Death of the Auramancer [Nightmare 1.7.2]

[sixteenmiles]

I need to take a little break from the game after this, but I wanted to do a write-up for this character since it was probably the most fun I’ve had in-game so far. This is not a build guide, but I’m writing it up in detail in hope that some person smarter than me can help me tune this build to be a little more efficient for when I come back.

Disclaimer: Just to repeat. This is not a build guide. I freakin’ died in High Peak on Nightmare. I do not endorse you playing this build. It is just a stupid idea I am trying to make work because I am stubborn. This is a build where you literally walk through the game and do not press buttons or engage with enemies. You just auto-explore and when you see an enemy you hold down the “Pass Turn” button until everything on the screen is dead. I’ve been stuck on Nightmare for weeks and I died in High Peak so I’m posting this for cathartic release before I go and cry in the shower for a while.

The Boring Origins of the Auramancer

I made a post last Friday in the Adventurer forum asking for help with a build I’d been trying to put together [Here]. The core concept was that I was trying to put together an Auramancer, a build that could walk through the game passively dealing damage to enemies without really casting spells/skills. The concept I’d been working on was okay, and whitelion gave some great suggestions to improve it. I spent the week unlocking the classes I needed to try it out, but I kept hitting a wall with it really early in the game. It has a really rough start. After dying repeatedly to Gunsnake and other assorted T1 trash I had to switch it up, so I hit reset on the whole concept.

Enter the anti-magic attempt.

While playing through EoR to unlock Raze, I did it with a Psyshot and sort of fell in love with Mechanical Arms, and although it doesn’t quite have the same range as the other auramancer concept, it got me thinking that I could try the same thing as an anti-magic character.

Here was my run: “Dead at Level 7”, the Level 50 Cornac Adventurer [Nightmare 1.7.2]

Died in High Peak to Kshakor the champion of Urh'Rok.

Post-Game Reflection

Since I don’t have a huge knowledge of the game, I was assigning points by “feel” rather than any sense of calculated break-points or ideas about min-maxing. I didn’t even plan what categories or prodigies I was going to take from the start (I took Furnace on a whim with Wyrm Bile and it turned out to be awesome). I winged it. It turned out to work better than I thought it would, and it was insanely fun.

By the time I got to the East I was just walking through zones and everything was passively dying around me. To an extent this starts much earlier, but it was probably by about Dreadfell or so that I really started feeling like I could just go into full-on lazy mode and not even engage with enemies anymore. In the T1s and T2s you can still do this, but you have to be a little more active in skill usage because you're not outputting the same amounts of damage.

Status effects didn’t matter at all. Stunned? Doesn’t matter, everything dies around you anyway. Blinded? Doesn’t matter, by the time you get your sight back, everything is already dead. Frozen? Great! I’ll just hang here in my ice block while everything dies.

The Build

Stats

Strength: Dump stat.
Dexterity: Take only as much as required for Mechanical Arms. Use gear boosts to avoid spending stats here.
Constitution: Third-stringer. Probably the safest choice to max after Willpower and Cunning. Put points here early as needed.
Magic: Useless stat. Do not waste points.
Willpower: High Priority Stat
Cunning: High Priority Stat

Early on split Willpower and Cunning to be able to afford skills. I put some points into Dex just to be able to unlock Mechanical Arms but I tried to use stats on gear as much as possible to be able to do this so as not to waste points on Dex. After getting enough Wil and Cun to get the talents I needed, I took Con to about 20 to take the edge off. I started maxing Wil first, making sure I had Cun to 50 in time for Level 25. Then I maxed Wil -> Cun -> Con in that order and dumped whatever stats I had after that into Str.

Category Points

I took Dread at 10 to get Mechanical Arms going since it was a core concept to my idea. I took an Inscription at 20 because I was suffering with Steam engines. I took Discharge at 32, with Mind Storm becoming one of my primary attacks for the rest of the game. With Wyrm Bile I took Furnace on a whim since it seemed to synergise well with everything else, and it ended up being pretty good. I don’t know if this is the best or right order to do things but that’s what I did and I’m not sure if I’d do it differently if I did it again.

Inscriptions

Steam Engine
Phys. Wild
Regen
[Flex Slot]

Ideally you would run one steam engine that could satisfy the drain cost of all of your skills, but it seems like luck is required for that. I ended up having to use two steam engines throughout the whole game because I never found one that put out enough steam. I took the Wild for convenience, but to be honest status effects just don’t matter with this build and I stopped using it later in the game and just started brute forcing through most status effects. Could probably just load up on Regens and Heals.

Prodigies

I had in mind that I would take Elemental Surge to contribute to the passive damage output. I don’t really know how good this was in the end. It’s not something I think I ever really noticed and it definitely didn’t feel like a big power upgrade when I took it at 25. On the other hand, when I took Meteoric Crash, that was huge. This thing was one-shotting groups of enemies as soon as they appeared on the screen, right up until the end.

A lot of the build was built around trying to trigger Elemental Surge and in my head I feel like it should have been really good, but I don’t know how well that is reflected in the numbers, or if there is something better.

Question: Is it sheer luck whether you see a meteor event to unlock Meteoric Crash?

Gear

Weapons: Two Mindstars (Psiblades)
Psi-Slot: The best Physical Melee weapon you can find.
Armour: I went with Light Body and then Heavy mix in other slots.

I don’t know if there are any specific artifacts that work great with this build. I don’t feel like I particularly found any. Cloud Caller makes the early game easy and synergises okay. It’s probably worth replacing later on, but I ended up wearing it right until the end because I never found anything that made me want to take it off. Spellhunt Remnants are sweet since the build is anti-magic. If there’s anything else that is worth looking out for, let me know, but nothing stood out. I had a look through the various Mindstars and Seeds of the Black Tree could be a nice offhand for proccing passive AoE damage through Mechanical Arms, but I never got this so not tested.

The reason I chose to put a physical melee weapon into the psi-slot is to try and bolster an interaction between Mechanical Arms and the Kinetic and Thermal Auras. Kinetic and Thermal Aura says that if you have a conventional weapon in your psi-slot, it will add the damage to all your weapon “hits”, whereas if you have a Mindstar or a Gem, it will simply create a damage aura. Since we are running Mechanical Arms which also “hits” enemies, I wondered if the bonus damage from the aura would also be applied to each hit from Mechanical Arms. I don’t know if this is how it works. The way it’s worded seems like it should be, but if anyone could confirm or deny, that would be awesome.

(Maybe a staff would be best for added proc damage, though I’m not sure what in this build actually counts as a proc, and I’m not entirely sure a staff counts as a physical conventional weapon or as a ranged weapon)

I was mostly just looking for life and defenses on any gear that I took, but I would prioritise a weapon if it had added fire damage because that synergised with Furnance and would speed up Elemental Surge triggers.

Class Talents

Cursed/Shadows [?/?/?/0]

In my head, I’d been thinking of these as “pets”, but I really needed something that suited the passive damage concept of the build, that would also carry me through the early game until other things came online, and this was it. So I started thinking of these as a damage aura. You turn on the sustain and they bounce around dealing damage to things. Sometimes they disappear for a while, then they come back. They’re pretty nice. Not sure if I need to spend as many points as I did, but these guys are bread for the early game.

Psionic/Projection [5/5/0/0]

I’m hoping this works the way I think it does. Essentially, the idea is that having a physical weapon in your psi-slot, will allow the Kinetic and Thermal auras to apply their damage to every hit from Mechanical Arms, thus empowering you with physical and fire damage to trigger off Elemental Surge. If it doesn’t work that way, then there is a huge flaw in this build!

Steamtech/Dread [5/0/0/0]

5 points in Mechanical Arms. This was the core concept that started off the build. Creating that passive aura of death around you. It works with Psiblades. The idea is to synergise it with Projection. I’m pretty sure hits from this count as mind attacks that trigger Meteoric Crash. No Hope is great, but we don’t ever have the Dex to get that far into the tree.

Steamtech/Furnace [5/X/5/1]

I took this really late on a whim, but it seemed to have a lot of what I needed. Passive damage from Melting Point and Vent, defenses from Molten Metal, and Furnace scales other damage sources like Projection and Meteor Crash.

Steamtech/Thoughts of Iron [5/0/0/0]

Molten Iron Blood is defense and passive damage rolled into one.

Cursed/Gloom [5/?5/X]

This is a tough one. It’s a nice aura, it adds passive damage through Mindrot and spreads status effects. It scales our Mindpower, but it sort of blends into the background so I was never really aware of how much it was really doing for the amount of points invested into it.

Psionic/Discharge [5/1/5/0]

Mind Storm ended up being the first thing I cast whenever I came into range of an enemy. This turned the game from “walk through zones while everything dies” to “auto-explore into enemies and then hold down the ‘pass turn’ button until everything dies”. Backlash is more passive aura damage. Unlocking this tree is probably where I felt one of the largest power boosts.

Wild-gift/Ooze [1/1/0/0]

40% all damage resist.

Psionic/Absorption [?/?/?/?]

I didn’t really do much with this.

Generic Talents

Technique/Combat Training [5/X/X/0/0/0]

Thick Skin is good. Might as well.

Psionic/Psionic Feedback [X/5/X/5]

I ended up maxing this, but not until close to the end. Feedback became a huge part of the build, fuelling Mind Storm, keeping damage down, and absolutely massive amounts of healing.

Psionic/Augmented Mobility [X/X/X/X]

I pretty much took this for Telekenetic Leap which is nice, but I was so squeezed for generic points that I didn’t do much with it.

Wild-gift/Mindstar Mastery [5/1/5/X] [Bought for 500g from Zigur]

Grabbed this asap to get Psiblades and ended up casting Leaf Tide pretty much every combat. Never used Thorn Grab and probably could have saved a point on Nature’s Equilibrium as I had so much healing from other sources.

Wild-gift/Antimagic [X/X/X/X] [Free from Zigur Quest]

I used Anti-Magic Zone and Mana Clash whenever I was up against casters. Resolve and Shield are nice. I feel like I could have done more with this tree than just one point in each, but it worked fine.

Wild-gift/Fungus [?/?/?/?] [Free from Urkis Quest]

I don’t know. The build is pretty tanky, and towards the end (until I died of course), I don’t think I ever really dropped below 75% health. Maybe a couple of moments this saved me. It’s hard to judge. This could have been awesome, or it could have been 5 wasted points.

Wild-gift/Harmony [?/?/?/?]

I used One with Nature and Healing Nexus pretty frequently. It’s nice to have a way to shut-down enemy healing (Weirdling Beast especially, since we have so many sustains), but these points could probably also have been saved.

Final Thoughts

I don’t really know if this is a good or bad build. It seems like a dumb idea, and there were points in the game where I wasn’t sure if it would scale well. Then there were other times where it was absolutely absurd. It seemed like the more enemies you come against, the more powerful the build became, so in areas like Scourged Pit where there were huge amounts of enemies, it was just a bonkers explosion of death across the screen. The early game is a little rough but it becomes tanky as hell. I don’t think on paper the damage output is that high, but since you’re just passing turns and not really thinking, it doesn’t matter as long as you can tank and survive indefinitely. There were two enemies I struggled with in the game. I died once to Grushnak in Grushnak’s pride because I got complacent and was just passing turns and didn’t realise I was taking spiky damage. I’m not sure how it happened, but I was wearing a Ring of the Dead so I was able to revive. The second time I died was to an absolutely absurd amount of damage (like 2000+ physical damage) from some random rare in High Peak. I think this build should have easily gotten me through Nightmare but in this instance it didn’t. I’m sort of burned out after this so I’m going to take a little break, but I’d really appreciate anyone who is smarter and more knowledgeable than me to take a look over this write-up and offer any suggestions for changes/improvements, and definitely any corrections on mechanics that I have misunderstood. I know it’s a long write-up, but I wanted to be comprehensive, and I think I just want to get the concept out of my head for a little while and putting it all down on paper will help that.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

[visage]

Thanks for the post! I wouldn't have thought of Melting Point for an auramancer; that's a fascinating idea. As an aside: if Mechanical Arms and Shadows feel enough like auramancy to you, you might also want to look into Artillery.

Incidentally, the title of this makes me wonder -- might you happen to be a fan of Martha Wells?

[sixteenmiles]

Thanks for the post! I wouldn't have thought of Melting Point for an auramancer; that's a fascinating idea. As an aside: if Mechanical Arms and Shadows feel enough like auramancy to you, you might also want to look into Artillery.

Thanks. Melting Point turned out to be one of the things that carried it forwards, whereas other things that I thought were going to better (Gloom, I'm looking at you) turned out to be kind of lacklustre. Artillery looks like one of the two classes I still have locked, so I'll have to work on unlocking that before I can test it, but thank you for the suggestion.

Incidentally, the title of this makes me wonder -- might you happen to be a fan of Martha Wells?

Just a coincidence, I'm afraid. Not heard of Martha Wells.

[sixteenmiles]

Quick update after talking with Tradewind Rider on Discord. I took this into dev mode and got a few insights.

Projection Auras do not apply to mindstar strikes from Mechanical Arms, which means those 10 points in Projection were essentially wasted (you could put a mindstar in there for the aura, but it's only adjacent enemies and that's not great). Lacerating strikes does apply to Mechanical Arm hits so could be a replacement to think about. Mindrot is kind of really bad damage for the amount of points invested. The status spreading from Gloom is nice, but might be able to save a whole category and a bunch of points here which would allow us to take Psionic Fog instead of Augmented Mobility for our movement skill.

Eye of Summer is probably BIS offhand if going Elemental Surge and Meteor Crash (I don't know if there are other fire mindstars). Seeds of the Black Tree is absolutely amazing but obviously doesn't synergise with Elemental Surge or Meteor Crash, or Furnace, so would need to take Endless Woes and something else, and that's if it even drops?

I'll do more later but that's what I came up with for now.

[whitelion]

Wow, this ended up going in a very different direction, very cool. When I have some time I might try out the original concept I had proposed and see if I can figure out what the problem is and how to make it more robust.

For this build, if you will do a lot of instances of mind damage, with Mech Arms, Mindrot, Mindstorm, etc. you could also consider Cursed/Punishments for the last skill Madness: whenever you deal mind damage, you get a chance to proc one of the Gloom debuffs on enemies. You could even switch out Elemental Surge for Mental Tyranny and proc Madness almost every turn if you wanted. If you didn't really used Absorption or Shadows, you could swap out one of those and go 1/1/1/5 in Punishments.

[visage]

Mindrot is kind of really bad damage for the amount of points invested. The status spreading from Gloom is nice, but might be able to save a whole category and a bunch of points here which would allow us to take Psionic Fog instead of Augmented Mobility for our movement skill.

Mindrot doesn't do appreciable amounts of damage directly. It can be very useful in other ways, though -- proccing Madness, as whitelion suggests; powering "on-mind-hit" effects on gear; and giving you a source of darkness damage for Armor of Shadows. (I did an Insane / Roguelike run recently where an awful lot of my damage came from Mindrot triggering gear procs.)

...and if you're going into Gloom for Mindrot, the other effects can be quite useful, especially the reduction of all incoming damage from outside of your Gloom.

[sixteenmiles]

Wow, this ended up going in a very different direction, very cool. When I have some time I might try out the original concept I had proposed and see if I can figure out what the problem is and how to make it more robust.

I think once it gets off the ground (probably around level 20 or so) it will be good, but I just kept struggling with the early game, and I think part of that was me trying to go all in on the "passive damage" side, and not wanting to take trees like Nightfall that would give me early game actives that would make that whole part of the game a lot easier.

Discussion on Gloom/Mindrot/Madness

This is really interesting!

I can see a line here where I can fit in Seeds of the Black Tree offhand for Tendrils Aoe triggered by Mech Arms, and Eye of Winter main hand for the mind proc from mindrot, maybe using Endless Woes to trigger off the mind and darkness damage.

Thanks for the suggestions both.

[Tradewind_Rider]

Hi!

It might be helpful: mechanical arms & beyond the flesh hits also procs on-melee-hit things,
like Arcance Combat or Arcane Destruction. These are not auras, but basically passive damage
and free spell on hit.

But this way you have to skip the Anti-magic tree.

[whitelion]

I tried something closer to the original magic version of the auramancer: https://te4.org/characters/229407/tome/ ... d60ca40b8e.

It's definitely true that you will need to press at least some buttons early, but the early game actually wasn't so bad--some of the actual classes have it worse IMO. I had to retry once because I died to Inner Demons in Heart of Gloom (which is fairly common there on insane since 1.7), but the next try won insane/RL. Nightfall works nicely because of Night Sphere and Errupting Shadows going so well with all the instances or darkness damage. In addition to giving you a way to do damage early with Invoke Darkness, you can slap a bane on anyone who looks threatening and it will stick forever unless they remove it or are immune. This was my go to early against rare+, and I used it throughout if I thought an enemy was truly dangerous.

Around level 15-20 the passive damage starts coming online, as you get Spike of Decrepitude and Hymn Nocturnalist going, and you can supplement with Dire Plague and Crepuscle since you just hit the button once and wait with these. You also get Dark Reign going around this time which with the resistance from Thick Skin and Reaping lets you tank a lot of damage. You still have to do things against actually dangerous enemies, but everyone else will just die, and by late T2 I could basically stroll around and watch everything melt so long as there weren't any dangerous randbosses around.

For prodigies, I took Adept to get the 5th stack of Dark Reign, and then Corrupted Shell--with the saves from that combined with Golden Age of Necromancy and already wanting Con for the healmod and Blurred Mortality, I thought it fit well with the minimalist style of play. A huge number of debuffs will just bounce off you so you can mostly ignore them, and the main danger to this build is getting oneshot, which 500 extra hp and some armor+hardiness make less likely. Armor of Shadows, Cauterize, and Ethereal Form seem like good possible alternatives, depending on how you plan to build your defenses. I rounded things out by going for darkness respen with Eternal Night, crit shrug and a bit of darkness damage with Writhing One, and crit mult from Dark Ritual.

By the endgame, everyone in my field of view was taking thousands of damage per turn passively and I could just stroll around watching everything die. I literally waited against all the pride leaders except Vor and most of the high peak stair bosses while my passive damage killed them. If I got tired of waiting I could cast Dire Plague and Crepuscle to speed things up. Every once in a while some dangerous enemy will still demand a response, often because they strip your sustains or have a lot of respen, but there are plenty of buttons to press if things start going badly: Dimension Step out, activate Vampiric Surge for lifesteal, use River of Souls if someone isn't dying fast enough, etc. The final battle only took me 10 actions and Aeryn survived with 95% of her hp.

One other note is that on spell hit items are amazing for this build. I found the Spellblade and Lunar Shield so I used those, and Spike and the Hymn beams can proc them. It adds a nice chunk to the passive damage as well as a way to get through flat DR, which Raze and Spikes are less effective against.

Anyway, this magic auramancer build is quite effective in my opinion. That was one of the quickest insane runs I've done, and once it got going I was almost never in serious danger.

[sixteenmiles]

Hi!

It might be helpful: mechanical arms & beyond the flesh hits also procs on-melee-hit things,
like Arcance Combat or Arcane Destruction. These are not auras, but basically passive damage
and free spell on hit.

But this way you have to skip the Anti-magic tree.

That's fine, I only took anti-magic because everything else that I wanted to take was either psionic or steamtech, so anti-magic was a nice bonus. I thought the beyond the flesh hits were only on adjacent enemies (I might be wrong about that?) so I wasn't sure how good that was if most things were dying before they ever reached that point. I'll definitely do some testing with this.

I tried something closer to the original magic version of the auramancer: https://te4.org/characters/229407/tome/ ... d60ca40b8e.

It's definitely true that you will need to press at least some buttons early, but the early game actually wasn't so bad--some of the actual classes have it worse IMO. I had to retry once because I died to Inner Demons in Heart of Gloom (which is fairly common there on insane since 1.7), but the next try won insane/RL. Nightfall works nicely because of Night Sphere and Errupting Shadows going so well with all the instances or darkness damage. In addition to giving you a way to do damage early with Invoke Darkness, you can slap a bane on anyone who looks threatening and it will stick forever unless they remove it or are immune. This was my go to early against rare+, and I used it throughout if I thought an enemy was truly dangerous.

Around level 15-20 the passive damage starts coming online, as you get Spike of Decrepitude and Hymn Nocturnalist going, and you can supplement with Dire Plague and Crepuscle since you just hit the button once and wait with these. You also get Dark Reign going around this time which with the resistance from Thick Skin and Reaping lets you tank a lot of damage. You still have to do things against actually dangerous enemies, but everyone else will just die, and by late T2 I could basically stroll around and watch everything melt so long as there weren't any dangerous randbosses around.

For prodigies, I took Adept to get the 5th stack of Dark Reign, and then Corrupted Shell--with the saves from that combined with Golden Age of Necromancy and already wanting Con for the healmod and Blurred Mortality, I thought it fit well with the minimalist style of play. A huge number of debuffs will just bounce off you so you can mostly ignore them, and the main danger to this build is getting oneshot, which 500 extra hp and some armor+hardiness make less likely. Armor of Shadows, Cauterize, and Ethereal Form seem like good possible alternatives, depending on how you plan to build your defenses. I rounded things out by going for darkness respen with Eternal Night, crit shrug and a bit of darkness damage with Writhing One, and crit mult from Dark Ritual.

By the endgame, everyone in my field of view was taking thousands of damage per turn passively and I could just stroll around watching everything die. I literally waited against all the pride leaders except Vor and most of the high peak stair bosses while my passive damage killed them. If I got tired of waiting I could cast Dire Plague and Crepuscle to speed things up. Every once in a while some dangerous enemy will still demand a response, often because they strip your sustains or have a lot of respen, but there are plenty of buttons to press if things start going badly: Dimension Step out, activate Vampiric Surge for lifesteal, use River of Souls if someone isn't dying fast enough, etc. The final battle only took me 10 actions and Aeryn survived with 95% of her hp.

One other note is that on spell hit items are amazing for this build. I found the Spellblade and Lunar Shield so I used those, and Spike and the Hymn beams can proc them. It adds a nice chunk to the passive damage as well as a way to get through flat DR, which Raze and Spikes are less effective against.

Anyway, this magic auramancer build is quite effective in my opinion. That was one of the quickest insane runs I've done, and once it got going I was almost never in serious danger.

That's awesome! Thanks for taking the time to do that and write it up. I was definitely going to go back and try the magic version, I just needed to take a break from it after a few failed runs and that's when I ended up on this anti-magic version. I see it looks a lot different again, dropping Eclipse which I thought would be a big part of the damage. It was looking a bit like the build was just Anorithil+ so it's nice to see something different.

My first question is how did you sustain negative energy for Hymn Nocturnalist without Star Fury? Or did you just rest it up after fights?

And yeah, it is hilarious how fast this is when you can just walk past things and they all die. It's such a fun concept and I'm glad there's some good discussion on it since I've had this idea in my head for weeks but just not been executing it very well.

[whitelion]

That's awesome! Thanks for taking the time to do that and write it up. I was definitely going to go back and try the magic version, I just needed to take a break from it after a few failed runs and that's when I ended up on this anti-magic version. I see it looks a lot different again, dropping Eclipse which I thought would be a big part of the damage. It was looking a bit like the build was just Anorithil+ so it's nice to see something different.

My first question is how did you sustain negative energy for Hymn Nocturnalist without Star Fury? Or did you just rest it up after fights?

And yeah, it is hilarious how fast this is when you can just walk past things and they all die. It's such a fun concept and I'm glad there's some good discussion on it since I've had this idea in my head for weeks but just not been executing it very well.

I skipped Corona because I wanted to be lazy and not think about pos/neg energy. With the number of spell crits you get, this would burn through pos/neg energy way faster than you could generate with Twilight Surge. Of course, everything will probably be dead by then in which case maybe you don't care that much about running out of energy and you can just rest up between fights. I think it would be reasonable to switch out Path of Horror or Blight for Eclipse and use Corona (shuffling some points around if needed), but I wouldn't bother with Star Fury unless you really wanted some other skill in that tree (e.g. the stun from Starfall). The energy generation from Twilight Surge amounts to at most 15 extra bolts (and in practice usually less) every 5 turns. It also hurts a bit that Corona bolts can't crit given all the crit mult you get from Hymns, but swapping Path of Horror for Eclipse should improve your damage at the expense of some defenses.

Unlike Corona, which costs energy per bolt, Hymn Nocturnalist only drains 5 neg energy per turn regardless of how many targets it fires at, so you can have it going for quite a while before you run out, assuming you aren't using neg energy for anything else, as was the case for my build. Plus it does all darkness damage, which is my focus, and Hymns is already attractive for the crit mult from Hymn of Detection and the darkness damage boost from Hymn Incantor. The only option to refill is to rest, yes, but by the end everything dies so fast that you can stroll through an entire level before you need to, unless you get manaburned or something.

That's fine, I only took anti-magic because everything else that I wanted to take was either psionic or steamtech, so anti-magic was a nice bonus. I thought the beyond the flesh hits were only on adjacent enemies (I might be wrong about that?) so I wasn't sure how good that was if most things were dying before they ever reached that point. I'll definitely do some testing with this.

If you do this, Incinerating Blows might be simpler than Arcane Combat, which requires itself plus another category to have a spell to trigger, though the Arcane Combat version no doubt has higher damage potential if you are willing to invest the points. If you use Furnace and Meteoric Crash, your fire damage and respen should already be good. Incinerating Blows also makes all your melee hits also count as spell hits for the purpose of triggering on spell hit effects.

[sixteenmiles]

Dumping this here:

Whirling Death the Level 50 Cornac Adventurer [Nightmare 1.7.2]

I went in to test Scoundrel and Poisons with Mech Arms and ended up just going all the way through. I uh... I'm pretty sure Scoundrel and Poisons is not good, but I wanted to do my due diligence and make sure I tried it (and by "not good" I mean the build still decimated the entire game because even if you waste 30 odd talent points and two categories, Adventurer is broken).

The actual build is the Mindrot + Mindproc items you guys were talking about. At the end I was getting mind procs from Shard of Insanity, Eye of Winter, Serpentine Cloak, and Crimson Robe.

I was determined to test offhand Seeds of the Black Tree with Mech Arms so on this run I cleared every single zone, opened every single vault, touched every single tree, opened every single chest and sac, and literally did everything I could in my power to make sure I didn't miss it if it dropped. I was level 40 by the time I hit Reknor for the first time (before going east for the first time). I cleared the Vor Armory room of death as soon as I hit the east. I never ran into anything that really caused any sort of problem. Seeds finally dropped in a vault in Grushnak pride right before doing High Peak and when that dropped I could feel a huge power boost. At that point I just zerged to the end and I didn't stop to engage anything, it all just died if it got in my way.

Admittedly this is all on Nightmare with an Adventurer though, so.......... I should probably stop making stupid Adventurer builds and actually play the game properly.

[Tradewind_Rider]

Hey, Congratulations!

Admittedly this is all on Nightmare with an Adventurer though, so.......... I should probably stop making stupid Adventurer builds and actually play the game properly.

Playing with adventurers is a proper way of playing the game, I also made several ones. I enjoy creating new, unusual but strong builds and character generation is a very important process when you making an adventurer.
More important than with any other classes.

You can learn a LOT from creating different adventurer builds, you can understand the individual talents and more importantly CROSS-EFFECTS (interactions) between two or multiple talents.

This is a game, so do what you enjoy. If you enjoy playing with adventurers, then play adventurers.

Here is a link for one of my former adventurer build:

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=49919

This was designed for play & beat madness.

As you increase the difficulity, you can experience: your adventurer builds are not working anymore.

So, you can still continue to play with adventurers, but increase the difficulity further
and you will be forced to create different & stronger adventurers.
If you are not playing an infinite-loop adventurer, it can be really fun & also challenging.

[sixteenmiles]

Some notes from standing at a test dummy for a couple of hours today, just in case anyone wanted to try a variation of this build and didn't want to repeat the work (I'm sure someone has done this before, but I didn't see it anywhere).

Test conditions: Zero gear. 1 Mindstar in main and offhand. Test dummies in Sher'Tul Fortress. Each talent was tested for 100 turns without any consideration for other useful skills in the tree (purely damage). Talents were tested in isolation with the only other active talent being Dread unless stated otherwise.

vs 1 TARGET DUMMY 100 TURNS

DREAD (11k Baseline)
+ MAGICAL COMBAT + STONE (+15k) 2 Category, 10 Class (*)
+ APPLY POISON + VOLATILE POISON (+14k) 1 Category, 11 Class
+ APPLY POISON (+9k) 1 Category, 5 Class
+ WEAPON FOLDING + WEAPON MANIFOLD (+7k) 1 Category, 11 Class
+ MAGICAL COMBAT + FLAME (+7k) 2 Category, 10 Class (**)
+ MAGICAL COMBAT + LIGHTNING (+7k) 2 Category, 10 Class
+ SHADOW MAGIC (+5k) 1 Category, 5 Class (***)
+ TORTURE (+5k) 1 Category, 5 Class (**)
+ PSIBLADES (+4k) 0 Category, 5 Generic
+ WEAPON FOLDING (+4k) 1 Category, 5 Class
+ LACERATING STRIKES (+4k) 1 Category, 5 Generic
+ WEAPON OF LIGHT (+4k) 1 Category, 5 Class

* Magical Combat has high variance, slightly edges out Apply Poison, but costs an extra category point and only 1 less class point. Probably hits less resistances though.
** Fire attacks obviously have a lot of synergy with the build as a whole because they can synergise well with things like Elemental Surge and Furnace.
*** Darkness damage can work well with a variant of the build that uses Endless Woes and Seeds of the Black Tree.

vs 3 TARGET DUMMIES 100 TURNS

DREAD (25k Baseline)
+ APPLY POISON + VOLATILE POISON (+28k)
+ TORTURE (+23k)
+ APPLY POISON (+20k)
+ WEAPON FOLDING + WEAPON MANIFOLD (+13k)
+ MAGICAL COMBAT + LIGHTNING (+11k) (*)
+ SHADOW MAGIC (+9k)
+ LACERATING STRIKES (+8k)
+ PSIBLADES (+5k)
+ WEAPON FOLDING (+5k)
+ WEAPON OF LIGHT (+5k)
+ MAGICAL COMBAT + FLAME (+1k)
+ MAGICAL COMBAT + STONE (-1k) (**)

* Lightning had a very high variance depending on the placement of the dummies.
** Stone had a very high variance depending on the placement of the dummies. It had the highest peak of damage, but that was an anomaly compared to the average which was garbage (admittedly only doing 10 tests).

Take this as you will. Obviously the category investment is stronger for some skill trees than others.

[visage]

Incidentally, if you're willing to dip into addon classes, some options for auramancers capable of just waiting The Master to death.

If you're playing a Decrepitude auramancer, adding Genesis from Void Scholar is absolutely hilarious -- you're spawning Visages everywhere, and they shut down enemies pretty hard while each has their own damage aura.

I once waited The Master to death with a Bristlebarb, though that particular category has been nerfed since then.

...and similarly, the Discordant has a ridiculously OP passive damage aura category.