Extra notes: If you can't find a 1H staff by lvl 25, you can either continue with your 2H staff and cast spells from range or it's doable to use: any weapon (probably dagger) + dagger temporarily. The damage of the weapons is not too important, you just want to be able to use Flurry and blow things up through Arcane Combat procs. For the inscriptions, don't forget you need to keep the Mana Surge rune, until you get Arcane Feed. Otherwise you can't regenerate mana, which would be a big problem.
Interesting Arcane Blade trivia fact for you: Back before patch 1.3, Arcane Combat was actually usable with Pulverising Augur, and it was unambigiously the best build for the Class due to having good Bump Damage, amazing Proc Damage (Being a Physical Beam meant that Augur got to benefit from Staff Accuracy along with all the other Physical Boosts), and even had the best defences thanks to Stone Wall.
Thank you for the guide, Drybe. Knowing how to build the class after watching the video made me persevere through the horrible early game. Now I'm level 49 and clearing the prides like a tsunami. What a fun class to play.
Thanks so much for this guide! RUclips has been sorely lacking an Arcane Blade guide. This class always seemed simple and powerful at first glance, but I've never been able to get one to the 2nd half of the game.
The real problem with physical/earthen missiles is that you lose 1 category point to unlock Stone Spells, while as fire or lightning can save it. This is a real huge downside, since you will STILL need to unlock another class weapon style, making the class points really scarce in a build that is hungry for it.... You can play as Cornac, but you will lose very good racials as skeleton, drem, or else. OR you can use staffs as main weapon, at the cost of no special atacks. Still, I really wish to play as 2-handed physical Arcane Blade, since some 2-handed weapons are really broken.
This is a great guide. I like the format, and I like how you explain your choices and train of thought; this is very useful for newer players given how niche of a game ToME is. Subscribed, and I hope you keep the ToME videos coming!
Very cool insight! It mostly matches the way I approach AB but your execution is clearly much better as the best I've managed so far was an NM Adventure win. You talking about Arcane Shield not fitting into the AB design gave me pause for a moment but then I realized the talent was changed from what I remember. The shield given by it used to stack with other shields active so you could pre-heal (even when on full health) with Arcane Reconstruction before using Aegis, thus increasing your total shield by a fairly huge chunk before initiating knowingly dangerous fights. And, if things would go south and you need a heal, you'd usually still be able to manage by using Stone Wall and waiting for the cooldown. I used to like this interaction a lot. Maybe as a carry-over from the times when you could get Anorithil's Light tree from an escort, as that would give you another (and also free) heal. And I'll probably still be using Arcane Shield to enhance my Arcane Reconstructions anyway.
IMO danger sense is vastly underrated. It gives you a second roll in case you failed a safe. Even if that's at a malus, if your saves are high you can reroll that unlucky roll on your 10% fail chance.
Arcane Blade was one of the first classes I tried. I was feeling pretty good until I went back to the town after the elementals took over and they destroyed me haha. I'll try one again at some point and will definitely use this guide! I'm playing a Doomed atm and it's a lot of fun
It's an interesting class. I tried it only once so far and against my better judgment committed to a genius idea of going only arcane talents with Eldritch Vines as my main damage. I couldn't even get through T1 dungeons.
Another great guide :D Wanderer next? /s Side note: What makes flexible combat so strong? It's only a 50% chance of an unarmed attack per turn, which doesn't seem like it would provide such crazy damage numbers. Are gloves that powerful?
The unarmed attacks can trigger Arcane Combat, so it just makes Flurry even more of a ridiculous ability. But it's often taken even on other melee classes, that hit often, because you can get really good procs on your gloves specifically, like for example "of the iron hand" (te4.org/wiki/Glove_Egos), that gives Disarm: Hits the target doing 50% damage and trying to disarm the target for 3 turns, so just an extra weapon attack. You don't see these effects, until you have an unarmed talent or turn "Always show glove combat properties" in the options UI tab. The Storm Bringer's Gauntlets at 41:16 for example, the Chain Lightning and Nova can only trigger from unarmed attacks. You can also look at this post, going more in depth about all the procs, even on unique gloves: forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?t=48744
@@Drybe Just to be clear since you were referring to flurry, does each individual melee hit of flurry have a chance to proc flex or is it max one proc of flex per turn? Also, thanks for the link to further resources
@@ariholahan9631 So I believed it could only trigger Flexible Combat once per attack (so 3 times at most from Flurry), but apparently this is outdated information and it can trigger on every hit, so possibly even 6 times from Flurry, making it even better than I thought. It just can't trigger from the same hit twice, like if you had procs for extra attacks on your gloves like I mentioned. Source: www.reddit.com/r/ToME4/comments/x5vbze/can_flexible_combat_prodigy_be_used_with_sword/in8hnbz/ This part of ToME is a bit of a struggle, the tooltips are not always entirely clear and it's not always easy to test on target dummies, so you're left with trying to piece information together through sometimes many years old posts. Sometimes there are also people in ingame chat, that know the game's code.
This is unrelated, but a funny tidbit is that throwing knives, used by the Rouge and Marauder class, can proc Flexible Combat. The procced attacks break stealth though, which can be something to keep in mind if you want to go throwing knives, since they normally don't break stealth.
New player here so might be a dumb question but I find early game there tends to be some lightning immune enemies like the lightning drakes and storm elementals, what do you do against these when you're going hard on lightning only spells? I started putting 1 point into the 1st earth skill just to have a different damage option but curious what others are doing.
Don't worry, it's a sensible question. It depends how far along you are with your character. Temporarily putting a point into one of the other elements is definitely a good option for the early game. The laziest safest approach is to find/buy gear with a bit of lightning penetration and slowly kill them from range. But this gets harder, if it's a nasty rare or unique (especially if they can heal) and it might be best to try and skip them. If you leave the zone, all mobs deaggro, so you can try to slip by. The other approach is to try and kill them in melee, since your attacks will do physical damage. Even if you don't have the tree for dual wielding/2H unlocked yet, you should have Arcane Strike, which is alright. This is potentially very dangerous, depending on the enemy's class. I generally try to brute force it through a bit of pen.
@@Drybe thanks so much for the reply that makes a lot of sense! I would love to see a full playthrough some day from start to finish where you just explain all the major moves and decisions you make as you go! It's definitely a lot to record but would be awesome :)
Hey Drybe! Another thing I noticed while trying this build is that 1h staves are super rare and I literally didn't have one by the time I unlocked dual techniques. Is it ok to just use dual daggers in that scenario til you find one?
If you still don't find one after getting Ethereal Form, dual wielding daggers can definitely be a decent placeholder. Or if you have a good 2H staff, you could keep casting spells from range until you find a 1H one. You can also check Angolwen and Elvala, they sell staves. There are two 1H staff modifiers, one is pretty rare, the other is uncommonish (based on this info: te4.org/wiki/Staff_Egos ), so you're unfortunately getting pretty unlucky.
I still dont understand how to get 1h staff... I have over 40h in a game and did not passed lvl 18yet... Im mastering arcane blade atm and it does well but before I find any 1h staff idk if I should use combination of mindstar and dagger or what? Thanks for the guide :)
Why not dual-wield shields to get 2% accuracy proc damage bonus? Seems even better then staves actually, and since procs are main source of damage should work better than melee weapons
I use developer mode to record that part (you can get into it through options), so I set all my stats to 60, so that I can continue putting points into talents like Thick Skin. To expand on that, the point is you should try save up gear, that gives you that stat during your run and then take those talents. It's just tedious to do in the dev mode.
I think my thought process was, that the armor and armor hardiness is not as useful, since I'm stacking defense, so I likely won't get hit and the %life could be better. Looking back I strongly disagree with myself, I value Chant of Fortress higher just for the physical resistance, which is the most important one to have (most common damage type, also comes in the form of spells not just attacks) and it's especially useful if you get the Sun Paladin escort early. Armor and Armor hardiness has some effect even in small numbers and if you do get hit with high defense, it will be something powerful, so it's nice to have. I'd take Fortress > Fortitude on any character.
Hey, I think I spoke to you ingame :) I'm not sure if I responded in time to your last message, but I wanted to say I don't mind people asking questions, ToME can be pretty confusing (even to me still), so I'm happy to share what I've learned. I can't say how soon, but I'd like to make a more extensive walkthroughish video about the early game eventually. For now, I'll do my best to explain how I leveled through text: It's unintuitive, but I found it best to completely avoid melee and use a 2H staff to cast Lightning and Chain Lightning from 10 range and kite back between casts. Staves are good for spells, because you can change the damage bonus on them through Command Staff, so in this example you change it to lightning. It's difficult to go melee this early, because you are pretty squishy and won't deal that much damage yet, Arcane Combat gets much more powerful later on. I keep this up until level 25, where you take Ethereal Form prodigy, which gives you a lot more defense, so you can start fighting enemies in melee. This also gives you time to find a 1H staff. If you still can't find one at that point, you can try checking shops in Angolwen and Elvala. If they don't have it, you can dual wield any weapon + dagger. The stats of the weapons are not that important, most of your damage should come from Arcane Combat proccing Lightning many times, once you use Flurry. I would stay away from Mindstars though, they are the one weapon type, that is pretty different from the others, because it uses Willpower for accuracy, instead of Dexterity like every other weapon. I know this is a lot of information, but hopefully it answers some of your questions. The biggest secret to Arcane Blade is not going full melee too soon.
It's not a problem, if you make sure to eventually have some resistance penetration. Ethereal Form gives you 25% penetration, so you don't really need to itemize for it until late game. (it does help though) Penetration caps out at 70%. Early on you could run into Lightning Elementals (Daikara), which have 100% lighting resist, so they might be harder to kill, but you deal a bit of physical damage also, so they should die eventually or you can run away from them.
@@Drybe that means items with penetration. Although i often hear that aiming for 100% spell crit and crit multiplyer is important so it conflicts with that. Shouldn't it be easyer to just float a few points in flame ? Wait, doesn't spell combat work with the digging ray ? That's how you get decent physical damage ? Because with so little strengh you probably don't get that much physical damage otherwise
@@smile-tl9in I meant you always deal some physical damage, because you're still hitting with your weapons, but like you say it's not a lot since you don't have much strength and no increased physical damage. You used to be able to use the digging ray in the past, but it was changed and you unfortunately can't anymore, just Lightning, Flame and Earthen Missiles. In general it's rare to focus on multiple damage types in ToME, it's not needed. You could float some points in Flame, but it's unlikely to make a big difference and you could instead just improve your other talents. You can get penetration and also enough +% damage, crit chance and crit multiplier on gear, you don't have to pick just one. All of this is mostly relevant in the later parts of the game, early game you wear what you can find and +Max HP items are important to survive.
@@smile-tl9in I'm editing a video about Demonologist right now. I think I'll do Doomed next, but I wanted to play Krog Wyrmic for a while, so I'll make a video about it eventually.
Same as the channel name, I've just not been playing too much last few weeks. I go through cycles with ToME, where I play a lot, burn out, come back and repeat. I'm getting the itch again though, so you might see me in game.
You only need Manasurge rune until level 8, where you can get Arcane Feed sustain, which gives you mana regen. (although it requires Strength, so you might have to wait until Inner Power, which passively gives you Strength)
It´s great to see a content creator for TOME. One of my favourite games (even tough I am not that great. I only won the embers campaign on NM)
Extra notes:
If you can't find a 1H staff by lvl 25, you can either continue with your 2H staff and cast spells from range or it's doable to use: any weapon (probably dagger) + dagger temporarily. The damage of the weapons is not too important, you just want to be able to use Flurry and blow things up through Arcane Combat procs.
For the inscriptions, don't forget you need to keep the Mana Surge rune, until you get Arcane Feed. Otherwise you can't regenerate mana, which would be a big problem.
Don't you have issues with resistance if you only use one element ? What if you run into lightning resistant ennemies ?
Interesting Arcane Blade trivia fact for you: Back before patch 1.3, Arcane Combat was actually usable with Pulverising Augur, and it was unambigiously the best build for the Class due to having good Bump Damage, amazing Proc Damage (Being a Physical Beam meant that Augur got to benefit from Staff Accuracy along with all the other Physical Boosts), and even had the best defences thanks to Stone Wall.
Thank you for the guide, Drybe. Knowing how to build the class after watching the video made me persevere through the horrible early game. Now I'm level 49 and clearing the prides like a tsunami. What a fun class to play.
Enjoying the tome content!
Thanks so much for this guide! RUclips has been sorely lacking an Arcane Blade guide. This class always seemed simple and powerful at first glance, but I've never been able to get one to the 2nd half of the game.
The real problem with physical/earthen missiles is that you lose 1 category point to unlock Stone Spells, while as fire or lightning can save it. This is a real huge downside, since you will STILL need to unlock another class weapon style, making the class points really scarce in a build that is hungry for it.... You can play as Cornac, but you will lose very good racials as skeleton, drem, or else. OR you can use staffs as main weapon, at the cost of no special atacks.
Still, I really wish to play as 2-handed physical Arcane Blade, since some 2-handed weapons are really broken.
This is a great guide. I like the format, and I like how you explain your choices and train of thought; this is very useful for newer players given how niche of a game ToME is. Subscribed, and I hope you keep the ToME videos coming!
Very cool insight! It mostly matches the way I approach AB but your execution is clearly much better as the best I've managed so far was an NM Adventure win.
You talking about Arcane Shield not fitting into the AB design gave me pause for a moment but then I realized the talent was changed from what I remember.
The shield given by it used to stack with other shields active so you could pre-heal (even when on full health) with Arcane Reconstruction before using Aegis, thus increasing your total shield by a fairly huge chunk before initiating knowingly dangerous fights. And, if things would go south and you need a heal, you'd usually still be able to manage by using Stone Wall and waiting for the cooldown.
I used to like this interaction a lot. Maybe as a carry-over from the times when you could get Anorithil's Light tree from an escort, as that would give you another (and also free) heal.
And I'll probably still be using Arcane Shield to enhance my Arcane Reconstructions anyway.
Still obsessed with all these guides. If you made one for every class, I'd watch them all! Also, an EoR Insane playthrough?
IMO danger sense is vastly underrated. It gives you a second roll in case you failed a safe. Even if that's at a malus, if your saves are high you can reroll that unlucky roll on your 10% fail chance.
Arcane Blade was one of the first classes I tried. I was feeling pretty good until I went back to the town after the elementals took over and they destroyed me haha. I'll try one again at some point and will definitely use this guide! I'm playing a Doomed atm and it's a lot of fun
I love this content so much
Rewatching the content because I need tome in my life.
Would love to see a stone warden video sometime
It's an interesting class. I tried it only once so far and against my better judgment committed to a genius idea of going only arcane talents with Eldritch Vines as my main damage.
I couldn't even get through T1 dungeons.
Great guide! Thank you very much =)
Another great guide :D Wanderer next? /s
Side note: What makes flexible combat so strong? It's only a 50% chance of an unarmed attack per turn, which doesn't seem like it would provide such crazy damage numbers. Are gloves that powerful?
The unarmed attacks can trigger Arcane Combat, so it just makes Flurry even more of a ridiculous ability.
But it's often taken even on other melee classes, that hit often, because you can get really good procs on your gloves specifically, like for example "of the iron hand" (te4.org/wiki/Glove_Egos), that gives Disarm: Hits the target doing 50% damage and trying to disarm the target for 3 turns, so just an extra weapon attack.
You don't see these effects, until you have an unarmed talent or turn "Always show glove combat properties" in the options UI tab.
The Storm Bringer's Gauntlets at 41:16 for example, the Chain Lightning and Nova can only trigger from unarmed attacks.
You can also look at this post, going more in depth about all the procs, even on unique gloves: forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?t=48744
@@Drybe Just to be clear since you were referring to flurry, does each individual melee hit of flurry have a chance to proc flex or is it max one proc of flex per turn? Also, thanks for the link to further resources
@@ariholahan9631 So I believed it could only trigger Flexible Combat once per attack (so 3 times at most from Flurry), but apparently this is outdated information and it can trigger on every hit, so possibly even 6 times from Flurry, making it even better than I thought.
It just can't trigger from the same hit twice, like if you had procs for extra attacks on your gloves like I mentioned.
Source: www.reddit.com/r/ToME4/comments/x5vbze/can_flexible_combat_prodigy_be_used_with_sword/in8hnbz/
This part of ToME is a bit of a struggle, the tooltips are not always entirely clear and it's not always easy to test on target dummies, so you're left with trying to piece information together through sometimes many years old posts. Sometimes there are also people in ingame chat, that know the game's code.
This is unrelated, but a funny tidbit is that throwing knives, used by the Rouge and Marauder class, can proc Flexible Combat. The procced attacks break stealth though, which can be something to keep in mind if you want to go throwing knives, since they normally don't break stealth.
thx for this now i know why going earthen missles is useless :D
ah man that's awesome to have someone actively making guides for this great game. Thanks for sharing the knowledge!
No problem, glad it could help :)
New player here so might be a dumb question but I find early game there tends to be some lightning immune enemies like the lightning drakes and storm elementals, what do you do against these when you're going hard on lightning only spells? I started putting 1 point into the 1st earth skill just to have a different damage option but curious what others are doing.
Don't worry, it's a sensible question. It depends how far along you are with your character.
Temporarily putting a point into one of the other elements is definitely a good option for the early game.
The laziest safest approach is to find/buy gear with a bit of lightning penetration and slowly kill them from range. But this gets harder, if it's a nasty rare or unique (especially if they can heal) and it might be best to try and skip them. If you leave the zone, all mobs deaggro, so you can try to slip by.
The other approach is to try and kill them in melee, since your attacks will do physical damage. Even if you don't have the tree for dual wielding/2H unlocked yet, you should have Arcane Strike, which is alright. This is potentially very dangerous, depending on the enemy's class.
I generally try to brute force it through a bit of pen.
@@Drybe thanks so much for the reply that makes a lot of sense! I would love to see a full playthrough some day from start to finish where you just explain all the major moves and decisions you make as you go! It's definitely a lot to record but would be awesome :)
Hey Drybe! Another thing I noticed while trying this build is that 1h staves are super rare and I literally didn't have one by the time I unlocked dual techniques. Is it ok to just use dual daggers in that scenario til you find one?
If you still don't find one after getting Ethereal Form, dual wielding daggers can definitely be a decent placeholder.
Or if you have a good 2H staff, you could keep casting spells from range until you find a 1H one.
You can also check Angolwen and Elvala, they sell staves.
There are two 1H staff modifiers, one is pretty rare, the other is uncommonish (based on this info: te4.org/wiki/Staff_Egos ), so you're unfortunately getting pretty unlucky.
I still dont understand how to get 1h staff...
I have over 40h in a game and did not passed lvl 18yet...
Im mastering arcane blade atm and it does well but before I find any 1h staff idk if I should use combination of mindstar and dagger or what? Thanks for the guide :)
Wouldn't the ogre wielding penalty of -50% procs and -20% accuracy completely ruing everything you're trying to do with arcane blade?
Why not dual-wield shields to get 2% accuracy proc damage bonus? Seems even better then staves actually, and since procs are main source of damage should work better than melee weapons
Only Stone Warden can dual wield shields unfortunately
@@Drybe sad. Thought I could just equip two shields and bash. Great content,btw! Thank you.
How are all of your stats base 60 in the lvl 30 levelling template?
I use developer mode to record that part (you can get into it through options), so I set all my stats to 60, so that I can continue putting points into talents like Thick Skin.
To expand on that, the point is you should try save up gear, that gives you that stat during your run and then take those talents.
It's just tedious to do in the dev mode.
What add-on/option do you use to fully display the effect per level on talents?
It's just the "advanced display" you can toggle by pressing x.
Here for ToME
Why is the chant of fortitude better on this character?
I think my thought process was, that the armor and armor hardiness is not as useful, since I'm stacking defense, so I likely won't get hit and the %life could be better.
Looking back I strongly disagree with myself, I value Chant of Fortress higher just for the physical resistance, which is the most important one to have (most common damage type, also comes in the form of spells not just attacks) and it's especially useful if you get the Sun Paladin escort early.
Armor and Armor hardiness has some effect even in small numbers and if you do get hit with high defense, it will be something powerful, so it's nice to have.
I'd take Fortress > Fortitude on any character.
Would it be possible that you make better tutorial and show us how to reach to level 25 from just the start? It would be very much appreciated :)
Hey, I think I spoke to you ingame :)
I'm not sure if I responded in time to your last message, but I wanted to say I don't mind people asking questions, ToME can be pretty confusing (even to me still), so I'm happy to share what I've learned.
I can't say how soon, but I'd like to make a more extensive walkthroughish video about the early game eventually.
For now, I'll do my best to explain how I leveled through text:
It's unintuitive, but I found it best to completely avoid melee and use a 2H staff to cast Lightning and Chain Lightning from 10 range and kite back between casts. Staves are good for spells, because you can change the damage bonus on them through Command Staff, so in this example you change it to lightning.
It's difficult to go melee this early, because you are pretty squishy and won't deal that much damage yet, Arcane Combat gets much more powerful later on.
I keep this up until level 25, where you take Ethereal Form prodigy, which gives you a lot more defense, so you can start fighting enemies in melee.
This also gives you time to find a 1H staff. If you still can't find one at that point, you can try checking shops in Angolwen and Elvala. If they don't have it, you can dual wield any weapon + dagger.
The stats of the weapons are not that important, most of your damage should come from Arcane Combat proccing Lightning many times, once you use Flurry.
I would stay away from Mindstars though, they are the one weapon type, that is pretty different from the others, because it uses Willpower for accuracy, instead of Dexterity like every other weapon.
I know this is a lot of information, but hopefully it answers some of your questions.
The biggest secret to Arcane Blade is not going full melee too soon.
Thanks a lot for that man! Yes we talked in-game yesterday ^^@@Drybe
Don't you have issues with resistance if you only use one element ?
It's not a problem, if you make sure to eventually have some resistance penetration. Ethereal Form gives you 25% penetration, so you don't really need to itemize for it until late game. (it does help though) Penetration caps out at 70%.
Early on you could run into Lightning Elementals (Daikara), which have 100% lighting resist, so they might be harder to kill, but you deal a bit of physical damage also, so they should die eventually or you can run away from them.
@@Drybe that means items with penetration. Although i often hear that aiming for 100% spell crit and crit multiplyer is important so it conflicts with that.
Shouldn't it be easyer to just float a few points in flame ?
Wait, doesn't spell combat work with the digging ray ? That's how you get decent physical damage ? Because with so little strengh you probably don't get that much physical damage otherwise
@@smile-tl9in I meant you always deal some physical damage, because you're still hitting with your weapons, but like you say it's not a lot since you don't have much strength and no increased physical damage.
You used to be able to use the digging ray in the past, but it was changed and you unfortunately can't anymore, just Lightning, Flame and Earthen Missiles.
In general it's rare to focus on multiple damage types in ToME, it's not needed. You could float some points in Flame, but it's unlikely to make a big difference and you could instead just improve your other talents. You can get penetration and also enough +% damage, crit chance and crit multiplier on gear, you don't have to pick just one.
All of this is mostly relevant in the later parts of the game, early game you wear what you can find and +Max HP items are important to survive.
@@Drybe thanks for answering.
Do you have an idea for your next overwiew ? How about a Wyrmic ? I don't see many of those.
@@smile-tl9in I'm editing a video about Demonologist right now.
I think I'll do Doomed next, but I wanted to play Krog Wyrmic for a while, so I'll make a video about it eventually.
Amazing
Love TOME! What’s your IG name, I’m always talking in game and would love to interact with you when I play
Same as the channel name, I've just not been playing too much last few weeks.
I go through cycles with ToME, where I play a lot, burn out, come back and repeat.
I'm getting the itch again though, so you might see me in game.
How did you get away without using a manasurge rune? Or has AB changed that much in 8 months?
You only need Manasurge rune until level 8, where you can get Arcane Feed sustain, which gives you mana regen. (although it requires Strength, so you might have to wait until Inner Power, which passively gives you Strength)
@@Drybe Thank you! Just died to a double rare chest ambush so I'll give it a go tomorrow 😅