YASD: level 50 insane/RL shalore doomed shadowmancer in HP

[Berder]

https://te4.org/characters/254382/tome/ ... 93aa73e42d

• I had stormshield up, around 80% health, and was fighting a unique orc pyromancer and a rare orc necromancer in HP. There was no indication anything was remotely dangerous.
• I cast Blast. Instantly, shadow decoy triggered because I had been killed, which made me swap places with my shadow and remain alive. In the same turn my Ring of the Dead triggered because I had been killed a second time.
• I used shadow transposition to get out of the fight and behind a wall. Instantly I died to a melee attack. I had blood of life but my lantern was making me undead and I hadn't had time to swap away from it (which I was planning for my next turn).

Most of the damage was done by melee attacks from Xerena the orc pyromancer, just a unique. In the first turn it used Whirlwind and Flurry. Shadow Decoy apparently works only a per-damage-instance basis, so Shadow Decoy only saved me from a single damage instance of 118 damage out of like 20 instances. In the second, finally fatal turn it was Xerena again chasing me down with Heartseeker.

This character was not fragile so all of this was a complete surprise. I'd been fine in melee for much of the game, never having anything like this happen, burning through two of my death protections and my final life in two turns. By the way, it sucks that I can't inspect Xerena post-mortem to see how it was doing so much damage so fast.

IDK. Anyway, some comments about the character. Here's my logic for the build:

• Why Shalore? Because the lore is that Doomed are fallen mages. Also Timeless is very good.
• I found from experience that it's quite strong in the early game, below level 20, to rely on Force of Will and Darkness schools. Float points in Willful Strike and Reproach, until Dark Torrent and Blast are available. The combination of Dark Torrent and Blast is enough to rip through pretty much everything while keeping it at a distance.
• Around level 20 I picked up shadows specifically so that I could get Shadow Decoy. This is simply too strong an ability to pass up. It saved me from death around 11 times over the course of the game. My run would have ended much sooner without it.
• Since I already had shadows, I decided to also go with advanced shadowmancy. Advanced shadowmancy is nice because it lets you deal damage at long range, often even from the other side of a wall, while also distracting enemies from yourself. However, my own character's damage modifiers do not work for advanced shadowmancy; instead it uses the shadow's damage multiplier from the Shadow Warriors talent. So, damage wasn't that great. Against a test dummy at level 50 with all 4 shadows I managed to average 3000 dam/turn over 30 turns, but of course this would be much lower in actual combat with shadows getting killed and perhaps with me being unable or unwilling to get close enough to melee, and with the enemies having resists and armor.
• Between Timeless, Relentless Pursuit, and Shadow Transposition, it wasn't necessary to have a Shatter Afflictions rune. I never missed it.
• I took the Adept prodigy and the Blighted Summoning prodigy, so that my shadows would have bone shields and last longer. Blighted summoning seemed decent for a committed shadowmancer. I had tried to get the Corrupted Shell prodigy to double my at-the-time very low HP, but wasn't able to beat the Grand Corrupter at that time. Adept prodigy was great anyway so no big loss.
• Up until my completely unexpected death, the most challenging opponent had been Vor, because his relentless AOEs killed my shadows before they could do much damage.
• I neglected to get psiblades mastery because I didn't know about it. By the time I learned about it, my Shalore racial talents prevented me from ever entering Zigur. Next game I'll just float those racial points in the early game so I can enter Zigur and learn psiblades.
• I also didn't get the cursed aura talent tree because I was trying to keep it simple. I hear this was a mistake.
• I went with heavy armor for survivability in melee. (Fat lot of good that did me! Although tbf I had lower AC at my death than I had for most of the game.) I've heard other players will not take heavy armor on doomed but will still fight in melee. That seems crazy to me, doesn't seem possible.

[trungaczne]

RIP, this is why to always eyeball strong melee classes before engaging them (or not to engage them at all). I don't think your armor would have helped here since anything that has flurry typically has access to sizeable APR as well. Your class doesn't have a very good line of defense against melee. When I played Doomed with shadows I typically focus shadows on myself to soak enemy melee attacks and only casting offensive spells when there's a shadow between me and them. This is kinda hard to do now as Shadows are bugged not to fade at higher talent levels so they buy you fewer turns.

I think you should also focus more on mind damage the next time around because the debuffs can carry the character. I wouldn't rely as much on Blighted Summoning and Shadow Decoy as you might have observed. Shadow Decoy gives you like 500 negative health but that's 500 you lost from not picking Corrupted Shell anyway. Also Adept helps a bit at lvl 25 but tapers off as you get more skill points, I think you could consider Ethereal Form here as a longer term solution.

[Tradewind_Rider]

Hi!

I had stormshield up, around 80% health, and was fighting a unique orc pyromancer and a rare orc necromancer in HP. There was no indication anything was remotely dangerous.

Try to position yourself in a way, you can fight only 1 enemy at a time.

You are writing, you are fighting with a UNIQUE orc pyromancer in High Peak (possibly a stair guardian?) AND a rare orc necromancer too.

You also write: there was no danger at all ...
It seems, you underestimated these enemies.
Btw, new Necromancer is also very dangerous and necro was just it's basetype not it's class as i understood.


Unique & randboss enemies can be crazy dangerous, espeially at the later stages of the game, and very especially at High Peak.

What classes the unique had? Possibly it was a Rogue or Shadowblade or Marauder, because it had Dual Techniques.
All of these classes are dangerous even on their own, not to mention the unique also had another class too...

They can have Blinding Speed and Shadowblades can also have Essence of Speed, so it can easily act two or three times per turn.

Flurry can immediately deplete your stormsheld effect, due to the high number of damage instances,
and Heartstalker has increased crit multiplier, so increased damage.

Be very careful at High Peak, treat rare+ enemies there really seriously.

[Erenion]

As a general rule, if you encounter a marauder/anything unique in High Peak, run.
These things are very nasty and will kill you in a turn or two.
This is also valid for rogue uniques to a lesser extent, and doubly so for marauder/cursed uniques.

In my experience, you should only fight uniques in High Peak if you have no other choice or are absolutely sure you can take them on.