Tanking Madness - Partially Tested Build

[K2Grey]

I was theorycrafting builds for tanking Madness straight up with an Adventurer, without using Stormshield runes or disabling enemies. But then I read some advice from Tradewind Rider to actually test builds in dev mode and see what it's like. So I dev mode'd up a character, endgamified it and teleported to High Peak and Gorbat 3 and the attached is an example of what happens. I stitched together the damage instances into one image. The full log is too big to attach, but it's uploaded here: https://imgur.com/a/5hr8XVY

So uh, it might save some time to know in advance you have to be able to tank this kind of damage.

My endgamified character actually survived that turn, and he had only 183% crit mult and 150% healmod. With actual endgame Madness quality gear it would be more like 300% crit mult and 250% healmod and Shield of Light would be healing for 200 per hit, which would have been enough to keep me up. But as soon as the character got disarmed or sustain stripped it'd be all over, and there were way too many detrimental effects for Meta+Chants to keep up with. If I took Torment as well for Blood Vengeance (not sure what category I would sacrifice, maybe Energy?), I think that would effectively allow using the Chants to remove effects every turn, and finding Untouchable would be really helpful defensively. With 100% disarm immunity from double Iron Hand gloves, I think it'd be possible to hold up for a while, but running out of positive energy and double sustain removal (to get past Aether Permeation) would be killers.

The build was: Flux, Necrosis, Solipsism, Energy, Meta, Fate Weaving, Spacetime Weaving, Chants, Agility, Spellbinding, Guardian if anyone wants to try improving it.

BTW, Ivemira the orc master wyrmic was a Rogue with 217% global speed (with Blinding Speed), 313% movement speed and (with Blade Flurry up) 180% attack speed, and a +2426% Lightning Speed so that boy goes fast.

[Tradewind_Rider]

The build was: Flux, Necrosis, Solipsism, Energy, Meta, Fate Weaving, Spacetime Weaving, Chants, Agility, Spellbinding, Guardian if anyone wants to try improving it.

If i would like to tank madness - without debuffing enemies and without e.g. stormshields - i would go with
an invulnerability effect, that cannot be removed (so other effect).

Back in 1.5 I made some adventurers around Suspend, I wrote a character description here about 1 of them.


Class - Meta, Sun, Timethief, Spacetime Folding
Generic - Spacetime Weaving

You will need to reach level 25 & chose Hidden Resources prodigy.


These trees will provide you a nice core with 100% invulnerability that cannot be removed.
Meanwhile, you will continously deal damage to your enemies & debuff all your enemies too.

The mechanism behind this is to have ~ 83%+ spell cooldown reduction (30% Spellcraft, 20% from items, 33%+ from Suncloak).
This will reduce Suspends cooldown from 28 to 5, so you can continously cast Suspend all the time.

You will be invulnerable & you will have all effect immunity.
Before casting your Suspend, you just have to set up at least 2 Spatial Tethers at least 7 tiles away from each other.
None of your beneficial effects' duration will be reduced so you will have your tethers infinitely.
Tethers are independent actors, so it does not matter if you are out of the timeflow.

The only things that can affect you are effect/sustain removals.
But even if your Spellcraft, Suncloak is removed, you are still invulnerable during the Suspend,
so you can react to this & e.g. you can go into Temporal Reprieve and reset everything.

Ofc these are just 5 talent categories, so I would add some extra for early game survival
and e.g. Timetravel & Speed Control too and some generics (Energy for Redux & Entropy) as you wish.

With Aegis, you can have infinite strong damage shields (i would go with Time Shield because that cannot be penetrated or removed),
and if you are a Shalore, you can extend all your buffs to infinite duration.

[overgoat]

I've been trying out similar builds for awhile as well and I finally came across one that in nearly unkillable on Madness: The core of the design is around using two passive abilities: Ghoul Resilience and Dark Reign from Corruption/Doom Covenant. The concept is you no longer care about how much damage you take as you always heal more than you can be hit for.

In order to be successful the build has to be able to trigger darkness damage as soon as possible. Once getting two stacks of Dark Reign you become unkillable. I choose to go with Tentacles and Horrific body for my darkness damage dealers

Two other talents that help a great deal are Reality Smearing from Flux and Necrosis. Reality Smearing is very cool for Ghouls as it is calculated AFTER Resilience so while the sustain is up you can't be hit for more than 1/3rd or your life. Necrosis providing lower max health actually makes Resilience more effective and the Spikes of Decrepitude provide a chance to trigger dark reign as soon as enemies are in sight. The negative life before death from Necrosis allows you to take 5-6 giant hits without dying even with Dark Reign not active.

Average combat looks like this:

Lootz.jpg (210.12 KiB) Viewed 9559 times

The item selection on this character has been interesting I don't care about resist anymore as high damage hits don't really matter and you avoid max health items. This frees up a lot of room for more %damage items and status protections.

I have this character currently to level 50 on Madness and haven't felt a risk since hitting level 35-ish. Only time he bogs down is when I have to fight inner demons and thats mostly because I get hit was so many debuffs it takes forever to get through the fight: https://te4.org/characters/4988/tome/77 ... d827e2b082
I'll admit he's a bit cheezed as I'm using the adventurer buff & Arcane combat buff, but many of these categories could easier by dropped and still work. It would just be tougher going to start. As he is here he usually does 10k+ damage a round.

[visage]

I'll admit he's a bit cheezed as I'm using the adventurer buff & Arcane combat buff, but many of these categories could easier by dropped and still work.

So Wretch has three extra category points and is proccing Drain via Arcane Combat, both thanks to addons. ...and seems quite dependent on those -- Drain seems to be Wretch's primary source of damage, and the infinite vim from that is powering Abyssal Shield.

How would you build the character without those addons? Which categories would you drop? If you drop four or more, which would you sub in?

Do you in effect get continual near-instantaneous talent refresh from Blood Vengeance?

[visage]

The core of the design is around using two passive abilities: Ghoul Resilience and Dark Reign from Corruption/Doom Covenant. [...] I choose to go with Tentacles and Horrific body for my darkness damage dealers [...] I'll admit he's a bit cheezed as I'm using the adventurer buff & Arcane combat buff, but many of these categories could easier by dropped and still work.

I've spent some time playing around with characters based on this concept, without the +3 category points and the ability to use Drain with Magical Combat. I've gotten a couple of characters to the East, and my observations:

1. You really want more damage than just Tentacles and a psi focus, no later than the lvl34 category point. Magical Combat + Stone works pretty well, though it can be awkward if you don't find a good mana-per-spell-crit item by then.
2. Anything that cleanses your Dark Reign stacks is very dangerous. For this reason, I've been going with Aether Permeation at 42 rather than an offensive prodigy like Flexible Combat. Unfortunately, Spell Disruption ignores Aether Permeation, so enemies with that ego on weapons are a problem. (...as are Wildfire archmages.)
3. Another case that's very dangerous -- damage that bypasses defenses and affinity. One notable example of this that I've run across is braided damage.
4. Being able to hit enemies is critical to getting your defense up and running, so gear for accuracy and blindfighting. Finding no picks of Perfect Strike is another place where bad luck with drops can hurt.
5. I've been running Solipsism for the additional reduction to max HP, as well as for the global speed. It does, of course, compound your problems when things aren't going your way, so perhaps you're better off passing on it. (Note: Dismissal has some actual value in this build.)
6. At least up to the early East, Blood Pact from Doom Covenant generates enough vim to power Abyssal Shield. If at some point that falls off, any vim-on-spell-crit gear should by then provide plenty of vim. So, Demonic Strength is viable here. Energy can be subbed in for Demonic Strength, but getting Energy Decomposition back up after a dispel effect is generally really hard thanks to the paradox generated by Reality Smearing.
7. Rot isn't very good for steady-state damage reduction (as Infestation has no effect if you have five worm masses), but it does really help when you're most vulnerable -- at the beginning of a fight before you've accumulated enough Dark Reign stacks to heal more damage than you're taking -- assuming you're getting a Dark Reign stack per turn then Infestation cuts out just around when you get up to max DR stacks. I don't consider Rot worth a category point before Bile, but it's an option for that last point or as a replacement for Solipsism.
8. I really should test how Golden Age of Necromancy's immunity works with affinity-healing. Anyone know offhand whether that's a synergy?
9. I'm finding The Untouchable strangely less useful than I'd expect. It does help buffer whenever your defenses get stripped, though, and you can use all of the buffering you can get in those cases. (...so definitely put a second point into each of the psi shields once you have Adept, in order to get their shields-on-deactivation.)
10. My current baseline for this build:
    • Starting class categories: Solipsism, Tentacles, Horrific Body, Flux, Absorption
    • Starting generic categories: Ghoul, Necrosis, Demonic Strength
    • @10: Doom Covenant
    • @20: Stone (or Magical Combat)
    • @25: Adept
    • @34: Magical Combat (or Stone)
    • @42: Aether Permeation
    • @bile: Multiple good options available, but default to Physics / Tinkers.

[Pseudoku]

What's the point of grabbing Demonic Strength?
Abyssal Shield should act before flat dmg cap.

[visage]

What's the point of grabbing Demonic Strength?
Abyssal Shield should act before flat dmg cap.

Abyssal Shield acts before resilience does, but it's after affinity calculations and most attacks don't trigger resilience. That means it adds to net healing in practice.

However, I admit I hadn't gone and checked the sequence of damage resolution when looking at this, so I'd missed that. That does make a good argument for Energy over Demonic Strength.

[ooli]

1. I've been running Solipsism for the additional reduction to max HP, as well as for the global speed. It does, of course, compound your problems iwhen things aren't going your way, so perhaps you're better off passing on it. (Note: Dismissal has some actual value in this build.)

Doesnt the affinity Heal assure you're always on full Psi? I never put more than 1/2 points in the first talent, because else it is indeed super dangerous.

[*] Rot isn't very good for steady-state damage reduction (as Infestation has no effect if you have five worm masses), but it does really help when you're most vulnerable -- at the beginning of a fight before you've accumulated enough Dark Reign stacks to heal more damage than you're taking -- assuming you're getting a Dark Reign stack per turn then Infestation cuts out just around when you get up to max DR stacks. I don't consider Rot worth a category point before Bile, but it's an option for that last point or as a replacement for Solipsism.

I cant do madness without Rot at lvl10. Auto unlock for me.
(I never experienced having more than 5 worms so I dont know if they stop protecting..) but anyway those 5 just prevented 30% damage each. And they will die so fast anyway, and then heal you in the process. And the rest of the tree!! Silence, disarm on blight damage! And the worm to get rid of annoying super healing and other enemy physical effect buff! Plus one Heal / teleport! Every talent is awesome

[*] I really should test how Golden Age of Necromancy's immunity works with affinity-healing. Anyone know offhand whether that's a synergy?

Unfortunately it doesnt. It activate on a turn basis. When your turn start it compares your life from your last turn and then give the immunity. So if you start positive, go negative and got healed back to positive by affinity heal, you dont get the immunity.


...
I dont own the DLC. But I tried similar build based on Rot (20% blight affinity heal!!.. I almost forgot about that) , Radiance (20% light affinity heal)..Lantern/Pickaxe with 5% darkness Affinity heal. and , best of all: the T2 common artifact wand "Penitence" . The wand give affinity heal on whatever you want. Setting it to Physical (you can instantly change the Damage type when you have some other damage enemy ) was the only way I got some chance on the T2.

If you have a better source of affinity heal in the DLC, it must be perfect with a resilience build and the crazy damage of Madness. I especially enjoy the irony of using the unfair damage of Madness against itself.

[visage]

Doesnt the affinity Heal assure you're always on full Psi? I never put more than 1/2 points in the first talent, because else it is indeed super dangerous.

With Solipsism, the affinity heal goes to Psi just as it goes to hit points. So, if you've got your defenses up then yes you'll be at max Psi. The problem is that when your defenses aren't up then you'll quickly fall below the solipsism threshold.

I really should test how Golden Age of Necromancy's immunity works with affinity-healing. Anyone know offhand whether that's a synergy?

Unfortunately it doesnt. It activate on a turn basis. When your turn start it compares your life from your last turn and then give the immunity. So if you start positive, go negative and got healed back to positive by affinity heal, you dont get the immunity.

The case that I was thinking of is if affinity healing would heal during the invulnerability. However, looking at Actor.lua, invulnerability kicks in during onTakeHit, which is before affinity healing is calculated -- so it also doesn't work for that reason.

If you have a better source of affinity heal in the DLC, it must be perfect with a resilience build and the crazy damage of Madness. I especially enjoy the irony of using the unfair damage of Madness against itself.

Dark Reign from the Demonologist's Doom Covenant category is a passive effect -- whenever you do darkness damage there's a 20% chance of getting a stack of Dark Reign (100% chance if you kill an enemy with darkness damage), at most one stack per player-turn. Each stack of Dark Reign grants 8% affinity-all. Five ranks of Dark Reign allow you to accumulate 4 stacks; 6 ranks (either due to 1.2x+ mastery or due to Adept) allows up to 5 stacks.