Thanks Bateau! Now, to hit 68 so I can actually use that sceptre I bought…
Been trying my Templar lately, he’s at 23 in A2N. Using a two-handed hammer thingy and offering lightning strike, glacial hammer, and flame totem confession to sinners. Doing armor/energy shield and pluses to elemental damage. So far, he’s been fun, and with Herald of Thunder going he shocks the monkey for sure. Trouble is, he has…short pants. Apparently, unless you pay for cosmetic upgrades, a Templar always looks like he forgot to dress for work that morning? Pantsless Friday?
PantsVZ
1643
Templar has always looked like some demented uncle. It adds to the effect that he runs slow and mumbles to himself.
Stupid Dominus! He killed my level 55 dual flame totem Witch somehow. I knew about the bleed so I was sticking close, and I even had a bleeding flask (which, um, I think I didn’t use). Pretty frustrating. Think I’m going to try a different spec for a while. Hello Incinerate Templar!
My condolences. It’s the joy of hardcore, though; the victories are sweeter, the defeats more bitter!
I seem to remember that there’s some armors that actually will cover his legs. Full Chainmail, maybe? Something like that.
If so, I have to live long enough to get them. Because, yeah, this little boy look has got to go. It’s waaaay too NAMBLA.
Well, that didn’t take long. My first Dual Totem Witch, never even got a single totem. Dead at level 6. Two evenings of play wasted because I wasn’t watching my health during a routine yellow monster. I guess I was too focused on listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Next time: worse music!
… And I can’t create a new character! I’m finally out of character slots! Time to delete some more standard league players I guess. I should strip them of their possessions before deleting them. That way I’ll finally get some stuff in my Standard stash. That might actually make that a viable league later on.
@Bob: bummer about your Witch. Strictly speaking, she could have gotten the fire totem at level 4 (you get it or can buy it after completing the Breaking the Eggs quest).
My fastest death was at level… 2. I had a Witch, was going for Flame Totem. I was rushing her and the literal first mob I encountered after my initial visit to town killed me (since I was rushing I didn’t have any gear on at all). Oops!
Started a pretty tanky incinerate Templar and so far he’s a lot of fun. Early game I had serious, horrible mana issues (even after taking all the early regen nodes and running Clarity) because he didn’t have a lot of pure int, so my mana pool was fairly low. So low that I would literally have to chug mana potions while fighting more than 3 mobs (but give me 5 seconds and I’d regen to full!). The tipping point, however, was when I was able to purchase an Eleron’s ring that gave me -8 mana cost to spells. That took the incinerate cost from 12 to 4, which meant my regen could keep up with my casting, which means, I’m a mother-flubbing machine gunner of fireballs! Now with mana reduction nodes and the ring, my incinerate costs 2 to cast so even though about 90% of my mana is reserved, I don’t need to drink at all. Pretty cool.
The build is essentially what LiftingNerdBrois playing (his toon’s name is LiftingNerdBruh). There’s no writeup or anything, but I’ve watched him streaming it and it’s easy enough to suss out how the build works. His build uses Righteous Fire also (which gives like a 40% dps increase to incinerate) but using that sort of requires the Rise of the Phoenix shield, which I don’t have (and it’s level 65 so I won’t need it terribly soon). He also uses some The Blood Dance unique boots which do stuff with frenzy charges.
One cool thing about a Righteous Fire build is that since your fire resist is typically close to 100%, you can just ignore most fire effects.
My toon is level 39-ish and has Daresso/Malachi left to graduate to Cruel.
One upside of the many Tempest deaths I’ve had is that I’ve gotten pretty fast at leveling through normal.
I got my new Witch to her first three totems.
I have to admit, this is pretty great. I haven’t tried totems since my very first marauder tried one and found it to be useless back in the beta days.
Now I’m putting down a flame totem, or more likely the cheaper mana fireball totem (support totem linked to fireball linked to increased critical hits), and to clean up, I’m putting down the devouring totem, which eats up all the dead bodies and feeds me mana so that I’m ready to go to the next fight. This is fantastic. I’m always looking to play different types of characters in the Diablo 2-style ARPG, and this is a very different type of character.
Got my summoner Witch to A3N finally; her mini-horde took out the Vaal dude at the pyramid at the end of A2N before I had a chance to really do much. Just swapped in Convocation for Flame Dash, and added Enfeeble instead of the old Fireball, which I almost never use. She’s still toting some axe because it has resists and the right color sockets, but the weapon itself is totally irrelevant to this character I think.
I had Flame Dash for a long time, but lacking cast speed and with its annoyingly limited range I found it didn’t really help and I was better off with a quicksilver+quartz flask. I don’t even run Convocation, though I probably should.
Enfeeble is only occasionally great, but when you need it you really need it.
Four levels to go before 68 and the super-zombies from the sceptre!
Bateau
1654
Fucking map piety. She bugged out for me and positioned herself against the wall and basically wasted my map. Good thing I’m on softcore (and leveled moments before I engaged her, lol) or I’d have popped a vein.
I’m guessing the answer is no, but is there any way at all to conveniently swap between summon mode and battle mode? In combat my bar looks like this:
Move - Desecrate - Enfeeble
Vaal Skellies - Flesh Offering - SRS - Skeletotem - Convocation
But that leaves me no room for auras and resummons. Annoying.
Bateau
1656
You don’t need auras on your hotbar, just cast them and replace with some other skill. And I ran my summoner with desecrate in a secondary weapon slot, but this is mildly annoying because you’ll usually lose auras if you switch (due to stat loss etc).
Summoners could really use some QoL improvements across the board.
That happened to me on the story mode Piety when I first encountered her. Being a stubborn moron, I sent my marauder back in for repeated deaths until I finally killed her. It was so bad that I actually went over intending to complain on the GGG forums, but when I read the existing threads I realized that she was supposed to stay in the middle of the area. Could have avoided the grief with a reset of the area, but of course I didn’t think of that at the time.
Wouldn’t have worked on a map, of course, not enough portals to death-bomb her and no reset option. I suppose it’s too much to hope that they’re fixing it.
You think the horde destroys that Vaal Oversoul quickly now, wait until Cruel when you’re throwing the better part of two dozen dudes at him! :) Outside of Malachai and Dominus, a horde summoner owns bosses from about level 30 to 70 (when really nasty map bosses start to be a problem).
I look for +mana and cast speed on my weapons early on, and later those plus resists. If you’re really lucky, you might find something with life on it. That’s about all you’ll find that are useful, since damage bonuses and stuff like accuracy don’t do anything for you.
Yeah, sadly there’s not a good way to handle this. Your setup is pretty much what I had on the first Tempest Sarah, although I think I had Desecrate on weapon switch and kept Raise Zombie on the main skill bar. You pretty much have to manually swap your auras in whenever you turn them on, and the same with your other summon skills. Fortunately it should be pretty rare to need to do a full resummon…just on initial login, and maybe after a particularly nasty rare or boss.
My second Tempest Sarah just passed Cruel Dominus, at level 61 this time. I suppose I could have waited until 63 like I did with the first one, but I really didn’t want to grind through the Harvest for two more levels. It worked out OK, although I did have to portal out once, and many zombies gave their lives (undeaths?) in service to the cause before it was over.
Spock
1658
Just started this game, thanks to this thread. Pretty great for a FTP game! A couple questions:
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I started a witch, and I’ve taken two passive “raise spell damage” skills so far. Should I be taking Intelligence instead?
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The mini-map overlay seems sorta unhelpful to me. It shows level outlines in red, I guess, but not much else of help. Am I mis-reading it?
The small +10 INT/DEX/STR nodes are not worth taking just to pump the stat. They’re referred to as “travel nodes” because their purpose is to lead you to a cluster you’re interested in.
Two pieces of advice on the passive tree:
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Focus! If you take minion nodes, take lots of minion nodes and gun for those clusters. Likewise spell damage/crit, or any particular weapon specialization, or whatever.
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Life! You need a pretty significant amount of life to not get insta-gibbed against certain bosses and later difficulties. Prioritize life.
Agree with Adam - you want to find two things on the passive tree for pretty much any character: life, and whatever offensive thing you’re focusing on. For a new Witch, spell damage is a fine thing to work on. You’ll get all the Int you need while going after those. You might need to pick up some dexterity and strength eventually since you won’t pass through a lot of those nodes, but you’ll find there’s options for that pretty near your starting area.
As for the mini-map, it’ll show the outline of the zone you’re in, and (when close enough) waypoints or quest objectives. Nothing for enemies, though.
