One-Hit-Point Wonder

[Nethellus]

Consider the following build:

Century: Wild Garden Age
Health: 45
Attack: 205%
Mana: 50 + 10 upgrades = 261

It sound insane, right? One hit (more or less) and you're dead, but not if you put on a conserving mind enchant and start using shields. With the mana regeneration this character has it should be able to keep a shield up permanently, ignoring its own health completely and use mana instead for defense, and the great thing about mana is that it is limitless and regenerates in a few seconds, something that health does not do.

This build makes most enemies quite easy. Forget about dodging, with a permanent level 5 shield you're a 45 hit point tank, and with enough damage reduction, the shield will not need to be reset as often either. The only problem is that if you make a single mistake while toggling the shield on and off, you're dead. And with the recent enchantment nerf, getting enough damage reduction will be difficult I think.

But if you can live with that, consider windstorms. They drain your health until it reaches 1 point but this build doesn't even care. 1 health or 45 makes no difference when you'll be taking 0 damage.

A wild Environ appeared!
Environ used Windstorm!
It's not very effective...

[nanostrike]

How does the Shield work for other elements?

I thought a Fire Shield would only block Fire damage?  Maybe I'm confused on shield mechanics.

[Terraziel]

How does the Shield work for other elements?

I thought a Fire Shield would only block Fire damage?  Maybe I'm confused on shield mechanics.

Shields get a ?25%? bonus for their element type.

So a Fire Shield can block 100 points of water damage before failing, but can block 125 points of fire damage.

That said I'm not sure how they do that, i think they probably cut incoming fire damage by 25%

[Nethellus]

Now, if you're having problems with monsters doing too much damage and breaking through your shield, you need not worry any more for I just found a hilarious exploit that boosts your shield to take hundreds of thousands of damage. I'm not kidding.

If you enter a journey to perfection mission you will notice that the magical power of all your spells have been boosted through the roof to be able to kill all enemies in one hit. This boost also affect your shields, making them pretty much impenetrable if you activate them inside such a mission.

So what you do is you go in, activate the shield, go out again and enjoy your new 200.000 damage reducing shield that will last as long as you want it to if you never turn it off. So feel free to kill boss gangs, clear umbra vortices or why not spank the overlord to death with clinging fetor level 1. =)


EDIT: I've reported this exploit and it looks like it will be fixed in the next patch, so enjoy it while it lasts. =)

[khadgar]

Ah, so that explains what happened! I knew that JtP missions boosted shields, but I never realized that the effect persisted outside of the mission. A fellow member of the server I play on once noted that my shield strength was listed in the tens of thousands of points. I couldn't figure out why, or how to replicate it. It all makes sense now.

[Nethellus]

Now that enchantments have been nerfed, Chosen One is not as easy with this build. The damage reduction I currently have is not really enough, and my shield goes down a lot easier.

But one thing has improved at least: Now that we've got easy access to draconites, I've found that they are far preferable to Pre-Industrial npcs. I will update the first post to reflect that. The only problem is that they are quite slow, but I've found that that has actually helped me more than hindered me, since it can stop me from making stupid mistakes, falling off ledges or running into enemies.

[nanostrike]

I have better luck with this build using Time Of Magic NPCs.  Their attack isn't that much lower and their mana is off the charts.

[Nethellus]

Well, starting mana doesn't matter for me, only the regeneration rate, and it is the same for any amount of mana with 10 upgrades. It regenerates so fast that I don't see the need for a bigger pool anyway. And since neither mana or health matters, the character with the highest possible attack wins.

In what way does it help to have higher mana?

[nanostrike]

Shields can stay up longer and you can cast some of the more powerful spells (Creeping Death 5 is pretty insane).

[Nethellus]

Creeping Death only do about 2.5x damage per second more than for example energy orb (I'm comparing these spells at tier 2 and assuming that the damage increase is not exponential), but costs 10x as much mana, and is very slow. Plus if you want to use it constantly and take advantage of this higher damage while your shield is active, you would run out of mana I think and your damage per second would suffer. The higher DPS it has is only accurate if you never run out, for when you do run out, you do 0 damage per second.

So, I don't think Creeping Death would be worth it even if it meant I did not have to sacrifice attack to use it. With Energy Orb I can keep my shield up permanently as well as fire the orbs forever without ever running out of mana, making its DPS constant, and if I do want to spend my mana pool I can fire something else in tandem, so my true DPS is actually higher, but how much higher I do not know.

[nanostrike]

I use Leafy Whip a lot, actually, and being able to let off several in a row instead of just one or two really helps.

[7foot_sativa]

What do you use for your Torso? I noticed Risk Taker doesn't effect the shields damage, and since it boosts magic, you probably will get a stronger shield. The opposite effect of if you weren't using shields. For fun, you could also use Minimize, it only costs to cast it(so no reduced regen), and with Risk Taker and Minimize, you'll be taking 400% or 300% more damage, making you more of a 1HP wonder.

Risk Taker often has a nice Haste Rating too, helping you return to having a high recharge that the patch took away.

Fall damage still gets through shields I think, so you'd probably die if you ever fell too far with this combo. Still more of a '1 hit wonder' though.

[Nethellus]

@nanostrike:
If I'm close enough to use a melee spell, I'm too close, and probably dead already, so I don't use them. But maybe leafy whip has I longer range, I don't know, I don't have that spell at the moment. Maybe I should try it out and see what happens. =)

@7foot_sativa:
Damage reduction/deflection rating does effect shields, meaning that with a risk taker enchant, your shield takes twice as much damage, so I don't use it. I use as much damage reduction as I can, so my torso slot has a resilient form enchant with +60 deflection rating.

[7foot_sativa]

Maybe they changed it. I tried it once and both times with and without, whatever hit me only did 3 damage to the shield both times.

[Nethellus]

Nope. I just tried it again. I ran into a skelbot dwarf with no damage reduction and got 27 damage blocked by shield, then I did the same thing again with the -100% damage reduction of a risk taker enchant and got 53 damage blocked by shield. 27+27=54 which is close enough.

Maybe you're playing at a lower difficulty and not noticing the increase?