Introduction
I have beaten possessor on nightmare, insane, and madness RL in my time with the class, and have learned quite a bit of the general strategy of how to play it with its many intricacies. This class is a lot of fun and has many different strategies, so don't take this guide as guidelines of how to play, every run and player is different. That said, this is what got me through madness and the impressions I generally got from what the class has to offer. I'll also go over some key points of very useful talents and fixed bodies which can make a possessor run really strong.
Important Notes
Possessor is subject to having its psi pool being very important to its powers. Psi is essentially extra life for possessor bodies, and if you run out of it you become weaker due to global speed reduction from solipsism, are unable to use many abilities, and take much more damage to the life of your body. Essentially, this means that, in conjunction with solipsism, both healing and defensive strategies are very important for the class. Our bodies only have so much health, and getting as much mileage as possible out of the valuable ones is pivotal to your success. All of the trees have great benefits, though some are definitely better than others. Without further ado, let's get into the guide!
Stats
Generally, possessor tends to prioritize wil=str>cun>mag, dex if you have extra after that. If you're mindstar focused, I would put willpower strictly above strength, but for one handed+mindstar or two handed strength is very important as well. Wil also increases our psi pool, which is nice too. Cun and magic are just generally nice to have for crit chance and bodies.
Inscriptions
Infusions
As stated before, healing is very important for the class. Whenever we die in a body, the cooldown of assume form won't happen, so the most important inscription for any possessor, above almost any others, is healing. It will instantly give us a bunch of psi with solipsism, which will allow us to use abilities within a body if we run out of psi and instantly hop into a new one if our current body happens to die mid combat. I cannot stress enough how much utility a healing infusion provides to a possessor. You will always find this to be great to have, and it is totally worth the inscription slot.
Aside from healing, regeneration and wild are nice, but generally we would prefer shielding or shatter afflictions over either. Movement is great for all the reasons it normally is, but I personally prefer to use something else (except for EOR).
Runes
Shielding and shatter afflictions runes are awesome for possessor, full stop. Shielding on its own lets a body save hundreds of health every time it activates, while also temporarily protecting your psi pool, and shielding improves with a bunch of bodies (mainly sun paladins with weapon of light or archmages with shielding sustain). Shatter afflictions provides much needed effect removal, and provides a shield when you use it, protecting bodies further. These runes are preferred over all others, but dissipation can be used later if need be. As for other runes, ethereal isn't good, blink can provide some needed escape, and acid wave/biting gale runes are still pretty great for disabling enemies and protecting our bodies in the process.
Stormshields, as always, are pretty great. I unfortunately never found any great ones in my runs but for possessor they would still be extremely useful.
Injectors
Injectors are not great on possessor in general. Affinity from injectors is nice for keeping psi up but isn't as good as it is for most classes, but the effect removal can be nice I guess. The healing one which you would assume is useful isn't great since it isn't instant, and late game you'll die in one turn outside of a body, so the instant use nature of healing infusion is just better, and the shielding from shatter afflictions will generally be better. This isn't to say tinkers are bad (they're pretty great, really), but the injectors just aren't worth it for this class.
Race
Each race spawns with a different kind of innate body possession category, along with humanoid and animal, the starting types are as follows:
- Giant: Cornac, Higher, Halfling, Orc, Yeti, and Whitehoof
- Immovable: Shalore and Ogre
- Horror: Drem and Dwarf
- Undead: Skeleton and Ghoul
- Other: Doomelf (Demon), Thalore (Elemental), Yeek (Insect), and Krog (Dragon)
Dwarf has a great defensive generic set, with a situational escape for its tier 4 talent as well. The passive saves from power is money is pretty nice, the armor from resilience is good, but the generic that takes the cake is stoneskin. Stoneskin provides passive damage negation on melee attacks, and given the permanent nature of health on our bodies this makes them last much longer. Stoneskin is what makes dwarf a great race pick for possessor.
Drem has frenzy which is what we want from it. Frenzy allows us to use our body talents multiple times, hop out of bodies and into a new one without dealing with the shock debuff, and allows our other class talents to really shine.
Cornac is obvious, anywhere you put this category point will be great really, and it can bring any possessor build from good to great a lot of the time.
Doomelf has a blink as its first racial which is great as possessor lacks good escape tools, resilience of the doomed is a great defensive option overall, the third racial would be nice but you will be taking less than 10% damage on a body the vast majority of the time so it sees little use, and pitiless can be pretty great if you use a bunch of procs on equipment.
Ogre is a notable mention as well, as it can let us use both the psychic blows and battle psionics trees at once, and our larger bodies can negate some of that damage penalty from doing so.
Possession Body Types
The various types of possession body types we get sometimes are more valuable than others, and making sure we don’t waste our limited selection on bad ones is very important. That said, you get more of them as possession levels up, and adept/mastery equipment let you get 2-4 more than usually possible. I’d say there are 3 tiers of value for body types.
- Best: Demon, horror, undead, giant, humanoid
- Good: Dragon, animal, insect, elemental, vermin
- Okay: Aquatic, immovable, spiderkin, and construct
Useful Talents/Classes and other Stats on Bodies
These are the real meat and potatoes of this class, the talents we get from possessed bodies. With a category point in possession and getting adept, we have 8 active/sustained talents (the upper max), and they will be level 10.5 with adept (higher with mastery gear for possession). This means that the further we go in the game the harder and more important it will be to choose the proper talents from our bodies, and it can make or break a body. Once these are selected, they are locked in for that body. Every class is viable, for maximum laziness it is best to just pick up whatever uses the same gearing as whichever of the possessor weapon paths you take, so to that end I’ll list which ones fit in best with each of the three, and which ones fit well with multiple of them. Most magic classes fit in with any archetype, so those ones won’t be listed here. Ranged weapon classes don’t work well with possessor talents but can still be used.
- Two-handed: Doombringer, berserker, arcane blade, marauder, rogue, shadowblade, wyrmic, sun paladin, oozemancer, cursed, and mindslayer.
- One-handed+mindstar: No classes that I know of as of now fit in well with this archetype, aside from mages. Might work with psyshot but I haven’t tested it.
- Dual-mindstar: Oozemancer, breath wyrmic, summoner, doomed, and solipsist.
- Classes that have some parts work with any but aren’t great: Skirmisher, demonologist, brawler, reaver, bulwark, and temporal warden.
Equipment
Equipment is very important for this class. For two-handed builds, you would like to focus on having procs on melee hits, as well as strong weapon damage to maximize what you get out of your talents, same goes for your one handed weapon in the one-handed+mindstar tree, and you would like to focus on the stat gains from your mindstars in either tree. In general, raw stat gains (like str, wil, etc.) are okay, but not as important as they are for other classes since we get so much from our bodies.
If there is one thing I can suggest strongly it would be to use a psionic shield torque in your tool slot. The sheer amount of health you save on your bodies is incredible, and it’s great to have in conjunction with the stacked device mastery we get from a bunch of bodies. Psionic shields in the late game can have over 150 flat damage reduction for 5 turns with about 40-50% uptime, which saves an incredible amount of health over many combats.
Also, for any tree, mind respen and mind damage increases are very important as most of our base talents do mind damage. Physical damage increases are nice for two-handed, but are not as much of a concern as mind is for the most part.
Also, any lifesteal we can get is great and will help us maintain our bodies and psi pool in combat much more easily, so bloodcaller or dethblyd work very well for possessor, as well as any lifesteal talents we may happen to find on bodies.
Category Points
There are a lot of places possessor likes to put category points. Tinkers as always are pretty great to have if you can get your hands on them, especially since possessor tends to have quite a few extra generic points. Putting a point into the possession tree is pretty great. Even if you pick up adept, the category point gives you extra stats from bodies and higher talent levels, which is very useful. You generally want at least 4 inscription slots, 5 if you think you can spare it. If you’re looking for a useful generic tree from escorts, conditioning is pretty useful since we get a decent amount of CON from bodies and it should help us remove debuffs pretty nicely, while intimidating presence will help us take less damage since we get a lot of extra physical power. You obviously should unlock body snatcher, deep horror if you think it’s worthwhile (which it usually isn’t). If you get mastery gear you could consider putting another point into body snatcher to get an extra use out of our better bodies, but I would rather have another inscription slot.
Prodigies
There are a few prodigies that are pretty great for this class, but above all else adept is absolutely incredible. This gives us essentially +4 to all effective talent levels from bodies, an extra talent from full control, makes all of our weapon trees better, allows us to possess more body types, and in general just makes us much stronger. This also makes 1 point into any talent much more valuable, and allows us to save some. With this and psionic clones from the two-handed tree, you can essentially have them lose one turn of duration per 13 turns passed, which is incredible. Adept, in my opinion, is the best prodigy for this class.
If you're able to get your hands on windtouched speed, that would also be pretty great for this class. The 10% CD reduction is pretty great on its own, but assuming you go 1/0/0/0 this also completely negates the solipsism slowdown at 0 psi, and gives you extra global speed outside of that.
Flexible combat is pretty great. We have a lot of splash damage and high strength as this class, and with all that we get from bodies the extra utility and damage with this is very nice to have. Also, this works pretty well with proc equipment, and I tend to use those a lot on possessor.
Other notable mentions are PES (Pain Enhancement System) since we get so much strength from bodies, arcane might or superpower to get a bunch of extra weapon damage, spine of the world for obvious debuff prevention, draconic will for the same reason, and eye of the tiger for that sweet cooldown reduction.
Talent Allotments
Psionic/Solipsism: 1/0/0/0 or 1/1/5/0 (going more than x/0/0/0 increases solipsism threshold, making global speed loss more severe and common.)
- Solipsism-Useful for preserving some health on bodies, and extra points makes healing restore more psi, but the downsides of running out of psi really aren't worth further investment, and the healing will be large enough late game where higher percentages shouldn't matter much.
Balance-While we will have some nice mental save, balance doesn't provide much really. You only really want this to reach clarity.
Clarity-Useful if you can consistently keep your psi pool high. 40% global speed at 5/5 and 100% psi is no joke, but this isn't worth it if you can't keep your psi pool strong as the increased solip threshold hurts.
Dismissal-Looks like it'd be great for this class, but rarely has any effect and isn't worth the threshold cost.
- Bodies Reserve-EXTREMELY useful to invest in, but you only need to invest 4 points into it for the 15 max bodies if you get adept.
Psionic Minion-Doesn't get as much credit as it deserves. Psionic minion lets you summon a body for a lot of turns with its full native set, meaning equipment, all talents, life, and stats. Especially on insane and madness, this means we can summon minions much stronger than they would be when we use them, or we can summon minions outside our archetype that can use their full moveset, which is much more useful than you'd expect.
Psionic Duplication-The best talent in this tree. Getting up to 4-5 uses out of a body that is rare+ is absolutely incredible, especially in conjunction with cannibalize and psionic minion. This talent also always rounds up when dividing, so if I were to get it up to 13 bodies from this I would actually get five uses out of rare+ ones, which is great.
Cannibalize-Made much better by having some method of regaining psi (like a healing infusion). This is the only way we can heal bodies, and is best used mid combat to fully restore psi. Generally, you'll want to use this when a body gets low, which means you'll usually be out of psi by the time this is needed, so healing is usually necessary to use it. The quality of life of getting to heal strong bodies is incredible, mid combat or not, and this is an easy 5/5 to maximize efficiency. Generally 3-4 cannibalize uses per strong body is the max, but more can be used with extremely diminishing returns.
- Possession-More points in this allows us to possess bosses and rares, and allows us to possess more body types. Do I even need to say how important both of those things are?
Self Persistence-The weakest talent in this list, doesn't provide too much value, but some. Not really that worthwhile, but at least 3 points is generally fine.
Improved Form-Very important talent. Maxing this gives you much more out of a body's attributes to use, and the increased talent levels you get from bodies is incredibly useful. This actually works extremely well with adept, raising the talent levels to 9 from this talent, then adding 1.5 after that to the talents, resulting in 10.5 effective talent levels in most talents from bodies. Cannot stress enough how useful this talent is.
Full Control-Another extremely important talent for us. This allows us not only to get up to 6 extra talents from our bodies, but also gives us their natural speeds (only if they're better than ours, which is very nice QOL) and their resistances. Many enemies have large amounts of all resistance, so this is incredible, and getting up to 8 talents instead of 2 is also absolutely necessary.
- Mind Steal-Definitely has some use to it. Has less use after 4 points since it'll have just about 100% uptime, but being able to steal a prod from some enemies is pretty good. This is made much worse by its mental save check and that you can't use it on elite bosses.
Spectral Dash-Would be useful if it was instant use. The damage isn't very good and the psi gain is minimal. Best limited to one point for its utility, not worth investing much more.
Writhing Psionic Mass-Probably the best talent in this tree, has actual use. Gives you some much needed effect clearing, is instant, gives some crit negation, and a lot of all resist for 6 turns. If you're getting this tree for something, get it for this.
Ominous Form-Not worth using. The only reason I would suggest putting anything into this is to give yourself some extra time for the rare times you'll be outside of a body, but even then it's pretty bad and can't be used on elite bosses.
Psionic/Psychic Blows: Easily 5/5/5/3-5 for me. The spawning of psionic imprints and then extending them, plus the extra damage and evasion from force shield is great.
- Psychic Crush-The bread and butter of this tree. Does good weapon damage, and spawns the psionic imprint which does quite a lot for either tanking or hurting the enemy. Scales based off of enemies so works great for higher difficulties, but does check mental save.
Force Shield-This gives you a pretty strong retaliation strike on attacks to you, and will give you quite a bit of passive evasion which will save you a lot of health over time. Pretty solid.
Unleashed Mind-Really strong talent. Aside from extending the duration of our psionic imprints, this has quite a large area of effect, and does a lot of damage to boot. Will likely end up being a part of your main moveset.
Seismic Mind-Pretty nice, but you should aim it to avoid exploding your psionic imprints. Does good damage and splash but the damage from destroying your minions isn't worth it.
- Mind Whip-A pretty nice ranged option in the early game, falls off as time progresses but not bad to use.
Psychic Wipe-One of the two main reasons you would use this tree. The mental save reduction lets a few other possessor talents (like mind steal or psychic crush) work better, and the damage is pretty okay.
Ghastly Wail-Pretty nice knockback talent. Not worth investing more than one point as the knockback doesn't increase and you're not taking this for the damage or daze length.
Finger of Death-The other reason you may take this tree. Checks mental save (which is pretty bad), but still can be pretty useful. The damage is pretty good, and the fact that it can possess bodies means we can use it when our possession talent is on cooldown, which can be pretty useful.
- Psionic Disruption-Does very good early game damage, definitely worth floating points into until it begins to fall off around level 15-20.
Shockstar-Does a pretty long stun and a splash daze is pretty okay, and the damage is pretty decent as well. Not worth investing hard in, but not that bad.
Dazzling Lights-The main splash damage of this tree combined with a large blind area, not that great but has some decent damage and utility, worth putting a few points into if using this tree.
Psionic Block-This is why you're here. Up to 50% damage negation with 33% uptime before adept is absolutely insane, plus it has retaliation damage making it even better. This talent is definitely worth maxing, even just to use it then switch back to two handed just after.
Technique/Combat Training: 5/1-3/0-1/2-5/5/0
- Thick Skin-All resistance is always great, no need to explain this one.
Heavy Armor Training-You always want at least one point for non-body heavy armor, 3 if you want to wear massive. Armor is always nice and crit shrug off is nice too.
Light Armor Training-If you're wearing light armor, might as well dump a point here. Extra armor hardiness is always pretty good, and fatigue reduction helps us save a little psi too.
Combat Accuracy-Helps with one-handed+mindstar and two handed attacks. Pretty self-explanatory that you want to be able to hit enemies.
Weapons Mastery-This is pretty great for increasing our weapon damage, and stacks with weapons mastery with our bodies, making it really strong.
Dagger Mastery-Not worth it for possessor.
- Heightened Senses-Nice to have but not why we're here.
Device Mastery-Allows us to defuse traps and reduces item cooldowns by 40% before adept. That 40% reduction is HUGE for psionic shielding torques and for other equipment with active effects. Very useful to have.
Track-Very nice to have for scouting and knowing what's coming up. Really can help you know how to approach any encounter. Always a useful pick up.
Danger Sense-Many might disagree with me on this, but one point in this with adept provides a decent amount of crit damage reduction, and the extra save roll can rarely be helpful. Worth one point but not much more than that.
- Psychometry-The mindpower bonus can be nice, but we're not here for the extra mindpower.
Mental Shielding-Very useful talent. Instant use time and can clear a bunch of current and future mental effects which can be extremely useful in a pinch.
Projection-The source of many exploits, but we're only taking it to have access to mind link.
Mind Link-Pretty useful talent. Invest here what you feel necessary. This improves most of our native class talents, even our two-handed one. Pretty nice to have for longer boss fights.
- Sadism-This is a nice passive boost to mindpower, but not why we're here.
Channel Pain-The main reason you want to invest in this tree. Lowers the damage we take by a good bit, and has a good bit of damage retaliation too. More points means less psi taken from us when this procs, which is pretty good.
Radiate Agony-Not a bad talent, put points here if you have some to spare. Damage reduction is always nice.
Torture Mind-Also can be useful but requires a good bit of luck. This usually isn't that worthwhile but it isn't terrible.
There are quite a few fixed enemies in this game we really want to have in our arsenal as we progress. Bill is usually a pretty good place to start after you beat trollmire, and any randbosses and/or rares you find should carry you up to that point. By the time we reach level 12-13 we shouldn't be spending almost any time outside of our body in combat. After the first few dungeons you should do either sandworm lair or the maze, both of which will have some high quality bodies for us. The minotaur of the maze and the sandworm queen are both pretty great, and have a lot of health for us to take advantage of. The assassin lord, assuming you can kill him, is pretty good as well. You should do old forest after one or both of these, lake of nur after the other T2s. Halfling complex and daikara are pretty nice too, but are more dangerous than the other T2 dungeons. By this point, assuming you can get your hands on an antimagic body, getting protector myssil is pretty nice too, and if you kill Urkis you can get both the Angolwen and Zigur rewards from the quest, which is pretty cool. Now, the last hope graveyard coffins have high quality bodies we should be able to kill, which will be really helpful for Dreadfell. Dreadfell uses bodies inside of it and some others you have accumulated, and hopefully you have saved a powerful one to kill the Master. After this, Ukruk is a great body. He has a lot of health, good stats and talents, and will help us breeze through Reknor and the early parts of the East. Next up, Vor armory has Warmaster Gnarg, which is incredible and has a couple of good prods for us to use. At this point, Slasul, Ukllmswwik, and Walrog are all pretty great. Slasul and Ukllmswwik both have a bunch of prodigies that will make the prides pretty easy, and the prides all have guaranteed randbosses we can take at the start too. Before the prides, though, we should kill (and possess) Briagh, then head back west to get a bunch of our endgame bodies. Aluin is the best choice we have in trollmire, so get him as soon as you can. This body is good enough to carry us through (except on madness) the prides, High Peak, and even the final boss. The corrupted sand wyrm is pretty great too, along with Pale Drake and Drolem from Tannen's tower. With these 4 bodies in our arsenal (and Linanill if you're able to kill her-not recommended), we are ready to beat the game and save the world! If you made it this far in the guide, thanks for reading and if you disagree with anything in this let me know and we'll talk about it.
Embers of Rage
Overview
EOR is a completely different beast than AOA. It requires a much more careful playstyle and different early to mid game strategies, and is in general much, much harder than AOA as a whole. No rares will appear until around the time we get our first prodigy, and we will not be able to possess bosses until level 20 since we need to use out first category point elsewhere, which I will go more into detail with later. Anything I do not list as being different for EOR you can consider to be the same in both campaigns. Also, EOR has far fewer fixedbosses and many more fixedelitebosses when compared to AOA, so there are fewer fixed bodies to possess here.
Body Types
Body types change in EOR significantly in what we want, and some are strictly necessary while others fall off in value when compared to AOA.
- Necessary: Horror, giant, mechanical, insect, humanoid, and animal
- Very Good: Demon
- Good: Dragon, elemental, vermin, construct, and undead
- Near-useless: Aquatic, immovable, and spiderkin
Talent Distribution Differences
There are four key differences between AOA and EOR in talents, the fact that we have tinkers (and need to invest in those generics), where we put our category points, psionic disruption point floating, and the fact that we get free generic trees from yeti tissues.
For our category points it is not realistic to put your first category point into possession, as we require body snatcher for extra bodies and cannibalize, but we especially need psionic minion. Body snatcher has to be your first pick if you want to win, as we need psionic minion to carry us through to adept at level 25 and through the sunwall outpost with the sun mages there.
Psionic disruption is required for early game. The damage output from it is MUCH higher than anything we have access to until we get rares at ritch tunnels, and it will be our only way to really damage enemies. Float 3 or 4 points in disruption and 1 in shockstar until you get a strong 2 hander after the first 3 floors of dominion port. I don't think this run would be realistic without floating points here.
Generic trees from the yeti tissues are extremely useful in this playthrough. Mobility was my first pick, as it gives us disengage and tumble which actually allow us to escape from enemies when the need arises, and evasion reduces the damage we take by a lot. You will never run out of stamina unless you really overuse class talents so it's not really a major concern. I also ended up taking chants with another tissue, as the third talent gives us some much needed effect clearing (since you lack relentless pursuit that you would have in AOA), and the bonuses from the chants themselves aren't all that bad either. In my run I also took a flat point in misdirection which had a pretty high chance of negating physical effects (23%) and granted a decent amount of defense, and stone touch, though I would recommend taking something different as it saw no use in the run.
For tinkers categories you should get at least one point in each for various tinkers, but getting enough points to make some of the artifact tinkers is really nice, especially the power armor you get from GEM. This armor allows you to get a good amount of passive flat damage reduction and some occasional extra damage, which is extremely useful.
One other thing to consider is picking up at least one point in light armor training until the late game, since it gives you extra defense (which is very useful until rares begin to spawn), fatigue reduction which allows you to possess and bodyhop more easily, and will save you a lot of health and time throughout until you eventually switch to heavy armor.
Race
There are only 3 races in EOR, and only 2 of them are usable. Yeti and orc both have very good talents for this run, and either is a good pick, but whitehoof lacking the ability to use a healing infusion and its relatively weak racials just invalidate it completely.
Orc has skirmisher which gives a decent amount of all respen and pride of the orcs which can essentially act as an effect clearer or another healing infusion to bodyhop. Pride of the orcs does not restore psi within a body the way healing infusions do, so this allows us to use our healing infusion to cannibalize, possess, or use other talents rather than saving it exclusively for bodyhopping, which allows for much greater freedom in psi-consuming talent usage. Skirmisher also helps us get past one of the major roadblocks in the run, which is pretty nice too. Also orc has extra early game levels due to its starting dungeon, which is pretty nice for getting past another roadblock.
While I did not use yeti in the run, all of its racials are very useful and would be throughout the run. Algid rage is just stupidly good for freezing to disable enemies, thick fur has nice phys res. resilient body looks very good for sustaining our psi pool, and mindwave is a nice little free burst of damage with confusion to help disable enemies. Either one is a good pick.
Don't use whitehoof, trust me.
Roadblocks
This is the meat and potatoes of the EOR run, the major roadblocks. There are 6 major ones in the run which could easily end the strongest of runs, which are the sunwall outpost, the 4th floor of dominion port, floor 2+ of ritch, the observatory, sunwall/GEM, and slumbering.
Outpost: This is what will kill most runs until you master it. Every enemy in this zone is super dangerous and will melt any body thrown at them, especially John. You need to possess spellcasters and use them to kill enemies from afar using a movement infusion or just hit and runs, and either summon mages or enemies from vaults (which you also kill using psionic minions) using psi minion. John must be kept far, far away, and it is best to summon a spellcaster, pop your movement infusion, and get behind a building or corner, then repeat this in circles until he dies. Even if you want to face him without running, you must summon psionic minion mages to damage him. Sun mages are the best body for you to use, while anorthils will damage John the most when you summon them. Kraltor might have some good stuff to use against John, though it isn't necessary.
Dominion Port (4): Korbek is your roadblock here. This guy will have true grit sustained for thousands of turns, and will easily reach just below 100% allres. This is one of the reasons why orc is a nice race since it gives all respen, while you can supplement this bonus by now switching to using 2 handers with a weapon from kraltor. He takes a long time and a lot of damage to kill, so if you are able to scavenge any bodies from vaults in the sewers they will be massively helpful here. Korbek and the Yeti in this port are two very useful bodies to have before tackling ritch 2.
Ritch Tunnels (2-4): The second most important roadblock after John, as rares will begin to spawn here. If you're able to reach level 25 and get adept before going into ritch 2 then you will find this part a lot easier. You need to get lucky and find a relatively weak rare to pick up before building up your stockpile. Use track for levels 3-4 to find which enemies you can tackle and which you can't, while scavenging as many bodies as you can from floor 2. Mindslayers and brawlers are very good here due to their bulkiness if you can get your hands on them. This is a turning point in the run as you begin to have some actual power.
Sunwall Observatory (1-2): This is a point where you can just lose the run if luck is not on your side. I would suggest picking up some horrors to distract strong enemies here from Eruan if you can. Here enemies can begin to spawn as uniques and randbosses, which are far more dangerous if they roll strong bodies. The basetypes here can have 200% global natively which makes them much more dangerous too. If you and your minions can deal with a strong enemy here it will carry you through until GEM, unless you find some exceptional ones in the internment camp. Watch out for really strong randoms and take it really slow and steady with track and hunted! radius.
Sunwall and G.E.M.: Sunwall has Aeryn, a very strong elite boss that will take a long time to whittle down. We wouldn't kill Areyn normally but she does drop the ring of lost love and grant access to the G.E.M. which is very important for the power armor and various bodies. You'll get some strong ones from the tunnels, but brawler basetypes can be quite dangerous and hard to kill due to evasion. Just clear out the enemies around Aeryn after beating her the first time and use your psi minions to do a chunk of her health while you summon psychic imprints and do damage yourself. Damage reduction is really good against Aeryn because she has a lot of damage instances which will all be reduced individually. For G.E.M., the first floor is the most scary surprisingly. There are a lot of enemies there and by this point the hunted! radius will be almost that entire area, so you'll have a lot to deal with at once, so AOE is very useful here. The second floor you should treat like the observatory, very slow and steady with only taking on a couple enemies at a time. Spiders are really good to pick up as well as any strong horror bodies you may find along the way. These will likely bring you all the way up to slumbering as both summons and your main bodies. After G.E.M. your power spikes hard and things are pretty easy until slumbering comes along.
Slumbering Caves: You should be level 50 and have your final equipment by now. Enemies here will have about 100k HP as randbosses and about 60-80k as uniques, and some classes they roll can do many thousands of damage per turn. Especially watch out for cultists of entropy, mindslayers, and burrowing wyrmics. Keep in mind by this point you should have a source of lifesteal and hopefully find a body to dig without a pickaxe, as you need to dig and hide a lot to kill enemies. NEVER engage more than one strong enemy at a time if you can avoid it, and use hidden vaults as safe zones if you need to switch bodies or equipment. You need to kill and possess at least one or two strong bodies to be able to deal with the final floor, and use them as psi minions to kill the final boss. As strong as dethblyd is, I do not suggest using it here as your game will slow to a crawl and crash a lot if you use it. For the final floor you could deal with all the enemies in the hallway but it will be very slow to do so, so if you can dig around until the mouth teleports you I suggest you do so. After the teleport to the arena the final boss is pretty trivial compared to other enemies you've dealt with, though he is quite bulky.
Edit: Here are my relevant characters from the vault:
- Madness RL: https://te4.org/characters/239952/tome/ ... 7c04dbfdc1 (winner), https://te4.org/characters/239952/tome/ ... e9e3ef3c06 (level 50 death)
https://te4.org/characters/239952/tome/ ... f551b68a47 (EOR winner)
Insane RL: https://te4.org/characters/239952/tome/ ... eec28dc7e6 (winner)
Nightmare RL: https://te4.org/characters/239952/tome/ ... 747eafef02 (winner)