ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Well this thread has gone wildly off topic haha.

Just to respond to a few points I guess (hypocritically):

Bone Shield is really not that good:
1. you fold to multi hit abilities (skirmisher, rush + flurry)
2. you fold to DoTs (which you could prevent with draconic)
3. you cannot predict when the fabled "one hit" will come
4. you fold to any situation that has multiple enemies
5. recharging puts you on a very long cd rotation that is pretty difficult to manage (probably impossible)

Despite this you can probably complete Insane, I believe virtually every class is capable of doing so.

Disruption Shield is complementary and only really shines when used in combination with:
1. damage shield
2. heroic
3. temporal shield
4. bathe in light

The effect gains power through the stacking and maintenance of these, therefore picking up disruption by itself is not really ideal.

Regardless, if you're going for min/max then Unstoppable would probably be the easiest way to do it, as it's basically 1 skill that covers the entire AM shenanigans with shield rotations.

As for stealth in general, it's a very heavy investment that largely benefits you only offensively, it gives you:
1. 100% crit chance (to attacks only)
2. +86% damage

This is all with a category point AND 10 talent points (and you probably need more for Unseen Actions etc unless you want to be unstealted upon action)
1. Can be achieved with gear (so it only gives early/kinda mid game advantage)

The increased damage is significant, but on Madness you get detected fairly often, even by rares, which are fairly common.

I would imagine it is viable on Insane to some extent... but it's quite a gamble considering the investment required.

Casters in general scale fairly poorly in damage compared to melee, however I doubt you will find it to be much of an issue even on Insane.

Mex wrote:As for stealth in general, it's a very heavy investment that largely benefits you only offensively, it gives you:
1. 100% crit chance (to attacks only)

What do you mean, "attacks only"? I'm pretty sure every spell that can crit will autocrit when stealthed, even defensive spells like Barrier or Arcane Reconstruction.

The description states attacks. If it does crit any spell, even then you're basically making a poor "investment" because you will probably eventually reach 100% crit chance even on Insane.

Mex wrote:The description states attacks. If it does crit any spell, even then you're basically making a poor "investment" because you will probably eventually reach 100% crit chance even on Insane.

I agree there may be better investments of talent points than Stealth, but at least it makes itemization a lot more easier with a few egos less to look for (especially if you want quickening and spellbinding on your tool and boots.)

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot this: stealth can free up talent or generic points too - e.g., if you want Divination for Arcane Eye you have no reason to invest in Keen Senses, for instance (unless you want Vision or Premonition, but you can still get those from escorts.)

I just checked, looks like stealth crits and shadowstrike crit power work for spells/mindpowers too. To my surprise, it looks like the shadowstrike reduction based on range works on any kind of talent as well.

Mex wrote:The description states attacks. If it does crit any spell, even then you're basically making a poor "investment" because you will probably eventually reach 100% crit chance even on Insane.

I can confirm that Stealth crits everything that can crit not just attacks.

In concrete terms Stealth helps out Barrier a lot and Time Shield not at all. This is perhaps not surprising since Anorthil have a crit/cunning focus. Anyway absolutely everything auto-crits that can crit in stealth. In the full scope of the game the Stealth becomes less powerful as you level since the crit chance goes from great to not as great compartively.

However it provides two advantages:

1) Its a very good crit mult addition, you would need roughly about three other talents from 3 different trees to get the same crit mult (for example combining the Thug and Shalore talents is about 50% +crit mult).

2) It allows you the budget other things into your equipment instead of crit chance.

One of the caveats to #2 is that often crit chance and crit mult go together on equipment, also if you need to budget stealth rating into equipment you get no advantage. So especially for melee who usually use equipment to augment stealth rating you may not see equipment returns. However you should in theory wind up with a straight up better crit mult than many builds and have more room in your loadout for other things since you need less Cunning and crit rate items. That may sound weird since Stealth rating is based on Cunning but many builds raise Cunning for the crit percent but it seems that by managing position and number of things in LOS you may get away with simply average Cunning.

Another caveat is that on the higher difficulties you tend to get more gear and better gear. There are WAY more rares and they drop pretty good stuff. You also gain levels faster.

So in higher diffculties leveraging an equipment advantage may also become less and less useful and the higher end crit rating will become available earlier thus doing a double whammy on the relative advantages.

All in all stealth is really not overpowered in anyway compared to other options, its just an out of the box effect basket you can get in other ways. However if you plan to run a strategy that will most likely keep you in stealth without a heavy equipment investment it is a very nice crit mult enhancer for only one skill tree, at the cost of a fairly heavy class point investment. From an adventurer point of view it may be a rather efficient way to get a lot of crit mult from a Cat point perspective but not a class point perspective (roughly same for class poiints at the cost of the mechancis of stealth itself).

I do not think stealth builds are really the height of min/maxing, I was making that adventurer to see how a more optimised version of a similar build worked out in Insane. I really don't think Stealth is appropiate in Madness (perhaps interesting to try just for grins). I haven't actually unlocked madness but the special effect of being "hunted" is most likely something that is very bad for stealth. There is another caveat there, in that Stealth seems to have an effect of making it much easier to lose mobs who want to chase you, perhaps that can help, but I suspect its nullified.

But I will say trying to make Stealth work out in Insane is kind of fun. Its an interesting extra wrinkle. It may become annoying instead of fun by the time you get to High peak.

I had heard Stealth is worhtless on Insane and I suspect that is probably true for melee, but I think it can work on Insane for ranged.


As for Bone Shield yeah its not working like I was thinking. I was assuming Bone shield was before Disruption Shield but its not. So its only real use together is for use as a back buffer.

In general Bone Shield itself is not a great overall mitigation tool. It is however an amazing alpha strike nullifier or buffer. I am currently running an arcane combat/brawler type build that I also am using the Bone/Disrupt shield I have had a bit more time to play with it and its not going to meet my original idea of using it as a frontloaded buffer to manager disrupt shield and mana since disrupt will intercept damage instead of BS when both are active. It may turn out to be useful though as a back buff for when Disrupt shield fails. A very large hit can still go through your disrupt shield and it seems possible that having Bone shield as a barrier of last resort may be useful. This scheme seems non-ideal in that when Disrupt fails you essentially get a DOT that will also diminish BS. However it may not matter really in that the idea is to simply put a hard stop on something extremely nasty so you can get outta dodge and/or give you some margin of error.

In the end though if I can get Disrupt shield to work the way I want then Bone shield was probably a waste and have the Unarmed Disciplined combo kick to remove 5 sustains of any type would be three points cheaper and very powerful on Insane+. Or possibly speed control as this build is meant to be fast. Or possibly Sun for path of the sun. Or another inscription. Or the tree with corrupted negation and spell crit sustain.

I will see how it works out and if BS offers a use in the idea of a sort ablative hard stop as a complement to true mitigation of disrupt shield + aegis (this build has temporal too) but I have a suspicion that I should have taken another tree. I never use Bone shield as a main mitigator, but I like it a lot for use as very nice margin of error thing. With perfect play and certain tools (track, clairvoyance) Bone Shield is of lesser value, but as an anti-WTF skill it has value when used in combination with a REAL defense.

Mex is probably right that in the end Unstoppable is the pure min/max way. But I don't like it really, I feel its kind of uninteresting. Its just binary effect set in stone effect. I just can't see myself playing a whole game using it. And bloodthrist would work well with the above build since it causes bleeding all the time (stone tree) and that would give very good resistance penatration.

Its true that Bloodthrist instead of Bone would almsot certainly make the build better. But I was kind of purposely trying to make it not use Unstoppable.

You can even do Unstoppable and Disruption together and I may try that on Madness if I ever get around to such a thing when I unlock it and if this build works out. But probably not I just don't like unstoppable.

grayswandir wrote:I just checked, looks like stealth crits and shadowstrike crit power work for spells/mindpowers too. To my surprise, it looks like the shadowstrike reduction based on range works on any kind of talent as well.

Yes, you can basically quite safely use a power at range 8 even with really bad stealth. So if you were a melee shadow blade, doing a barrier from range ten and then shadowstep is almost always gonna be a "safe" move (the barrier part).

It seems that people miss this a lot and think SB are super flimsy, when in fact they can use a "poor man's unstoppable" by shield a rather large barrier and/or bathe in the light at range and the shadowstep + various speed boosts.

A melee SB should in theory on normal difficulty be able to shadowstep with a roughly 3k shield that has about 3 turns(or a 800 to 1.2k 10 turn barrier) on it and attacks at about, what, like 300% with momentum +blinding speed+ essence of speed+ eden's guile+ cripple to debuff their speed.

The only real stealth risk will be the subsequent melee, and you will crit all the Light shields including Bathe in the Light.

I wouldn't say its the same as an unstoppable marauder. Buyt when you consider crit Light shields and Timeshield even melee SB's don't need to be squishy and from range (without many observers) all actions are quite safe in stealth.

cctobias wrote:In general Bone Shield itself is not a great overall mitigation tool. It is however an amazing alpha strike nullifier or buffer. I am currently running an arcane combat/brawler type build that I also am using the Bone/Disrupt shield I have had a bit more time to play with it and its not going to meet my original idea of using it as a frontloaded buffer to manager disrupt shield and mana since disrupt will intercept damage instead of BS when both are active. It may turn out to be useful though as a back buff for when Disrupt shield fails. A very large hit can still go through your disrupt shield and it seems possible that having Bone shield as a barrier of last resort may be useful. This scheme seems non-ideal in that when Disrupt fails you essentially get a DOT that will also diminish BS. However it may not matter really in that the idea is to simply put a hard stop on something extremely nasty so you can get outta dodge and/or give you some margin of error.

In the end though if I can get Disrupt shield to work the way I want then Bone shield was probably a waste and have the Unarmed Disciplined combo kick to remove 5 sustains of any type would be three points cheaper and very powerful on Insane+. Or possibly speed control as this build is meant to be fast. Or possibly Sun for path of the sun. Or another inscription. Or the tree with corrupted negation and spell crit sustain.

I'd pick Wild-gifts/Ooze 1/1/1/5 other these, if only for the ~50% crits shrug off, since it's usually crits that go through your shields. The immunities are great too, and the tree is even better on a wild-less Shalore, since you can get 10 turns of +40% resist all on demand along your 10 turns of Draconic Will with Timeless (you may have to invest an extra point or two in Reabsorb to get to 10, but it's worth it - as both crits and damage reduction are applied before shields, I believe.)

cctobias wrote:A melee SB should in theory on normal difficulty be able to shadowstep with a roughly 3k shield that has about 3 turns(or a 800 to 1.2k 10 turn barrier) on it and attacks at about, what, like 300% with momentum +blinding speed+ essence of speed+ eden's guile+ cripple to debuff their speed.

Do Blinding Speed and Eden's Guile stack now? Last time I checked, it seemed they applied the same Speed effect and overwrote each other.

jaumito wrote:

cctobias wrote:In general Bone Shield itself is not a great overall mitigation tool. It is however an amazing alpha strike nullifier or buffer. I am currently running an arcane combat/brawler type build that I also am using the Bone/Disrupt shield I have had a bit more time to play with it and its not going to meet my original idea of using it as a frontloaded buffer to manager disrupt shield and mana since disrupt will intercept damage instead of BS when both are active. It may turn out to be useful though as a back buff for when Disrupt shield fails. A very large hit can still go through your disrupt shield and it seems possible that having Bone shield as a barrier of last resort may be useful. This scheme seems non-ideal in that when Disrupt fails you essentially get a DOT that will also diminish BS. However it may not matter really in that the idea is to simply put a hard stop on something extremely nasty so you can get outta dodge and/or give you some margin of error.

In the end though if I can get Disrupt shield to work the way I want then Bone shield was probably a waste and have the Unarmed Disciplined combo kick to remove 5 sustains of any type would be three points cheaper and very powerful on Insane+. Or possibly speed control as this build is meant to be fast. Or possibly Sun for path of the sun. Or another inscription. Or the tree with corrupted negation and spell crit sustain.

I'd pick Wild-gifts/Ooze 1/1/1/5 other these, if only for the ~50% crits shrug off, since it's usually crits that go through your shields. The immunities are great too, and the tree is even better on a wild-less Shalore, since you can get 10 turns of +40% resist all on demand along your 10 turns of Draconic Will with Timeless (you may have to invest an extra point or two in Reabsorb to get to 10, but it's worth it - as both crits and damage reduction are applied before shields, I believe.)

Yeah that makes sense, although I don't have oozemancer unlocked. Also they seem kind of OP and I think one of the compensations for that is they are forced into AM, so I sort of avoid them on adventurers.

In a pure game the system perspective its a very valid point, that plus decent dex would defintely be nice. Maybe the temptation will get to me. I did drown a bunch of guys in Last Hope just for power ....

I forget about EG and Blinding I think you might be right, I was just shoving em all together as an example .

Edit: in fact I am kinda of the opinion that when you take oozemancer stuff as an adventurer it should give you the same effect taking AM does of disallowing arcane items and forcing you to be Zigur. Kind of like taking Absorption gives you TK grasp.

http://te4.org/characters/91775/tome/58 ... cedfa4da85

I tried the build on insane and got to the final bosses! And then I died (which is a shame). During the mid game I was getting detected by some rares which kicked me out of stealth, but I just teleported away and came back. In the final battle I wasn't being kicked out of stealth at all, and the 6k pre-shield I had was useful. But it wasn't really enough, I kept getting brainlocked/frozen/flameshocked so my shields/heals/utilities were on cooldown and providence and pursuit weren't enough to deal with it. I probably would've been able to win if I was a shalore, with the points in timeless for using that for removing conditions, reducing cooldowns, but I suspect that it may just have ended up the same case, with being flameshocked and unable to keep up my defenses. I just think I managed the final fight poorly, and that's a real shame cause it would've been nice to with a funny build like this.

Killing some uniques at end-game with a few channel staffs was extremely satisfying though, so not a total loss.

thaagi wrote:http://te4.org/characters/91775/tome/58 ... cedfa4da85

I tried the build on insane and got to the final bosses! And then I died (which is a shame). During the mid game I was getting detected by some rares which kicked me out of stealth, but I just teleported away and came back. In the final battle I wasn't being kicked out of stealth at all, and the 6k pre-shield I had was useful. But it wasn't really enough, I kept getting brainlocked/frozen/flameshocked so my shields/heals/utilities were on cooldown and providence and pursuit weren't enough to deal with it. I probably would've been able to win if I was a shalore, with the points in timeless for using that for removing conditions, reducing cooldowns, but I suspect that it may just have ended up the same case, with being flameshocked and unable to keep up my defenses. I just think I managed the final fight poorly, and that's a real shame cause it would've been nice to with a funny build like this.

Killing some uniques at end-game with a few channel staffs was extremely satisfying though, so not a total loss.

Yes I never tried this build on Insane after doing some other things on the higher difficulties. But this is somewhere in the neighborhood of what I expected. Pretty good a lot of the times, probably interesting and satisfying, but for certain key things lacking a certain oomph. You can make builds that will literally destroy the Final bosses in just a few rounds. But even at normal difficulties this is not really one of those, especailly for certain damage types.

I think its possibly winnable, but you probably have to be lucky in itemizaiton and also a very good/knowledgable player. Also on Insane the whole stealth thing becomes much less favorable.

All in all my conclusion was that slight variation of the build with an adventurer would be more fun. Something intentiionally very similar and not looking for OP syngeries but adding some interesting things. For example I did a Gravity/Stone based variation on this in Insane up to about level 25 and that was pretty fun (pre-chrono changes). It added some interesting control options and give some damage help from stone with head knocker, but was mostly the same. Such a build is in no-way as powerful as an AM, but its interesting.

Sweet, I actually tried a similar build but while it cleared out normal mobs fine, the horned horror in the maze owned me so hard it wasn't even fun. The light(even from stealth with high crit) barely did any damage on him. I used teleport a lot until he grappled me and I died(I always play roguelike(just normal, trying to beat the game)). My spec was probably just bad, but it wasn't faceroll that's one thing for sure.

<edit> I'm just curious how do you deal with Horned Horror in the maze? I've had him appear twice and killed me both times. I guess just save it for last, ie after daikara because that is probably "easier" than him... Minotaur is face roll of course, but never got him on a shadowblade. Also getting that 600g just by using illuminate seems like quite the challenge. I can pick a lot of classes that are way better than the light shadowblade up to 15-20. I know how good it becomes when you can channel the staff, but before that it's really risky and high death chance everywhere. Don't think I've skipped so many bosses on any other character I've done because they'd just rip you apart unless you're very close to their level or have some good drops. Ie the last troll in trollmire, Norgo's Lair(some of the rares can be nasty and last boss can really chew you up if you're not careful), Heart of the Gloom(that cat... cheesus). If I get some good drops then they all die on first roll through the places, but that rarely happen.

So I just won my second game (on normal adventure, I'm a reckless player), playing a staff Shadowmage. Here is the link: http://te4.org/characters/152470/tome/6 ... d308563c05.

In ToME 1.5 stealth now starts unlocked for shadowmages, so I played a Shalore and was able to unlock both light and temporal trees and still have all 5 inscriptions. My one cheat was that I used the Select Your Escorts addon. I accessed the item vault but only to place items in it (trying to collect The Black set). I decided to concentrate on darkness damage for my channel staff attacks because I wanted to pick Armour of Shadow as one of my prodigies with the idea that I could stay in stealth more easily. I lucked out and found a lamp of the moons early on which gave me Moonlight Ray and did most of my early damage and I used it all the way to the end. The 10 range on it was nice. I got Arcane Might for my second prodigy. By the end game I had about 175% darkness damage, 80% darkness penetration, and about 270% crit multiplier. This resulted in many 2000+ damage crits with my channel staff.

A couple of things about the new stealth mechanics in 1.5. Both good and bad.

Instant actions (non-attack actions at least) no longer break stealth, so healing infusions (instead of regeneration) actually have more value for stealthy classes now. Although I chose to use the eternal night items when I found them, so had to change my healing, heroism, and movements to shields and controlled phase doors (the merchant gave me boots that were of the void and gave 40% resist all after a teleport. I killed things so quickly I rarely had to use them. It amused me whenever I was forcefully teleported by an enemy.)

It is no longer possible to stay permanently stealthed as Unseen Actions has been replaced with Shadow Dance. Instead Shadow Dance is an activated talent (instant use) that gives you a set number of turns (5 maxed out) of remaining in stealth even if you take non-stealthy actions. Timeless of course will extend that duration. This means you don't have to do everything possible to maximize stealth, as you will get at least 5 turns of guaranteed stealth once a fight is engaged.

The Shadowstrike crit multiplier effect (though not the autocrit) lasts 4 turns after stealth ends.

Hide In Plain Sight has been replaced with Soothing Darkness. It seems the comparison between your stealth and the enemies' detection has been removed for the purpose of reentering stealth or maintaining stealth with the last two talents in the tree. Instead it is a straight up check to see if enemies are within range and thereby preventing entering stealth. If you are in an unlit square (hence why I chose Armour of Shadow), Soothing Darkness lowers that distance (down to 0 at higher talent levels) and if Stealth is not on cooldown you can use it. A similar check is also made at the end of a shadow Dance to remain in stealth and soothing darkness affects that check as well, of course taking unstealthy actions afterwards will break that stealth, so I found myself watching the Shadow Dance timer in any difficult battle.

Overall, I like the changes.