, 8 unused Class Points, 2 Unused Category Points, 15 unused Generics, and 1 death. I feel like i had a pretty good character going up until the Summit, and kinda forgot about my extra points until i had won. I think maybe another infusion slot would have helped at least. All in all, it was a pretty fun class with some pretty crazy challenges to overcome.

I hope this helps give you a baseline for a nice build and some info on how to make a Better Wyrmic than i did. Good luck! If you have any tips for me, feel free.

[Doctornull]

Nice build and guide.

If you haven't already done so, you might want to drop a copy of this write-up in the Character Reports forum, since you also talk about your run.