Exploiting Tentacles

[visage]

Rather than polluting Effigy's thread with assorted tentacular experiments and theorycrafing, I figured it would make the most sense for this to be its own thread.

What sorts of exciting options do Tentacles introduce? Are there places where they interact weirdly with existing abilities?

The obvious combo is Arcane Combat; I tested that pretty much immediately upon release of the expansion, and it's unsurprisingly quite good. You're getting a large number of extra weapon hits, melee AoEs, and a magic-powered weapon. ...and as it doesn't count as dual-wielding, you're (as far as I can tell) not taking the usual penalties to Arcane Combat.

As a nice little bonus to the standard Adventurer loadout, Beyond the Flesh attacks trigger Tentacle attacks -- both against the main target and the Tentacle "cleave" effect.

Inspired by the idea of Sawrd, I've done some explorations into Lethality. Tentacle hits against adjacent enemies do count towards Expose Weakness stacks, as one might expect; that makes Tentacles somewhat better than dual wielding for purposes of Expose Weakness. Blade Flurry does include Tentacle attacks and procs Tentacle cleaves.

One fascinating interaction is when equipping projection-ego weapons. With Tentacles, I'm seeing additional projection procs, one of which frequently hits the original target. I assume this is caused by the Tentacle cleaves, but haven't fully characterized the behavior yet.

[Snarvid]

Ogres with Incinerating Blows also get the flame procs off their tentacle, that might be fun given the chance to proc an AoE fire burst, and Eternal Suffering might have some good applications in stretching out the Black Blood and numbing debuffs (as well as Constrict, but that's already got a huge duration). Applying so many burn stacks obviously leads to some useful synergies with Heart of Fire as well, and although you’re going to be spread pretty thin there’s probably also a build combining all of that with Fire and Wildfire + Arcane Combat. With Temporal Guardian + Augmented Mobility and Elemental Harmony you’ll be able to put out a huge amount of hits at high speed, cover the ground in fire, and burn buffs off enemies while removing debuffs from yourself.

Dream Smith stuff still procs Tentacle, and Hammer toss gives you ranged tentacle hits.

If you're just optimizing around a large number of hits, Mental Tyranny / Punishment is always a hoot.

[visage]

Ogres with Incinerating Blows also get the flame procs off their tentacle, that might be fun given the chance to proc an AoE fire burst, and Eternal Suffering might have some good applications in stretching out the Black Blood and numbing debuffs (as well as Constrict, but that's already got a huge duration). [...]

If you're just optimizing around a large number of hits, Mental Tyranny / Punishment is always a hoot.

As a side note, you don't need to have a 2-hander to run Incinerating Blows; you just can't use Abduction or Fiery Torment without one. One of my favorite adventurers was built around Temporal Warden dual-wield melee combat + Torture + Mental Tyranny + Punishment. Later, I also ran Torture/Tyranny/Punishment with the adventurer+psyshot shell; ranged AoE stuns are unsurprisingly quite nice.

[Snarvid]

Hmmm. Abduction and Fiery Torment are pretty good on a tentaclemancer, though, especially if you’re going for Arcane Combat+Fire+Wildfire in order to rip away max fire resist (probably would drop Heart of Fire though). I’d have to think more about when I would want to spend a category on just Incinerating Blows. (Also, I haven’t played with Krog yet, but I think they can do something similar and also net stun resistance, although obviously not for Tentacle-types.)

I have played a punishment psyshot, but I went for lingering area damage effects for the most chances to trigger Punishments instead of Torture for an independent control effect. Incendiary Groove on 3 weapons is pretty good at this.

[Snarvid]

If you were stuck in a rut like me, you could also run a steamsaw/tentacle/TK hybrid and put demonseeds on your steamsaw and Tk weapon. If you focus on Flame Bolts and Acid Cone, which grant the player a talent that procs on any hit, the 4 hits per round could lead to some impressive sprays.

I think if you’re able to find a +mana on crit item, though, an attack spammer character would be better off with Arcane Combat/Stone/Tentacle/Horrific Body/Punishments/Raze/Mental Tyranny. That seems like you could line up north of 16 separate hits/round pre-Raze (and another 15 hits off Raze), plus another Defiled Blood hit on everyone within range, which is a lot of Punishment procs on anything that didn’t die.

[Effigy]

I did a bit of testing in dev mode and found out you can use Demon Seed while just using a steamsaw in your mainhand with an empty offhand for tentacles. Unfortunately, Tempest of Metal doesn't work unless you're wielding 2 steamsaws, but Grinding Shield does work with just 1 steamsaw. You could use a mainhand steamsaw with demon seeds for procs and maybe Osmosis Shield (although you wouldn't have that high of block rating), or possibly do Ogre with Razorlock for the multihit, 150 block rating, and it counts as 2 saws so you could use Tempest with it. The downside is you lose a demon seed slot comparing to actually dual wielding saws. Just wielding a 1H steamsaw with tentacles is probably not worth it unless you want Grinding Shield's one-shot protection for some weird proc build on Madness difficulty, but the Ogre-wielding option seems decent in general.

It does seem that the Ogre-wielding proc penalty applies to tentacle damage with the offhand weapon. It's hard to tell whether the penalty applies to projectiles from things like Fire Imp demon seed or Stone Missiles, but these don't normally get the proc damage bonus from staff accuracy and such, so I'm guessing they don't. In my limited testing, I didn't see a big difference in damage from Ogre-wielding. It's hard to be sure because dev mode has godmode/semi-godmode with huge damage bonuses and weak-damage mode with -90% damage, but no easy way to go to level 50 with normal damage, so I can't be sure if the dev options are messing with the damage numbers. Similarly, I can't tell for sure whether Sawrd reduces projectile proc damage.

Testing has shown that Sawrd only triggers 1 tentacle offhand hit even though it does multiple hits. Razorlock triggers 2 offhand tentacle hits (because it counts as dual-wielding), but not 1 for each hit and the 2nd tentacle attack damage is reduced by half for Ogre-wielding as mentioned before. Defiled Blood tentacles shouldn't be reduced by either Ogre-wielding or Sawrd penalties, but I haven't tested it specifically due to the extra setup required.

After this recent testing, it looks like I was wrong about Flexible Combat with tentacles. Flexible Combat does trigger a tentacle offhand hit. However, apparently Flexible Combat is limited to one proc per attack (regardless of multi-hits) which isn't listed in the description. I think before I couldn't notice the FC hits because there were so many hits occurring in combat; I should have tried this in dev mode sooner I guess. Tempest of Metal can trigger its own FC hits apart from the attack that triggered it though. ToM + FC can generate a lot of hits.

Long story short, Ogre-wielding Razorlock with tentacle offhand does 8 hits to the main target per bump, and with Tempest of Metal does another 8 hits to every adjacent target (including the primary target). Throw in some demon seeds and/or Arcane Combat, maybe Flexible Combat, possibly with Sawrd or a projection weapon in the TK slot, and your procs will blot out the sun. I'll probably try a build with this just for laughs. Could be Madness viable with the right setup, but it's hard to fit in all the categories.

[Effigy]

I completed an Insane/RL run with a Razorlock/tentacle build and it turned out to be quite good. Even though it's fairly similar to my Steamdemon build, I might write a separate guide due to the quirky nature of the mechanics. The character killed Elandar in 3 attacks and Argoniel in 3 attacks after that (using Link of Pain from The Black Plate). I tried Atamathon for fun, but it's been so long since I've attempted that fight that I totally screwed up and died in dishonor.

The crux of the build is Ogre-wielding Razorlock with the tentacle offhand, which fundamentally changes how Razorlock's multi-hit works. Normally, Razorlock does 4 hits per bump. If you Ogre-wield Razorlock with another steamsaw in the offhand, they only do 3 hits combined per bump, which makes that setup inferior to just using Razorlock by itself. However, the tentacle offhand interacts strangely with the "dual-wielding" component of Razorlock, causing it to do 6 Razorlock hits and 2 tentacle hits (8 total, double the normal amount for Razorlock). Tempest of Metal attacks with both hands, so you do 8 hits to all adjacent targets as well (including the primary target). 16+ hits per bump is pretty crazy. Projection weapons seem to have a weird interaction with tentacle hits, but in any case the projected attacks also do multiple hits because they use your mainhand and offhand weapons, regardless of which weapon caused the projection.

With Flexible Combat, Expose Weakness was adding over 300 weapon damage and well over 100% resist penetration (more like 400%, not that it matters). The build can do upwards of 26k damage per turn against the training dummy, although it seemed to be much lower in practice, perhaps due to armor. If anything can actually survive that damage for more than a few turns, the bleeding stacks up quite high as well. I was also using Corrosive cone, which didn't deal that much damage per proc since I didn't have much scaling for it (and it's affected by the Ogre-wielding offhand proc penalty), but the sheer number of procs and the AoE overlap made it quite good for clearing rooms. The leech from Suffuse Life was giving upwards of 1k healing per turn, so I was quite durable as well.

I'm trying to figure out a build that could leverage this to beat Madness difficulty, but the category points are really tight. The build in the posted link doesn't have a way to remove enemies' effects/sustains apart from dispersion gloves, so I think it would need tweaking to be Madness viable. It's very strong on Insane though.

[Effigy]

On a different note, unarmed attacks each trigger a tentacle offhand hit (including the multi-hit Brawler talents). This seems like a fun option, either for pure melee damage or spell procs. I'll probably mess around with that next.