First Victory - Halfling Doombringer on Nightmare Adventure

[The Tapir]

http://te4.org/characters/177251/tome/0 ... a9431b8e08

After having two attempts get incredibly close to the boss fight (Cornac Summoner, died to a stair guardian, and Shalore Doombringer, killed by a content patch), I finally managed to get my Doombringer into the final fight and, against seemingly insurmountable odds, win against some of the most annoying bosses I've ever fought in ToME. Elandar was an anorithil/archmage who liked to spam blinding and freeze spells before teleporting away, which became a HUGE problem later on as the shadow demons drained nearly all of the light out of the arena, making the spell unusable beyond the tiles next to me. Argoniel was a corruptor rare who kept critting for ~3k damage with soul rot and blood grasp while also using pacification, empathetic, and burning hex very liberally to ensure that relentless pursuit and a mental wild couldn't clear everything. I died 4 times before finally getting Argoniel pinned and unloading Destroyer-buffed Abduction, Reckless Strike, and Draining strike before following with Hope Wanes (that skill saved the run) to keep her from acting and finally killing her, meaning I could focus my efforts on teleporting madman. It took roughly 15 minutes of hunting Elandar down and using wanderer's rest/rush to get close to strike him only to get teleported away or have him use strike and knock me back.

Besides the pain that the final boss fight was (I should've searched for dispersion gauntlets - would have eliminated bone shield/essence of speed to make the bosses much, much easier), that doombringer flattened nearly everything else. I died once outside of the final fight to a boulder thrower crowd in Daikara, but was able to kill most everything (including slime pit orb guardians) in 2-3 turns with Obliterating Smash or Reckless Strike. Around the end game I managed to get 100% physical and magical crit with LotLF active given that I had ~100 cunning from items that boosted the crit chance from the skill to nearly 63%.

Feels so good to finally beat the game once and for all after nearly 500 hours of playtime logged on Steam. Going to begin my foray into Insane as soon as I finish some of my other characters I have sitting around.

[jenx]

Congrats! Insane is like a hard version of Nightmare. Madness is... just madness.