Meteoric Madness Build/Leveling Guide - Madness Winner

[Micbran]

Well, you still need damage. Interesting concept though.

[cctobias]

I have a build that I think can tank Madness, has tanked it up to Briagh and going back east. But its not compatible with this build as it must use a shield.

What about a build that evades everything? Evasion, misleading, Buckler Training, Repel etc.

I don't think you can get the evasion high enough. There are a couple problems.

1) even on insane a summoned warhound can hit for over 1200 raw damage. No amount of armor can stop a summoned warhound of talent level 20+. Even with say 80% evasion you are basically going to die, eventually, to a warhound. Similarly a good crit can one shot you pretty easy on madness and some things (i.e. stuff that get inflated Lethality) can crit at over 70% chance and have very nice mult too. So spike damage will almost certainly kill you.

2) Its very unlike you can get evasion to ALL types of things stacked up well. Melee? possibly. Projectiles? pretty high sure. But a lot of things are neither of those. Beams are not projectjtiles so what would you use for evasion against the many beam attacks or AOE attack? Leave's Tide, that's about it. This is one of the reasons Mindstars are considerably better defense than most people realize, Leave's tide is considerably superior evasion versus most other things, both a higher evasion rate and really covers a vast amount more things.

It can probably "work" on Insane, but would still actually requires extreme care due to the spikiness of things. You would basically have to run as soon as you saw a warhound or ritch get summoned and figure out some indirect or fast way to clear them and kill the rare+ summoner. Among other scenarios.

[Effigy]

I wonder if it would be possible to make Unstoppable still work in this build if it you played Cornac instead of Shalore and used the Corruption/Oppression tree. You could quickly stack up Horrifying Blows stacks with unarmed attacks, then use Mass Hysteria to spread stacks to nearby enemies and use Fearfeast to gain 56% of a turn for each enemy in range. Basically, you rely on gaining turns to get more mileage from Unstoppable instead of extending its duration. You could use Quicken Spells and Metaflow to shorten/reset the cooldown of the Oppression talents.

The obvious flaw is fighting single targets or small groups of enemies, where Fearfeast will not be able to give a net increase in turns. Hope Wanes can be used in this situation to paralyze dangerous targets for multiple turns while you burn them down with spike damage. Metaflow should allow you to do this a couple times in a row, after which you can retreat and wait for cooldowns if necessary. Extended fights that don't allow retreating (like the final bosses) might be a problem, but we'll see.

I think I'll try it out on Insane and see if the concept works as intended. If so, a Madness run will be in order.

EDIT: First run died at level 17 on Insane. The issue is lack of defensive skills before unlocking Unstoppable, but the same issue was present in the original build. It might take a few tries to get over the hump, but I suspect things will be easier after that.

[cctobias]

I wonder if it would be possible to make Unstoppable still work in this build if it you played Cornac instead of Shalore and used the Corruption/Oppression tree. You could quickly stack up Horrifying Blows stacks with unarmed attacks, then use Mass Hysteria to spread stacks to nearby enemies and use Fearfeast to gain 56% of a turn for each enemy in range. Basically, you rely on gaining turns to get more mileage from Unstoppable instead of extending its duration. You could use Quicken Spells and Metaflow to shorten/reset the cooldown of the Oppression talents.

The obvious flaw is fighting single targets or small groups of enemies, where Fearfeast will not be able to give a net increase in turns. Hope Wanes can be used in this situation to paralyze dangerous targets for multiple turns while you burn them down with spike damage. Metaflow should allow you to do this a couple times in a row, after which you can retreat and wait for cooldowns if necessary. Extended fights that don't allow retreating (like the final bosses) might be a problem, but we'll see.

I think I'll try it out on Insane and see if the concept works as intended. If so, a Madness run will be in order.

EDIT: First run died at level 17 on Insane. The issue is lack of defensive skills before unlocking Unstoppable, but the same issue was present in the original build. It might take a few tries to get over the hump, but I suspect things will be easier after that.

Well I would say, in theory as a back of the envelope math thing, that if you can double the amount of attacks in some way or increase damage significantly or a combo of both then you can get away with less Unstoppable.

My worst case was the last fight, which was I think 15 1000 energy "normal" turns. Without using potion of invulnerability which can give you some more turns. At 210% gspeed (a good amount of this was from shalore boost though) and 180% combat speed. You would probably need a further 100% gspeed or combat speed and then use the potion of invulnerability to make up the last like 4 turns. Since it already has high speed you would need a good bit of absolute speed to see something that would say make it a 10 "turn" fight. Basically 400% gspeed would be a 7 turn fight or something (going from 2 hits per turn to 4 hits per turn would be double damage).

So if you can solve that problem in some way it can probably work. But losing shalore will lose you a lot of gspeed something like 35%.

I think if you can get the last fight down to a theoretical 10 "turns" you are probably fine almsot everywhere else with one unstoppable and can save the potion of invuln for a few extra turns of fighting.

Edit: Yeah the start is not easy, you really need to be picky and get top end equipment from drowning. The start in the Tanking build I posted is a good bit easier. The winner I posted here got a very good shielding rune (about 300 shield) from drowning and this was really useful. If you can get the Rune of Reflection from a store during the drowning it can help a lot. Basically until Unstoppable matures I did a double shield and kill fast approach or flee approach. So basically need really good gloves to kill fast and enough shields to stay a few rounds. This is one of the reasons I farted around a few zones like hidden compound trying to get an extra level or two to transition to Unstoppable. There is a rough patch around lvl 22-24 or so where even Time shield + rune starts to not match well against things HP growth in certain places.

[Effigy]

Sounds like it might be feasible, then. Hope Wanes can paralyze a target for up to 4-5 turns and ignores saves/immunities, and with Metaflow you should be able to do that twice without waiting for cooldowns. As long as the damage is good enough, that might be enough to get through the final fight. I used Psionic/Augmented Mobility instead of Psionic/Absorption because it gives a global speed buff to replace the Shalore racial. The psionic speed buff is slightly inferior to Shalore's, but it should pick up most of the slack.

[Dracos]

*begins a run trying this out*

[erikkustrife]

Hey i dont know if anyone covered this or not im sorry but without any mods installed at all (im someone who doesnt use any ever lol) beyond the flesh is converting gloves from doing the normal 40% dex 40% str 40% cun to doing 24% will 64% cun :/ i had no idea it did that, is this addressed in the build? do i just aviod str like hte plague

[cctobias]

Hey i dont know if anyone covered this or not im sorry but without any mods installed at all (im someone who doesnt use any ever lol) beyond the flesh is converting gloves from doing the normal 40% dex 40% str 40% cun to doing 24% will 64% cun :/ i had no idea it did that, is this addressed in the build? do i just aviod str like hte plague

1) STR is not important to the build but cunning is very important and dex is important, so while not ideal you don't lose that much since you should be shooting for high CUN. In some regards its actually better this way as CUN is important for your skills and gloves in general are more spread out in stats. So concentrating into your main stat is actually a good thing. However you do have overall lower total % but you should actually wind up with similar damage overall.

2) This build does not really attempt to maximize gloves based damage although it should achieve high end glove damage. Somehwere on the order of a base crit "normal" punch of about 1000 damage. But keep in mind, for Madness, that punch can literally do zero damage and be unable to crit against things with really high armor + armor skill even with a good APR of 70 or so which bleeds into the next point ...

3) A large portion of your overall damage is from EM procs (which is a big reason you want high CUN) so don't worry overly much about glove damage. Having 120 DAM versus 130 DAM won't matter that much, although it is of course objectively better whether it worth a few points of crit or spellpower is very debatable. Against anything with really high armor + good armor skill (like armored orc solider guys) this becomes like 80% or more of your total damage. I believe spell crits still work even when high armor skill is nullifying melee crits.

4) As Effigy pointed out above it may be better to go for one the PSI generics instead of Absorption. Finer energy manipulations is a good choice if you want to address this issues as it gives you both more damage on your weapon and will give you better stat contributions if you put points into the last talent. However I would not go to the extent of putting points in the last talent unless I had quite a few spare generics, which is possible. Effigy was considering using the other talent line though for the extra speed which quite possibly is simply straight up better given the theme of this build. So keep that in mind.

[Dracos]

Trying this at the moment on a nightmare build, variation anyhow.

Some thoughts.

Yes, it is absolute overkill on nightmare. The beginning was totally brutal but once things got going, it basically has been a curbstomp usually on round 1 of a boss being seen.

I tried Rampage over Meta, since meta doesn't work on the two mains anymore. It's a really bad combo with this build though. The magic missles basically disintegrate the rampage duration as it treats as casting spells. It basically lasts for 1 or 2 attacks at best.

Psionic/Augmented Mobility seems like it'd be a clear win. I tried Finer Energy Manipulations, but outside the beginning, it really didn't add much over any other psionic discipline.

Mana shortage is definitely a thing without a Mana on Crit ability. It's just easy to burn through 200 mana in a few moments, slaughtering everything in visual. Given that, and the lack of meta synergy in the current game state, still feels like it could use some other nice passive tree on the class skills side. Not sure what though.

Went with vile life instead of harmony. This had a nice "Hey, its a mook instead of an unstoppable bit...I hit it and gain back 60ish hp". Since you're constantly doing crits (and multiple crits) it sometimes triggers twice, making it a decent one point wonder for mook fights. Pointless for madness of course. Might be good to spread among Bloodbath and Arcane Feed if you're not at max crit rate.

[Dracos]

Yeah, this basically anhilated the ending 3. Both atamathon and the last two bosses on nightmare evaporated before this. Definitely crushing.

[cctobias]

Yeah, this basically anhilated the ending 3. Both atamathon and the last two bosses on nightmare evaporated before this. Definitely crushing.

Cool I'm glad it works for you. But honestly I can't reccomend this build for NM. It just makes things kind of boring, like you say thing will literally evaporate. Although some people may find that fun I suppose. I think its pretty good for Insane even for semi-good players who know how to start Insane in a way that will work.

If people do it in NM you can definitely unoptimize it some and swap in some other talents lines for various reasons if you want. However like mentioned above do not ever use Rampage as that line is completely unworkable with Magic Combat. I had the same idea in the first iterations, fortunately someone in chat told me about the bad interaction so it didn't waste my time. Its a REALLY deceptive pick; it seems like a perfect fit, but its possibly the worst thing to pick.