So I started out playing Arcane Blade. Not totally sure what I'm doing, but here's where I'm at so far...

It's a pretty unstable experience for me, anyway. Sometimes you steamroll, but when it's hard, you're just out of luck. Maybe this is a late bloomer class? Melee obviously isn't as strong as with a pure melee class, and of course you can't cast spells quite as often as a mage, so extended engagements hurt hard. If you haven't already almost won the fight after spending your mana pool, you don't seem to have much of a chance (unless of course you can run away and Manasurge).

Weapons with the "projected attack" bonus (Duvydan is the only one I know of, but there could be more) are a godsend if they spawn for you. Saves you some mana and gives you another ranged attack to cycle through.

I bought a rune for Biting Gale, which seems pretty good for damage and for disengaging.

Lightning actually strikes through and hits all intermediate targets. Pretty nice. Fire seems to be the better single-target damage spell though, and the Pulverizing Augur also has strikethrough but limited range. Not sure Augur is worth the skill point, even if instant tunneling can be neat to have.

Human: Cornac is nice, at least early on. 2H skills and Combat Veteran helps out a lot with a STR build. Fearless Cleave is poorly explained, but you can use it to move toward and then strike an enemy two panels away in one turn. As far as I know, 20 Magic for Tier 2 skills is plenty for early on, especially if you go Cornac and are already spreading skill points thin. Unlocking plate armor seems like a really good idea, since you're sort of pigeonholed into 2H weapons - this is another reason not to raise Magic too much early. I might raise Magic some more after STR is high enough for Tier 4 stuff, but Cunning might be too low. Not sure. If anything, I might consider building *less than* 20 Magic early now that I've had to reroll...

It took me a while to notice that it DOES cost mana to cast spells on-hit. "Free action" only means it doesn't take any extra turns - it still costs mana. X-P

Anyway... I've found it way too tempting to go STR-END for the most part. A Biting Gale rune accomplishes so much more than any of your innate Tier 2 spells, and you need the mana to spam Lightning anyway. I'll probably crank Magic late-game, but I unfortunately died at level 15 last time around, which was when my other stats were going to just start to get some attention...

Interesting... I wonder if i should post my own limited experiences in the classes and thoughts on how to play/upgrade them... But they wouldn't be the arcane blade...

AFAIK, no one actually playes AB with 2H weapons, even though that's your starter gear and there are penalties for other setups (probably offset by other skills though...)

Execute is a great proc for Arcane Destruction or whatever the on-crit effect is called. And Fearless Cleave is great for getting a hit in on the turn the enemy steps back (until your stamina runs out anyway). The 2H stun skill together with Backstab gives you more procs as well.

Anyway, I died at 19 last run. Stupid Tempest guy. I was underleveled and/or needed to bring more lightning resist to the fight. I'm doing better with STR and END early, though. MAG just makes you into an underperforming Archmage early on. 2H and other melee techniques + tier 1 magic skills leaves a LOT of places to spend skill points already. I might do a detailed build when I can actually beat Normal Adventure, though it probably will be far from optimal.

Well guess i'll give some of my own class thoughts. I've done some experimenting in the arena, good fast way to level but only gives you bonus achievements for rouge levels.


The Alchemist:

The name is utterly dumb, by that i mean that they don't make potions. Instead you have a companion at the start. You also have access to a skill allowing you to extract gems from iron items (and later, steel, dwarven steel, and starlite). If you have never played the game before, i recommend this class, because you won't be leaving loot behind or constantly going back to town, instead you'll take junk you can't use (spears, flails, swords) convert them to gems. Besides they are worth more as gems usually, a sword would try to sell for 1.4 gold while gems are all worth multiples of 4. Your companion can use weapons and armor as well, so you can pass them stuff.

Note: Quite often it comments on alchemist gems, these are regular gems shavings. The Alchemist can break apart a gem and get 40-80 fragments, each worth 0.1 if you sell them (which can double the value of an item vs when you first extracted it).

Also Healing your golem is much cheaper (2) than having to rebuild him from scratch (20), although if you get advanced golem techniques later, you can super-charge him, and if he's dead, he will come back with 1/3rd hitpoints. No more 20 shards and 20 turns...

Basic Strategies:

You are either going to make your companion stronger, or you are going to concentrate on making explosive bombs.

Companion: Make him hit harder, harder to hurt, call him to your side at any time if he wanders away and give him a bonus to attack, and sometimes swap with him confusing your enemies while you get a free attack in... Decent but no crowd control honestly.

Other advanced techniques let you draw from your golem as an alternate healing point.

Also if you are uncertain about an area you can control your golem and have him investigate and leave your Alchemist behind, if he dies, well you know what's in the next room/area.

Bombs: Need i say more? Yes i guess i do...

You can begin at the beginning where throwing a single shard will result in an explosion. This is a radius of 2-3, and does 30 damage. Yeah sorta weak, however if you upgrade you can get damage something between 60-80, and the area can be as large as 5-6, or pretty much the whole screen.

VERY IMPORTANT!!! The second skill available is personal immunity to your own bombs (you and your golem). If you are going for full blown bomb route, save all your points and dump them in this and get it up to 5 as soon as possible (100% immunity). Upon successfully doing that and maximizing the area you hit, you can cover the entire screen on every attack with your bombs. Cooldown is 5-7, and not having to worry about being in the area really helps. I managed to get to the last boss in an area game with this strategy easy.

Next, you can specialize in types of damage. Fire, Acid, Cold; And later Lightning and iron (grenade). Haven't used them too much; You also can only have one at a time active, so specialize and choose wisely! If you aren't sure, remove them before the game actually starts and save those points for something else.

Staff Mastery: Take this. You are by default have 1 point in mastery which lets you attack anyone at a distance for 5 mana by channeling energy through your staff. Good for doing damage to weak enemies and something you can do while you wait for other skills to recharge.

Enchanting: At level 4 you can take a skill to enchant armor. This is just the body armor, nothing else. Good for giving small boosts to any armor for you or your golem. At higher levels it is probably really good, but i haven't used more than a teir 2 on them before dying :( Also 100 turn cooldown... Not so hot in arena fights.

Runes:

Phase Door: Just as likely to help you as hurt you. If you find a healing infusion, replace it! Regeneration is nice for 5 turns, or instant heal which you can set to automatically use without worrying about enemies acting on auto-use.

Shield: I recommend setting auto-use, specifically visible and adjacent enemies. This will give you that extra boost of protection. You can still activate it at any time if it's not on cooldown so don't worry.

Mana Surge: If you are using your staff a lot, you will need to use this regularly, if you are strictly using bombs and your companion, you probably won't need this as much. Still good for a default starting ability.

Attribute points:

Dump them into magic, when you max it out (at 3-4th level somewhere about 25, at least until you're higher level) then you can go with a secondary stat. If you go cunning you can get natural immunities, Willpower gives you more mana. Choice is sorta up to you, depending on if you get extra training from escort missions.

Golem:

Attribute points for golem is sorta up to you, i recommend raising his strength to about 20, then raise his magic to be the same. If there's a weapon you got that requires 25-28 strength max that out and give him the weapon, otherwise keep magic and strength even.

Golem has some interesting hybrid abilities. Try and give him 1 in everything at least, maybe higher in eye-lazers, as that can instant kill lower level enemies at a distance and keep things easier on you.

Two inventory item slots you can't use unless you enable advanced golem mastery, this lets you give your golem some gems to equip. However it seems gems like to stick as a group rather than individual, so you might give him 2 quartz, but he'll only benefit from the level of having a single one. I never used higher than a tier 3, so i don't know how good it enhances him.

Runes:
Note: Golem can use Runes BUT NOT infusions! Very important... I didn't know this....



Closing notes:
I haven't gotten above 25th level on this class, but i recommend using it until you at least get the transmutation box.

If you are careful with your golem, you can make 100 shards (2-3 gems) and then never had to make more (up to 20th level), even if your throwing explosions everywhere. If you convert items into gems, you'll soon find yourself with dozens of gems.

A number of abilities i've skipped going over, but this should give you a decent idea of what and how to play one at least to level 10-15.

Would be tempted to change the topic name now, if that were an option... Since we've already branched out, I may as well talk about Stone Warden here. You have to be a "donator" to get it, but buying the vanilla GOG version is equivalent.

Anyway...

Stone Warden is a Wilder class that only appears for Dwarves, so it will not even show up on the list if you don't select Dwarf. It took me a while to realize the class even existed because of this. I just recently unlocked Skeleton with this class at level 22, so that's how far I am.

I'm going with a WIS-MAG-END build. WIS-MAG high enough for skill unlocks ASAP, and END pumped a point or two almost every level. STR also needs to be high enough for whatever your best gear is. You can pre-emptively gain STR points if you don't want to be stuck unable to use the next good piece of gear for two levels, but that's hard to predict.

Surprisingly, the DPS on this class is a lot higher than Bulwark. Bulwark was a really boring and tedious class when I tried it out, and I expected this class to be more of the same, only a little mage-ier. Nope, this class does a lot of DPS to multiple targets, with some pretty solid single-target melee strikes.

Eldritch Stone at level 12 solves all of your resource problems, absorbs 100-300 damage, and damages enemies. Even with just one point, this solves all your resource problems. On top of that, it's probably your best panic button. This skill followed by a Regrowth Infusion is one of the safest ways to tank through the aftermath of a bad initial burst.

Stone Skin is sort of worth it, but there are too many good options to make the rest of the tree worth it. *maybe* you could pump Pulverizing Augur, but I didn't because I got a nice Wyrm gauntlet (whatever it's called) and two ranks of Acid Spit on escort quests. My hotkey bar was pretty happy by then. Pulverizing Augur might work well if you unlock the Stone tree and get Body of Stone, but I didn't do that. Even then, Earthen Missiles probably works better as a point sink.

Stone Vines is a nice tree, and a much more damaging skill than you'd expect from a persistent aura. It halves your move speed, though, so be careful. 2 or 3 points to get the radius up early, and then one point for each synergy gets you a lot of utility and some ways to counteract the mobility loss. For most of levels 1-20, the vines wail on things pretty hard, so you don't really miss the mobility too much. You sometimes have to disable it during escort quests, making for a dangerous 10-second downtime.

Stone Spikes requires a category unlock, but is definitely worth it. The synergies are all nice one-point wonders, but you may also raise some or all of them to 2-3 for the disable duration increase. The base skill gains some range, and is worth 2-3 points, possibly 5 eventually. I will probably skip Deeprock Form, but I don't have any judgment to pass on it exactly.

Elemental Split is a nice little summon, but I'm not totally sure it was worth it. I one-pointed the first two skills, since I didn't really want any more actives to juggle.

Eldritch Blow scales pretty well, and Eldritch Slam deserves more than one point for the radius buff. Eldritch Blow became my left-click skill when my hotkey bar started filling up (I don't like scrolling it)

Thick Skin and Combat Accuracy seemed pretty obviously important. The Dwarf skills are also important, such as the enhanced Resilience of the Dwarves and Power is Money (though the cap scales better than the gold scaling rate by far - tune this to your actual gold supply by level)

Mediatation is clearly a one-pointer. Nature's Touch probably deserves to be kept at whatever heals 50% of your max HP. Earth's Eyes can be sort of handy, but not really mandatory. Nature's Balance I haven't bothered with yet, but I should consider it - especially since some of your Tier 1 skills are augmented by the whole skill branch.

Stone Alchemy is probably worth it just for Imbue Item, but I spent an unlock on Harmony already and that makes two... The third comes at level 36.


Anyway, it's basically a pretty strong class with a lot of endurance, and more damage than you'd expect, at least early on. But you probably only want one of the three class unlocks, and the rest should be Generic unlocks. It seems like the class skill unlocks tend to pigeonhole your class points a lot with synergies.
I tried out Alchemist once, and didn't like it too much. Transmog Chest is easy to earn, so no problem.

I think I blame anime for the lack of actual alchemy with, like, potions and stuff. There is a certain full-metal alchemist who is famous for palling around with a golem...

I don't like depending on consumables too much. But it sounds like that's not even a problem. I didn't even know how "extract" works, but it sounds like you can basically turn weapons into 40 gem shards. That's pretty much unlimited, huh?

Admins? Judas? I'll send a PM a little later requesting a change... Hmm topic name... Probably Class impressions and build suggestions...

I've played a couple other classes but they were addons and not part of the core, so i think we'd stick with core and official DLC's.

Currently playing an Archer who does heavy traps... I'll give impressions on that a little later once i get to 20th level and have a good impression of how the character grows...

edit: Judas updated the thread title. Thanks a million :)

At least it's better than making a separate thread to give impressions about a single class...

No, Extract Gem will take a metal item (weapon or armor) and give you a single gem for it between tier 1 and 5. The type is probably based on the material, and you probably won't get a tier above the amount of skill points you put into it.

Carve Alchemical shards (looks like a green bottle... for some reason?) gives you between 40 and 80 shards for a single gem. This is very good as if you sell say a iron sword, you may get 1 gold from it, but as a gem it's worth 4, and if you max at 80 shards that's worth 8 gold! So hang onto old crappy weapons/armor!

Each shard is what's used for ingredients. I've done an Alchemist up to 20th level and never using more than 100 shards. That really depends on how conservative you are. Having over 200 shards and you're pretty much considered unlimited unless you're doing abilities all the time that take a huge number (like re-making your golem at 20 shards...)

So, it has to say iron/steel/etc in the title? Does it destroy the weapon/armor, or just make it not-metal? The description is pretty vague...

It destroys the item, and yes it does have to say it (usually). If you have the new gems addon, some items won't say they are a metallic type that's extractable, like a minute meteorite which is like half the value of any normal tier 1 gem but still worth 4 gold (grabbed them from some whips curiously enough)...

If you use the Zombie addon, it adds a new sorting field for items that you can extract a gem from. They also have shortcuts added, so if you click on an item the 'x' letter is for extracting, and if an item doesn't have a gem that item won't appear. Once again, weapons and armor only (as far as i can see)

Nice, thanks again.

If the thread were more popular, then there would clearly be demand for individual class threads in depth. That doesn't seem to be the case, though. At this rate, a new thread for winning with a class should probably just be a "Normal Adventure wins" thread.

I'm having enough trouble i wonder how anyone would want to play above nightmare, yeah +50%+3 isn't too bad, but then there's levels above that. I tried one of them, started off fighting 15th level monsters, and i couldn't even get them down 25% before they slaughtered me. Sure had i been a few levels higher maybe i would have stood a chance...

I suspect that you have to be a really thorough farmer, despite claims that this game is light on farming. You can probably afford a bit of sloppiness on Normal relative to that.

It seems like individual levels matter less and less as you level up. The scaling isn't particularly non-linear, and you get all your main skills at Level 12 (or slightly later if you don't have the stats). My level 23 Stone Warden did ok against an ambush of Level 40 orcs, not that it was easy. Granted, I think it was a bunch of normals and one Elite, but still. A 15+ level difference is just plain unmanageable when you're level 5 or so. I guess the difference between 700 and 900 health isn't the same as the difference between 200 and 400 health...

I hope this means that the gameplay experience stabilizes as you close out the mid-game. If so, this says to me that the developer doesn't have early-game game pacing under control.

If experience you get is anything like other games, you get more experience for killing higher level creatures and less for lower level ones. This means you should probably fight monsters at your level as much as possible... I've already entered very low level areas and you 'just zip to the last stage because the area is so easy'

Of course if you're following the journals and quest logs, and aren't sure where all the other low level dungeons are, this becomes a chore, not to mention traveling too, and gaining at least 1-2 levels per dungeon. At higher difficulty you'd have to do all the easy dungeons first (which are hard as hell) and then progress to the next level up ones, once you match their level it could be a cake-walk. But as that's a 10-15 level difference, just surviving and not fighting the bosses will be difficult enough as it is.

Being Rouge-like means the game varies wildly, and often not in your favor. First character I made in ToME so far was one of my best ever, and trying to duplicate that experience is impossible due to the random number generator. Some monsters are stupidly easy, and others are impossibly hard.

But learning from your mistakes to try and play a more perfect game is sorta what dying permanently is all about, but at the same time you can't play the exact same class and race 20x in a row from level 1-10 without wanting variety forcing you to change your game up, your style, your skills, where you start, the visuals, etc.

But eventually it changes, the game gets easy because you are playing near perfectly, because you don't give NPC's and enemies a chance to get you, using your skills to full advantage, using their weaknesses against them. Blindly attacking them with a generic attack although working for Normal would devistate you on Nightmare, yet if you took the time to ANALYZE EVERY MONSTER AND TRAP EVERY TURN; Much like chess, you eventually can find what probably is the best way to approach it, although you go 100x slower.

I guess it depends on how much Patience you have, and if you know what path to build your character to give you the best chances at survival. But this is seriously going off topic :P

Archer (Traps required):

The archer is an interesting class, entirely too limited. Honestly not for beginners, i recommend staying away unless you have a firm footing on how to play defensively.

The archer can use bows and/or slings, however you should probably specialize in one or the other. My experience is limited to the bow.

When you get above 4th level getting Tracking is useful, since you can identify where every creatures is near you, even invisible ones (since they still show up as a lighted area in a dark place).

Traps are required to survive from my experience, so going human and getting the extra category slot is a must, if i could unlearn slings i would do that too. :(

All the abilities are stamina hogs, and there isn't really a good way to restore stamina, sure some passives but they take a while and you'll run out far more often than you'd expect.

Traps:

Fire Trap - Set and then jump back 3 steps with Disengage. Or place a lure on it, although the lure doesn't last very long.

Bear Trap - Does damage over 5 rounds, and might pin them to the ground. Good way to stop a group of attacking monsters in a hallway.

Catapult Trap - Does no damage, instead it stuns the enemy. If they aren't lucky they will be shoved back several spaces along with anyone behind them. If this gets pretty reliable you can just use regular arrows for a while, or better shot through several of them with a piercing shot.

Note: SET TRAPS BEFORE MELEE! This seems like common sense but there's often you will lose track of how long you can wait before you can set traps and them being immediately effective or when running away. If they are 2-3 spaces away, perfect time to drop a bear trap. If they are on top of you and you have disengage and you can back-petal, perfect for setting a fire trap where you're standing and then jumping back!

Skills:
Most are uninspiring. Do a little more damage and slow them down, do more damage, do more damage and set them on fire, etc. Later you can do multi-shot or other group based skills.

Kick - Perhaps the single best skill early on. If an enemy is right up on you, you can kick them away, that combined with disengage and you can keep out of harm's way with just a little forethought.

Attributes:
Dex and Cunning straight up. First go for 14-16 Cunning in your first 1-2 levels, this will give you decent traps. After that go Dex to 24 or so, beyond that they are probably both equally important.

Equipment: Keep any extra quivers if you are specializing in the bow, you will run out of arrows and swapping a quiver in your inventory doesn't take you long, but better than being forced to reload and being disarmed for 2 turns.

Reloading: With an addon you can reload some of your arrows while you're walking. In the core game that's not the case. You will be reloading A LOT. Probably set reload to activate when resting or when no enemies are visible, if you can't use your bow due to reloading, either run or set traps (or both).

Oh yeah. I played Skirmisher just once not long ago, and it was taking me forever to kill Norgos. Stamina trouble, taking tons of damage... it was just bad all around. Maybe I should have left and waited for better stones before going in. That could have been the trouble. But it really did feel like a very slow and painful way to play. I don't think I'm doing ranged classes again any time soon.