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[Darkmere]

Yeah unless I'm running a super-strong character with 0 deaths and very few oh shit moments I skip the dark crypt and the temporal rift, and leave the elven ruins til after I return from the east. Those places just aren't worth the early game risk.

I took a few stupid deaths on my necromancer, one from impatience, one or two from baiting the combat log (trying to figure out specifically what was hitting me so hard) and one from ignorance of game mechanics (you can use Celia's heart for a soul. You can spend mana if you have none, but it nukes all your sustains... and oh yeah this isn't an equilibrium class, derp). I've still got 4 lives left and a blood of life, so I think I have a good shot at getting to high peak if I quit being a dumbass. Overall it's been a good experience, the minion buffer helps me just enough to realize what mistakes I'm making without them being depressingly fatal, so I have high hopes for my next character getting to the east, and me getting back to my old skill level. Good times. 10/10, would enslave souls again.

[Robsoie]

With the 2nd skill of the animus tree, when maxed you can get up to 19 souls instead of only 10.
Very usefull in some battles on already cleared levels.

[Graven]

So apparently there are some pretty wicked +fire damage artefacts out there.

My archmage is currently at 190% crit multiplier, +71% fire penetration and +98% fire damage, and I could improve half my gear.

I also have about 3-4K shielding available to me at any given moment. Let's see if this is enough for a win to happen.

[Robsoie]

Something i noticed since the time i play, it looks like the items (not only arcane, but random ones, even high level random ones) with arcane and/or physical resistance are a very lot more rare than the items with all the other resistances.

It's often that i have a whole character running through the game and finding at max 1 or two items with a miserable 5% arcane res or 10% physical res, but no more, while all the other resistances i find tons of them

[Frumple]

So apparently there are some pretty wicked +fire damage artefacts out there.

My archmage is currently at 190% crit multiplier, +71% fire penetration and +98% fire damage, and I could improve half my gear.

Fairly sure I've seen a few folks breach 150% +dam for fire, maybe 200%. It gets a little crazy. Think it's also one of, like, three elements you can conceptually get 100+% penetration on (along with physical and cold... maybe others, it's been a while since I crunched the numbers). Incidentally, one of DG's favorite class builds over the versions have been fire archmagi >_>

And yeah Robs, arcane and physical are specifically supposed to be hard to get a hold of in any meaningful quantity. Arcane's whole shtick is being hard to resist, really, and high phys resistance trivializes way, way too much of the game. So they're both pretty rare, comparatively. It's still pretty easy to rack up a good 20-30+% physres, though, especially if you get the right items. TK Core, Harky's gloves... throw in some mountain rings (they... still have those, right?) and you're doing pretty good. Might even kick up a jug shield for an extra non-passive source.

[Robsoie]

Too bad uniques generated with either 100% arcane or 100% physical resistance, or sometime even both at once are not as extremely rare as those res on artifacts (and nearly not existing on random items, even superitems from merchant).

[Graven]

Hey, would you look at this, I got a non-antimagic win!

This handsome fellow was probably my easiest actual win, since the poor bosses couldn't take down even one of my shields.

I didn't close any portals, or do anything much really, except for spam spells and try not to hit poor Aeryn too much [she survived in the end!].

Actually, nothing after level 40 posed any threat to me at all. Apparently after a horrifying early and mid-game, Archmages become Death Stars, only there aren't any goblin pilots lead by the Force to penetrate the shields. The actual turning point for me was levelling that 50% global speed sustain. It nuked my mana to sub-200 at first, but it was so totally worth it - this basically meant I got first strike in nearly every single fight, and the ones I didn't - against paradox mages - the morons sent me out of time and wasted all their cooldowns while I was invulnerable. Every fight against a caster was basically autoexplore -> AOE stun -> nuke. In the end I was hitting for about 600 in melee too, so I could spice things up a bit.

The most horrifying fight in the entire game was against the boss in the Charred Scar, who has the Wildfire tree and I didn't have the fire damage penetration then. I had to backpedal nearly a third of the way, running, entombing myself, and running again. I took only 100 turns on the counter to get to the boss [I specifically got a movement infusion for that fight, since I was scared I wouldn't make it], and probably half an hour fighting him. It was really the peak of my experience with this character, honestly, and quite a memorable fight.

It was pretty fun, but it took way too long to get going and I only got to feel powerful in the most boring part of the game. I'll probably get one more win in and close Tome4 up for a while, since it is pretty repetitive, all in all, and the end-game is really the worst part of the game.

Wonder if Cursed are still as god-awfully boring as I remember them? Or I might get a non-antimagic berserker and  go for Irresistible Fun. I do have that one Oozemancer, but I'm not having that much fun, since he's way too powerful already, and things probably won't get harder.

[Robsoie]

Currently running a Thalore Archimage.
Despite the experience penalty, i took a Thalore to help with the summon treants from their racial tree

I decided from the start to make that character a pure Tempest, only getting manathrust to add to my firepower in case the enemy was 100% lightning protected.

During the whole early game it wasn't easy as the archimage was a bit squishy, but it was still doable with the more and more powerfull lightning spells (as i was slowly maxing them)

Then roughly between the end of the tier 2 dungeons up to Dreadfell start it was insanely hard, i lost several lives, the lack of levels (Thalore feel like playing with Skeletons on that slow leveling) was really felt but the problem was actually something else entirely :

At some point of my tier 2 dungeon clearing, i found the Staff of Destruction, it was great at that point of the game as it added +15% spell crits, lots of spellpower, and it haf 10% of launching Impending Doom (though only level 1 unfortunately) on the enemy at spell hits.

I had never used it before because by the time i found it earlier, everytime i had something better already, but not this time so i equiped it.

And then the game became insanely hard. I was wondering at some point how it was possible for my character to lose so much health during the fights, and barely getting any despite the many healing (arcane healing spell, regen, healing light from escort)
And looking at the logs i understood why it was that insanely hard.

It looks like the random generation on the enemy in that run seems to put some reflection shield to at least 1 out of 5 monsters ... leading basically 20% of my battles ending with my character affected by my own Impending Doom !

Once i switched to something else after discovering that, the battles became much more reasonnable.

I'm now in the East, my Tempest is now really starting to feel powerfull as he has several important lightning and storm skill maxed (there's a great synergy between some sustains of those trees and their skills), lots of his lightning spell can now daze and trigger the hurricane effect, he has high lightning penetration (so those pesky 100% res monsters can still get their bottom handed to them) and as i just hit level 30 i decided to choose the Meteor prodigy to add some more overkill damage

[Darkmere]

...And so the Grishnak pride falls to Dark Tessa the necromancer. She's 42 now, and the only things I'm missing are the daikara temporal rift, slime tunnels, and high peak. She was a Shalore in life... But 42 feels a little low. It's been a long, long time since I got this far, but I seem to remember 45 being my old entry goal. Is that about right? I remember getting SOME levels before the final fight but I don't recall that many. Should I hit up some farportals?

[Robsoie]

Have you done all the optional dungeons in the east ? (orc mother slave camp, the underwater temple of creation, the shadow crypt with the boss that clone you, should get you 3 levels )

Have you gone back to the west and defeated every backup guardians (should get a level from them) ?

From slime tunnels 4 powefull bosses maybe you can get a level

[Seriyu]

This actually reminded me of something I was curious about way back when I played ToME4 regularly, lore wise, which is, the entire deep bellow thing, is it ever confirmed what it is that's causing it?

I know there's some kicking around near the thaloren starting zone, but I forget if they ever mentioned if both the zones were part of the same problem or what.

[Darkmere]

Have you done all the optional dungeons in the east ? (orc mother slave camp, the underwater temple of creation, the shadow crypt with the boss that clone you, should get you 3 levels )

Have you gone back to the west and defeated every backup guardians (should get a level from them) ?

From slime tunnels 4 powefull bosses maybe you can get a level

Done all the backups but Aluin who killed me twice so I left him alone. Done all the camps but had to recall out of the shadow crypt when there were two clones of me (bugged, I guess. I don't have forgery of haze, there were literally 2 clones. never seen that before) and i couldn't do meaningful damage. I will say a couple pieces of my gear are crap and I'm fairly close to another randart, so I may grind some farportals for XP and gold, at least to 43, and then see how Slime Tunnels go.

Re: Deep Bellow/Scintillating caves

If I'm understanding the lore right, Scintillating Caves is blight-infested, and blight is sort of a "magical overload cancer" that's kind of a remnant from the spellblaze. Too much raw magic manifested in the world like a disease, so corruptors and reavers who wield raw magical power end up casting plagues and causing sickness.

Deep Bellow is more of a "Eldritch horror out of time" in lovecraft style, where they dug too greedily and too deep, then woke up some cosmic abomination. I think.

[Seriyu]

Oh when I said thaloren I meant the "physical" elf, rather then the magical. Can never keep them straight. Is the gloom a part of the blight then, or is that something else/hasn't been spelled out?

[Darkmere]

Oh when I said thaloren I meant the "physical" elf, rather then the magical. Can never keep them straight. Is the gloom a part of the blight then, or is that something else/hasn't been spelled out?

... Nope you were right, with Thalore, I just can't read. Disregard the Caves thing. I actually have NO idea what causes the gloom/cursed stuff other than "you're cursed!" because... well my cornac Cursed didn't make it very far. There's lore stuff about Doomed/Cursed being fueled by hatred or something, other than that, no idea. 

[Robsoie]

In the Deep Below, the Mouth cast regularly "Call of Amakthel"

So it's possible that it's not some random cosmic abomination but the dwarves dug so deep that they may have started to awaken a part of the imprisonned Amakthel that was cast down there by his own creations, the greedy Sher'thuls .