Anorithil Guide

[donkatsu]

Introduction

This is a guide written for the Anorithil class in ToME4, current as of 1.2.2. Anorithils are a spellcasting class with a unique style of damage dealing found nowhere else, while also sporting solid defense and crowd control. Although they can do damage from afar, unlike other spellcasters they can only realize their full potential at medium range.

Positive and Negative Energy

Anorithils use two types of resources, positive and negative energy. For Anorithils, positive energy is essentially unlimited. Your core defensive talents generate positive energy when used, and usually what little positive energy you do expend will quickly be repleted. Negative energy is a completely different matter; you will burn through it quickly and there are only two talents that generate it. Your maximum positive/negative energy is determined solely by your level, so resource management will be difficult early on and gradually improve over the course of the game. Fatigue affects costs normally, as with stamina. Both types of energy gradually fall over time to a low default value, but they are easily replenished using certain talents. Because of this, if you want to keep a full tank while autoexploring, you will either have to constantly manually replenish your energies, or use the autocast feature. Manual replenishment is incredibly tedious, but autocast will have you start each fight with one or more talents on cooldown. It is up to you whether you want to manually replenish energies, use autocast, or just go around with the low default value. I recommend using autocast, or more specifically, autocasting Twilight Surge.

Race Selection

With no glaring weaknesses, Anorithils work reasonably well with all races, but here are a few that work somewhat better than others:

Shalore: Absolutely perfect synergy. Since your main stat is Magic, Grace of the Eternals will be giving you a large amount of global speed. The primary offensive mechanic for Anorithils is Corona, which depends on crit rate, which is provided by Magic of the Eternals. Lastly, Timeless is especially good for extending Providence and Totality, in addition to its non-class-specific uses. Shaloren tend to bloom in the lategame, but combined with the Anorithil's strong early game, you should have a smooth ride throughout.
Halfling: The large crit buff is useful early on before you get 100% crit rate without it, and passive Evasion is also nice since you may find yourself taking melee hits early on. Indomitable is a nice emergency button for when stun puts Providence on cooldown. Anorithils are probably the best class for fighting multiple enemies, and Militant Mind, while not necessary in the slightest, amps up your one v. many power to downright goofy levels. Compared to Shaloren, Halflings are the stronger early game race.
Dwarf: Like Halfling, you get a lot of saves, and some help against melee in the form of armor. Armor is not nearly as good as Evasion though, and you don't get Indomitable, but you do get more saves against single enemies and you also get added mobility in the form of Stonewalking. Also don't forget that halflings are racist jerks and yeeks hate them, so there's that too.
Ghoul: Anorithils can do a lot of damage by just sitting around and doing nothing, so the Ghoul speed penalty is actually not as bad. And while this may sound like a bad idea for a spellcaster, often as an Anorithil you will actually want to get closer to your enemies, for which Leap is well-suited. However, do note that as undead, you'll be locked out of the Harmony tree, which does limit your build options more than it would for other classes.

Talent Overview

Class Talents

Sun

The entire tree is just filler for when your darkness talents are on cooldown. Don't bother investing too much in it.

Twilight

Twilight: This is mainly what you use to generate negative energy. Note that the amount of negative energy you generate scales with Cunning, and although you may be tempted to put a lot of points into Twilight early on, later even just 3/5 will generate more negative energy than you can even store. So don't go above 3/5. It does affect your default positive/negative energy value, but why settle for 40% of max when you can get 100% of max for free by using autocast?

Jumpgate: In theory, this will allow you to teleport to safety. In practice, autoexplore will just take you out of range of your jumpgate and it'll suck up 20 of your precious negative energy for nothing. 1/5 is enough to lay down a jumpgate before diving into a vault, but I would recommend against getting more levels unless you're really going to recast your jumpgate every other second.

Mind Blast: Confusion is really really good. Blind and stun are commonly resisted, but confusion immunity is extremely rare, and at high Cunning this thing will confuse for 12 turns or so, which is plenty of time to kill whatever you just confused. Even if it isn't, with Totality you can get 24 straight turns of consecutive confusion which should definitely be more than enough. However, it only has a radius of 3, which is one of the reasons why you'll want to get into close range even though you're a spellcaster.

Shadow Simulacrum: Doesn't work on bosses, but it's still great for elites and rares. You can get a lot of mileage out of this in higher difficulties, where you'll find several rares on every level. Note that the simulacrum will inherit the original's current effects, so if you stun/blind/confuse the original before casting the simulacrum, your simulacrum will also come out stunned/blinded/confused, which is no good. This one is largely based on preference, as it is very strong anti-elite/rare but useless everywhere else.

Star Fury

Moonlight Ray: Every caster has their signature low cooldown spell. Some have multiple, but Anorithils have only one, and this is it. Does way more damage than any of your other spells, especially your puny light damage spells. It should already be apparent that darkness, not light, is going to be your main damage element. This is also your only range 10 spell, so if you're trying to snipe something from a distance like, say, a Fearscape user, this is all you have to work with. Usually you'll fire off a Moonlight Ray and then try to close in to unleash the rest of your arsenal. The first damage spell you should be getting to 5/5.

Shadow Blast: Your go-to spell for damaging crowds. Later in the game, crowds will melt like butter without you even having to lift a finger, but even then Shadow Blast's single target damage isn't too shabby either. As with all ball spells, you can use Shadow Blast to snipe stuff hidden around corners and such.

Twilight Surge: Does good damage, but has such short range that you won't be able to use it all that often, especially if you go for the Circles tree. However, get 1/5 early on and put this on autocast when no enemies are visible. Bam, you now have full positive/negative energy while autoexploring. Just remember to disable autocast when walking into villages, because it will autocast next to a villager and neither Linaliil nor Aeryn will appreciate that very much. Also disable it for escorts. Even if you don't level it past 1/5, however, it has the benefit of being the only other spell besides Twilight to generate negative energy, and it also rolls to crit twice. Why this is important will become evident later.

Starfall: A short stun with decent AoE damage. Its radius increases at higher levels, and while that will help hit bigger crowds, it also makes it harder to not hit yourself with it in tight spaces.

Eclipse

Blood Red Moon: 5/5 because Corona. Start working on this after you've finished Mind Blast.

Totality: Serves two independent functions but not really at the same time. You obviously want to use the cooldown reduction when most of your spells are on cooldown, especially Providence and Mind Blast. However, this also gives you resistance penetration, and sometimes you'll run into things with a lot of darkness resistance. Sometimes you'll run into things that are completely immune to darkness. In these cases, you don't want to waste time throwing out darkness spells first and then use Totality; you just want to use Totality straight away even if nothing is on cooldown. This will first come in handy in Lake Nur against umbral horrors.

Corona: This is the talent that really defines the Anorithil. The damage doesn't look like much at the beginning, but start stacking spell crit and you'll see those little Corona bolts really start to add up. The bolts are quite slow, but the AI doesn't really dodge them and by the end you'll be spewing out so many that it wouldn't really be feasible anyway. Because it only fires at range 6, you'll do a lot more damage at that range than you would by staying at range 10 and trying to snipe with only Moonlight Ray. Needless to say, you should get 5/5 immediately after Blood Red Moon. You may come across some artifacts that have a chance to cast a spell every time you hit with a spell. Because you'll be hitting so often with all of your little Coronas, these on-spell procs become devastating in the hands of a properly-built Anorithil.

Darkest Light: I couldn't really make this work in either of my Anorithil playthroughs. You need low positive energy and high negative energy, and most of the time it'll be the complete opposite: you'll have high positive energy and low negative energy. What negative energy you do have you need for your Star Fury spells. If you don't spend negative energy and you don't generate positive energy, you're left with nothing and then what's the point of being invisible? You could just forget about the invisibility and use it for the explosion damage, but the damage is really low and you'd even be better off with Sunburst. And the damage penalty is the final nail in the coffin for this interesting but ultimately impractical spell. 0/5.

Glyphs

The lesser of your two unlockable trees. The selling point of Glyphs is undoubtedly Glyph of Fatigue, with its massive slow. The slow can crit, and with some additional crit multiplier you can get upwards of 130% slow for 6 turns, which will cut the actions the foe can take by over half. And unlike blind/confuse/stun, there is no such thing as slow immunity, so as long as you can pass the save check it will work on anything that's not immune to all status. The other nice thing about Glyphs is that it's not just Fatigue; all glyphs can crit. And they are instant cast. That means that, if you want, you can trigger Corona four times in one turn. The main problem with Glyphs is that something has to actually walk over it, and this can be more unreliable than you might think. Ranged enemies will often just stay in place and not walk over the glyph for several turns. Melee enemies can Rush you, passing over the glyphs entirely. Anything that's been confused may not approach you in a straight path, and actually walk around the glyph.

Circles

Your other and better unlockable tree, which doesn't have anything as powerful as Glyph of Fatigue but instead is much more reliable. Like glyphs, circles are instant and they can crit. In addition, with the exception of Circle of Sanctity which can crit only once, all circles roll to crit twice: once for duration and once for damage. First of all, that means you can trigger Corona seven times in one turn. Second, with some additional crit multiplier, the duration of circles match their cooldown. Also, all of the circles are worthwhile in their own right except for Circle of Blazing Light. Shifting Shadows is damage over time in the element which you'll be stacking while also granting something in the realm of 70 defense by the endgame, which is on par with classes that actually focus on defense as their main form of damage mitigation. Sanctity completely shuts down most spellcasters as long as you can get close enough, and with high enough spellpower it also inflicts Brainlock every turn, which is like a permanent mini-stun. Finally, Warding also does good damage, knocks back anything that would try to melee you, and slows down projectiles so much that even the fastest ones will be crawling along at one or two tiles per turn. Note that projectile slow caps out at 90%, so even though it'll say projectiles are slowed by something crazy like 200%, they will still move towards you... albeit very slowly. Also, you might not want Warding to knock things out of your other circles, so it may be a good idea to keep it at 3/5 so its radius is one lower than the others. The projectile slow feature will still cap at 90% so that won't be a problem. Since Warding prevents things from staying close to you, it works really well with Chant of Fortress and Bathe in Light.

Generic talents

Chants

Hey, speaking of which, here's Chant of Fortress. Get it; it's tailor-made for Anorithils. Get 1/5 in Chant of Fortitude for the prereq then ignore the others because they're mutually exclusive with Chant of Fortress. Okay, Chant of Resistance can be a valid alternative in the lategame but Fortress starts out good and stays good throughout.

Light

About as straightforward of a defensive tree as they come. Everything but Providence can crit, which means more Coronas. Bathe in Light is probably your best defensive talent as long as you can keep everyone out of range 2, which Circle of Warding does quite effectively. Bathe in Light's shield component is based off of the healing done, so healmod will improve its shields. It can also heal escorts, and combos with Healing Nexus in the Harmony tree, should you choose to unlock it. If you're about to initiate a difficult fight, you can pop Barrier then Bathe in Light and just sit there for a few turns to build up your shield, or you can use Bathe in Light in the middle of a battle right as your shield is about to expire so that its duration refreshes as long as you're Bathing. Providence is your ultimate status effect removal talent that really just puts all other status effect removal to shame. 5/5 Providence as soon as possible and never look back.

Hymns

Hymn of Moonlight is the clear winner here, because Hymn of Moonlight crits. It crits a lot, all the time, and you know what that means. Corona. It does, however, have short range, and against large crowds it will drain your negative energy very quickly. No matter, it will also kill the large crowd equally quickly. Forget everything else and get 5/5 Hymn of Moonlight, right after 5/5 Providence.

Staff Mastery

You can buy it unlocked in Angolwen for 750 gold. Channel Staff has no cooldown and can spell crit, which makes it really good filler for more Coronas even though it takes a lot of generic points to get its actual damage up to par. Blunt Thrust is not so great because you already have a stun in Starfall and Circle of Warding will push everything out of melee range.

Survival

Not as useless as it once was thanks to Charm Mastery, but still probably not worth spending a category point on.

Harmony

Anorithils can get surprisingly good mileage from the Harmony tree, available once you kill the Sandworm Queen. Elemental Harmony is good for anybody, but the fire effect is much better than the others. Conspicuously enough, Anorithils have a weak fire damage spell on a class that does not stack fire damage. This means that shooting yourself with 1/5 Firebeam for 10 turns of +41% global speed is actually a pretty good deal, especially if you do it in safety and heal the damage away afterwards. And with Totality, you can ensure that that global speed doesn't go to waste because all your spells are on cooldown. One With Nature is universally useful because who doesn't like infusions, and Healing Nexus has interesting synergy with Bathe in Light. If you do allow something to get into Bathe in Light range, and you use Healing Nexus, it will steal the heal that they would normally get (but not the shielding). However, it's simple enough to keep things out of your Bathe in Light, so this combo is cool but of questionable efficacy.

Strategy

1-10: With Moonlight Ray for offense and the Light tree for defense, you should be unstoppable. Put Twilight Surge on autocast when no enemies are visible when you get it, making sure to turn it off in towns and when you get escorts. Stat points should go primarily to Magic, and then split as you like between Cunning and Constitution until they're both maxed.
11-20: Much the same as before, except now you're also maxing your main two disabling spells, Sun Flare and Mind Blast. Use your second category point for Circles, if you didn't get it at level 10. Circle of Sanctity absolutely dominates the bosses of Lake of Nur, Tempest Peak, and Dreadfell, which are normally pretty threatening.
21-30: By now you should begin the first steps of your Blood Red Moon/ Corona/ Hymn of Moonlight combo. It will not be very strong at first, and you may have to turn off Hymn of Moonlight against large crowds to conserve negative energy, but it will get better. Much better. Also beware of getting silenced, as Providence will not help you with that. Either build your mental save as high as you can, or carry a mental wild infusion.
31-40: Somewhere around this range you should start finding more artifacts with on hit(spell) procs. Wear them and love them. If you were using a mental wild before, you may drop it once Aeryn teaches you Relentless Pursuit. Use your category point to unlock one of Glyphs, Circles, or Harmony, if you haven't already, and start working on that once your Corona combo is complete. If you go for Circles, I recommend using a Movement infusion to quickly get into range of spellcasters. There are other options, but Movement infusions are best because they are instant, plus you have the side benefit of however many turns of stun/pin immunity.
41-50: By now, you should have equipped yourself to maximize spell crit, crit multiplier, darkness damage, and on hit(spell) procs. Also, spellsurge equipment will allow you to hit the spellpower cap fairly easily.

Prodigies

I won't discuss the generic prodigies that are good for every class (Cauterize), but here are a few that can have special interactions with Anorithils.

Armour of Shadows: More for dwarves than anything, the armor and armor hardiness will stack well with your armor-boosting racials and between Moonlight Ray, Twilight Surge, and Shadow Blast, everything will be covered in darkness.
Temporal Form: Partially consolidates all of your damage types into one, allowing your light damage to benefit from all of your +darkness damage stacking, in addition to the +30% damage on top of that as well as the 20% resistance penetration. This dramatically improves your Sun spells, on hit(spell) procs, as well as half of Corona, while also giving you ten turns of stun and blind immunity. The only downside is that you won't benefit from Totality's dark/light resistance penetration, nor any of the dark/light resistance penetration you may have gotten through equipment. But this also means that you can afford to wait to cast Totality until you've gone through all of your spells first, at which point Temporal Form will likely have expired.
Unbreakable Will: So you have Providence to clean to rid yourself of status effects. What are you still vulnerable to? Silence, confusion, and spell feedback, as they can stop you from casting Providence. Unbreakable Will neatly takes care of all of these without forcing you to use Relentless Pursuit.

[ohioastro]

Nicely done! I was working on a related guide and there are a lot of parallels here.

A couple of points of discussion:

Twlight Plus Bathe in Light on autocast (no enemies present) ensures that you're full on dark energy, but typically low on light energy. Twilight Surge on autocast (when no escort and not in town) leaves you with full light + dark bars. If you have 100% spell criticals, typical for a good high-end build, you can use these spells to ensure that you keep your spellpower up with items that stack spellpower on criticals. This is ....extremely useful.

Firebeam lets you diversify your damage (fire vs. light), which can help against opponents who are dark / light resistant. It's also a reasonable cooldown,and thus can be a decent investment of points. I'd recommend it over Searing Light for that reason.

Jumpgate has a significant situational use: if you can plan ahead (for example, opening a vault) you can have a reliable emergency escape plan. Similar comments apply when dealing with challenging bosses in cases where you know where they will be. It requires planning, but can have a significant benefit if you do so. (For example, you could set up an emergency exit before opening a door into a large room.)

Twilight Surge actually can deal decent damage if fully pumped up. If you're using for autocasting it's usually on cooldown and not worth pumping up.

Hymn of Perseverance is a legitimate alternative to Hymn of Moonlight. The immunities are very useful and let you focus gear more on damage. Providence isn't up all of the time.
This is very common based on the character vault.

Gear: You can get a lot of mileage from focusing on spell criticals, darkness damage plus resistance penetration, and then light damage.

In terms of escorts, you can gain a lot from stone alchemy.

The prodigy that resets cooldown timers on spell criticals is handy with a class that has almost 100% spell criticals at high levels. In particular, you can frequently stack Moonlight Ray at the start of a battle, which gives a very handy damage boost.

[donkatsu]

While putting Twilight on autocast does work, I just found myself feeling uncomfortable with the idea that I might open a fight with Twilight on a 5 turn cooldown, and then Hymn of Moonlight zaps 6 guys and drains all my negative energy, leaving me helpless for 5 turns. Not a serious concern, but one that is sidestepped by Twilight Surge.

On diversifying your damage types with Firebeam:
I can think of nothing that has both light and dark immunity. In fact, typically anything immune to one is weak to the other, and even if there were a case where they have both light and darkness resistance, Totality lets you punch through those resistances quite easily. Also, you have more incentive to boost light damage than fire damage because half of Corona's damage is light, so typically your light damage will be higher than fire. I'd say Firebeam's main advantage is that it's, well, a beam, but Anorithils are already so good at killing a bunch of weaklings that that factor ended up not mattering.

On Hymn of Perseverence, I actually went that route on my first anorithil, back when stun reduced healing and confusion was guaranteed death, but in this brave new world where status effects won't necessarily be the thing that ends your run, I think Moonlight has become rather better. Of course, Perseverence is a legitimate alternative, and I did actually discuss it briefly in the original draft, but in the interest of keeping the guide as concise as possible I ended up just discussing the build I personally believe to be best. There are, of course, many paths to victory.

The only reason I didn't mention stone alchemy is that everyone can gain a lot from stone alchemy, and Anorithils don't particularly gain more from stone alchemy than others. Same reason I didn't mention many of the prodigies.

Eye of the Tiger (and the thrill of the fight) just don't play well with either of your unlockable class talents. That's four talents that will be sucking up your cooldown reduction for little benefit, and consider that spells only get half the benefit to begin with.

[lukep]

I found Eye of the Tiger to be very useful on my winner, but mostly after I started managing my spell usage, so that only a couple of them were cooling down at once.

[Aerach]

Hidden Resources can allow a LOT of spammed circles/nukes without slowing down moonlight spam, especially for Shalore. Wonderful suggestion with harmony firebeam, since it's useless wihtout temporal. Else... remarkably thorough summary, love it~

[ohioastro]

It's also worth noting that anorithils can safely hunt adventurer parties, and it's immensely satisfying to do so.
Not all classes are well suited to this.

[malboro_urchin]

Has any of this information changed with the most recent version of ToME as of my post (1.1.3, iirc)?

How important is Mind Blast? I've skipped over it, in favor of putting the points into Blood Moon & Corona and the like.

I've found that with enough spell crit (on my previous anorithil, Staff of Destruction <3, on my current one, Vestments of the Conclave because Last Hope didn't sell any robes with the 'of chaos' ego, and a pickaxe with spell crit, of all things!) I can get the Corona/Hymn of Moonlight combo going quite early, like in the mid-teens; even without Corona, an anorithil's spell crits do ridiculous damage.

[Bahndriin]

Very nice guide.

[MarginalMagus]

I want to chime in that Hidden Resources is excellent, but does NOT apply to Corona.

EDIT
Furthermore, it prevents positive energy gain--I have changed my mind, and think Hidden Resources is not worth it.

[Satarus]

I liked hidden resources. I got a lot of mileage out of it because I could spam all the circles and still have the energy to use my big darkness spells.

[donkatsu]

Updated slightly for 1.2.2.

[kvaak]

Just in case someone's wondering, this guide is still highly relevant for 1.2.5.

Some thoughts:

- Hidden resources. I had a lot of trouble with some AoE-intensive fights due to my p. energy bar draining almost instantly. Twilight allows you to fill your n. energy completely, gaining more than 20-30 p. energy a turn on the other hand is rather difficult.
- Doomelf's first racial is nothing short of perfect for Anorithil. That instant blink is a medium range caster's wet dream. Sadly the other ones aren't that impressive, although you can never have too much crit reduction. If your shields go down corruption of the doomed (probably) resets your blink and gives you bonus darkness damage, what's not to like? (I guess Shalore's one bad racial got turned upside down when they were corrupted).
- Early ~everything died almost instantly, I didn't really feel the need to use mind blast at all. I went through most of the game without it, got 3/5 at some point and only maxed it once I hit 50 and didn't really have anything else to put the points into. Mostly I found it was useful against stuff that just refused to get knocked back by my circles.
- Triggering the only outstanding talent in the harmony tree (elemental harmony, fire) is rather difficult, your survivability is mostly based on gigantic lolshields so burning yourself midfight is a big no-no. If you can scout the enemies with clairvoyance or pull behind a corner or somesuch then sure why not but personally I wouldn't grab this tree again if I did another playthrough. Healing nexus didn't exactly impress me either as BiL still shields enemies.
- Even though I got 5/5 shadow simulacrum I think I successfully used it... once during the entire game? It probably has decent potential if you actually remember to use it.
- You probably don't want to grab Eye of the Tiger like I did. It has a bad habit of targeting mostly your circles which should eventually stay up consecutively for 30+ turns with totality anyway (although if you manage to refresh a circle before the previous one expires they DO stack). Unless you are paranoid you're somewhat vulnerable to out-of-LoS oneshots and, although I didn't trigger cauterize once during the entire game, (well, until lolmathon) probably want to grab cauterize first. Not really sure about the second prodigy, while at times I certainly felt a need for hidden resources it isn't that useful for most of the game, even in the final battle I don't think I dropped below half p. energy at any point. Generally good ones + those in the OP probably all work.
- Knockbacks will make your life miserable. Inertial twine is your friend.

[Bodhi]

http://te4.org/characters/153517/tome/8 ... d14184b88f


The guide works well on Insane. Surviving the early game is tough but once you hit 30 and have circles, bathing light, totality, and timeless maxed along with cauterize, you won't die unless you seriously screw up. Even the final bosses can't do much of anything under your circles

[OrionJAnderson]

I'm level 14 right now, with 5 points in moonlight ray, 3 in mind blast, and 1 in just about everything else, including both of the available Circles. What's worth leveling up first? Do I go straight to maxing my blood red moon / corona combo and running it off my darkness rays, or is it worth pumping some points into another actual damage spells like starfall or shadow blast?

EDIT: Also, I'm currently floating points into Hymn of Perseverance. Is it really necessary to switch over to Hymn of Moonlight?

[Ory]

Question about Staff Mastery.

I picked it up and then finally put a point in to it... but I have no mana regen. That seems to make it a less than ideal tree. Am I missing something in this guide?