Adventurers and 1.7

[visage]

So, what does 1.7 change for Adventurers?

The removal of Suffuse Life seems like a huge change for many Adventurer builds.

Mindrot no longer being affected by movement speed is also a notable change.

Magnetism should now be more useful for shield Adventurers.

What options for Adventurers do the new Necromancer categories open up?

What else is of particular note?

[sixteenmiles]

First thing I thought of was adding necro pets to my dumb OOPS ALL PETS build.

Also thought about adding Necrosis to the Ghoul/Solipsism low-life build.

[whitelion]

Solipsism+Necrosis can get you to very low max life vs. effective hp with your die_at and psi pool. There are many things that trigger upon hits of at least X% of max hp, so you could trigger them more often. Also, anyone can temporarily take advantage of resilience by using Suncloak, which works the same as ghoul resilience it seems (though 60% threshold). The uptime is only 1/3 and it has fixed cd, but Suncloak also has other useful benefits.

Effects that cause you to heal on hits or frequently could be interesting too to try and cross the 1 hp threshold often. Dark Reign is one, since affinity works by you first take damage and then heal. Osmosis Shield also means a lot of damage and then healing. It might be too hard to control precisely though.

[visage]

Solipsism+Necrosis can get you to very low max life vs. effective hp with your die_at and psi pool.

Yeah, I started a Ghoul+Solipsism+Necrosis character on Madness pretty much as soon as 1.7 dropped.

With TL5 Blurred Mortality and low constitution, you're knocking about 130 off of your positive HP pool. ...which is certainly nice but even with Solipsism it doesn't get you down to trivial levels of positive hp. In terms of ghoul resilience, you're reducing the maximum hit you can take by ~65 for a category point and 5 generic points.

With all four Solipsism talents and TL5 BM each point of constitution (at low con levels, around 15-35) gives you approximately a net of 2 negative hp and 1 positive hp. At higher levels of constitution the ratio shifts towards positive hp. So if you want to exploit ghoul resilience you still don't want to invest in constitution... but at least Blurred Mortality means getting a point here or there from gear doesn't hurt very much.

As Tradewind_Rider pointed out in his Ghoul PM post, if you're playing with resilience then you want lots of flat damage reduction. Osmosis acts like having a lot of delayed flat reduction, so assuming you can buffer the hits then it should be quite good as long as you can maintain it. Brawler flat-damage and Automated Cloak Tesselation are presumably also worth looking into. The caps on proportional damage reduction are less restrictive here, so Energy Decomposition, Absorption, and plain old armor. ...and of course there's Reality Smearing, which racks up paradox much more slowly if the damage you're taking is capped.

Feedback and Infestation (or Ooze, if not a ghoul) are also both useful. I expect that Trained Reactions is less exciting, as its cost is independent of the amount of damage absorbed.

The above suggests that if trying to build a maximally-tanky necrotic ghoul solipsist you either want to go with unarmed combat or osmosis + demon seeds. The latter has unfortunately lost Suffuse Life, so perhaps that tips things in favor of brawling in the vein of Effigy's recent post. Of course, my initial madness character trying this is doing neither. :p

[sixteenmiles]

The main problem I’ve run into with this build before is that minimum life gear just feels pretty rare. So stacking negative life is a real crapshoot. You can get some good numbers with Black Core and Blood of Undeath, but in general finding ‘die at negative life gear’ hasn’t been common enough that you can comfortably stack it, so I end up trying to compensate with other mitigation’s that aren’t as good.

Stacking damage reduction skills (I went with Rot but maybe Ooze is better) and pairing that with the low life and Ghoul damage cap, didn’t feel great on its own (I mean it was fine, but there were some hairy moments) until I got Vile Life/Blood Splash going. Then it turned into steamroll mode.

I’m only level 30 at the moment though, I’ll see how it does in the east.

[whitelion]

Do flat DR sources trigger after resilience? I was playing around in dev mode and it seemed like many (e.g. Energy Decomposition) didn't. Mitosis should be really good with low max hp vs effective hp. And I think Reality Smearing triggered after resilience.

[sixteenmiles]

I don't know what I was talking about before. Ghouls can't take any Wild-gift talents.

[Tradewind_Rider]

Hey, hi!

Here is an incomplete order how damage reduction functions triggering:

1, Wards
2, Iceblock
3, Affinity healing calculates heal here
4, Resistances
5, Psionic Shields
6, Block
7, Flat damage reduction
8, Flat damage cap
9, Stormshield
10, Webs of Fate
11, Energy Decomposition
12, Absolute Resistance
13, Displacement Shield
14, Time Shield
15, Damage Shield
16, Reality Smearing
17, Affinity healing is done here after taking the damage

The "first part" is "CallbakOnTakeDamage" what ends in this order with Damage Shields.

After CallbackOnTakeDamage, "CallbackOnHit" functions triggers, like Reality Smearing, Fugue Clone sharing and Mitosis.

[sixteenmiles]

Died at level 40. https://te4.org/characters/262597/tome/ ... 2e5f79bdde

If I try it again, not sure I’ll go the brawler route. The defenses felt fine. It’s definitely easier to stack minimum life. I had a threshold of something like -800 at the end.

[Tradewind_Rider]

Hey, hi!

If you would like to go with a meme-damage reduction adventurer that do not use infinite loops,
you can try a core like this:

1. choose Yeek as a race for lower max HP

2. choose Solipsism for lower max HP

3. choose Tinker - Battlefield Management for Grinding Shield

this gives you: melee damage reduction, projectile avoidance AND

69% flat damage cap AND

Battlefield Veteran will add - 250 die_at what is very good with this build


4. choose Spell - Necrosis generic tree for the reduced max HP AND extra die_at

you will have ~440 max life at this point with a very good die_at and you cannot take
a higher damage instance than ~307


5. choose Chronomancy - Fate Weaving for Webs of Fate for 30% damage reduction
-> you cannot take for than 215 damage instance

6. choose Chronomancy - Energy for all the stuff there but, Energy Decomposition
will reduce the damage by 30% (~65 with high paradox & some spellpower)
-> so max damage instance is ~150

7. choose Agility - Agile Defense
this requires a Shield, but Saws are shields
you will have a 45% chance against ANY damage instance to reduce it by 50% of your block value
and this triggers on CallbakonTakeDamage, so it is after flat-damage_cap, not like flat_damage_reduction

8. choose Chronomancy - Flux for all the stuff there. Reality Smearing will
further reducr the damage by 30%
-> max damage instance is ~105


This is so far 4 class tree & 4 generic tree (including Yeek)

you have a tons of utility (Entropy, Redux, Anomalies)
you have Attenuate with Seal Fate for damage
and Attenuate on yourself for continous healing

AND

becasue you have just ~440 max life and a very good die_at from talents
you can go with 2 Heroism Infusions!

you can very easily reach an infinte long & infiite die_at with those,
but these are just for extra safety, probably you never reach low negative life at all



you can add Spacetime Weaving tree for Dimensional Step & Wormhole for mobility
you can add Spell - Meta for Disperse Magic, the 30% spell CD reduction to maintain Seal Fate & Webs
and for Metaflow

and you still have space for a few class trees

[visage]

Grinding Shield [...]69% flat damage cap

FYI, it looks like the Great 1.7 Scaling Nerf means this is actually at 75%, at least without Adept.

[Tradewind_Rider]

Yes, I did not checked every class, just a few that i am usually playing.

Unfortunately, a LOT OF talents on EVERY CLASS were unintentionally nerfed significantly,
becasue of the change of CombatTalentLimit function ...

Ther are talent(s) that do exactly nothing at level 1 for example...
And these talents have a way worse scaling, usually you have to put +1 in order to have
the 1.6 or close to 1.6 values...

I posted this multiple times.
sad...

[sixteenmiles]

The new Necromancer Animus tree has a skill that deals damage to any enemy that you can see and have dealt damage to. I had a run yesterday that was probably the fastest I've cleared the T1s and T2s just by hitting a level 1 Illuminate that I got from a staff to tag pretty much a screen's worth of enemies, and then nuking the whole screen with the Animus skill (can't look up what it's called right now because wiki isn't updated). Don't know how well it scales, but feel like there might be some potential there if there are other skills that can spread even small amounts of damage in a wide area. Illuminate? Radiance + Searing Sight? Feel like there's a way here to make an Adventurer that just deletes anything that steps within range 10.

[Effigy]

Hey, hi!

If you would like to go with a meme-damage reduction adventurer that do not use infinite loops,
you can try a core like this:
*snip*

I played a build based on this to see how well it would work. It was hard to fit Battlefield Management in with the category limit, and I wanted to play a caster, so I made it a Ghoul instead of Yeek. Once all the talents were online, a lot of hits against me were reduced to zero damage. I don't think I was ever really in danger.

Character vault

Stats
Mag > Wil > Cun > Dex

Prodigies
Adept
Aether Permeation

Starting Cats
Psionic/Solipsism
Chronomancy/Flux
Spell/Animus
Psionic/Finer Energy Manipulations
Spell/Necrosis
Chronomancy/Energy
Chronomancy/Fate Weaving

Unlocks
Level 10: Spell/Age of Dusk
Level 20: Corruption/Fearfire
Level 34: Spell/Meta
Wyrm Bile: Technique/Agility

I probably would recommend taking Agility at 34 instead of Meta, but at the time I had a really good mindstar and no good shields.

Talents
Psionic/Solipsism: 1/1/1/0 early, 5/1/5/0 core
Chronomancy/Flux: 1/2/5/0 early, 5/3/5/1 core
Spell/Animus: 2/1/2/2 early, 2/2/2/5 core
Spell/Age of Dusk: 5/5/1/4 early, 5/5/4/5 core
Corruption/Fearfire: 1/1/0/0 core
Spell/Meta: 2/5/0/0 core
Technique/Agility: 5/0/0/0 core

Undead/Ghoul: 1/1/1/0 early, 1/4/1/0 core
Techniques/Combat Training: 0/1/1/1/0/0 core
Psionic/Finer Energy Manipulations: 1/0/0/0 early, 1/1/0/0 core
Spell/Necrosis: 2/2/1/1 early, 5/4/1/1 core
Chronomancy/Energy: 3/1/1/2 early, 5/2/1/2 core
Chronomancy/Fate Weaving: 1/1/1/4 early, 1/5/1/5 core
Corruption/Vile Life: 1/1/1/1 core
Corruption/Hexes: 1/1/0/0 core
Spell/Staff Combat (optional): 1/1/1/0 core

I ended up getting a bunch of alchemist escorts, so Staff Combat was practically free. If you don't get escorts, it's debatable whether Defensive Posture is worth 3 generics. I did do a bit of bumping while waiting for cooldowns though.

The early game is not ideal because you have to rely on bumping until level 8, but it has enough early defenses that I didn't have trouble with this. Once Attenuate and the Necro nukes were available, it was smooth sailing. The damage is good enough to quickly kill most enemies throughout the game, but the damage was a little low for the final bosses. I don't think there was any danger of losing, but it took long enough to kill them that Aeryn died. Seems like one of the tankiest builds you can make, at least for Insane.