Torchlight 2 is a MASSIVE incline

[Multidirectional]

Wow, seems like a pointless nerf. I mean Glaive was pretty damn powerful, but that change just makes it useless. They should've fixed the scaling of the spell. As it is it's stupid to go beyond 5 skill points since the mana / damage ratio isn't worth it. Soon it's not gonna be worth 5 skill points either, let alone 1.

Why not? Now you are forced to go beyond Tier 1 to get decent amount of bounces. It still has 80 percent Interrupt chance and still is pretty good at gathering Charge. Far from useless skill, just not OP anymore.

 

[Hobo Elf]

No, the reason no one went beyond tier 1 is because the mana cost got to be too astronomical for practical use. The amount of bounces then didn't make up for the mana cost, and they certainly wont now seeing how they decreased the amount of times the glaive bounces. All that and 25% less damage will put this skill greatly behind Cursed Daggers. The only reason to get this skill is just for the charge generation, and that'll be no more than 1 point. Great.

 

[Stabwound]

I've put about 10 hours into this. It's starting to get pretty tedious, but I think that might have something to do with playing on Elite. Every monster is so HP/damage bloated to the extreme, especially bosses. Boss battles become a battle of attrition where your attacks take off a almost invisible sliver of damage while theirs smash you in half. The only way I can possibly survive as a Berserker is with that Shadow skill that turns you into a wolf that dashes and drains 5% HP. Without it I wouldn't be able to do anything without chugging potions every 5 seconds.

So yeah to put it in a word, it's tedious. I also have grown to dislike this style of skill tree, where you either have to put points into shitty low level skills, or horde them up until high levels where you can start putting them into higher level skills. If nothing else, I think Diablo 3 got the skill system right. If TL2 allowed full respecs, and not just the previous 3 skills, it might be different. But it still sucks. And the skills that I've seen are pretty boring to boot.

Elite is probably designed for a 2nd or 3rd playthrough, after you've farmed a bunch of epic gear to twink a build with. Running Elite on your first playthrough with random drops can't be too fun. I'd dial it back a step, enjoy yourself. Games are supposed to be fun...you're not gonna win KKKs telling us you beat TL2 on Elite anyway.

I don't really care about KKKs, but my pride makes me select the hardest difficulty levels in games. But yeah, Elite goes over the line of hard into the realm of tedious. I had the same problem with Divinity 2. I think they put Elite in as some kind of afterthought or as a mode for masochists, because there's really no way you can progress through the game normally without restarting and grinding. I'm only on Act 1 and the bosses take like 30 minutes to kill by slamming my head into the brick wall over and over until they eventually die. If they regenerated HP I wouldn't be able to kill them whatsoever.

But yeah, I'm in the ice/snow area and it's just not fun anymore. Getting 2-shot by every regular mob isn't what I'd call fun times.

 

[Terpsichore]

I started (elite and multiplayer again) with an embermage, the damage is really really bad until you pump enough focus and equip some unique high level weapon (level 45 wands at lvl 20, 200 focus), certainly not a class to be played on elite without having stocked up gear.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Depends on the spells you are using. Elite was a breeze on my Embermage ever since level 2 when I used Prismatic Bolt. You don't need a good weapon for it to be a good spell, although + damage% certainly will help at later levels. It's one of the most no-brainer spells out there.

 

[Metro]

Yep. Like I said you can't mess up a build on elite. I didn't have an entirely awful time because I went cannoneer and you can't really mess that up. The irony is on a difficulty where survivability is rough you can't afford to pump too much into vitality because you need to be able to kill things. Of course, since vitality is mostly useless on Elite, anyway, you can largely ignore it. You need to use elemental attacks or have a high amount of armor shredding.

 

[Terpsichore]

*Rapid Fire and Venomous Hail now use DPS instead of Damage

Fucking retards.

 

[Metro]

Yeah that pretty much makes shotguns awful. They really need to hire a few people that know a thing or two about crunching numbers and balancing skills.

 

[circ]

Lolol, I discovered you can give your pet heal all. So much for healbot being overpowered, also fear the frost breathing ferret. I wish they'd not been lazy as fuck and given the pet more customization though, like mana or physical build. Although you can perma change the pet to a few different things like mimic which change resistances, I think hp and mana totals stay the same?

Anyway, embermage is the most ridiculous thing evar once it gets going. Kills bosses with staff mastery/spell faster than any other class. Also, though I ran around blasting with PB mostly, I had some points left and experimented. Looks like arc lightning is badass, and fire pillar something pretty interesting too.

I used to think zerker was the most boring thing ever, and it still is, but engineer just joined that club too. Did a test, leveled him to 100 to test out skills and ugh, boring overload.

 

[Terpsichore]

Two-handed weapons are pretty much useless (just like they were in the first game).

 

[Blaine]

Anyway, embermage is the most ridiculous thing evar once it gets going. Kills bosses with staff mastery/spell faster than any other class. Also, though I ran around blasting with PB mostly, I had some points left and experimented. Looks like arc lightning is badass, and fire pillar something pretty interesting too.

I've played a nearly-pure Frost Embermage to level 100. The skill build is fairly straightforward:

• Hailstorm 15
• Frost Phase 15 (you'll never run out of mana later on anyway unless you spam skills without gaining Charge)
• Frost Wave 15
• Ice Prison 15
• Elemental Boon 15
• Frozen Fate 15
• Ice Brand 15
• Charge Mastery 15
• Prismatic Rift 12

Staff Mastery is neither needed nor wanted in this build, because Icy Blast has terrible damage (in fact most Weapon DPS-based Embermage skills do), enemies' elemental armor works peculiarly and thus Staff Mastery isn't nearly as good as it might seem, and Icy Blast barely fits into the skill rotation in any event. You'll get better CC/damage just using more Frost Waves.

You have to see Frost Embermage in action to believe it. It has excellent mobility (Frost Phase), excellent crowd control (almost everything), burst capability (Elemental Boon, fast Charge), defensive measures (Ice Prison, Prismatic Rift, Elemental Boon), and also deals astonishing damage in a wide area. All of this, without ever running out of mana (at later levels). With so-so gear, you can crush Veteran difficulty without trying terribly hard. With good gear, playing on any other difficulty than Elite feels like cheating.

Add in Dervish (the spell, best used simultaneously with Elemental Boon), some +ice damage% and +cast speed% on your gear, and some +Charge % for good measure, and watch the entire screen explode into ice cubes continually.

 

[Metro]

Lolol, I discovered you can give your pet heal all. So much for healbot being overpowered...

Well, heal all is on a thirty second cool down and your pet just casts it at random not necessarily when you might need it. The heal bot (while it heals less) is basically a constant pulsing heal (drops to around 8 seconds or less cool down) that not only stacks with a pet's heal all but also returns mana and provides an armor buff at the higher tiers.

Re: Ice mage -- you pretty much just hide in your Ice Prison (you can run out of it but nothing can get in... not even ranged attacks) and spam frost wave. This video is on Elite HC:

 

[Blaine]

Re: Ice mage -- you pretty much just hide in your Ice Prison (you can run out of it but nothing can get in... not even ranged attacks) and spam frost wave. This video is on Elite HC:

Clever positioning/movement and skillful use of Frost Phase are more than enough to survive in nearly all situations, but Ice Prison absolutely adds an additional and substantial layer of safety.

What's really great about Frost Embermage (in my opinion) isn't its power so much as the variety of useful actives and passive synergies. With some classes/builds, you'll only get two or three really useful actives.

 

[circ]

Yeah, that video looks like a rawbawt playing, completely unfun and I wonder why he or she even bothers.

 

[Terpsichore]

Infernal collapse hits pretty damn hard.

 

[Mastermind]

Yeah that pretty much makes shotguns awful. They really need to hire a few people that know a thing or two about crunching numbers and balancing skills.

Yes, they should hire me and ignore the rest of you.

Rapid fire should work better with dual pistols than with shotgonnes. It was absurd that it didn't before. It's the only skill that focuses on killing one enemy as fast as possible (which is what dual pistols are best at) but require an AOE weapon to make the most use of it. There was no point in making a dual pistols build before, whereas now you can still use shotgonnes because the area effect is useful at incapacitating hordes and stealing mana. Personally I'd have changed it so that Execute chance has an effect on rapid fire and venomous hail. No shotgun nerf and dual pistol builds are now useful as well.

 

[Turisas]

Just got this; did the recent patches do anything to nerf the embermage? I want to build the most overpowered, face-rolling build that I can since I don't have that much time to dedicate to this. Prismatic Bolt ftw or what?

 

[Mastermind]

Just got this; did the recent patches do anything to nerf the embermage? I want to build the most overpowered, face-rolling build that I can since I don't have that much time to dedicate to this. Prismatic Bolt ftw or what?

pb gathers less charge but it's still deadly. start with prismatic bolt/hailstorm then grab frost wave too when it opens up. put at least 1 point in every brand. the rest is optional, but see blaine's post for what to fill it up with.

 

[Metro]

As long as you get PB and every brand (frost, fire, and lightning) you can pretty much roll your face and pick anything else. Of course, some talents are better than others. I wouldn't bother with more than a point in frost phase if you're non-frost. The blink is the same it just adds more damage/bigger blast radius.

 

[Rhalle]

Been playing for awhile now, all Berzerker.

I've got some gripes, but I'll save all except one. The armor mechanics are fucked, but knowing how can help you greatly.

Armor is a flat reduction of monster damage, which means that armor is essentially the same thing as health.

So, for instance, an armor with 30 armor will reduce monster damage by 30 points, while an armor with 10 armor and 40 health points effectively reduces it by 50. This gets especially ridiculous at end game, apparently, as armors max out at, say, 300 armor, while certain gems can give you 1.5k health, meaning the gem has 5 times the effectiveness of the armor itself. It's the same for elemental armor. A piece of equipment with 20 health points will be superior to an armor with 19 of all elemental resists, since they are flat reductions, too.

I've started a new character with this understanding. In the past I would have simply thrown out the 2 armor armor with 20 health for the 5 armor armor. At level 10 I have a chest piece that has 5 armor and 115 health. That's like an armor with, well, 115 armor.

Still having fun, though.

 

[Mastermind]

Armor is a flat reduction, but it's reduction per hit. So it adds up to a lot of damage reduced over an encounter if you get hit a lot. So it's not as useful for an embermage but for a zerker or engineer it's a lot more useful.

 

[Metro]

Also I believe that engineers and berserkers have a 'baked in' 25% damage reduction (probably because they are usually played as melee) while the other classes do not. Seems like a fairly sloppy balance fix and one that can be exploited a bit simply by having a cannoneer or caster berserker. Following up with what Rhalle said the best itemization for survival is 'X% all damage reduction' followed by '+X health.' Everything else, at least in terms of elite, is fairly worthless.

 

[Blaine]

The "reduce all damage by X%" effect could be stacked to 100%+ before the last patch, which implemented a hard cap of 75%. There were players trying to farm up these invincible armor sets legitimately, and I suspect plenty more used the console to spawn themselves a set. I've read reports that on Elite at higher levels, even 75% damage reduction will at best turn one-hit kills into two-hit kills, two-hit kills into four-hit kills, etc. That's pretty significant, but even with Berserkers' and Engineers' built-in damage reduction to use as a base, it's quite a large gear/gem investment to reach that 75% mark.

On the other hand, I've seen players with massive armor values on their Engineer bragging about their ability to tank things. I rather doubt they were doing that on Elite, or on Veteran with 2-3 players present for that matter, but I have no experience with tanking at all so I might be completely mistaken. For my money, kiting/not getting hit and having just enough armor and health to survive one charge attack from a brute-type mob is the way to go, but I play Embermage primarily so that's to be expected.

The main trouble I run into with Torchlight 2 difficulty-wise is actually that some sectors of the game's "viewport" have a much longer sight range than others, since TL2 is three-dimensional and uses a faux isometric perspective (with the camera seeing significantly further above the character than below); rectangular 16:9/16:10 resolution standards (as opposed to the rather square 4:3 standard in Diablo 2's day) further exacerbate the issue.

Put another way, I can see monsters to the northwest (top-left) and northeast (top-right) corners of the screen from much father away than I can if they're approaching directly from the south (bottom-center), leading to hilarious but frustrating scenarios in which brutes are already 90% finished one-shotting me with a dash attack from the south before I even know they're there.

 

[Mastermind]

Engineers tank well due to force field. lvl 100 force field + max charge (extremely easy to get) = 60000 extra health.

 

[Blaine]

Ah, nice. I've heard that Forcefield is fantastic and have been meaning to test Engineer tanking, but my few co-op friends are either done with the game by now, or are extreme cheapskates waiting until the game goes on sale for $5. I look forward to testing Engineer with them in or May or April 2013 if they catch the Steam Daily Deal in time.

(If I'm soloing, I want to see huge damage numbers all over the screen.)