Meteoric Madness Build/Leveling Guide - Madness Winner

[ghostbuster]

Concerning the prodigies, flexible combat is a must, of course.

But why not replace draconic will by either
- arcane might (that will roughly give you +30% melee damage)
- or eye of the tiger (that will give you a double strike every 2 turns, with also approximately +30% damage)

Draconic will can be replaced by a wild infusion and a unique movement infusion should be enough...

[Effigy]

On Insane+ difficulties, you get absurd amounts of negative effects on you. Movement + wild infusions help, but they aren't really enough on their own.

[cctobias]

Concerning the prodigies, flexible combat is a must, of course.

But why not replace draconic will by either
- arcane might (that will roughly give you +30% melee damage)
- or eye of the tiger (that will give you a double strike every 2 turns, with also approximately +30% damage)

Draconic will can be replaced by a wild infusion and a unique movement infusion should be enough...

I am not 100% sure, but I believe there is some wiggle room here. I am not 100% convinced that Draconic Will is entirely necessary for this build. I think it is probably the most bang for your buck especially if you play the build as roguelike. As Effigy says there are tons of negative effects and in certain very annoying places draconic will really shines even if 90% to time you are ok.

But beyond that, given that this build with the stats enumerated can kill the final bosses before you out of time, do you need more damage?

Secondly both of those increase melee damage. I killed Argoniel (admittedly a special case he may or may not have the crazy armor value) solely with procs from Earthen missile and Arcane might would have had no effect on that. An extra double strike here and there would help but not that much.

In the end my evaluation is the build does enough damage, so being consistently and reliably unimpeded and fast is much more important (especially since that is also a contributor to overall damage and efficiency).

Now you are perfectly able to swap of these around and I think you can even make it work. I just don't think you will see the returns on it.

Eye of the tiger may seem nice as this build has LOTS of crits. But EoT is limited to one per action and in the end the build just doesn't benefit that much as only double strike really gets helped. But EoT may not apply to DS, its random which one it descreses and you have a lot of "noise" from various long CD skills that may get hit instead.

All in all I would say don't do EoT you should (I have not tested it) find it to be quite bad on this build I think. Many things just have too long of a CD to really help much and they will get hit instead. And in the end, unlike a normal brawler, DS is not really a huge thing its just a nice thing that weight unarmed as better than other Magic Combat options. Arcane Might you can try but I don't think it will be noticably better (obviously it must increase some, but the effect will be negligible) such that having complete immunity will be obvious better/more conviennt. I would say that even when Draconic Will is no longer extended by Timeless it will still be a better option.


On a related note it may be possible to repuprose aspects of this build to seriously reduce certain cooldowns via the Meta line and spell CD reduction similar to what Mex does in his Archmage guide. I purposely opted not to do this for two reason:
1) Unstoppable is cheesy enough and I didn't want extra cheese on my pizza
2) if the base idea of the build worked then it was pointless (i.e. kill everything before Unstoppable is out else hide and rest).


So for people who really want to leverage killer CDs on Timeless and getting rid of Draconic Will for something else that may a potential avenue. I would say that such a thing would take precise tuning and some pretty serious thought and testing to make it work out in Madness. While such a variation may only wind up something like 8 class points different it would still be a very significant change gameplay wise, such that I cannot tell you in an reliable way what its performance would be like. However I think its possible and maybe even feasible.

Edit: I think for the above variation EOT may work well, not sure, in that EM procs should consistently reduce spell CDs and you can possibly get Metaflow going pretty regular and get mabye like 20-30% spell reduc on items. Then you can completely get tid of Draconic Will by using Timeless to remove tons of conditions. Additionally if you ramp up your mana on spell crit some you may be able to do something like leverage Aegis instead of Unstoppable.

Edit2: This Aegis variation theme was originally something I was trying to make, but it was hard to get right and there were too many conccurent variables to juggle. So I opted for the "known" strategy of making a "magic marauder". I would still like to see something like this build using AM style defense instead of marauder. This build should be taken a reference. Ultimately I would like to see something in this vein that does not use Unstoppable. I may or may not invest the time into this. One of the main reason I opted for this build as first step is that winning in Madness is a fairly major investment and I wanted a godo ROI (return on investment).

[ghostbuster]

I tried some variations around this great concept and I experimented an interesting unstoppable-less variant.

The basic idea is to also use the defensive skills of brawlers. Precisely strinking stance gives a flat damage reduction that can be very high (30-35 in the late game). Now, combine this with bone shield. Bone shield is one of the most powerful defensive talent in the game, but it can be completely ruined by DoT, terrain effects, melee project, etc. So the idea is to have a build that combines both. With the psionic shields that initially reduce the taken damage, high resistances and the brawler flat damage armor, most small effects are filtered out and deal no damage. This includes poison, most bleeding, most burning, some diseases, all melee or range projections, wretchling acid vapour or lasting effect, most terrain effect (except some infernos), many melee attacks by critters (even in the late game), etc. Actually it depends on your resists and your investment in the psionic shields, but you can this way ignore damage up to 150!!! This has the interesting effect to let the bone shield active for *real* damage, that fortunately is not so frequent.

I experimented that up to the prides and it seems to work (after, I encoutered a bug that gave me 50+ permanent HP regen and the game became boring). This is more difficult as you miss the unstoppable emergency button, but quite playable.

Here is the build:
Pugilism
unarmed discipline
magical combat
absorption (I suggest 3300 to 1/ increase your resists and 2/ get the useful psionic shield on deactivate)
stone
corruption/bone (1115, but some investment in bone grab can be useful)
Temporal
Meta is not so useful. So I replace it with cunning/tactical. This gives you a *high* defence that will suppress some blows (and thus protect your bone shield) + extra melee attacks (and extra missiles!). Not sure about the usefulness of exploit weakness. It complements the crystalline focus, but the phys damage reduction is nasty....

Unarmed mastery
I replaced conveyance by another mobility tree. Indeed I considered
scoundrel: nice bleeding synergy, nimble movement is a good shord range teleport and misdirection increases your defence. But I have some doubts about lacerating strikes. Not sure of the exact mechanism, but I think that instead of improving your bleeding effects, when lacerating strikes are applied, they will reduce the bleeding applied/turn by rescaling it on 10 turns...
ambush: many useful talents. But no real escape...
acrobatics: a couple of efficient escapes and trained reactions can be useful if your shield crumbles.
But I finally selected psionic/augmented mobility. All the talents are useful for this build (extra movement speed, extra speed and crits, distant grab and short range targeted teleport. More they are not spells and can be used while silenced or manaclashed.
If you have an extra cat point (cornac), I would suggest chronomancy/energy to get an extra damage reduction.


Concerning the race, it can be shalore, but this is no longer a requirement.
I played a halfling (for crits, status removal and evasion).
Thalore can also be interesting. For the extra resist all and disease immunity (as diseases are the main remaining DoT).
Also undeads. Indeed I found the mummy set. When complete it adds 30 flat damage armor (around 50-100 extra damage avoidance!). It was great, but without any way to heal, the build was not viable. But a skel with the mummy set and protected by a bone shield would be very powerful.

One last word. The main issue in this build are RESISTS. Much much more than other chars. In general, taking no damage or taking 1HP damage does not make a great difference. But for this build it does. 1 HP damage means one bone of your shield destroyed, and a large part of the build is about protecting the shield. Increasing resistances will reduce the amount that is passed to the flat damage armor and give it a larger chance to remove all the damage. So increase your resistances to improve your chances to survive. If you find the eternity counter, use it in the defensive version (10% resists, 10 flat damage armor!). I also had a phase door rune with 50% resists as an emergency escape. With such resistances you completely avoid all small to medium damage.
The second issue is defence. With a high defence you will ignore most ennemies melee attacks, leaving the bone shield available for difficult ennemies.

[jdisk]

I just finished playing (basically) the original build on Insane (adventure). A few stupid deaths, but that's why I play adventure.
Once it got going, the build really is overpowered. It feels somewhat like Doombringer on Normal.
In the end, the biggest problem was me running into my own missiles with Step up

Talking about speed: In the late game I got like 4 attacks per round (with Grace active, I had 192% global speed and 216% attack speed) Plus several of my items had slow on hit, so most of the time I attacked about 8 times for each enemy attack.

A few remarks:

• An mentioned in the original, mana is a big limitation and "mana on crit" items seem to be rare. I found my second one only around level 40. That was when the build got really sweet.
• Stamina is also a bit of a problem
• Since in the end, generic points are no problem, I went with Wild Gift/Harmony (which is unlocked anyway). With "One with Nature" and a low cooldown movement infusion, I never felt the need for a second movement infusion. And if "One with Nature" got triggered with fire, you just kill even faster

[Effigy]

I tried this briefly on Madness, but I decided Madness isn't for me, at least for now. Some of the rare+ mobs are just ridiculous, even in Trollmire.

I tried it again on Insane (Roguelike) and found the start to be a little rough with Time Shield as the only real defensive skill. It's also really hard to find decent gloves during start scumming, so I ended up having to use conventional weapons during the early game. I'll try it again, but it feels like a late bloomer unless you manage to get good T3+ gloves from drowning. That's probably more realistic on Madness, but I rarely find gloves on Insane.

[daed4]

How you feel about psy fighting instead of absorption?
You get a % of cun to dex for even more dex which sounds good-ish.

[cctobias]

How you feel about psy fighting instead of absorption?
You get a % of cun to dex for even more dex which sounds good-ish.

Short answer is getting there takes too many points.

For the purposes of this build specifically you can choose anything that will let you psychically wield a staff, BUT this build is tight on points and you will almost certainly not be able to put a point or two into that psychic tree. You are basically trading a cat point to get the third wield. For a one point investment I think absorption is the best investment as it helps early on as well.

For a variation on this build you can certainly feel out something like psy fighting, but you gotta find the points somehow. Certainly for an Insane target build you could do something that reduced damage, I would say you would wind up less effective, but I believe it can still be effective enough and maybe fun.

With this build you will probably find any attempt to free up points will either make you much worse at covering ground or do much less damage or sacrifice time left in unstoppable. On Madness you can't really sacrifice any of those except maybe the ground coverage, on Insane you can sacrifice in damage or unstoppable time if you have good equipment to help the damage get nice and overwhelming.

I put a lot of thought into this decision, i.e. which psychic line to use, and while I really did want to get the stat boosts from psy fighting, I simply couldn't make it work without some sacrifice on what I would call a "multiplicative synergy" vs a simple stat addition. I simply couldn't escape the issue of trading a multiplication for an addition and the easy one point investment of absorption was something I was always forced back into. Also psy fighting works really poorly with brawling.

It can be made to work fine in Insane I am sure, but in the end and given the point of the build, pretty much any deviation from absorption will be less optimal in the strictest sense.

Keep in mind your main use for dex is simply get to get more procs on weapon focus, so while its tempting, this build achieves 70% proc rate. So the sacrifices you make to get, maybe, 3% extra proc rate are not really worth it. Its another one of those things that sounds like a good synergy and to some extent it is, but when you fully plot it all out really only is additive and at the extremes only adds a small amount. Whereas something like step up, which is very hard to quantify, adds a huge amount of tactical superiority. So taking points out of step up for, optimistically, +5% weapon focus proc rate is really poor.

You can probably do a variation of this build that uses psi-fighting, but you probably want to switch over to something like the shield and staff build Effigy has done and do some significant monkeying around. If you wanted to keep almost everything the same with this builds I will say its doable but less optimal. My analysis was basically any real attempt to leverage the psychic lines beyond the first point to gain the ability to psychically wield a staff is basically detrimental.

[daed4]

Thanks!
That was very insightful, now I know and that's half of the fight(game?)!

[wuxiangjinxing]

Very sad. In 1.3 Unstoppable can no longer be extended by Timeless. So this build may not work in the new version.

Gesus, how can a melee character ever have a chance to survive MADNESS?

[cctobias]

Very sad. In 1.3 Unstoppable can no longer be extended by Timeless. So this build may not work in the new version.

Gesus, how can a melee character ever have a chance to survive MADNESS?

Yeah this always had a limited timespan. Also Draconic Will is going to unextendable although that is a less serious issue. It might still be workable with potion of invulnerability but its gonna be much more of a pain in the ass to run. 7 turns seems a bit tight though. You probably need to do even more damage through gear than this guy had.

Honestly nothing is technically supposed to win Madness.

Perhaps the change will make it more reasonable on Insane. I dunno. Unstoppable is kind of a cheesy ability that, personally, I don't think should even exist. Its too late to remove it without guttinger berzerker and marauder, but mechanics wise its extremely uninteresting and I don't like it. I only chose it because marauders had won madness before.

So it makes me a little sad to see it make the build, probably, not quite work on madness. But it makes me happy because unstoppable is an ability I just don't like in general.

But yeah tactically melee are extremely disadvantaged. Just the ability to do damage when not in LOS is a huge difference.

Perhaps someone can make a variation with an alternate defense without impairing damage too much. This build kills MUCH faster than an AM so you technically don't need the long term survival they do and it is very fast so you should have space to cast a shield or two. I think this build kills things in like 10x less turns than a Madness AM. Dunno its pretty hard to fit in other defensive lines without losing like 20-30% damage though.

Its hard to say because there are so very few defenses known to be sufficent for Madness. I am not entirely sure how SeeJust survives on his rather unique alchemy/chronomancy wins (of which he has multiple with various variations). Obviously that is not melee, I think he uses mostly Throw Bomb, and he may even be using extra range type stuff.

But the main thing is to re-tool the build you would need a pretty solid idea of what kind of defense you would use versus your killing time. Fortunately this build can be used as a good reference for killing time. Unfortunately I don't really know what is an adequate defense, possibly mimicing the shielding AM has but the seems tricky and hard to fit, but the build has very good crit and could do pretty good crit. And possibly with meta you can get the good CDs and large 15k or so shield of Mex's AM build. The trade off for corner crits is that hopefully even with a drop in damage due to something like less points in weapon focus or step up, you would still kill like 5x faster than an AM, meaning you need less shields and you are less hurt by things that heal alot. If you are hitting for 15k multiple times in one 1000 energy "turn" and they are healing for 3k once per "turn" its annoying but not a big deal whereas it hurts AM a lot and they need wildfire to cleanse it.

One of the problems there is that managing disruption shield is probably going to be rather tricky and your mana requirements change a lot as well. I dunno, maybe it possible maybe its not.

I can say one thing for sure you will have no more than half the time in Unstoppable with no extensions. Therefore you would need to do double the damage to finish the final fight in a similar way and that is pretty unlikely. The gear on this guy is pretty high end, its possible to get higher but I don't see double. Its possible to do something like save the poition of invulnerability for the final fight to get somewhere around 12 turns, but you will probably have some 10-12 turn engagements before that as well etc.

Aegis can be fit into the generics, but that is a cat point. Displacement shield requires another cat point and Mex's AM uses Light line too. I think you could actually shift around skill/generic points to possibly make that work but the problem is alters too many cat points. Maybe just Aegis + light and massive crits+spellpower is enough to give you enough time to kill things. I dunno, it seems like there may be room there on a build that does massive damage, but Adventurers are just so tight.

Its an interesting build challenge. Building Adventurers strong is actually a lot more challenging than people give it credit for. Many Adventurers don't wind up any more OP than an Oozemancer. Getting past that bar takes some really efficient design. Seems like there is some room, maybe some can figure something out on the defense side.

[Mankeli]

Very sad. In 1.3 Unstoppable can no longer be extended by Timeless. So this build may not work in the new version.

Gesus, how can a melee character ever have a chance to survive MADNESS?

Seeing that temporal wardens damage smearing got a nerf too, I don't know if a non-item vaulted non-adventurer roguelike melee character can complete madness in 1.3 at all (yes, this is a challenge for all you mad people out there, lol).

Its hard to say because there are so very few defenses known to be sufficent for Madness. I am not entirely sure how SeeJust survives on his rather unique alchemy/chronomancy wins (of which he has multiple with various variations). Obviously that is not melee, I think he uses mostly Throw Bomb, and he may even be using extra range type stuff.

The deathless run in online vaults has both damage smearing and aegis.

[Effigy]

Mex unlocks Celestial/Light, but he really only needs Bathe in Light. If you used Succor mod, you could just get 5/5 Bathe without unlocking the category. Perhaps that's a little cheesy, but for playing melee on Madness, I say use whatever advantage you can.

I feel like Disruption Shield could work really well on this build due to the huge mana usage. If you kept a "+mana on spell crit" item to swap in as needed and just played without it most of the time, you should have no problem burning mana to keep DS sustained. Spell/Aegis would replace Techniques/Bloodthirst, so it only really costs one more cat point to do this version assuming you don't unlock additional defenses. You might even get away with playing Cornac for the extra category, but Shalore does have a lot of nice buffs, even without extending Unstoppable or Draconic Will.

If you're not relying on the timer of Unstoppable, you can probably drop Step Up to free up some points.

[Effigy]

So I crunched the numbers and this seems like a workable 1.3 Aegis version of the build:

Race
Cornac is required, for category points and lack of generics for Shalore racials.

Stats
Magic > Cunning > Dexterity

Class
Techniques/Pugilism
1/1/2/4 = 8
Techniques/Unarmed Discipline
5/0/0/0 = 5
Techniques/Magical Combat
5/1/1+/5 = 12+ (Note: In 1.3, you need 5/5 Arcane Destruction for max range/damage.)
Spell/Stone
5/1/1/5 = 12
Techniques/Battle Tactics
5/0+/0/0 = 5+
Spell/Meta
3/1/1+/4 = 9+
Spell/Arcane
1/1/1/5 = 8
Spell/Temporal
1/1+/1/5 = 8+
------------------------------
Total = 71 talents, 8 categories

Generic
Psionic/Augmented Mobility
1/5/0+/0+ = 6+
Techniques/Unarmed Training
5/5/5/2+ = 17+
Spell/Conveyance
5/1+/0/0 = 6+
Spell/Aegis
3+/5/1/1+ = 10+
Techniques/Combat Training (buy)
5/1/5/0/0 = 11
Spell/Staff Combat (buy)
0+/0+/0/0 = 0+
------------------------------
Total = 50 talents, 4 categories

I used Psionic/Augmented Mobility instead of Psionic/Absorption because we're too tight on class points, plus this gives us a nice speed buff to replace Shalore's Grace of the Eternals. The build needs the Elixir of Focus for class points; Elixir of Foundations is recommended, but not required. You would need to use the Succor addon to get 5/5 Bathe in Light from escorts. If you wanted to actually unlock Celestial/Light or get a 4th inscription, you could drop either Spell/Arcane or Spell/Temporal. I would also consider dropping Step Up to get 5/5 Quicken Spells, as long as you can support another 80 mana sustain. I didn't include any points in Staff Mastery because it's not strictly required and can be gained from escorts.

EDIT: I forgot to account for the extra levels in Arcane Destruction, so it's necessary to drop Step Up unless you shave points elsewhere

[cctobias]

Mex unlocks Celestial/Light, but he really only needs Bathe in Light. If you used Succor mod, you could just get 5/5 Bathe without unlocking the category. Perhaps that's a little cheesy, but for playing melee on Madness, I say use whatever advantage you can.

I feel like Disruption Shield could work really well on this build due to the huge mana usage. If you kept a "+mana on spell crit" item to swap in as needed and just played without it most of the time, you should have no problem burning mana to keep DS sustained. Spell/Aegis would replace Techniques/Bloodthirst, so it only really costs one more cat point to do this version assuming you don't unlock additional defenses. You might even get away with playing Cornac for the extra category, but Shalore does have a lot of nice buffs, even without extending Unstoppable or Draconic Will.

If you're not relying on the timer of Unstoppable, you can probably drop Step Up to free up some points.

Yes a Iagree step up can definitely be done without when you have a "stable" defense and conveyance as well. Although I do really like step up in general.