Brawler/notes
Contents
Old notes (from 1.04)
Current notes (1.7.4)
What Brawler Is and Is Not
You are going to go up to things and punch them in the face. You need to pick a tanky race in order to survive doing this.
Early on, Striking stance will give you a lot of help with this (a flat 10+ damage reduction to all sources is godly in early game.)
Later on, you will be leaning heavily on Conditioning/Healing infusions/Shield runes.
TOME is a survival horror game, meaning you cannot just blindly facetank everything (maybe in normals, but in Nightmare+ Roguelike this will mean you are recreating a lot.) So, even though your methods in combat amount to "charge in and punch the enemy" knowing WHEN to charge in and what groups to fight is crucial.
You Are Melee
One of the core facts about combat in TOME is that it matters greatly whether you are ranged or melee. Brawlers punch things. You are melee. This means everybody else gets free hits on you while you are out of position.
If you are not playing a race which fixes this (Wights get Step Up if they spend category points correctly, and Ghouls get Ghoulish Leap) then you absolutely want to fix this by other means.
Gauntlets: Generally, get the hardest hitting gauntlets you possibly can.
Rings and Armor: Get +Movement speed.
Everything else: Boost your raw attributes sky-high. The old guide said Dex > Cun > Str but honestly, what you want is more of everything. If you're choosing between +12 Str and +4 Dex, you're not going to take Dex for that slot. Get all your stats BEEFY. MAG is the only stat you arguably don't need but even that has its uses in some builds (Stone Touch, and qualifying for Ethereal Form prodigy.)
When you Spinning Backhand into an elder vampire for 800 damage and then Haymaker execute him the next turn for 650+, you will not regret building your stats up.
Defense
As a Brawler you mainly care about building combo points, getting in to a high value target, executing it in 1-2 turns, and jumping out or mopping up critters and mooks. The Brawler toolkit is excellent for doing this.
However, some things work better with existing Brawler skills than others.
Brawler is one of the few classes that can take full advantage of stacking defense. It's trivially easy to get 60 Defense. Get 80+ Defense and most orcs and undead will cease to be able to hit you on a regular basis. This means you will only worry about special skills, summons, and unique monsters with boosted 120+ ATK hitting you.
First Category Unlock
In most playthroughs you will want access to the Sher'tul Fortress so you have a place to dump stuff. This means you will want to kill the Wierdling Beast somewhere around level 20.
You absolutely want access to Combination Kick to break his sustains (he has ~8 sustains which make him obnoxiously hard to kill.) Go for at least level 3 in this talent. This will be useful not just for this boss, but for the vast majority of elites, rares, and bosses in the game.
This means that Unarmed Discipline will be your first category unlock.
Prodigies
The old advice was to pick Flexible Combat for more damage. This is still valid.
If you are a build that is not hurting for damage, then you should spend Prodigies either fixing your melee issue, like Great Leap or Steamroller, or on defense.
If you have a race that adds skill trees (such as Vampire or Wight), strongly consider Adept for your first prodigy, and something defensive like Ethereal Form, Armor of Shadows, or Blighted Shell for your second prodigy.
