Every companion's breakdown

[Queegon]

Got to 5th level on Hard, got too strong, restarted on Epic, got too strong anyway so here's my 2 cents:

=Mild spoilers ahead=

Companion breakdown starting with Kane

Your go-to meatshield with healing abilities and a skill to close distance to enemies. Never was out of party. While you have 2-3 companions use 2-handed weapons, 1-H are too weak and ambushes with trapped heroes are a death sentence, if Kane is the one to break them. Switch to 1-H + shield with a full party. When you get Thorns enchantment (Leg armor and a legendary ring) it's possible for Kane to have the highest DPS in battles just thanks to those for a time. Falls off dps-wise in lategame even with Thorns but is pretty much unable to get killed. Up Mastery and Life.

Dash - your bread and butter skill to move around the battlefield, especially with low movement speeds.
Stone Wall - useless, try it out it while you have less than 4 skills to see for yourself
Heal Wounds - priceless in the beginning, the need for it falls off at around level 4. Don't autocast.
Armor aura - the skill that makes you impervious to damage from non-boss creatures. It heals you so quickly you'll never need to Heal Wounds ever again. Extra armor on top is gravy. Autocast the crap out of it and never look back, have mana regen to keep it up.
Taunt - An OK skill you'll use more often than not, not for the taunt but for the extra weaken/reflect ability stapled to it. Don't put on auto-cast until your mana regen can comfortably take it together with armor/heal aura (mid to endgame)
Physical Wave - Kane is best played as a tank/healer. Damaging skills take up space needed for support skills. Thorns make up for his low DPS. Next!
Blades of Justice - see above. Next!
Command Aura - amazing. If you can auto-cast it with mana regen and -% cooldown to comfortably keep up the damage bonus, you'll have a fine time. Otherwise use in a pinch for the invulnerability.

Enchant boots with +25% speed, helmet with +15% crit chance (thorns can crit, use a high crit 1-H weapon), gloves with -15% cooldown, legs with thorns and amulet with 1% regen health/mana.

[Queegon]

Maeve

Your first DPS companion and for a long time your only DPS who will carry you through. Again, never out of party. Use bow/crossbow with physical damage (guns go to Kaela because they are slow). Don't even think of using double 1H-xbows, in general elemental damage is kinda meh, don't know about lower difficulties but Hard/Epic boasts resistances through the roof. Up Might and Speed.

Fire Arrows - your autocast skill from the get-go. Never turn it off. Splash damage>critical chance.
Arrow Barrage - useful in a pinch. Can save your arse when it gets crowded around you in the beginning. Nothing to write home about though - low-ish elemental damage. Will get cycled out.
Smoke Screen - you'll use this once to see what it does and never again. Next!
Bear Traps - you'll use this maybe twice before it gets replaced. Next!
Hunter's Mark - the number one skill Maeve has. Big damage boost and slow on top? Sign me up. Use on bosses/elites. If you have the mana use on everything else.
Rain of Arrows - deals a crapton of physical damage against unarmored targets - with high penetration can be kept till the end. Does short work of portals and the crowds around.
Summon Phantom Bow - an ok skill that brings some DPS, 1 Health but is never getting directly attacked. Not bad. On lower difficulties go with bow, on Epic switch to x-bow.
Headshot - By the time you get this skill you should be able to kill anything with <1300-1700 health in a few seconds and will have trouble dealing the killing blow yourself (use the instant cooldown path). Use either this or Rain of Arrows, you won't have mana for both.

Enchant boots with elemental resistance, helmet with crit, torso/legs with elemental resist aura and mana regen. Amulet with attack speed/movement.

[Queegon]

Aeric

Your healer that deals next no damage himself but won't need it. Brings a tanking tree and a DPS water elemental to the table. Will be a mainstay in your party for a long time, later on your healing from Kane will be good enough to swap Aeric with Kaela for example who is a better DPS by herself and has a better tanking skill. You can consider going with earth damage Aeric, wouldn't recommend on hard difficulty because of resistances/immunities though.
The only character that will be Skill points starved, so if an opportunity presents to you (there are a couple) give the extra points to Aeric. Up Mastery to max, then whatever you want.

Earth's Blesing - your auto-cast skill, don't turn it off. Choose the increased duration line up until the point where your mana regen can comfortably take the shorter duration but much more powerful line.
Healing Totem - an ok heal AoE, feels better on paper than in reality, good skill, if you can spare the skill points. The mana regen route seems nice. Actually is poop, go for the greater AoE + resist.
Summon Ent - Aeric's bread and butter. Cast it always and everywhere, the tree can take some beating and taunts enemies. Immunity to earth can be useful against specific enemies too. If you go the DPS tree route...well, it's your funeral.
Ice Cloud - If your party is elemental damage based and your Aeric is less a summoner/healer and more DPS oriented, try this out. I wouldn't.
Earth Fury - same as above
Water Lord - Aeric's DPS summon. Cast always and never look back. Either upgrade route is fine, choose one that suits your needs.
Earth Curse - a must-have for an elemental party, otherwise skip
Revival - Well it's either this or Healing Totem. Healing Totem is kinda meh in the endgame. Aeric will be using all his skill points on ent, water elemental and blessing. 4th slot is free, I'd say.

Boots with elemental resist, gloves with -% cooldown, helmet enchant doesn't matter for a summoner, for DPS aeric your call, torso/legs with mana regen/elemental resist.

[Queegon]

Rakhem

Ugh, where to start. A melee fighter/mage. Can be build as a straight mage but in the front row (ouch), can be a dual-wielding or 2-handed fighter. Lacks in one significant point though, has no skills allowing movement on the battlefield, so if you plan on going into melee and have an ok armor to withstand some punishment, you'll have to make concessions on speed...and that sucks for Rakhem. Personally, I found this char a good couple power levels below other ones.
As a mage you'll be putting points into mastery but then you aren't realizing his full potential. As a hybrid you'll be starved on stats. He will need life to last, speed to gain the most from his auto-cast skill (triggers on hit), mastery, if you plan on using any of his fire skills and might for obvious reasons. My recommendation is ignoring his spells and using him as a melee DPS.

Inner Fire - your auto-cast skills and one of the best skills Rakhem has. Don't turn it off, use mana regen path, then swap to defense later when you have enough regen from equipment.
Fire Runes - See Maeve's Bear Traps, only worse because fire damage is good only from tower level 1 through 3 and Maeve immobilizes foes on top.
Blinding flash - An ok debuff, costs a lot and has a big cooldown, but is worth a slot. Use the less damaging, more debilitating path.
Fire Barrage - deals little fire damage and heales even less health. This is a skill you'll be using near death and die anyway because that's how much health it returns.
Fireball - a skill that does nice fire damage but scales poorly and costs a metric ton of mana. Good in the beginning, falls off the radar later unless you specced a full mage.
Path of Flames - lolwut? So instead of bashing enemies you are now solely dedicated to clicking on one of your four (who are getting beaten in the meantime) and moving him slowly across the battlefield with monsters in the chase? Hard pass.
Acid splash - the best skill Rakhem has, permanent armor reduction is amazing for a pure physical party. You have to ask yourselves, if it's worthy of adding him to a party for it.
Firestorm - low damage slow AoE, pass. If you are a mastery Rakhem, you have no choice.

My personal take is dumping him for any other character, Whisper is a better mage and Boron is a better fighter. There is no need for a hybrid.

[Samseng Yik]

Will you add other members?
And consider do a run with different party?

[Queegon]

Originally posted by Samseng Yik:

Will you add other members?
And consider do a run with different party?

Am adding one per day, it allows this thread to not be buried and hopefully more people to see it. I ran a party of Kane/Maeve/Aeric/Boron, Kane/Maeve/Aeric/Whisper and Kane/Maeve/Boron/Kaela (last one being pure physical party and objectively the strongest for the difficulty)

Which brings me to: Boron, your 5th party member

Firstly, Boron doesn't have mana pool, as a barbarian Frostling he is unique in the way his skills cost and how this Rage pool of his regenerates (it regenerates by hitting enemies). Starts with 1 Mastery and is best left at 1. His skills, while dealing extra damage governed by Mastery, mostly give passive static bonuses ignoring Mastery. He starts with 100 Rage pool and items that add to mana pool increase his rage pool BUT any mana regen items are wasted on him. He'll allways have 0 regen.
All of this makes him different from all other companions and a worthy candidate to at least try in battle. He uses medium armor, but don't think he's squishy because of it, not at all. While he will definitely have about 30-40 less armor than Kane, his health pool and power more than makes up for it.
You could put two 1-handed weapons on him but, IMHO, he is best used as a cleaving menace with a nice 2-handed high crit, high cleave weapon. Will likely out-perform Maeve in pure DPS on later levels. Up Might, Speed and Life 2:2:1.

Cleave - your auto-cast skill. Amazing skill to have, adding extra cleave damage making him a melee slaughterhouse while generating extra Rage to use on other of his skills. The other more damaging path (also Mastery-based and elemental damage-based) pales in comparison.
Jump - Remember when I wrote about Rakhem sucking because of no relocation skills? Jump is like a slow teleport. While Kane dashes in a straight line in his line of sight, Boron can comfortably jump across the whole map disregarding any obstacles in path. I like the weakening path.
Winter Wall - not worth a slot, I feel like Boron has 4 great skills and this one isn't one of them.
Stunning Shout - brings a stun affliction on the table, costs NO rage and generates MORE rage. And if that wasn't enough for you also increases your whole team's movement and attack speed by up to 30 % for 15s for good measure. Pretty spicy.
Axe Throw - Physical damage stapled on a low cooldown, low cost skill at range. If you feel you have too much rage and nothing to spend it on, consider Axe Throw. It's kinda weak though and scales off Mastery. Oops.
Earth Hammer - permanent debuff and my choice over Axe throw untill you get the last skill in his tree. Deals fine earth damage but the permanent armor reduction or slow is indeed powerful.
Ice Chains - I must say I never used this skill, I never had the need for it. Scorpion's "Get Over Here" is wasted points when you are jumping across the map and on high difficulty the number of enemies is too high to spend rage and time on grappling some.
Blind Rage - this is the final payoff. High rage cost and worthy every point, if you want to use it. You lose control of Boron for the duration of Blind Rage giving him attack speed, extra physical damage and extra movement and it can be auto-cast, so once you reach 100 Rage Boron should be able to indefinitely rage upon the world. "But losing control is bad" you say and I hear you. But if you have Kane's heal and Boron with health regen he'll be moving all by himself to chase enemies without your input and that saves a LOT of time where you can focus on other characters' skills. He will continue to auto-cast Cleave and Blind Rage without your help (for some reason auto-cast of Axe Throw won't work under rage). This also means you will probably use his Jump and Shout skills once before he starts zerking. I think it's a worthy trade but that's up to you - switch to earth hammer instead, if this is not for you. Be wary of enemies with Reflect as uncontrollable Boron will kill himself.

[Cepherous]

Should put this into a guide too when you are done.

[Franky]

Curious to see what your thoughts are on Kaela when you get to her, I found her to be such a ridiculously good dps it made Maeve obsolete (save for hunters mark, that debuff is so good).

[Queegon]

Whisper

The only real elemental damage spellcaster and elemental DPS.You'll want all the magic penetration you can get your hands on and all the skill cooldown you will see.
Best would be used as a ranged DPS on auto-attacks with a damage dealing spell here and there, will be stat-starved this way, however. Won't really fit into a physical party and needs a good deal of micromanagement to cast spells whenever they cool down.
Up Mastery to max and spend points on might for penetration, the thing is you want Speed as well when you consider attacking with weapons. I'd say Might Speed Mastery 1:1:4. Also 2-handed staves are crap compared to two 1-handed wands or foci because of the extra enchantments you can stack on two weapons. From level 7 onward or so you will be finding void damage foci, use those. There is literally like 3 enemies immune to void, one in the tower level you find Whisper and 2 in the last one. I might be forgetting one elsewhere. And last note, same as Aeric, Whisper will be skill-starved.

Thunder Injection - magic penetration and some extra air damage, auto-cast the poop out of it. This is also the reason why you want to be an auto-attack dps, this skill is too good to pass up. The crit chance seems good too but from my own experience where I ended up with Whisper at 140%+ crit chance it made no sense.
Elemental Barrage - Let's say in endgame each bolt will deal either 200 elemental + 200 void + immobilize and there are 3 bolts, or with the other path deal 200 elemental per each of the 8 bolts. So your options are 1200 damage, 600 of which are pure damage and immobilization or 1600 damage that can be resisted. Wonder what path to take /s. The skill itself is ok in the beginnings, the mana cost for it is too damn high though.
Magic Tower - you create a repulsing totem dealing crap fire damage keeping monsters at bay or a tower with earth splash damage. The damage of this tower is 3 times as high, and still crap. The choice is yours really. If you have 2 melee guys and a tank summon (Aeric/Kaela), feel free to go with the extra small DPS from earth tower.
Suffocation dome - one path ups the area and deals around 100 air damage per second for 100 mana. Lol wut? Terrible ratio. The other path removes up to 25% elemental resistances. If your penetration is low and you have an elemental-based party, take this. For physical party...why are you even taking Whisper?
Teleport - So you either use this as a mana regen tool or a debuff tool. You won't be using this to flee from impending doom, your melee guys will take all the aggro to themselves. 30 mana to cast and regenerates 120 over 20 seconds. Or you stun everyone in a huge AoE for an incredible amount of time. Unless you REALLY need the mana regen, the stun is very good.
Meteor - the skill that lets Whisper shine even in a physical party and the skill you want all the -% cooldown equipment for. This deals insane amount if damage in a small AoE, don't even look at damage over time path, take the 100% extra damage, who even came up with that DoT... Using 2 or 3 will send Whisper to dps god levels at the end.
Mind Control - never used this, never felt the need for it. Why control someone when I can kill them in 10 seconds. If I did I'd go with the damage path. Probably good with extra defence, if you for some reason have neither Aeric nor Kaela.
Blizzard - cca 400 damage per chunk, one path increasing AoE and adding DoT, one increasing number of shards raining down to double. The heck, why would I choose a bad DoT in a large area over twice as much damage? Also 160 mana, oops. Would probably choose this over earth totem.

Cap with resistance penetration. Boots with elemental resist, chest with mana regen and legs with mana regen won't hurt either, if you are using elemental barrage. Gloves with cooldown. Add elemental shatter to weapon. The other whatever you see fit. For Whisper I'd make a party of Kane/Boron/Aeric/Whisper or Kane/Aeric/Whisper/Kaela (Rakhem takes advantage of your elemental party but doesn't contribute to it). Kaela up next, oh boy @Franky

Originally posted by Cepherous:

Should put this into a guide too when you are done.

I considered it but I'd have to polish it a lot for a guide (and hey, no "crap" and "poop" limits my gaming vocabulary :D). That's why I opted to post here instead. This is mostly a stream of thoughts.

[Queegon]

Finishing off with Kaela

You find her pretty late in the game and you are asking the game and yourself at this point: "Why the frick would I change my party composition this late in the game when I was boosting the stats of my heroes with fountains and scrolls?"
Well, little Timmy/Tammy, frankly, because Kaela is OP AF. She uses medium armor and bows/crossbows/guns the same way Maeve does, so what's so special about her? Dive into the skills section to find out. Kaela will outdamage every other team member in terms of raw power. Best to give her dual boomsticks (the most powerful, slowest boomsticks you can find). Up Speed and Might 2:1. You will have enough skill points to get 3 skills to max and one just tagging around.

Rapid Fire - first skill and the one that changes things. 100% attack speed indefinitely on a ranged glass cannon. Extra powerful knockback, so no enemy can even come close? Splash damage on top? Maeve can use guns but a difference between 0.36 APS for her with bow and 0.13 APS for a hand cannon? Kaela looks at this 0.13 APS and laughs heartily. The void damage path is useless compared to sheer power of KB/splash.
Summon lightning rod - my skill of choice for the 3rd slot. It brings a repeating stun and almost no cooldown, will stop enemies in their path. Don't take it for damage, take it for the affliction. Spam it as you will have nothing else to spend mana on.
Electric Cage - I will admit I never used this skill, so I can't comment on it but the weaken path looks ok, still trapping enemies is the same as stunning them with lightning rod. And you won't have skill points for it anyway.
Summon Mech - cute and useless. Deals next to no damage, dies in one hit suffered, costs a lot. What's to like?
Void Grenade - my skill of choice for the 4slot. For an elemental party, go with elemental reduction, for everyone else spend a grand total of 1 skill point on the Daze path since it doesn't get better with more points put into it, it just adds low damage scaling off mastery.
Tesla Cannon - clunky but for an elemental party a valid choice. Still, spending all that mana on elemental damage that's half of what she will deal with auto-attacks? Ehhhh.
Gravity Pull - so you can choose whether to stun enemies with rods, trap them with cage or pull them with this. I chose rods, you choose whatever you like. In case of thise I'd go for the greater AoE.
Summon Titan - You will start the battle by summoning one of these, they last indefinitely until their death, so, like, forever. Choose the melee path as even Aeric's ents scrape their rootfeet when titan gets down to business. Quite literally you are fighting with 5 heroes instead of 4.

Helm with crit, amulet with movement/attack speed, gloves with attack speed, torso/legs with mana regen and armor/elemental aura, boots with elemental aura, weapons with whatever extra damage you can get on them. Personally I was using a boomstick in main for immense damage and a 45% crit chance pistol in off-hand to guarantee nuclear power.

Have fun out there people, and be prepared for a right WTF (but in a good way) ending. :P

[Sherr]

Great effort man. Kinda a lot of mistakes in game mechanic like this one (spells obviously do not crit), but still an interesting read.

Originally posted by Queegon:

Cap with critical unless you have around 100% (spells do crit)

[Franky]

Ha! So I wasn't crazy in feeling Kaela was OP xP
An interesting read, will keep a lot of this in mind when I make a new run on higher difficulties (beat the game on normal).

In particular I want to try and use Rakhem more, even on normal difficulty I dropped him like yesterday's news as soon as got Boron.
Only towards the end of the game when he had a speed of 15 (basically all the heavy armor pieces i gave him had a movement speed buff) did he start to look better and I thought that maybe if I could get him to keep spamming his hammers for self heal he could be a decent distraction tank? Didn't really try it though as by then my team of Kane/Kaela/Boron/Aeric (who I probably could have swapped out but it just feels weird for me not to have a dedicated healer character and didn't want to rely exclusively on kane for heals) was set in stone.

Would likely have to use stat fountains on him too since as you mention, more then any character it seems this dwarf needs a lot of stats to be good.

[Queegon]

Originally posted by Sherr:

Great effort man. Kinda a lot of mistakes in game mechanic like this one (spells obviously do not crit), but still an interesting read.

Originally posted by Queegon:

Cap with critical unless you have around 100% (spells do crit)

You are of course right and it is now fixed. You say "a lot" of mistakes. Feel free to pinpoint them and correct me, so I can fix those as well.

[Event Horizon]

Hello Queegon.

I have read your guide with real pleasure. ToT was kind of an experiment if we, people with not so great experience but a lot of fire and passion, can create an interesting and novel (in some ways) combat - our aim was for diversity, so players could have fun experimenting with party composition and different builds. Looking at your post I think we more succeeded in that then failed.

We tried to make each stat focus (Might/Speed vs Mastery) and every spell useful - but some are better, some worse, some situational (like in most RPGs I think) - and some are pure fun skills (e.g. Kaela's Mech summon with second path adding swarm of mechs, I really love this one).

I hope that you will also enjoy our next game, which we will announce at the end of August - we have learnt a lot while making ToT and this next game will be a "level 2" game. If you would be interested in trying out the combat mechanics there in closed beta (when we are ready to share it) and helping us out in polishing it, please drop by on our Discord so we can keep in touch.

Cheers,
Kris

[Samseng Yik]

I hope developer make a better balanced Skill vs Weapon. And design better encounter.
The enemies spawn wave by wave...... Make the game more DPS race than balance.
If you have enough DPS to kill enemies soon right after they spawn ? The encounter become enemies walk lonely 1 by 1 into a death trap until 100%.
The design of MMO like WOW/FF14, where each encounter has unique hand placed enemies type, quantity and position. Make players have to consider their target priority or sequence, save CC for what situation.

There is another game with very strong Tank Heal DPS Trinity I recommend developer take a look.
"The Fall of Dungeon Guardians". Technically is first person grid based WOW real time with pause. But the full party really have to make use of everything for the boss/elite encounter.

[Stu -1]

im intrigued at your assessment of smokescreen. i loved this game and completed it 100% a while ago. and i know since then there have been changes made. i might be wrong but is it no longer a viable build to make a dual wielding death machine? because i definitely managed that on the hardest difficulty. one skill i SPAMMED was smokescreen. i dont have the game installed so can't check to see if its changed. but im sure you could upgrade it to i THINK hit multiple enemies. it had like a 2 second recharge. and blinded for much longer than 2 seconds. one of the boss fights near the end i only manage to complete by keeping them blinded for the duration of the fight. i also found any and all summons to be near useless on the hardest difficulty. i wonder if the games been balanced to make them more viable on the tougher difficulties. its really interesting though reading different opinions on the skills and wondering if i could have made them work with better builds or if game changes have led to it. would love to see more of this world in the future if the devs can manage it

EDIT

my apologies. its not smokescreen i meant. i think the spammable blind skill i meant was arrow barrage. im going to copy paste my old post from another thread about my thoughts on the characters. WARNING this information will likely be outdated. but it might be interesting to read how the balances in skills have changed in the last year, year and a half