Well I am back after a hiatus of a few years! And as such I have mostly forgotten how to play TOME, but as I am craving some Roguelike goodness (and masochistic punishment) I will be restarting all over again.

If any wish to watch me flail about I will be live streaming the game on Twitch (@ https://www.twitch.tv/geek_chef) and archiving the footage on youtube (Geek Chef Gaming)

My Rogue is out at level 12. I focused on getting my crit percentage as high as possible and two weapon fighting. I outright ignored stealth, as I don't know how this game's stealth mechanics work, but know that in many turn based games stealth is kind of useless. It is either too random to be relied on until it is almost maxed out or just allows you to avoid fighting and thus exp gains.

I really underestimated bleed effects and died almost exclusively to bleeds. I never really had to deal with it much before as I usually had high con on my characters before this or they just broke in two hits so bleeding didn't matter.

The Rogue died three times to The Shade and once to a vault boss. The last death was to a randboss spawned from a chest. A thief with a nasty bleed and brain locked me so I couldn't heal until after I bled out. Here is my rouge's character sheet: https://te4.org/characters/246275/tome/992a66d1-ffda-40f0-a022-17bd1ed957a8

On the positive sieve I unlocked Reavers this time.

I then rolled a Yeek Possessor. I found the class fun but made the mistake of not giving myself a default attack skill, instead focusing on making my self able to steal any body and make them a good as I could. I even felt like I was getting the hang of it by the time I needed to head to the mainland but Subject Z stopped me flat. I quickly cleaned out my vault and have nothing to fight him with, and lack the health to go toe to toe. With both starter dungeons cleared out, my Possessor is done despite having lives left.

Here is her character sheet: https://te4.org/characters/246275/tome/e1f2c10c-51b9-40b4-95cc-9ffb5dd9a201

As for what is next I don't know. Maybe a Higher or Shalore Spellblade or a Thalore Archer. I'll figure it out.

Well I'm back and it didn't take to long for my Halfling Alchemist to bite it. A fair amount of it comes down to the fact that compared to the other Classes I have played so far the Alchemist has the most unique gimmicks. Namely controlling to characters at once, each with their own specialized role, equipment, and AI management. The other part is I had a one month gap between play sessions so I had to relearn and remember the class all over again.

I had read the guides on the forums to get a basic handle on things, but dispite them telling me to dump every point I can into Magic for both characters, I found halfway though Trollmire that I REALLY needed that golum to be a better tank for me so I had to split my stat points so I could put heavy and massive armor on it. This in turn slowed down it growth, but seemed to be working... Mostly.

I had my first three deaths in Vol's tower, two from the golum charging into large groups and pulling them onto the Alchemist himself, and the third was to the Zone boss as I was stupid and had the Alchemist take the lead when they stepped into the boss room. He was then quickly frozen in a narrow hall, blocking the golum from helping, and stood helpless as the boss bolted him to death.

The last few deaths were to the Horror guarding the tower after the lake dungeon. I may have been under level or the golum under equiped as the golum died in only a few turns, no matter what i did, then I couldn't seem to damage him fast enough before he'd pop an infusion and heal most of the damage I did to him.

Here is the link to his Character page: https://te4.org/characters/246275/tome/1d75def2-b71d-455d-b723-21771cfcb0db

I was able unlock the Poison skill tree for Rogues and Archers, so at least it wasn't a complete waste of a run.

My next character will be a Halfling Rogue. I want to see how a crit monkey plays like.

So close yet so far away is the feeling after my latest final death. The character this time around wad my Level 43 Dwarf Bulwark who met final death trying to topple his first arc pride. From what I gather that means I made it 4/5 though the base campaign! With only my second character no less!

His first death was due to drowning in the lake as no bubbles spawned close to the stairway you use to enter the ruins. So in short RNG screwed but that happens in rougelike.

The next one happened in Reknor to a rare troll who some how caused my encumbrance to spike, locking me in place, while several AOEs stacked doling over 600 damage in turn. When I died it happened so suddenly I wasn't sure how it happened a first. Not sure how I could have prevented it to be honest.

The next two happened when I tried taking on the dragon vault in Vor Armory. I was an idiot for opening it in the first place seeing as I just barely survived clearing out the armory in the first place despite having 60+ cold and fire resistance. That said, even at level 35 at the time, I still felt I could take those dragons if could fight them one at a time. I withdrew and planned to try again after a few orc prides fell.

Next was in Ruins of Tennin where I was crit spiked by six Undead. Again not much could have been done to stop it.

And the last two were the Necromancer pride. After looking over I figure they were due to me having relatively low blight resistance and as soon as I entered I got swarmed by 5 necromancer and a corrupter in a large room. Should have backed out and tried a different pride. Maybe grind farportal dungeons for a few levels.

Here is his character log if youwant to take a look: https://te4.org/characters/246275/tome/19ea4ba4-eff6-4bf3-8e45-df3266bf2667

In the end I feel I did far better than I should have given my world lack of experience but I am quite happy with how things went. I will say dwarf bulwarks or borderline overpowered in normal difficulty, especially if you have high HP regen.

During the course this play through I unlocked almost all the races in the default campaign with the exception of the ghoul and the Doom elf as well as majority of the classes. I still need to unlock psychic classes but that can come later.

My next class I'm thinking about is Alchemist and probably halfling when given how much they feature in the lore

Well I'm new to the game, and I figured the best way to keep track of my development as a player is to record and dissect my play sessions when my characters invariably die permanently. After about 10 hours of play it finally happened and my Cornac Berserker ran out of lives. I ended up dying

two or three times in the Maze, as I didn't expect the difficulty spike when I started to enter IV 5 dungeons and got swarmed. I chalk this one up to suboptimal play, and not knowing what infusions I had equipped or not. As it seemed that every time I tried using it it said please replace an old one and I couldn't tell what the old one was.

I also died twice to a random raiding party on the world map. Not much to say about this really other than to say I wasn't high enough level up or or well-equipped enough to deal with them. I'll try better to avoid them in the future.

And the last death came from multiple randbosses spawning from a chest and being caught in a cave in as I was running Sand Worm Nest. I think I didn't use my infusions well enough and my teleport room didn't work as well as I'd like.

Despite all this I feel I did fairly good for a new player and unlocked the transmogrification chest my first playthough as well as the Arena. So I'm happy with my progress so far.

I think my next character will be a dwarf bulwark

Here's a link to that characters data if anyone wants to look over my build and give me critiques on it: https://te4.org/characters/246275/tome/054fef0a-a997-41bd-a9d6-4d2bcd3a81ca

Thank you for taking the time to read an idiot new players Blog