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[Frumple]

That's... odd. I don't remember the final EoR boss being nearly that tanky? Want to say there was a gimmick involved with the supporting more-or-less invincible stuff, but the boss itself wasn't bad if you kept on top of that.

[Darkmere]

I think I'm done for a while. Normal is mostly a non-issue with any amount of preparation, so I took a Krog Wyrmic to Nightmare to see how it went.

One of the AoE final bosses spawned with 97% all resist, lightning resist, and cold resist. At that point I did have +47% respen but it wasn't enough to do meaningful damage in between retreats while I was taking 2/3 life total damage through antimagic in two turns. This was after casually strolling through everything else, including High Peak.

Further plays follow the same pattern of 98% of enemies being complete non-entities while the remaining 2% can 2-shot you. I don't remember this being the case last time I tried Nightmare a couple years ago.... so hard pass, I guess.

[Frumple]

I'unno, that sounds like nightmare (or higher, for that matter) to me since like day 1. Chaff is chaff and occasionally you hit a randboss or whatever that casually pushes your shit in. Winning's mostly an issue of figuring out what the latter is at a distance, staying away from it, and hoping the final bosses don't fall into that category. Also being a broken buzzsaw of death, generally, heh. Not sure if wyrmic's back to being one of those... know there's been some changes I haven't paid much attention to, but for a long while they (and especially going antimagic) were one of the weaker classes.

Unless DG's changed their mind since the last time I was particularly close to the dev process, T4 is fundamentally not balanced around the higher difficulties, though. They're there for 'fun' and for people that want their teeth kicked in occasionally, but making it a smooth or generally enjoyable experience isn't even on the priority list, nevermind high up it. Super broken stuff is (sometimes) fixed, but that's about it.

Personally, if I want more of a challenge or a spicier run without dealing with nightmare+'s horseshit, I'll roll out one of the mods that increases rare/randboss spawning rate and crank those numbers up. That makes things more interesting without enemy scaling et al getting quite as silly.

E: In other news, annihilator is some fun times. Built pretty passive offense so far (grenades, spiderbot, artillery, basically avoiding their active stuff), but I've finally gotten around to really reading some of the talents and holy shit does the tier 4 shield one look all kinds of busted. Flat damage mitigation based off block amount, in a radius? Sign me the hell up, frumple wants that 100+ dam reduction lolno field to stick my arachnoblender and turrets in. There's even a damage component too, ahaha.

E2: And in adventurer fun times, it turns out annihilator rockets will indeed trigger psyshot projections... which, of course, trigger arcane combat procs. I'm having mild survivability issues, and lost two lives to rngreebus deciding a level 37 orc pyromancer was a good thing to drop on my level 12 arse on OF 3, but overall... this is a good kind of silly. Can't even figure out quite how to describe what this would look like. You'd have some crazy thing doing one-handed jojo punches through portals, with the portals exit being attached to rockets they're firing off from a shoulder mounted launcher.

Except rather than punches it would be braining people with psionic voodoo rocks that occasionally erupt into varying pyrotechnics on impact. Also they'd be constantly shooting people in the face to project more rock smack portals. The mechanics are effective, the visuals, absurd.

E3: As for how silly, you know that thing that can happen when you've gotten so silly you're passively killing many things so fast auto-explore doesn't even recognize they exist and just keeps going as you mow down half the level with basically no input from you outside of pressing the auto-explore button? That's how silly. It's not something I've seen very often in the years I've played T4, ahaha.

Also it turns out rocket pods have a nice synergy with relatively low capacity shot, like some of the set artifact shot likes to have. Since, y'know, it doesn't use ammo but is otherwise entirely like a normal shoot command

E4: Vor armory death room clear cheevo at level 32. Been a while since I ate the wyrms <3

E5: ha ha ha tk wielding a steamgun makes rocket pod hit twice

ho ho ho psyshot dgaf it hits twice too

this is glorious

gloriously stupid

[Darkmere]

I may have gotten the wrong impression, but I thought I saw poking around the official forums that the 1.6 series of patches was supposed to downplay the cheatscum starts and make the early game a lot saner than before to compensate, nightmare included. Whether that's effective or not, I can't really say.

Wyrmics and AM both got buffs, to the point that anti-magic is what the Light tree used to be for any class with spells. You can make anti-magic fields that restore equilibrium and use mana clash to shut off magical sustains. It's basically amazing.

How amazing? I took a Krog wyrmic through high peak on nightmare with ice breath, sand breath, lightning breath, and some of the basic 2H attacks. Easily.

Annihilators are silly, yes. I put thunderclap edge on my weapon (I think that's it, anyway), and the rocket pods were a stream of spammed AoE knockbacks for the rest of the game. If you want, you can take the defensives for the flamethrower that give you evasion while it's equipped and just stand there while your ROKKIT SHOOTAS stunlock enemies against a wall.

[Putnam]

wyrmic is super strong right now, esp. with krog. I would say krog is the best on Tinker classes due to inherent antimagic if drem weren't still insanely strong and that silly the fact that ogres get better stat growth out of steam generators/injectors (which, btw, unless they explicitly changed this part in particular salves still get cooldown reduction from device mastery, which with the new items has been promoted from merely a top five talent to maybe the single best talent in the game)

[Unnamed]

This is actually one of my favorite roguelikes.
The average difficulty in the latest version is easier but bosses are harder. Also there is the issue that you frequently are oneshot (even by rares). With all the procs and damage boni enemies can easily hit you for 400% of max. health or more which is just ridiculous.

I tried Annihilators both on nightmare and insane difficulty and they are rather weak on insane. Also the attack of the upgraded steamgun turret is the only good nuke but turrets are often oneshot on insane which makes boss fights take really long.

[Frumple]

Annihilator rocket pods make for delightfully stupid adventurer build fodder, for what it's worth. The rest of their stuff trends nice but only so interesting, but those pods are just ridiculous. Especially paired with psi-shot, giving you passive ranged melee procs on basically everything in weapon range.

Have a fun, if not terribly optimal, one I've paused to play with shields, that picked up the rogue tools thing for hidden blades and then flexible combat. My bullets shoot rocks that shoot punches, basically. It's all sorts of amusing, and the regular quick as thought procs coming from fist of the desert scorpion are tasty. Wish rocket pods worked right with non-steamguns, though. Might end up fiddling up an add-on for that, I'unno.

[Graven]

So uh... anyone have a general overview of the 1.6 and higher patches?

I stopped playing a bit before that, and from what I can tell, there's been a bit of... controversy. Neither Bpat nor Cathbald seem to have updated any of their guides for 1.6, either, and I was under the impression they're some of the more serious people in the TE4 community.

[Frumple]

AI's smarter/meaner, apparently, and there was some damage spike issues that have been getting ironed out is most of it, near as I can tell. Some of the older guide writers apparently threw their hands in the air and walked off when the stronger strategies changed in effectiveness, but folks seem to be adjusting, too, and balance changes are coming along.

Personally, the few runs I've done since have been... fine, at least once the run-away-run-away behavior was fixed. Most of the stuff folks were flipping out over seemed only super noticeable if you were playing on like insane or somethin', which has always been masochistic one-shot horseshit land to me anyway. Normal or nightmare's mostly been about the same or better, least as far as I've been able to notice from playing a bit.

[Putnam]

Madness is now a game of inhuman patience rather than being a game of inhuman patience and sometimes you're just completely fucked with absolutely no chance of continuing. It should be noted that in 1.5 decisions that completely fucked you included: picking any class that isn't possessor, adventurer or archmage (and nobody was very sure about archmage, and the only confirmed possessor win was save scummed).

Insane's got harder fixed bosses here and there but that's good because fixed bosses were (except for the final bosses and occasionally the master/urkis/weirdling if you were terribly unprepared) kind of jokes. Overall I think it feels fine, there's no drowning but drowning was silly. I should note that I've only won on insane once, though, and that was on 1.5.

[Graven]

Interesting... so if I continue playing on normal and treating the game as a turn-based hack-n-slash, nothing much will change for me (except for the class balance changes)? NOT TOO BAD

Thanks, lads!

[Frumple]

Yeah, pretty much. You were marginally more likely to get one-shot on normal a patch or three or whatever ago, but so far as I'm aware that's been more or less reigned in. If you're in it for normal difficulty romps you're probably just fine.

[Graven]

Yeah, Normal is probably still fine - I just went and won my first ever Bulwark!
https://te4.org/characters/15454/tome/f12d8b0b-dac5-4561-991c-297ed1e18488

Unfortunately, I now have a very good idea why I never bothered to win a bulwark in the first place.

At some point during the prides my mans got tanky as all heck, but up until the absolute very end (floor 5 of the final dungeon I think?) where I got what appears to be a pretty sweet randart mace, I only did damage with Assault, and maybe occasionally with Bleeding Edge. Enemies with plans other than "shove my face up the angry dwarf-shaped statue's armpits for the next two weeks" were a problem. Also a problem - groups of more than one enemy. Bulwark (ot at least the way I built it) appears somewhat lacking in the AOE department. All in all this run was what you might as well refer to as a "proper slobberknocker".

The mace seems pretty sweet, though - might be fun to transfer it to another character

I probably went way too overboard on defensive items, and I'm still not quite sure how to prioritize offensive stats. Since I have ICCTW as a prodigy, I'm lugging around pretty much every single unique item in the game, but at some point I got too exhausted to actually go over every one and just changed items if they had more resistances.

If someone could check out my items and advise what I could've changed/worn for the better, I'd be pretty grateful. Also I'm open to suggestions on tanky melee classes with better AOE - I seem to remember Writhing One was pretty fun towards the end, but apparently that was nearly 2 years ago so who knows.

Brief thoughts on 1.6 on normal:
1. It's probably perfectly fine
2. The prides have a TON of unique enemies for some reason. Every single one took ages, and the fights did very little to improve my enjoyment of the traditionally bog-like East.
3. The new AI (maybe?) appears to lead to a few more deaths early on due to improved talent usage, and to a lot of enemies running away later on. Considering I treat Tome4 as a better Diablo, this also didn't help my enjoyment  For normal people playing it like a proper roguelike this may be a good thing? Probably not tho
3. All in all I enjoyed it slightly less than usual, but I haven't played in a while (last win nearly an year ago), so I can't actually tell if it was due to any changes, or just to the Bulwark. Will definitely be trying to win a few more characters sometime soon, game's still pretty ace.

[martinuzz]

After quiet times, now has come the quiet before the storm.
Udate 1.7.5 has been released, 'Before the Storm'

[Robsoie]

It's been years i haven't played this one, will have to give another play as i wonder how the game is nowadays.

Noticed on the website, apparently a "Lost Land" expansion dlc is near completion, and there's some planning for a "Beneath The Tides" expansion dlc (for which he also contracted someone to work with him)