Tryb's wins: New: FlatDMG Mindslayer

[Tryble]

Yeek cursed, the fifth Ins.Roguelike winner of that combo and the only one who didn't go the standard STR Cursed route. This cursed didn't follow any of the usual cursed advice, instead going heavy on psiblades, speed, and mindpower.

The goal of this character was to press speed advantage to high levels. Yeek's global bonus & Rampage's bonus (both slightly pumped by Adept), Eden's Guile (which showed up very late, sadly) and alacrity armor for me. For the enemy, ~80% on-hit slow, ~40% thorn grab slow, 30% gloom slow if lucky enough, Cripple via Flexible combat. In the very best case scenario, enemy global speed went <40% with 70% action speeds, whereas my speeds were ~190% global & ~170% action. I also took Fears, hoping to steal the enemy's few turns with Paranoia attacks or Panic movement. Most advice says to stay away from Fears since moving an enemy away is the last thing you want as a melee, but with this much speed advantage it's a huge positive - remember that Surge & Rampage active, movement speed shoots up >500%. Go ahead, step away...I'd be happy to take a half dozen turns in response!


The Good Stuff

• Rampage is good. Early game it saved the run by activating if an enemy so much as stood nearby threateningly, and lategame served as the "murder everything" button.
• I love Mark Prey - it dramatically reduces the need for Track (which is good since I didn't get any till the end) and nerfs the damage of the most dangerous targets on the floor. It's seriously great.
• Leaves' Tide provided a consistent 54% chance to avoid all damage at the end, which is pretty nuts.
• Fungus is good as usual, but getting that ~500 max health from Wild Growth was really important. I was dropped <200 health several times in the run by surprise attacks from dangerous melee enemies - although I wore the ring of the dead the whole game, it was nice to dodge those instakills.
• Although I'm unsure how well Savage Hunter worked, Shrouded Hunter was unexpectedly a huge defensive bonus. The massive amount of stealth it provides when mindpower is high (& Adepted) is surprising; enemies lost turns constantly wandering around or attacking wrong directions. I floated points in occasionally to pump it to about 120 stealth by the end, and had another ~20 or so stealth power from equipment. That's enough to beat the vast majority of stealth vision around, although not all.
• Corner sniping enemies with Instill Fear was useful when jumping right onto a target via Blindside was too risky.
• Fears commonly crush enemy mind res and mindsave, the former of which is a really nice bonus when using Psiblades attuned to mind.
• Wayist is fantastic! You can aggro from outside LOS with something actually strong, you can distract dangerous targets, burst down an enemy, and they are pretty strong besides. I ran Nexus of the Way in my mainhand purely to get doublecastings of Wayist, which was stupid effective.
• It's really nice how all-round great Adept is. A bit of Global Speed, Max Health, All Res, DMG/Armor Pen, Immunities from all the passive talents, as well as pumping the best effects of all the stuff you 5/5; Leaves Tide, Wayist, Mark Prey, Gloom...I need to double check to be sure, but I think it was boosting the talent procs of flex combat, too.
• Wore the Cut Drem Arm purely for immunity, but holy moly the free yanks were super practical. I never once regretted keeping it equipped.

The Bad Stuff

• Tier 1 zones as yeek is pure suffering. I had about a dozen runs that got to Maj'Eyal only to walk into every single T1 zone, get forced to flee by a deadly instakill rare, and then sit wondering on the world map which zone I'd prefer to die in. I had absolutely trash luck with gear in the shops which didn't help any.
• Despite high Mind Speed during Rampage & Alacrity, plus boosted by Adept, Gloom effects just don't trigger often enough to be meaningful. Generally, once an enemy was tagged by gloom, they were being shredded by a billion psiblade attacks as they helplessly waited out the slow turns.
• Part of the early game problem is fighting with one hand behind your back waiting for Psiblades - mindstars still suck early on and 500g to unlock the tree is crippling. However, pumping too much STR to get good melee weapon damage is wasteful. I lucked out in this run by getting the Three-Edged Sword to carry me through T1s to get to Psiblades much more safely.
• Psiblades not dealing physical damage is an anti-combo with Rampage's physical damage bonus, unfortunately.
• Debuffs were a problem, so I wore a bunch of crappy-to-mediocre fixedarts just for the immunities. Boots of the Hunter for pin immunity was the most painful.
• Enemies had such a hard time targeting through stealth, hitting through leaves tide, or punching through immunities that I barely used my two Wild Infusions. Similarly, I used my Heroism twice the whole game (neither was necessary, though), so I effectively was only using a single infusion (regen) nearly the whole game. I considered dropping Heroism for Primal, honestly.
• I only found a single piece of alacrity armor the whole game, and it was trash. I wore it anyway.
• Mana clash is really unnecessary when you can flexible combat punch with spellhunts all you want.

General comments on the build & run
The survivability of this character was night and day from T1 to T2. I attribute this to Shrouded Hunter & Mark Prey - once those went up I felt like I was ever really in serious danger ever again (while shrouded was active, that is). But before then, it was RIP city and super frustrating.

I was pretty worried about defenses considering how all of Cursed defenses are 'soft' defenses...but there's so many that it actually works out pretty well. It just takes a bit to get them all online.

I really wanted to take Windtouched Speed, but idiotically transmog'd all the Dex gear I had. By Lv29, I had none and was really hurting for a prodigy, so took Adept. At 42, I figured Flexible Combat beats out windtouched on the 'speed' theme since it grants access to Cripple as well as providing a huge chunk of free damage on account of all the high speed attacking. I skipped Parasite speed as a result of low generics. It would have been nice to have all of those at once, but it didn't really make sense to try.
Took Fears with the last category point; it was useful in a lackluster kind of way. I'd probably take it again if I ran the same char (infusions saw surprisingly little use) but they're not that important.

I skipped a lot of stuff again. Didn't bother checking half the backup guardians, ignored Tannen, ignored spidercave, skipped elven ruins, the underwater east zone, both dark crypts etc. I rushed dreadfell early so that I could get east & back ASAP, hoping to buy merch randarts and get the last cat point fast. After that, straight to prides instead of cleaning up. Yeek go fast.

I also learned near the end of this run that siding with the Assassin Lord actually gives something really good. I've been running merchant for my last three wins...

[Tryble]

Krog Berserker - another vanilla Ins.Roguelike character. Lost the Blood of Life somewhere in midgame although I don't remember how, but managed to wiggle its way to a win & Atamathon kill.

The main differences between this Zerker and my older Cornac antimagic one is that this guy ignored Fungus in order to unlock Dirty Fighting on top of the usual Bloodthirst/2 Inscrips.

Thoughts on the run

• Fungal Blood: I overlooked it for a long time, but this is actually a pretty neat prodigy. I ran double Phys/Ment wilds for a while which now effectively act as Shatter Afflictions in that they clear one of everything (except all magic debuffs basically) and provide some defensive support. By endgame where I had max healmod & heavy max life, a single incription's worth of Fungal Blood provided nearly >400 healing.
• 5/5 Vitality: With CON approaching the stratosphere and healmod maxed, Vitality's tooltip claimed about 1,800 healing...which is before healmod kicks in. >4,500 healing is pretty darn good for a character that relies so heavily on enduring hits and healing them off. Vitality & Heroism mix pretty well too since you can breathe safely at 40% health and let Vitality tick, knowing you have another 1.5k life buffer under you.
• Skipping fungus wasn't a problem at all since between Fungal Blood, Vitality, and a heal/regen infusion everything was taken care of. I should probably have dropped the regen for another healing - stripping poisons and wounds that slash your healing (and hit you with serious talent failure chance sometimes...) was really useful. No will/mindpower to speak of made this an easy choice.
• RNG was insanely generous with randart 2Handers in the latter portion of the game. I have about a dozen wicked powerful 2Hers that lots of characters would kill to have laying on the floor of the fortress.
• This was my first time making thorough use of the Font - it's pretty interesting, but I had a few slots it took a very long time to get decent equipment as a base for. And on the other hand, my 2H luck was so good I couldn't really improve anything since I had some serious gunz to choose from.
• Krog is good, and mixing in Dirty Fighting really helps. Lots of dangerous targets get shut down with a Drakeblood silence. Between AM Zone, Drakeblood Strike, and extending them tactically, you can keep someone silenced for a very long time indeed. Additionally, Dirty Fighting & Wrath is effectively a guaranteed Stun on anything, which was super practical and really handy. It even lets you deal with cleanse spammers (orcs...) since you can reapply every turn for its duration. Great stuff.
• Twist the knife is worth bringing up again. An enemy is virtually always vulnerable to one of Stun, Silence or Confuse, which we have good sources for, and getting something to stick and then extending it works really well for keeping threats manageable. It even came in useful once as a clutch Bleed extend for a kill on a fleeing randboss who I was afraid was going to alert a brutal high peak floor boss.

[Tryble]

Ins.Rogulike Mindslayer.
The goal of this character was to pump flat damage reduction to whatever levels this character can manage. That level appears to be about ~600-750 (150~300 from Psi Shields, 150 from a decent torque, 150 from Subcutaneous Metallisation, and 150 from TrickyDefenses Antimagic Shield), with the caveat that all of those effects block only certain damage types or at certain times. Ata crapped on this character since throwing two ~2k hits in one turn (see the char sheet log!) is basically the exact thing that this character can't deal with.

Flat damage reduction rocks
In practice, there's very few times where you need to deal with explosive single damage hits. They're not that rare, but it seems that most of the time 'burst damage' comes in the form of several enemies hitting all at once, multiattack talents, or getting doubleturned. I see very, very few hits >1,000 damage, but tons of Dual Strikes for 600 apiece. 1,200 damage at once is scary, but not that big a deal if flat damage cut that in half. Even more so for when a Fan of Knives comes in at ~1,000 damage but got reduced to zero from active reductions. Considering that Blade Flurry, GWF, Essence of/Blinding Speed are plenty common on enemies in Insane, it's not at all uncommon to see anywhere from four to twelve hits land inbetween one turn and the next even in a 1v1 and high flat damage is really good at neutering that kind of damage. I 5/5'd forcefield but literally never used it since Psi Shield/AM Shield + a psionic shield torque was enough to handle 99% of situations.

Subcutaneous Metallisation sucks
First, triggering at half health with a duration & CD just limits its applicability too much. In the midgame it'll fire off every now and then, but this character had so much other flat reduction that it basically never triggered after dreadfell even though I tried to 'allow' it to trigger as much as was reasonable. Its theoretical uptime of 50% is in practice more like...1%.
It appears that it can activate between enemy actions - I've gotten hit with Dual Strike/GWF Dual Strike and seen it reduce the second instance, which is pretty good. But I didn't find any good opportunities to find out if it can defend against a single talent with multiple damage instances, like a single Flurry/Fan of Knives. If it doesn't, that limits its attractiveness big time. The whole reason you'd take SM is to defend against a storm of damage instances - getting 'oneshot' by a ton of hits in one talent that SM doesn't protect you from would be super frustrating.
I dunno, it just doesn't seem like there's any character that can really get value out of SM - I sure didn't, since it virtually never triggered unless I went out of my way to do so.

If it were to improve it with as few changes as possible, I'd probably have it be active any time you're below 50% health without limit, lingering for a few turns after you rise over 50%. That health area is already a dangerous area to be in and it's not powerful enough even at high CON to be super busted considering the opportunity cost of other prodigies.

Tricky defenses sucks too
Tricky Defenses just provides so little benefit that it's nearly impossible to like. This char pumped WIL/CUN hard and got about 50 extra on the shield. It's nice in that it was always active unlike SM. On the other hand, in the rare situation where that shield actually got used to the fullest, equilibrium started becoming a problem. Maybe if Tricky Defenses also extended a portion of its protection to phys/mind damage it'd be more attractive.

Mindslayer is...weird
The entire design of mindslayer seems odd. There's missing 'pieces' and anti-combos in its skillset that make it the whole class feel very incoherent.

• Augment would have provided tons of STR/DEX if I took it since I was going out of my way to wear huge amounts of pure WIL/CUN, but why bother? Resonant Focus eliminated the benefits of STR/DEX. You could skip Res. Focus by relying on Augment instead, but you need WIL/CUN for mindpower. TK Strike ignores most of your STR/DEX anyway...
• Mindslayer is missing sources of physical power as well as mindpower. It 'accidentally' gets physpower from Augment...if you pump STR, that and Augment together should give middling levels of phys power to actually land stuns/pins etc. However, nearly the entire class scales off mindpower and there's no native sources for it, pushing your prodigy choices into a really narrow band into one of PES/Superpower/Master of Disasters to get scaling on your class talents.
• Mindslayer's also missing sources of +damage and resistance penetration. Lacking meaningful resistance penetration on a class isn't too strange (berserker suffers there as well), but given the class talents hit with all sorts of damage types (physical, fire, cold, lightning, and wildcard if you're using Frenzy gem lasers), the near total absence of penetration seems like a surprising oversight. Transcend. talents could provide double their damage/respen and it wouldn't be uncalled for considering the category point cost, low uptime of those effects, and how they incentivize lowering your damage by pushing you toward using the Focus/Leech talents in their window.
• The Augmented Striking talents seem pretty good on paper, but somewhat less so in practice. The main strength I found was their fairly high multipliers and main rider effect - their damage type and secondary effects were useless or detrimental. Thermal Strike > Kinetic Strike is a pretty glaring anti-combo; after a while I gave up trying to deliberately hit Frozen enemies with Kinetic Strike for the damage bonus when I realized that the damage bonus was lower than the lost damage from hitting the Iceblock... Additionally, these talents really suffer trying to stick the first half of their combo effects if your power is low.
• I tried floating points into projection, but the aura talents are all really bad - I'd much rather have the Psi than fuel those talents. Frenzy? Just wear a projection weapon. Only near endgame when I'd dropped spare class points into Psi Tap did I feel that Psi was not at a premium, but by then the damage from Auras is near worthless.
• Psi Tap & Insatiable fill pretty similar roles in that they're really only good for refilling Psi, but the lack of stuff to mind crit with makes Psi Tap the way to go since it appears to get multiplied benefits from a TK weapon. It doesn't seem like both these talents are necessary.
• The focus attack talents are all also really bad. I floated them to 5/5 to try them out, but melee attacks tended to double or triple the damage output for no Psi cost and at no cooldown. I never used them even when their relevant Trancendent. effects were up.
• Does anyone ever actually use a gem in their TK slot? The ability to put a 2H in that slot is a giant, major power boost. Look at the weapon in my TK slot on my char sheet - that is a weapon that basically outclasses a 5/5 Resonant Focus weapon even before the part where it deals a ton of damage!
• Trying to use psi shield deactivation & transcendent talents together cost my first mindslayer his first life. The usual combo of high action speed enemies with way too high weapon damage & multihit talents. I'd taken a few big hits and had a massive charge on Kinetic Shield. I figured the smart play was to deactivate Kinetic to get that colossal damage shield, use transcendant to restore the CD, and put Kinetic Shield back up for the doubled flat reduction. But doing that leaves you without Kinetic Shield for one turn. As it turns out, GWF Flurry from that guy hit for far more than max health + 2k damage shield. If Kinetic Shield had been active (even baseline shield, not even the doubled Transcend. version), I'd have lived through that hit. Somehow I'd figured that Trasncend. would put Kinetic back on but it does not. It's an odd 'hole' in the combo that didn't make intuitive sense to me at the time.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something central about the class but it really does not click with me. It seems like the best way to play it is to flat out ignore the whole kinetic/thermal/charge theme and just be a double 2H wielding monster. /shrug

[Chattius]

Ata crapped on this character since throwing two ~2k hits in one turn (see the char sheet log!) is basically the exact thing that this character can't deal with.

Wouldn't a flat damage cap be useful to the FlatDMG Mindslayer? Taking a ghoul or another race and using the Rak'Shor's cunning prodigy to turn into a ghoul?

[Tryble]

That's a pretty good point - I did strongly considered ghoul since Resilience & flat damage are a good pairing on paper, and getting doubleturned isn't as big a deal when you're swimming in so much mitigation via flat reduction. Bonus in that mindslayer's lowish health pool would make resilience skew a bit stronger than normal. I also considered a similar character in the same vein, a brawler with focus on striking stance/reflex defense/worm nest with trained reactions as the resilience standin, although that didn't really seem significant enough to focus a whole character on.
The reason I decided against ghoul is because I personally consider single hit life-threatening burst damage (outside of Ata, of course) to be so rare as to be close to nonexistent. The one instance of a single serious power attack I really remember is a hit from Argoniel that landed during one her completely bonkers curse of vulnerabilities that reduced resistances something like -80% between that and spellshock.

I went cornac since I half expected to take all transcendent categories just for the ability to pump all three psi shields, but I left Thermal Shield off for most of the game.