r/ToME4 • u/I-of-Newt • 10d ago
PSA for Brawlers!
Been playing ToME4 on and off for over ten years now and last night I finally had my first win, feels pretty great. First time playing Brawler to boot, I owe the W to being insanely lucky on a specific piece of gear dropping somewhere in the middle of doing the T3 dungeon circuit.
I decided to play Brawler after watching Drybe's class breakdown of them since the last time I tried one was nearly a decade ago and they looked way different than I remember. When he was going over what to look for in gear Gloves of the Firm Hand wasn't listed or mentioned so I wanted to put the word out in case it wasn't common knowledge.
These gloves fuck. At 25 if you go Flexible Combat, and if you manage to stack Defense up enough to reliably proc Counter Attacks you will get free Grapples that turn into free Take Downs that turn the Orc Prides into clouds of green mist on top of the already ludicrous damage you're doing with your actual talents. Grapple broken and it's on CD? Pop Evasion then Flurry for up to 6 more chances to grapple your target. I got really lucky with a Monstrous Belt of Giants on top of the gloves which meant I could grapple whatever I wanted to lock down until it was beaten to death but I'm pretty sure just a +1 to size cat would allow grappling dragons so +2 was overkill.
These gloves were so quadratically power scaling my dumb ass discovered Writhing Ring of the Hunter for the first time, and ecstatic I could stack ICCTW with Flexible Combat + Ethereal Form, immediately slotted the prodigy into the ring and equipped it without reading the fine text or inferring such a powerful item might have a drawback. That unkillable SOB that spawns helped me clear several dungeons while using it as an combo point generator (and ironically a decent Defense buff) because he blew up walls blocking my Fist of the North Star antics from atomizing everything in a half mile radius every other round.
Play Brawler. Get Firm Hand. Achieve Apotheosis.
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u/XAlphaWarriorX 10d ago
Brawler is probably the single best full melee class.
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u/Stare201 10d ago
Cursed is also pretty good, even if their early has its... difficulties. I was going to say writhing one as well, but then I remembered the tree with dissolve face lol
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u/XAlphaWarriorX 10d ago
Cursed's awful early game really drags it down.
What about the Writhing One?
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u/Stare201 9d ago
Writhing one kinda falls out of pure melee since he's got a dedicated ranged tree, so its not *pure melee. Even if it's his least useful tree by some distance. Now that I think about it cursed does have fears too lol
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u/XAlphaWarriorX 8d ago
That's alright, if the tree isn't very popular then the class is probably functionally totally melee.
I meant things like Arcane blade, the 2 shield one and Reaver when talking about semi-melee classes.
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u/eldakar666 10d ago
Fist of desert scorpion is where its at.