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[Neonivek]

From what I found... the stat that means the least is the "Exp penelty".

I've never found a reason to play a race that was outright better but earned exp slower.

[lemon10]

Blarg, complete bullshit.

After rescuing my Soliphist from the horrors of glitching, it seems the games autosave function (at least on this account) is completely broken.
Last night play for ~three hours, it borked out and froze upon loading (which isn't uncommon for mea t least), when I loaded it this morning, it was at the same state as it was yesterday (with the same character level and items). I fix it again, and play for ~1 and a half hours (saving it manually once), when it crashes next, it goes back to where I manually saved it (erasing my completion of crypt ). I think this dude is permanently broken, so at least I will try to unlock yeek with him, so my next dude will be a yeek sophilist (which I suppose I will start as soon as I unlock him, since I think it will save more time then having the game screw me multiple times over the course of the game by not saving like it should and crashing).

[Graven]

So... is the game expected to save three times every time I change location? It saves one, loads the zone, then saves two more times for good measure. Also I'm on the verge of just giving myself the solipsist unlock because two characters haven't gotten the zone already and I hate the early game waaaaay too much to bother with another.

[Robsoie]

Yes, it's extremely annoying that ToME4 autosave everytime you enter/exit a zone.

Nothing better than to break your whole game and force you to restart from scratch when you land into a bugged area and the ugly autosave will save there, preventing you to play anymore if you don't  backup  a save before

I hope the dev will seriously consider to make that autosaving an option, allowing the player to save only -when he wants to save- and when quitting.

But in the current state, it's very annoying, add too much time in which you do nothing but wait for that double autosave to work, and that without mentionning the possibility of breaking your character definitively too.

[Frumple]

The saves aren't just saving you, exactly. Part of what it's doing is saving the zone you just left. It does this so it can take said zone out of your RAM, from what I understand, and keep T4 from completely devouring your physical memory. Which it would happily do otherwise, heh. Part of the multiple bars is more of a loading thing than strictly saving, it's just said bars haven't quite been sorted out for clarity and accuracy and junk. From what I understand of it, anyway.

Beyond that, I think there will be a disable auto-save (except for the get-zone-out-of-memory bit) option at some point in the future, once DG stops active development (On the main maj'eyal module, anyway). The other half of autosave is to help with debugging and suchlike, yeah.

In the meantime, someone capable of decoding lua could probably hunt down the saving stuff somewhere in the code and spit out a little addon just flat out disabling non-manual saves. Just expect it to cause some problems, heh.

[Robsoie]

Hopefully, the devs will find a better system, as it's not fun to have a long run being definitively broken due to autosaving when entering/exiting a bugged zone.

[Graven]

Yeah, it certainly isn't :|

On an unrelated topic, does anyone have any Temporal Warden advice? I'm trying Solipsist now, and the overabundance of options reminds me of how I felt when I first tried TW. TWs remain my second favourite class after the Paradox Mage, but the last win in the Vault is in b040, and there were nerfs to the paradox classes later than that, weren't there?

I'm mostly interested in a melee-oriented TW, but good ranged build advice is also quite welcome.

[Frumple]

With TW, I generally build for speed, mobility, and utility first. Flurry and a good bow will give you plenty of physical damage for most situations without needing much investment, while your varying paradox talents will give you a great deal of battlefield control to allow you to leverage that.

The big thing I find with a TW is not getting into a single build mentality... if you're really trying to get a TW through, you don't run a melee build, or a bow build, or a caster build, or whatever, really. What you want to do is invest your talent points so you can leverage all of that maximally. So this means stuff like investing as little as possible for the greatest benefit, and generally trying to overlap as little as possible, at least for the early-mid. You want flurry and you might want sweep, but you can probably do without whirlwind; your paradox talents (especially slow, but also stop and echos) cover AoE damage plenty, and you don't want to be fully surrounded in almost any situation. You want dual arrows (it's a free damage boost on your bow attacks), but you probably don't want volley of arrows (AoE, yadda). You don't really need much beyond a few points into dimstep for a long, long time. When you can, invest in stuff that's going to have a multiplicative effect on your other capabilities -- slow and haste are both good examples of this, and I personally place much, much higher value on them than stop.

When it comes to actual on-the-ground; though it can be annoying to keep swapping, use that bow and consider prioritizing debuff-capable bows and ammo. Max out celerity and make sure you're in melee with melee enemies as little as possible; if at all able, only use a melee attack when you can one-shot something. Even a primarily melee build is going to be seriously benefitted by heavy utilization of ranged force and control. Similarly, don't try to win a ranged fight with most ranged enemies; drop a slow on them, dimstep or movement infusion over, and lay down a double strike->flurry. Fight the enemy where they're weakest, instead of where you're strongest, basically, because a TW is built best when it's not strongest anywhere.

The TW talent set makes them one of the classes most able to do just that, whereas most classes are more about maximizing their own strengths and leveraging them unilaterally. Wardens do better when they instead maximize enemy weakness and adjust their tactics to take advantage of that. Choose your battles, choose your battlegrounds, etc., so forth, so on. You've got the speed, mobility, debuffs, and damage, to basically fix every fight in the game specifically to your favor. Do so. Stack the odds.

[dei]

Would a Higher make a good Time Warden or Shadowblade? I want to try one of those two classes after I get my fill of Archmage and Alchemist, and I figure that I would ask if my favorite race in the game would work for those.

Also, how do I build a Shadowblade for speed and high damage output? How do I build an Alchemist for high damage output and the golem for maximum damage and durability? Is Freeze a good choice to add onto an Archmage? What about Stone Wall, is that good to add onto an Archmage? Does Command Staff and Change Damage affect the damage of an Alchemist's bombs? I'm sorry for asking so many questions, I'm just wanting to get them all out at once while I'm here and can remember them due to the whole short term memory loss bit I deal with on a regular basis.

I'm going to sleep now because honestly I have got to wake up before 9:00 AM tomorrow, though preferably before 7:00 AM for once. Good night.

[Frumple]

Highers make decent enough anything. Iirc, their primary racial scales with willpower, which makes them a pretty solid match with temporal wardens (whose primary stats are will/mag, followed by str or dex (or both) depending on what they're leaning toward). Less so with shadowblades, but SBs will want to build a little willpower to open up some of their more expensive sustains so it's not a total loss. The extended max visual range dovetails nicely with an infravision spec'd SB.

SBs get speed primarily from essence of speed (temporal tree) and momentum, but both are pretty late game due to how expensive they are. Maybe blinding speed and some conditional stuff (Shalore racial, fire harmony). Before that, they're primarily burst melee guys (flurry/sweep with the added darkness damage) with high mobility (controlled phase door), so it's nothing really fancy. Remember the second tier talent in the tree that has willful combat is an instant, so it doesn't take time to use. SBs can also invest in the phantasm tree if they're fully plucky; there's some nice stuff in there.

Alchemist damage output comes naturally; max the bomb tree except shockwave (which is mostly junk), and then invest in two infusion talents (I tend toward fire and acid; most tend to take fire and one of the debuff-able infusions. Fire hits a bit harder, but the crowd control can be useful). Generally you'll want to use the highest tier gem you can get access to, as bomb damage scales with gem tier. Other than that, you just get channel staff to at least 3/5 (initially; you'll max it eventually) and max out staff mastery. Get a nice staff and channel will pretty easily be chunking off 1-200 HP per turn at range by the time you're twenty-ish. You can invest in the heat tree, but it will never do more damage than your bombs can; it's more for supplement while the bombs are cooling down than an actual primary damage source, though there's some utility, too.

Golem durability and damage comes from the first two talents in the basic golemancy tree, the gem and runic golem talents, and supercharge golem. The first two are no-brainers, simple passive boosts. Gem golem allows you to change the golem's base damage type (so a golem with an amethyst in its eye will do arcane instead of physical when it beats on something, ferex.) as well as adjust the golem slightly as needed to lean toward damage (+% alldam or stats) or durability (+% resall), usually you'll gem the golem toward resistance to stack with the golem resilience talent. You'll also want to stick an appropriate gem in the golem's armor with imbue.

Runic massively increases the golem's regen (boosting it further with a verdant/eyal heavy or massive armor is possible! Chainmail of bloodletting is also pretty good.) and allows you to stick extra offensive runes on the golem (I lean toward the fire and lightning one's, but acid wave can be good, too. Don't use frost spear. Rune of the rift is a possibility on a magic-leaning golem, but requires willpower to land easily, so is sub-par.) for extra damage. Know that the golem starts with three inscription slots, same as the player, so 5/5 runic golem actually gives the golem six, total. Get two shield runes (and possibly the rune of absorption or whatev', if you happen upon the troll hedge wizard) and then load up on damage runes.

Supercharge gives the golem massive healing as well as insta-resurrects the golem if it's dead (unlike refit, which takes many turns) -- you can use it two ways, mostly; preemptively at the start of a fight to lengthen the golem's up time, or save it to resurrect the golem after it drops. Sometimes if you do the former, the talent will have came off cool down before the golem pops, letting you very much massively extend the golem's presence in a fight.

Freeze is an excellent single-target debuff and alright damage. Most archmagi stick at least one point into it, more id they've got the points to spare. Stone wall is pretty useful, but somewhat situationally so, and you can get it on a hat. YMMV, I've personally never really used it much.

The +% damage on staves effect everything. Bomb damage, heat tree, channel staff, smacking things in the head, whatever. Doesn't boost the golem (though it does boost the damage on summoner summons! Iirc, anyway.), but that's about it. Vilestaves are excellent on an acid/fire alchemist, especially if it's a greater prefix ego.

Questions are fine, heh. There's also the t4 forums and the in-game chat, if you want second opinions or on the fly advice or answers.

[Ukrainian Ranger]

Temporal wardens are very versatile, and while jack of trades is a viable option, they can concentrate. My favourite way to pay them is dex\str based archers with two bows (that ensures that you almost never run out of ammo, and can have two arrow options for special effects)

Concentrating solely on strength and dexterity gives you insane damage with arrows, especially with maxed strength of purpose and weapon folding, and without melee weapons you can avoid spending generic points on weapon skills, and high dexterity let's not spending points on combat accuracy, all that generic points can be used for racials (Shaloren and skeletons have cool options for archery based warden) and bringing armour training to 10 (that will improve your survivability, trust me)

[Graven]

Whoa Frumple, those there are some huge posts. Thanks! You too, Ranger

I generally prefer melee classes to ranged ones, and back in b038 melee TW was quite possible. Guess I'll try a generalist/ranged one.

I also tried Solipsist, and it's balls out easy. You can tank through almost anything and do incredible sustained damage. Really, really needs a nerf. You have great CC, you can base your entire defence on your mental saves, you have a controlled phase door... My first death was to a fellow Solipsist unique, albeit a snake. Then I died 3 times to the Minotaur since I hadn't anything to rid me of stun, so I got mad and quit.

Weirdly enough I feel I don't like the Solipsist. Sure, he plays great, is really powerful and has some fun talents... I don't actually know why I don't like it. Ever had this happen to you? There's a class in an rpg or whatever that you ... just don't like in general. Without a reason. Kind of the opposite of how I feel about Doomed and Cursed. Maybe it's the [miniature] lore, like ability description and even names of talents.

Wow, this feels dumb when I try to type it out. On the other hand the Dreamforge line of talents is incredible. I could base a god damn novel on that thing alone.

[lemon10]

Soliphists are the only class that should have no trouble taking out soliphist rares, since their main threat is that they will sleep you for like 5 turns and do like 500 damage and eat through all your sheilds, if you have the lucid dreaming talent on (which you should always have on at least at level one as soon as you get it), then they can't sleep you, and become a pushover pretty much.

[Robsoie]

Been running a Cornac Rogue, mostly with the goal to unlock the Poison talents and the Marauder class, i had some fun so far , thanks to finding nice weapons early.

But it will take a while before he's able to deal the "600 damage in 1 hit" required to unlock the Marauder, i have read a bit on the tome4 board about the talents to use, hopefully i'll keep it surviving until then.
And mostly everything seems to be able to see my character when i have activated the stealth talent, looks like i'll have to put more points in it to improve its efficiency, as getting into high damage are requiring hitting something while being stealthy.

[Terra_Inc]

And mostly everything seems to be able to see my character when i have activated the stealth talent, looks like i'll have to put more points in it to improve its efficiency, as getting into high damage are requiring hitting something while being stealthy.

Early game stealth is basically useless for sneaking up to an enemy. The main use of stealth in that part of the game is to keep ranged enemies from hitting you consistently - they'll miss a lot even if they see you every now and then. It nicely complements Rush, if you're going for that (which I personally would recommend).

Once you have more levels and more points in stealth / higher cun, you can sneak up to most enemies quite easily. My b39 rogue had no problems sneaking up to the master and killifying him quickly. Combine maxed stealth with maxed shadowstrike and do a flurry or whirlwind. Pure carnage, I tell you.