Difference between revisions of "Survival guide"

Revision as of 20:16, 1 April 2013

A Survival Guide to ToME4

Note: This guide is meant for new players who find themselves dying a lot, so it will not cover some of the more esoteric hazards.

Life, Armour and Defense

Having a decently high Life rating is important, because it will help you survive when you take damage unexpectedly. You shouldn't neglect Constitution when building your stats. Likewise, equipment with a bonus to max Life can mean the difference between being one-shotted, or being gravely injured but having a chance to escape.

Armour and Defense help you survive against physical attacks (melee or archery), which are by far the most common threats. Getting respectable scores in one or both of those will do wonders for your longevity.

Saves

Saves, or saving throws, are extremely important for preventing death by negative effects (stun, confusion, disease, etc. -- see below). You probably won't be able to avoid all of the negative effects, but you should aim for preventing as many as you can. Even if you don't fully prevent an effect, a high save can reduce its duration.

If your race or class has a skill that gives you bonuses to saves, learn it! Also collect gear that give you good saves, because you'll need them.

Escapes

The vast majority of early- to mid-game "unavoidable" deaths come from a very predictable set of circumstances that are, in fact, quite avoidable if you play your cards right. The thing to remember is this:

Always have an escape ready, and use it liberally.

By "an escape" I mean some way to remove yourself from a combat situation. And by "liberally", I mean before you're down to the last 30% of your health. If you are able to do this, and you exercise the appropriate amount of caution, your survival rate will shoot up dramatically. For most classes, the best escapes tend to come in the form of infusions. Here are some universally available escapes, ranked roughly in order from worst to best.

• Phase door rune: The worst escape in the game, it has a tendency to do nothing helpful for you, or even put you in a worse situation than before. However, it's better than nothing and in the very early game, you may have no alternatives.
• Sun infusion: Surprisingly helpful in the early game, although snakes are blind-immune. Later on, most bosses are blind-immune as well, so a sun infusion won't help you escape from them. It does, however, allow melee characters combat dreads and dreadmasters which you'll hit mid-game.
• Invisibility rune: Like sun infusions, except instead of not working against blind-immune enemies (of which there are many in the mid- to late-game), it doesn't work against enemies that see invisible (of which there are few throughout the entire game).
• Teleport rune: Has a chance of landing you in the midst of more enemies, especially if you haven't cleared out most of the level yet, so for maximum safety you have to teleport before you're down to your last 1 hp. Also tends to fail on very small levels, like ambushes. Otherwise, the standard go-to escape.
• Movement infusion: Like a perfectly controlled phase door, but with the catch that you can't be surrounded. It has the advantage of being able to be used inside vaults and other no-teleport zones, and the disadvantage can be negated by things like a rogue's Switch Place, or a dwarf's Stone Walking. So if you have one or more of these things, or if you're antimagic (and therefore can't use runes), movement infusions are the way to go. The infusion shop at Last Hope sometimes stocks these, so once you collect your first 80 gold or so, it's worth coming here just to buy a movement infusion.
• Torque of psychoportation: Unlike the others, this is a charm, not an infusion. This means that it won't eat up an infusion slot, and it will only eat up your tool slot if you want an on-demand escape. If you have enough foresight to switch to it 3 turns before you actually need to escape, then you can simply keep it in your inventory and it won't even use your tool slot in the meanwhile. Now, the disadvantages are that, like the phase door rune, it has no minimum radius, so you might end up just one space away. The chances of this are small, however, as psychoport torques tend to have a much higher maximum radius. Also, since it's a charm, it shares a cooldown with all of your other charms. Disadvantages aside, there's almost nothing to be lost from just keeping one in your inventory, and it has fantastic synergy with movement infusions.

Status effects

Even with good saves, you're still going to get hit by some detrimental status effects. These won't kill you directly, but they'll leave you vulnerable. Even worse, some of the effects leave you open to more negative effects, and pretty soon you're completely unable to do anything but die.

The worst part of status effects is having your escapes negated, either by having them on cooldown, or by having them fail when activated, or by having your feet stuck to the floor (which negates things like movement infusions, but not teleports).

• Confusion: Although capped at 50% power, a 50% chance of your escape not working, and of you dying, is still way too high. The vast majority of confusions are mental effects, so a mental wild infusion will clear this right up. It's even instant, so the wild infusion itself will never fail due to confusion. Do note, however, that there are some enemies, most notably snow giants and wights, who come in packs and all have the ability to confuse, so you might end up using your wild infusion only to be confused again immediately. Alternatively, you can stack confuse immunity or mental saves. Also note that torques of psychoportation, being an item, can be used with guaranteed success even while confused.
• Stun: Puts 4 talents on cooldown when you get stunned, and your cooldowns do not count down. If one of those 4 talents happens to be your escape, then you may be in trouble. The most obvious solution is a physical wild infusion, but unlike with confusion, this is less reliable. That's because wild infusions clear only one condition of their type, and since there aren't many mental conditions, you're unlikely to have another one on top of your confusion. However, there are tons of physical effects, and they're quite commonplace. Burns, poisons, insidious poisons, cripple, slow, you name it. It's quite possible that you'll be stunned, and have one of those other physical effects, and if your physical wild infusion fails to clear the stun and instead clears that 2-damage-per-turn-for-6-turns bleed, you may regret your decision to rely on that physical wild infusion. Since stun always puts 4 talents on cooldown, an unintuitive way to deal with this is to simply have a lot of active talents, thus reducing the odds that your escape gets put on cooldown. Also, stuns tend not to hamper your defenses too much, so often you can just tank through it with a regeneration infusion or whatever, and then escape when the stun is over. Stun is usually a physical effect, so you can also stack physical saves, or stun immunity. Stun can never put your torque of psychoportation on cooldown.
• Freeze: Similar to stun, to the point of relying on the same immunity. The differences are: (1) you can't move until the ice block is shattered (see Pin below), and (2) you can't attack NPCs while frozen -- your attacks do damage to the ice block instead. You can either clear it with a physical wild infusion, or tank through it with regeneration effects, or dish out some damage to destroy the ice block. The nice thing about freeze is that you're immune to further effects and you take less damage while frozen.
• Silence: Prevents you from using spells. Runes count as spells. If you rely on spells to survive, then you'll want a mental wild infusion to clear this up, or just don't rely on a rune (hint hint, movement infusions) as your escape.
• Pin: Another physical effect (usually), but it only stops movement infusions so if you have anything else, you're fine. Plus if you're a ranged class, usually you don't even care if you're pinned.
• Daze: This was changed to something like a stun+pin in recent versions of the game. It's negated by taking damage, so usually you'll only be dazed for a single turn regardless of the duration of the effect (unless you're not being attacked, in which case, you don't really care as much). Attacking something that has retaliation damage should break the daze, at the cost of one turn spent attacking with reduced damage output. The pinning part negates some escapes, though.
• Pacification Hex: A devastating mental effect that lasts for 20 turns and dazes you every so often, it is yet another reason, in addition to Confusion, that mental wild infusions are so useful. A high mental save is also effective against Pacification Hex because it now gives you a chance per turn to break the hex.

Resists

This is last, because these don't really matter a whole lot until the later stages of the game (although the lightning quest in Derth is an early exception). Resists will help you survive, so don't neglect those either. Put 5 points into Thick Skin as soon as you can, for the +15% all resistance. Wear gear that gives resistances to the kinds of attacks you expect to be facing in the near future, unless it would take away something you need even more (saves, defense, stats).