Torchlight 2 cont'd

For my second playthrough, I chose the embermage, for whom I had found few very good uniques. I started on Elite but the early game was way harder than it had been for the engineer. And so I restarted on Veteran in hopes for a more pleasant experience. It was still pretty challenging, though.

That was mostly because I decided to play a frost spec and the first frost skill, Icy Blast, is really poor for damage. It's very handy for debuffing enemies, since it procs Staff Mastery and the tier bonuses reduce enemy damage. But for killing enemies, 30% of weapon DPS is just crap. And for some odd reason, you can't bind the skill to the left mouse button, unlike Magma Spear and Prismatic Bolt.

Once I started having high enough stats to wear the twink items, the game got easier and with Frost Wave it became a cakewalk. The charge bar was filling up so quickly that I never ran out of mana and could just spam stuff to my heart's content. Dying still happened every once in a while, though; being at half health is never safe and sometimes you just get hit by too many things at once.

With the exception of the mentioned issues, the frost skills are quite amazing and work splendidly well in synergy with each other. Enemies get slowed, frozen, stunned, and their protections are removed. Ice armor is also common on enemies only in the second half of the first act.

Torchlight 2 is a very fast-paced game; the base movement speed is much faster than in Torchlight, for instance. Thus it seems slightly off that there are so many skills that have so slow casting animations. And as there is no way to interrupt casting (I think) and with the skill queue system, increased casting speed intrinsic is one of the most important things to stack on your character. Otherwise you end up standing on one spot way too long and getting killed. I managed to get +30% casting speed on my embermage and found it to be quite a comfortable amount.

The outlander class is all about speed; her charge bar increases dodge, crit, and attack and casting speed as it fills up. And when the bar is empty, the outlander's next attack is guaranteed to cause stun. Share the Wealth passive also gives a part of the bonuses to your party, including yourself. With a full charge bar, the outlander attacks ridiculously fast. I also just finished the game as an outlander. And on Elite -- it was so much faster and nicer than on the melee engineer.

I had perused the forums for an entertaining build and ended up using an odd one someone had discovered. It works as follows: on your main hand you wield a wand and on your off-hand, you use a pistol, whose only purpose is to allow you to use all skills that require a weapon other than wand (with the exception of Rapid Fire); all the skills use the dps value of your main hand weapon. As for attributes, you should only stack Focus to increase your magic (and wand's) damage. Dexterity is needed only for max dodge, 110 or so.

Stamina is evidently not worth investing unless you are going for max block. The armor and health stamina gives (and armor value in general) lose their worth in the second half of the game when you play on Veteran or higher. If a proper attack hits you, you die regardless if you had 10 or 100 points put in Stamina. Health bonuses on items are much higher, and if you really want to go for survival, you should find items and socketables with +x% damage reduction.

Some people are going as far as to farm the mid-act boss of the first act for his eyes that give +3% to damage reduction when socketed into armor. Before the second patch on Friday, the stat didn't even have a limit (now it's capped at 75%) and you could go for a total invulnerability, with the exception of attacks that ignore damage reduction, like traps.

But to return to the outlander, a much larger portion of deaths were ones I could have avoided by not running into an AoE or such. I could blame myself for doing a mistake, whereas on the engineer there often was nothing I could've done. The last boss's second phase was also much more tolerable. I died once, though, and a few deaths followed that because the boss was camping the teleporter when I came back and kept two-shotting me until I managed to get past him and continue kiting him around.

I discovered having multiple sources of the same crowd control is quite effective; web spell combined with a spider pet; silence spell combined with a silencing imp minion and a swamp flyer pet. All spells on the pet, of course; I like having just passive spells on my character -- the class skills are quite enough. I think my pet even managed to silence the Netherlord at some point as he was just walking towards me stupified without using his impressive spell arsenal.

I was using Chaos Burst as my main attack (LMB) but as it doesn't gain charge for whatever reason, I had Glaive Throw on RMB for that. When the bar got full, I switched the RMB attack to Venomous Hail, which is bit too slow to use on fast targets but does massive damage when it hits, especially with the nigh +300% poison damage bonus I managed to accumulate. Cursed Daggers is a must have poison skill as well.

Glaive Throw is the go-to skill for many outlanders. It's actually so good that Runic nerfed its damage with the latest patch, by maybe 30% but it still remains quite effective. The outlander also has a very good healing skill (a one point wonder, really), Stone Pact, which lays down an area that gives a 3s healing over time effect and armor buff when you stand on/go through it.

I think I will play the game through at least once more. As Berserker and on Veteran; I'm not going to even try a melee on Elite anymore, at least not without a shield build. Also, I have an insane amount of unique items stored. I wish they'd add more stash space...

(I wonder where that 75k highest damage dealt came for the engineer and outlander. Their abilities definitely weren't hitting that hard. Either it's a bug or there's some mob that takes greatly increased damage. The embermage's 21.5k seems feasible, though.)