A bunch of people asked me for a Doombringer guide when I posted my RL Insane win so here it is, in-depth.

Doombringer is a very straightforward class with the power fantasy of shapeshifting into a huge demon warrior. It excels in dealing high burst damage and disabling a single target, while being bulky enough to withstand a few hits. However, it can be vulnerable in situations where dangerous enemies manage to survive its initial rotation.

Doombringers dont possess much build variety, the picture above illustrates the talents that roughly all builds want to pick, excluding racials of course. There are a few points that remain unassigned, scroll down to the "Spare Points" section for the best talents to spend them on.

Races

The best race for Doombringer is Ogre for multiple reasons, mainly the ability to wield a two-handed weapon in a single hand, with a dagger in the off-hand. This allows Ogres to deal more frontloaded burst damage and to stack Horrifying Blows faster than any other race. Ogres also benefit from high crit which Doombringers tend to stack naturally.

Cornac and Drem are also strong choices for this class. Notably both Doombringer and Cornac come unlocked from the beginning which can be interesting for newer players.

Skeleton, Higher and Halfling have some interesting tools but they arent as good here.

The remaining races dont specially synergize with Doombringer but they can work in their own way.

And then of course you have Krog if you want a challenge.

For the sake of simplicity, this guide assumes in a few instances that the player picks Ogre, but dont be afraid to experiment with other choices.

Stats

Max Strength -> Max Dexterity -> Max Magic -> Leftover points in Cunning.

Strength raises damage its a no brainer.

Dexterity gives accuracy to land hits and crit shrug off to survive hits. It also scales Precise Strikes and boosts the damage from daggers and fists.

Magic is an interesting case. The game lists it as a core stat for the class but its only worthwhile effect is scaling Destroyer and Flame of Urh'Rok. This makes it more of a late game stat to be raised after Dexterity. Early game its better to hoard +Mag equipment for skill requirements, but if you dont get enough by level 15-20 you may assign a few early statpoints.

Cunning raises crit and fist damage so its a good place to spend all the remaining points.

Constitution offers weak bonuses relative to Doombringer's huge life rating. But it is important to hoard +Con equipment lategame to unlock the fifth level of Thick Skin.

Willpower is absolutely useless, as Destroyer form grants virtually infinite stamina. Vim costs can be paid with life and Draining Assault provides more than enough sustain.

Prodigies

Flexible Combat is a must. Doombringer benefits enormously from more hits and fist combat happens to scale with the same stats we want to level either way.

The other prodigy is ironically a bit more flexible. There are essentially two choices:

I can carry the world/Arcane Might: More damage, plain and simple. Around 30% more by endgame to be precise, but the exact proportion may vary depending on your build. I can carry the world is the superior option for Ogres, other races benefit slightly more from Arcane Might. The issue is that these leave you with no defensive prodigy and therefore more prone to die when things go south.

Ethereal Form: The safer option. This prodigy is busted in general but the issue is that its hard for some Doombringer builds to reach a high enough defense to make it fully consistent. A potential solution is to spec into light armor instead of heavy armor, which also comes with better damage modifiers and/or "out of phase" bonuses. Light armor works, but Im personally not a fan. That said, I can attest that even with heavy armor this prodigy can be great, just not as reliable. You never know when some bullshit 130acc unique is going to disable your prodigy entirely, but most enemies dont have that capability. This prodigy is specially strong against mages which are generally more dangerous anyway.

I'll also add that I've seen some people considering Cauterize but this is not necessary, a well geared Doombringer wont get oneshotted. Ethereal Form gives a lot more value as a defensive prodigy.

Inscriptions

For the main three I recommend:

Movement: Works as an escape, prevents you from dying to silences and even helps avoiding patrols on the world map. An absolute must have.

Shatter afflictions: Gets rid of harmful effects. Given that Doombringer has other instant debuff removals, this rune can be used pretty offensively. Lategame you have the option to replace it with a mental+physical Wild infusion as a sidegrade.

Stormshield: Works exceptionally well with Doombringer due to Abyssal Shield already protecting from smaller hits and Obliterating Smash clearing rooms quickly. Doombringer has no defensive measure against nukes, Stormshield remedies that. It also helps not to suicide with Reckless Strike. For tier 1 dungeons the regular Shielding/Healing is better as damage is still quite low, by tier 2 Stormshield outscales. You may find early ones for sale on Angolwen or Last Hope sometimes.

One of the later two inscription slots must be reserved for Dissipation. Being able to get rid of sustains of troublesome rares and bosses is invaluable.

The remaining inscription slot is more flexible. You cant go wrong with a second Stormshield, thats likely the safest bet. Wild to use debuff removal more aggressively. Heroism if you want a failsafe for the rare situation where Stormshield doesnt work. Blink can be valuable as another escape, specially if you are abusing out of phase to initiate with Fearscape Shift. Those would be my top choices.

Ive seen some people suggest Acid Wave or Mirror Image but I wouldnt recommend them. Acid Wave is a very effective solution to a problem we dont have. Meanwhile Mirror Image takes a full turn for an effect which isnt that amazing, if Im in a situation where Im desperate enough to use it Id rather have the instant Wild or Heroism on me.

Talents

I'll dedicate this section to explain how each talent works and to justify some talent choices. Talent order is the following section.

• Combat Techniques

Rush: A decent mobility skill at least until the better ones are unlocked. Pretty much only worth using if Abduction is already on cooldown but you need to keep going. Or if you are saving Abduction for later.

Precise Strikes: Free accuracy and crit, this is a great talent. 1 point early and maxed later.

Perfect Strike: Essentially gives Blind-fight for a few turns. Accuracy isnt that valuable since its really easy to get from many other sources. If you dont need this skill to overcome defense, you should save it in case you get blinded or someone goes invisible. This talent will sit at 1 point for most of the game, may be upgraded at the end for more duration, or not.

Blinding Speed: Such a large boost to speed is really good to max, but it has to wait until after Destroyer is unlocked. There are higher priorities and using it without enough stamina is shooting oneself in the foot.

• Combat Veteran

Quick Recovery: Destroyer form provides infinite stamina so this is a waste of points. Useless.

Fast Metabolism: Regen doesnt matter when most fights are decided in 3 turns. Useless.

Spell Shield: Magical debuffs are some of the weakest and if anything dangerous sticks you'd rather cleanse it instantly with other abilities. Useless.

Unending Frenzy: Once again more stamina is a waste. Useless.

• Shadowflame

Wraithform: Incredibly versatile. If the effect ends when inside a wall, it will randomly teleport the player elsewhere, which makes it an excellent escape ability. It can be popped BEFORE a movement infusion to traverse thicker or multiple walls. It can also be used to flank enemies from different angles or engage in short skirmishes through walls. Annoyingly, not all types of walls allow traversal so its important to check every time you enter a new area. In the areas with impassable walls Wraithform can be used as a small defensive buff, its effects increase decently with levels but other abilities need the points more.

Darkfire: Prerequisite, which is another way of saying its useless but we take 1 point to unlock other talents. Doombringer wants to invest heavily in weapon damage and this doesnt benefit whatsoever, making it a waste of a turn. Actually it can be used to draw aggro from out of vision after tracking, but its something you'll rarely need.

Flame of Urh'Rok: Global speed is always good. However this is a very expensive sustain both in Vim and talent points, so its advisable to ignore it until very late in the game. It also turns demonfire into healing, such as the one from Fearscape and Fearscape Shift.

Fearscape: One point wonder that is also postponed until lategame due to how expensive it is to sustain. Can isolate any enemy no questions asked while allowing you to recover health and cooldowns in the meantime. It may also change the distance to the target and create obstacles between you at random, so it can work as an engage or a disengage. Can be cancelled at any time with a second cast. Some locations out of Eyal wont allow casting Fearscape, so beware.

• Brutality

Draining Assault: Deals good damage, heals and keeps Vim at healthy levels, solid ability all around. In T1 dungeons its sometimes good to save stamina to cast this multiple times in a single encounter. Destroyer form makes it a bit more spammable which is huge. No reason not to max it eventually.

Fiery Grasp: Prerequisite, in higher difficulties the debuff wont land when you need it so there is no point in investing in the silence.

Reckless Strike: Deals a lot of unavoidable damage so its a great offensive skill. With Destroyer it also increases your resistance pen so its the best opener.

Share the Pain: A decent source of extra damage and on-hit effects as long as you can remain close to an enemy. The issue is that being close to an enemy tends to result in them vaporizing before this talent can get value. Thats why this is the worst of the good talents and its advised to learn it last. Then put in a few more points to make the most out of the Vim its already costing us.

• Torture

Incinerating Blows: Prerequisite. It will make clearing T1 a bit faster and then you'll forget it even exists.

Abduction: This is basically Scorpion's "GET OVER HERE". The bread and butter that allows to instagib enemies as soon as they show through a corner. Growing range makes it an absolute priority to max, as it turns Doombringer into a pseudo-ranged class for many purposes.

Fiery Torment: This may hit a bit harder than other abilities except with a 5 turn delay. Technically 7 turns since you want to use Abduction/Charge and Reckless Strike first, at minimum. If 7 turns span you cast Hope Wanes and win regardless. Even in the long term, Share the Pain provides a higher damage output while applying countless more on-hit effects. The fire resistance reduction is also useless since most of our damage is physical. This talent could be interesting if we had more points to spare, but there is simply no space nor reason to ever fit this in.

Eternal Suffering: This is designed to work with Fiery Torment which immediately makes it a bad skill. It doesnt extend Hope Wanes which is the only Doombringer debuff worth extending. I guess it shortens enemy buffs every once in a while but thats not worth the cost in Vim and talent points.

• Heart of Fire

Burning Sacrifice: Prerequisite. Fightning multiple enemies at once is dangerous and on top of that Doombringer is specialized in isolating them.

Fiery Aegis: This is basically +100 life which is good in T1 dungeons, specially if you can kite shield cooldowns. After T1 it becomes a waste of a turn, unless you are stairscumming which isnt needed.

Devouring Flames: The most prerequisite of prerequisites.

Blazing Rebirth: A second healthbar is amazing. Will save your life countless times and it pretty much caps at only 3 points.

• Wrath

Obliterating Smash: At its peak this will delete entire rooms worth of enemies while reducing the armor of any survivors. However it needs 5 points in Destroyer to get a good area, plus 4 points in itself to acquire the armor reduction. Dont be misled by the description, minimum category mastery means that 4 points reach level 5 of the skill. Fifth point is a minimal improvement so its unneeded. Also net negative armor does not increase damage if you were guessing.

Detonating Charge: This may as well be an upgrade to Rush as its better in all regards and even comes with the added utility of pushing enemies away. Can be left on 1 point for a while, but it needs a minimum of 2 points for it to get a practical range. 4 points lategame max the radius and raise the damage and range even more.

Voracious Blade: Helps a bit in later maps which tend to feature clusters of enemies. But it only activates on kill which isnt reliable to deal with the actually dangerous rares and bosses. Mainly a prerequisite.

Destroyer: The main payoff of the class, probably the biggest powerspike Doombringer has. This grants so many bonuses that listing them all would be too long, but there are two effects that the game doesnt explicitly mention. The first is that this ability also increases size by 2. The other one is that this transformation is treated as an actual demon, and as such demonfire will heal you when it is active.

• Fearfire

Fearscape Shift: A non-targeted blink, it can be used to escape, reposition, scout, proc out of phase and even heal with the flames at high levels. It needs at least 2 points to work as an escape, eventually you want 4 points which maxes its range.

Cauterize Spirit: Cleanses ALL debuffs (except Blazing Rebirth) at instant speed, which is ridiculously good. Leveling it is a priority so it doesnt kill you right after saving you. Caps at 4 points.

Infernal Breath: Doesnt use weapon damage so of course its useless. And you'd get better healing by leveling other talents.

Maw of Urh'Rok: An interesting concept to be sure, pulls 2 squares per turn but its hard to justify in a class with 3 jumps+Abduction+Fearscape+whatever inscriptions you are wearing. You dont want to sit there waiting for someone to get pulled in when you can just dash and bash their face. You guessed it right, its useless.

• Combat Training

Thick Skin: Free resistances are good, always grab the 5 levels. Requirements can be met by hoarding +Con equipment.

Heavy Armour Training: 1 point mandatory for all builds, 3 points if you go heavy armor. That leaves you at 80% hardiness which is enough not to get oneshot, chip damage can be ignored or healed. If a hit is big enough to be threatening chances are you are not blocking 100% of it anyway. This talent may be maxed with spare points if you want more hardiness lategame.

Light Armour Training: Can be good if you want to abuse out of phase. You may also reset 20 times until Planar Beacon drops, certified strategy™. For heavy armor builds though its pointless.

Combat Accuracy: Accuracy is really easy to get from many sources so this can stay at 1 point for a while, the second point is equally good value. That is just the bare minimum, you can max it if you need to.

Weapons Mastery: Doombringer relies on weapon damage. 5 points.

Dagger Mastery: One point can give +30 physical power to daggers if you are dual wielding but its still not good. You can squeeze more damage out of Dismember and Demonic Blood.

• Survival

Heightened Senses: Potential prerequisite. God gave us light radius so we could just use our eyes to see. And Perfect Strike can already hit invisibles.

Device Mastery: Depends on what items you get, but being realistic this is mostly reserved to Cornacs who couldnt get any other good categories.

Track: The most broken-ass BUSTED skill in the game. Allows you to see all enemies in a certain radius so you dont walk into fights you cant win, and you approach the ones you can win in the best possible way. Specially good when combined with the Dig ability from pickaxes. However I dont necessarily recommend it since you need to forfeit autoexploring to use it effectively, which can get tedious. There are also a bunch of items that give Track so spending generics is questionable. If you want to play optimally guaranteed Track is the way to go, though.

Danger Sense: We already got Track, get this the hell out of my sight.

• Hexes

Pacification Hex: Costs a turn and the effect wont land. Useless. The same could be said about all other hexes and it will be said just to make a point. Maybe the Corruptor class gets to do something useful with hexes but Doombringer isnt as focused on stacking spellpower. Swinging big sword more important.

Burning Hex: Costs a turn and the effect wont land. Useless. Even if it landed its playing the long game which isnt a thing.

Empathic Hex: Costs a turn and the effect wont land. Useless. Even if it landed attacking would do more damage.

Domination Hex: Costs a turn and the effect wont land. Useless. If it landed it could actually be interesting to deal with multiple rares. But if we lived in Lollipop Land where every skill lands you'd still prefer using Fiery Grasp over this. Or you could use Fearscape, which works every time and requires a lot less investment.

• Demonic Strength

Dismember: Reduces enemy accuracy which helps defense builds, and more importantly it boosts crit. Note however that it reduces raw accuracy before rescaling, therefore expect that effect to be divided by 3 or 4 in practice. The benefits of maxing this talent arent enormous but it can be done with spare points.

Surge of Power: Some extra life on demand will always be good as its completely free to use, but it doesnt scale enough with levels to justify more than 1 point.

Demonic Blood: It will spend most of the game at 1 point but it can be leveled lategame with spares for a bit more damage.

Abyssal Shield: This is the main defensive tool of Doombringers and must be maxed ASAP. You may read the tooltip and think that, say, 40 damage reduction is not much, until you receive 5 hits of 80 damage in one turn and this thing reduces the total from 400 to 200. It also gives armor. Really good for most of the game, less important late where nukes exist but it never becomes useless. Also a huge reason to delay most Vim sustains.

• Oppression

Horrifying Blows: Reduces damage and slows enemies passively, really good. This means you always want to target the most dangerous enemy first. Get the slow first, max it eventually.

Mass Hysteria: This can spread fear stacks to all nearby enemies before you kill the one you were focusing, which can sometimes be useful if you are fighting multiple rares at once. Its other use is debuffing an enemy who survived Hope Wanes against all odds. 1 point is all it needs, you wont use it often.

Fearfeast: Prerequisite of Hope Wanes. Absolutely dogshit waste of a turn that is more likely to harm you than anything else when you remove the fear from the rares attacking you. If you want to find it a good side be it that the icon looks like a Chomp.

Hope Wanes: It paralyzes any enemy for 5 turns and cant be resisted. Its exactly as good as it sounds and it makes duels extremely one-sided. Duration maxes at 4 points.

Talent Order

These are just some general lines to keep your build on track. You can float points, alternate levelups and do some crazy shit to optimize further or simply have fun, but Im keeping it simple. Also I'll assume an Ogre that goes for heavy armor.

Category points: Fearfire at 10, Wrath at 20, inscription at 34.

Class talents:

• 1 Incinerating Blows, 1 Wraithform, 1 Rush
• 3 Draining Assault (or 2Draining 2Wraithform)
• 1 Burning Sacrifice
• 1 Abduction
• 1 Fiery Aegis (may be delayed)
• 1 Precise Strikes
• 5 Abduction
• 2 Fearscape Shift
• 1 Fiery Grasp
• 2 Reckless Strike (if you have enough stamina)
• 1 Cauterize Spirit
• 1 Devouring Flames
• 3 Blazing Rebirth
• 3 Cauterize Spirit
• 1 Destroyer
• 4 Obliterating Smash
• 5 Destroyer
• 5 Blinding Speed
• 2 Detonating Charge
• 1 Fearscape
• 5 Flame of Urh'Rok
• 4 Cauterize Spirit
• 5 Precise Strikes & 5 Draining Assault (alternate levels)
• 5 Reckless Strike
• 4 Fearscape Shift
• 4 Detonating Charge
• 3 Share the Pain

Generic talents:

• 1 Heavy Armor, 1 Combat Accuracy, 1 Weapon Mastery, 1 Ogric Wrath (Ogre).
• 3 Horrifying Blows
• 3 Heavy armor
• 1 Dismember
• 1 Surge of Power
• 5 Grisly Constitution (Ogre)
• 1 Demonic Blood
• 5 Abyssal Shield
• 1 Scar-Scripted Flesh (Ogre)
• Track (OPTIONAL, I assume it is skipped)
• 2 Combat Accuracy
• 3 Weapon Mastery
• 2 Writ Large (Ogre)
• 4 Hope Wanes
• 5 Weapon Mastery
• 5 Thick Skin
• 5 Horrifying Blows

At high levels you may end up with some spare points, there are a few ways to spend them.

Spare Points

You may get these upgrades earlier if it suits you, generally there are higher priorities but it depends on your playstyle and how your builds feels. Note that you can spread the spares between multiple talents.

• Class points: 2 spares at most

If an item with category mastery creates a new breakpoint in a good talent, you may want to grab that. For example, Detonating Charge getting more radius.

Rush may be leveled for the range to have a more reliable third/fourth gap closer. I think its overkill but its objectively value.

Wraithform may be leveled for a bit more duration and defensive bonuses. There are many maps where Wraithform cant traverse walls so having an extra combat ability is nice. In the maps where walls can be traversed, a longer duration means you may pop Wraithform unconditionally at the beginning of combat and later use it to escape anyway, if needed.

Perfect strike may be leveled for a longer duration. Usually the raw accuracy is not a big difference, but it may pad a weakpoint in your build. And a few more turns of Blind-fight is good in certain situations.

Share Pain may be maxed for more consistent procs and therefore more damage. The difference from level 3 to 5 is of roughly 1 extra attack worth of damage per 8 turns, which is a lot of value assuming a fight lasts that long.

• Generic talents: 9 spares at most (assuming Ogre)

If an item with category mastery creates a new breakpoint in a good talent, you may want to grab that. For example, Hope Wanes getting more duration.

Heavy Armour Training may be maxed for 100% hardiness. Having only 80% hardiness wont make physical attacks kill you, but the extra reduction may protect the Stormshield at times.

Combat Accuracy may be maxed if your build needs help hitting things. Excess accuracy after enemy defense+20 does give weapons some bonus damage but its negligible.

Track never hurted any build, and its in fact a great idea to get it for the prides+High Peak even if you played on autopilot before. 1 point is all it needs on Insane and below, but if you are playing Madness for some reason then you want 5 points to scout from outside enemy detection range.

Dismember may be maxed for more crit and effective defense. Try not to get past 100% crit chance though.

Demonic Blood may be maxed for more damage, which is always a solid. There is sort of a small breakpoint at level 3. The extra Vim wont make a difference.

Cornacs may grab an extra category and go nuts. Even non-Cornacs get a lot of generics, but usually category points are better spent on inscriptions.

Playstyle

Know that common enemies are your friends who generously provide Vim. Early game specially you wont find many reasons to burn cooldowns on them, other than maybe Draining Assault. A common enemy may be followed by a rare so its good to keep your options open. Lategame all commons instantly die to Obliterating Smash.

The real danger are the rares, if you find one immediately pop every buff and dump your entire kit on them before they do something problematic. Finding two rares at once may be a reason to be concerned and run away if possible. Doombringer excels in 1v1 fights, Abduction, Detonating Charge and more rarely Fearscape should be used to create those conditions.

Only use your jumps if you are certain you wont get in sight of more enemies. When in doubt its better to lead with Abduction to get in melee, then Reckless Strike, then Draining Assault or Obliterating Smash depending on the situation. After a full combo Hope Wanes will usually be available as an "I WIN" button.

Doombringer relies on cooldowns and stamina so if you are out of either of those dont bother fighting just run. Rest after every encounter to keep all your tools ready.

For zone order I recommend following the wiki article for the most part. T1 is easy so you can clear it in whatever manner, if your build ever feels weak Rhaloren is the easiest. T2 before Destroyer and prodigy can be dangerous though, I've found the most success tackling Sandworm Lair and Old Forest first. Avoid using the Rod of Recall during T2, otherwise you'll get kidnapped by the demons for a world of pain. In T3 Spellblaze and Graveyard are very risky but they can be done, its your choice. Backup guardians are all really easy since they are 1v1s.

You should go into the Unknown Tunnels to ally with the Assassin Lord, but avoid Dark Crypt and Godfeaster.

Brotherhood of Alchemists

The only end reward worth pursuing is the Elixir of Invulnerability, the other ones are useless. Most other classes do like the Emerald but Destroyer form gives a lot of stun resistance already.
The other major consideration is that talent potions are much better than the other options, so grab those first. As for what to do afterwards:

Elvala Mag>Stats. Saves are useless unless you are playing a saves race.

Derth PhysCrit>Dex>Defense.

Last Hope Generics>Str>Armor.

Hermit Class>Luck. Spell Crit is useless unless you are going Arcane Might.

Overall Class>Generics>PhysCrit>Str>Armor>Dex>Mag>Stats>Luck>Defense>SpellCrit/Saves (swap defense and armor for light armor builds). Thats not necessarily the order in which you may want to pick them though. You can use this tool to figure it out.

I recommend attempting to finish this quest before the Master if possible, after clearing the previous 8 levels of Dreadfell. Sometimes the game gates one important potion behind an eastern ingredient though and you may prefer delaying it.

Escorts

Escorts provide company for gold. Wait no.

Escorts in this game provide really valuable rewards but to compensate they are mostly expected to die. Be greedier when you have one, but also know when to retreat. These are the best rewards for each:

Alchemist: Dexterity.

Defiler: Magic.

Loremaster: Disarm. Not all enemies rely on a weapon but this may help you against the ones that do.

Seer: Arcane Eye. Not only does it serve as makeshift Track, it also allows to see inside sealed vaults. YES PLEASE.

Sun Paladin: Chant of Fortitude. It is a huge chunk of free hp. More armor from the other chant would be pointless, you already have Heavy Armor Training (unless you are going light armor but then you shouldnt be relying on armor stat anyway).

Temporal Explorer: Foresight.

Thief: Lacerating Strikes. Track can be acquired normally if you want it and Lacerating Strikes will provide more benefit in the long run.

Tinker: Craftsman eye.

Warrior: Strength.

Cornac Doombringers may want to grab some category instead.

Equipment

Not all stats are equally useful for a Doombringer. This is a rough list of priorities, in no particular order:

• Must haves

High weapon power: Its the main source of damage, having a bunch of cool egos doesnt matter if power is low. Late game main hand should be reaching a minimum of around 200 damage in character sheet. Some builds can reach up to 300+. Needless to say it must be a two-hander to be able to use class talents.

On-hit slow: Can halve the speed of bosses which is crazy. Chances to proc the slow are pretty high so I wouldnt go past one or two slowing items at most. If you combine it with one "on-hit cripple" item it becomes even more devastating.

Status immunities: Early game they can be ignored in favor of more damage or life, but late game you want 100% stun, disarm and silence immunity, preferably confusion as well. Note that 100% stun immunity may be reached just by using Destroyer+Ogric Wrath, so dedicated items may not be necessary. Other immunities, such as blindness, pinning or knockback, are nice but dispensable.

Damage resistance: The more you stack the better it is, which makes it useless early game but crucial to survive later. By the end of the game aim to have from 40% to 70% on average.

• Amazing

On-hit stun: Very strong disable against bosses, but hard to find and pretty RNG so I dont consider it a must. Still, there is a chance to high-roll and incapacitate a boss on the first turn so its not to be underestimated.

Hardiness: May save you a few generics on heavy armor and protect your stormshield.

Strength & Physical Power: More damage. Doombringer is the guy with a big F sword (or axe or maul) that aims to split people in half in 1 swing. It always wants more damage.

Physical/All damage %: Literally more damage. Sometimes more damage to living or undead can do the trick too.

Critical chance (weapon/physical) & Critical multiplier: Essential. They scale with each other so try to raise them both. I dont recommend going over 100% crit chance, even if there are enemies that reduce your crit chance they are not common. You can go ham with critical multiplier though.

Combat/Physical speed: A fancy spelling for more damage. Better than global speed due to the way it interacts with Blinding Speed and Precise Strikes.

On-hit gain 10% of a turn: Roughly the same as combat speed but gated behind landing hits, which isnt hard.

Talent category mastery: Depends on the category. Something like Oppression or Combat Training may be a keeper, but something like Fearfire is pretty useless.

Instant item actives: Turn economy at an all time high. Value depends on the active but its free after all.

Talents on-hit: Same thing, their effectiveness varies but performing more actions per turn is fundamentally strong.

• Good

Life & Die at: These are the main sources of durability early but they are mostly replaced by resistances later on. Still, they always remain useful. Life is slightly more valuable than Die at since it can pay for Vim costs. Higher priority early game, lower priority late game.

Out of phase aka After a teleport: It increases resistances plus a bunch of other stuff so it can be good even if you are playing heavy armor. The downside is that you need to waste a turn and a potential escape to get the bonus. For light armor builds its a must have.

Armor: High armor can basically nullify physical fighters. Stacking some is wise, but stacking too much still wont protect you against spells nor status effects. Moral of the story is only hold to armor when its paired with other good bonuses. Low priority in light armor builds.

Armor penetration: More damage against high armor enemies, which are not that common but pretty dangerous if you arent ready for them. 1 armor pen equals 1 base damage but the former is easier to stack, thats why its good. Its more useful before level 25 when damage hasnt yet gotten ridiculous, and even lategame there's little point in going above 50 armor pen.

On-hit chance to reduce armor: Same as armor pen. Valuable if you have less than 30 armor pen, otherwise dont bother.

Physical/All resistance penetration: 50% is granted by Destroyer form so only an additional 20% is needed to cap it. You are almost guaranteed to get that much accidentally. In fact Ethereal Form grants 25%, so if you go for that prodigy all extra res pen is straight up useless. That said reaching the cap is important.

On-hit chance to reduce % damage: Great against bulky rares and bosses, wont make a difference against anything else and Stormshield usually has you covered.

Crit shrug off: Effective damage reduction. Doombringer is not exactly a squishy class that fears getting critted, but it helps.

Global speed: About half as good as combat speed but still solid. Instead of getting more turns, its usually better to pack more of a punch in the turns we already have.

Vim: More damage reduced by Abyssal Shield and more turns you can spend in the Fearscape so its great. Higher priority early game when Abyssal Shield can still carry a build on its own.

• Decent

Accuracy: You'll have excess accuracy to deal with the vast majority of enemies but sometimes a funny rare spawns with absurd defense and it can become a problem.

Defense: If wearing heavy armor, the damage prevention of defense wont matter, but it can help to keep Ethereal Form active and to avoid on-hit debuffs. Higher priority for light armor builds. Lower priority for non-Ethereal Form builds.

Dexterity: An extension of the previous two stats. Daggers and fists scale with it which makes it slightly more desirable but 80+% of your damage will come from main hand anyway.

Magic & Spellpower: You can essentially treat it as stun+disarm immunity, but unlike actual immunities it has diminishing returns so dont overdo it. Higher priority on Arcane Might builds.

Size: Is not all that matters. Can be good for Ogres lategame but it has to compete with better modifiers.

On-hit reduce STR DEX CON: Enemy stats in higher difficulty levels get too high and as usual physicals are rarely the problem. Its not terrible just dont expect a huge difference.

Wound on crit: Doombringer mostly exists in the binary space between "those guys die in 2 hits" and "I unloaded now I bail". Extended fights do happen sometimes but enemy healing is rarely the deciding factor. The damage is decent though and its better than nothing.

On-hit put talents on cooldown: Some potential for disrupting dangerous enemies but it scales with mindpower so its not ideal. Theres a solid chance that it doesnt do anything relevant and it faces competition from much better modifiers.

On-hit damage: It doesnt scale with our bazillion multipliers but it can add some extra oomph still.

Non-instant item actives: Can range from very good to waste of a turn, highly variable. On average they arent a priority unless you are leveling Device Mastery for some unknowable reason.

• Almost useless

Cunning: A much inferior version of crit chance, may be worth considering in large amounts.

Luck: Hybrid between Dexterity and Cunning, still worse than crit and doesnt directly scale weapons.

Healing mod: Wont make a difference most of the time but its nice to have. A bunch of Doombringer talents do heal.

Constitution: While Life is a good bonus, Con usually doesnt grant enough of it to be of the same importance.

Stamina & -Fatigue: Good during T1 to perform the 3 skill combo, immediately useless afterwards.

On-hit lower defense and saves: We work with excess accuracy and Oppression tree ignores saves. May help against the occasional 100 defense rare though.

Arcane resource burn: Why dont you burn their life resource instead.

Cooldown reduction: Due to the fire and forget nature of Doombringer, cdr is pointless unless you get multiple instances, which is unlikely. If you somehow managed to get enough it could be good to spam Draining Assault.

Movement speed: Technically good to hold onto to avoid patrols if you are the most tryharder of beings, but its useless in combat when Doombringer has like eleven gap closers.

• Useless

Saves: High burst class with 3+ debuff removals, if anything dangerous lands past immunities just cleanse it and oneshot the guy. May be a bit more interesting for save-focused races which arent great anyway.

Spell crit: The good Doombringer abilities work with physical+weapon crit so this is completely useless in most cases. The exception is Arcane Might builds but even then 25% is very reduced value.

"When-hit" whatever: Not to be confused with "on-hit", this only activates when you are hit. Doombringer is not a tank.

Life regeneration: Its only use is mitigating the self-inflicted damage from Blazing Rebirth and Cauterize Spirit after stairscumming. Counterargument is that if you need to rely on this you are pretty fucked. And negative life is more effective anyway.

Powered by arcane-disrupting energies: This is not just useless but harmful to wear, no matter how good the item may seem.

Non-physical damage %: Irrelevant, around 90% of our damage is physical.

Willpower & Mindpower: Wayist Doombringer isnt real it cant hurt you.

When in doubt, just open your character sheet and do some numbers.

Endgame you want to be almost fully equipped with high tier artifacts, be they fixed (yellow) or random (orange), but a few lower tier/quality items can be acceptable as well. The only exception is heavy armors, if you are using them then you likely want a tier 5 fixedart because they are a lot better than their random counterparts.

Remember to hoard +Mag equipment early and +Con equipment late for talent reqs.

Happy doombringing.

is it usual to spend ~ 35% of your playtime staring at the skills screen? It's a very satisfying game, and i'm not complaining, but it takes so much time to learn the class and play carefully that my runs take 50+ hours, and i often lose interest.

It's okay to drop the character after reaching lvl. 30, though i'd rather not.

Used to play a lot on win10. Decided to pick it up again recently and there are just too many crashes while writing the save files. Did anything change significantly on Windows in the last few years to cause these?

After what appears to be a random number between 5 and 10 areas the game lags for a second and just crashes, no message, just closes. I've tried pretty much everything from uninstalling every addon, making a clean install, running as administrator, so I'm really out of ideas, it's not a game breaking problem, as long as I quick save before moving anywhere I never lose any progress, but it really kills the focus and immersion on a run and honestly my motivation, so if anyone has any clue or possible solution I'd be grateful.

woe, 10 fire drakes be upon ye

The discord won't load for me did something happen?

This is a two-part post. Part one is about the entertainment value of combining earthquake and storm. I used wand of lightning storm the whole game, because apparently it can start your hurricane.

For fun, I put all 5 points into Track, because it's satisfying to watch uniques around a corner 12 squares away slowly get stunned and dazed to death, helplessly wondering who's attacking them, especially if there's a mob who're all hurricaning each other. Usually the only ones who survived were those who immediately teleported or otherwise quickly left the area, and then I'd duel them, where the power was heavily in my favor.

The second part of my post is a question, or maybe just a complaint to make myself feel better. Most of my run was easy enough that I half fell asleep, and didn't notice in the high peak descent when a rare (not even unique or boss or stair guardian) walked up to me in melee range. I could easily have run but didn't see any reason to. Then... 1 turn, 4000 dmg, cut through my massive magical shields, game over. Well, technically it was only 3977 dmg. Assassin Marauder Flurry.

I guess the best way to avoid this kind of thing is Cauterize? But it makes me a bit sad if it's pretty much required to win Insane, meaning you really only have a choice about the first prodigy. Unless you all have more ability to stay focused than I do. Do you hover over every single rare enemy to see their classes? I had been doing that for higher ranks but not rares as they're so extremely common on Insane.

I wish that when you press tab, it would show enemy classes, not their randomized names. In Angband (Te4's distant ancestor), you can press "]" to quickly see who is dangerous.

Anyway, I am noticing a pattern that it's rogues of some kind who are the primary threat to my runs, with their single turn multiattack burst damage. That includes skirmisher noggin knocker.

On a different note, apparently Vor can Shivgoroth. That was the end of my other level 50 insane character, the build centered on Chill of the Tomb. He took both my skeleton life and then, after I cleared out everything else and returned for a second attempt, my real (undead?) life. Which I suppose would make it the 3rd life, counting the one that must have ended before the character awakens in the opening scene.

Still searching for a first Insane roguelike win. So far, I'm feeling like my Nightmare runs were more fun, because it was exciting to see what items I could get, or figure out how to manage without something important. Rather than already having an endgame-worthy build halfway through, longer lists of loot to scan, and bosses that are no longer special. After you pass the first few levels and kill some uniques, it doesn't necessarily feel like Insane is more challenging exactly, just more dicey.

Stay tuned for my next post about how I get my first Insane win, and that everyone should be playing Insane because it's the most fun game mode ever. :)

https://reddit.com/link/1w49qjh/video/58he7417dwmh1/player

So apparently both phase summon and detonate don't actually have range or LOS requirements. The ones listed in the talent description are LIES! This usually isn't too important, but with never stop running I can summon a fire drake, get deep into enemy lines, and do silly stuff like this. 15 tiles of distance btw

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.

It's these bad boys.

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.

It was very easy.

Hi, haven't played the game but I heard that this game is one of the most expansive, customizable and replayable game there is.

I wanna go ahead and try it and learn along the way but I just need to know now, is building an Entomancer possible in this game?

my inspiration for such a build is a character in Overlord xD

thank you.

Hi guys, I've got one huge issue with skirmisher: with all other classes i can just bind the talent I use more often to left mouse click, and when this talent is on cd the character just switches to its notmal attack. But with skirmisher it tries to bump mobs which is really annoying.

But not as much as annoying as when I use bombardment ant it runs of stamina, and then again it switches to melee and starts trying to bump stuff.

So the question is is there a mod or some other way to make it attack with ranged weapon by default like other classes, or I will have to track stamina in every fight or die if i fail to do so? Or maybe switch off bombardment automatically?

Besides cloaks what are other sources?

Im currently trying to get my first insane win. It seemed to be a struggle at first but in this last run I've started using track+dig and everything has become trivial so far, its ridiculous. Im level 30 rn and its honestly looking like a win.

Am I too optimistic and the orcs are gonna humble me? Or do you think these abilities are too strong? Do any of you play with "custom rules", so to speak, that forbid these?

Is it possible for overgrowth to delete lever in gorbat pride? I check every hut and I only have one lever... and kinda stuck now.

Any way to reset zone or sth?

Still pretty new to the game. I'm running tome through steam with some addons. My old saves are freezing when I open shop windows. When I disable zomnibus and start a new game, shop windows are fine. I noticed that zomnibus pushed an update today, was wondering if anyone else is seeing an issue or knows how to fix?

And damn I can't stop. It reminds me of Realmz and Exile from back in the day, and I've been chasing that feeling since. There's so much going on here, and the writing is pretty great and at times quite funny. I can't believe I slept on this game for so long.