Been playing tome a ton these past months and managed to get a few precious wins on insane roguelike with necromancer, brawler, oozemancer and now also archer added to the list.

Why archer? Well, it doesn't really sound like the most interesting character does it? My first win ever was with Skirmisher, and that was due to watching a guide on youtube calling it "the best class for beginners". That's basically how I learned to play the game, following that guide as a template on how to think in terms of building a character. It's a simple class, but also a powerful one. It uses a sling and shoots from afar. While archer, uses a bow and does the same thing? Yea... Well, sometimes you just want something simple.

Skirmisher on paper looks more powerful though, I'll be honest. It gets flat damage reduction in pace yourself, it can use a shield and has great defensive capabilities in buckler training, a beautiful aoe in hurricane shot, sling supremacy that improves damage a lot and kill shot which damage increases based on how far away you are from the target. That last one does insane damage at long range.

But archer doesn't get any of that stuff. It basically just seems like a worse version of skirmisher. And in some sense, it kind of is.

Archer CAN use a sling though, even though it doesn't share any of the same abilities with the skirmisher for it. But I was very adamant from the start that I wanted to play my archer like an archer, using bow and arrows (otherwise I think it would literally just be the worse version of skirmisher), so I never really looked at this option or entertained switching to a sling when I came across one.

Another reason for wanting to try out archer was that I had started to notice how I sometimes would get the big red target around me that says "marked", and it always made me nervous and made me back away so I wanted to test out of the source of this thing and see if it was any good.

Was it any good? Well, not that good. Using It wasn't like, "oh I got him market, now I got him for sure heheh", but at the same time, if someone didn't get market, I would be like"wtf, why doesn't this guy get marked, how will I ever be able to defeat him". It kind of became a thing you would just expect to happen in the end (since you get talents that scale the chance) so it basically just dictates which talents you will use next. If a target is marked, you use these talents, and if it's not, you use these. Basically, all of archers "first" talents, or core talents, in Archery Training, gives a percentage chance to mark a target on hit. And in archers second talent tree, Archery Prowess, it lets you use talents that give a bonus effect on targets that are marked and consumes the mark. These effects are decent enough, but not amazing.

The thing about the archer talents, there isn't really one specific talent tree or talent that seems "very good". If I had to pick one that is the most helpful to winning fights, it would be Trueshot, which for up to 7 turns gives 30%+ increased attack speed, doesn't consume ammo, and increases mark chance. Fair enough, but, imagine this... Archers also get the combat training tree, with blinding speed, giving global speed of up to like 47%. Both of these talents are instant speed, if you pop them at once, you have insane attack speed!

If there is one aspect archers really excel at, it's speed.

Towards the end I found an amazing unique bow, which might be the best bow that an archer can find tbh, with 118% inherent attack speed - The Thaloren-Tree Longbow. 10 dex, 20 will, 15% crit chance, 30%physical and 20% physical resistance penetration. I never came across a random unique one that was even worth considering rerolling.

In other words, we have at least 118% default attack speed (I can't remember if I had additional bonuses, I might have), we pop Trueshot and Blinding speed at instant speed, now we have like 200%. Then, we use talents like Fragmentation shot, that cripples, reducing THEIR attack speed by 40%, then we have poisons that reduce speed... I mean, it's insane how much speed difference you can get with archer in the end.

One area tome players might often find a bit daunting of course is the entrances to the orc prides, where you instantly spawn into a dangerous area with a boss and multiple enemies looking at you, ready to kill you. But I actually dominated these areas unlike with any other character I have played thus far, and one of these even had the elite boss in them. I was also getting powerful in other areas than just speed though.

For both archers and skirmisher, the thing that determines damage isn't the weapon, it's the ammo. So that's an area you can experience some power spikes when you find better ammo. I remember I having like 154% ammo strength and one time looking in the shop at Last Hope and saw 180% ammo and was "oh wow". Suddenly my character is a lot better. Then, at some point, I found tier 5 random unique ammo - and I only found ONE of these in the whole play-through, and I actually checked pretty much all of orc pride vaults as well. This ammo had 3 "greater" modifications when rerolling, and I re-rolled the only one that didn't add power and I got power, and this ammo then gave 216%!! power, with 24% crit chance and 48 capacity. I mean, that's just insane. After that I could one and two-shot many enemies.

So the late game was kind of a breeze tbh, it was fun though. In the final boss fight I went around the whole room to close all the portals after killing Elandar, just because I could (and because I kind of wanted the achievement). The final boss isn't the peak of difficulty though, it's high peak! I am sure of that. For some reason, no matter how powerful I seem to be in the orc prides, high peak can have enemies that are just insanely strong and tough to kill. And I have died in high peak before, and that's awful when you have spent 20 hours on a character. My way of navigating high peak is simply to use track, locate the stairs (it usually has some unique on top of it, but you can kind of see it beneath him), and then aggro the fewest amount of enemies as possible and just get through to the next level. Pretty much the opposite of the strategy to all previous areas where I try to clear everything.

Because I might have found the best bow and got some sick ammo towards the end I might have been quite lucky, so it's hard to say if archer is actually a powerful late-game character or not. Had I not found that one orange tier 5 ammo or that unique bow, it's tough to say what would have become of my character.

In the beginning, I did struggle quite a bit with just dealing damage when I moved to tier 2 dungeons. I recall both in Old Forest and Daikara did I come across unique and a random boss that I just wasn't able to kill, so I had to try to find other areas to level myself up and increase my power level to be able to come back and finish the job. I did also struggle with stamina for much of the game and periodically also ammo capacity was an issue in certain situations, but only a few (keep in mind that being in Trueshot doesn't consume ammo).

One thing I lacked for most of the game was a good light source... And the reason for that was that I found a light source that gave +30% physical damage quite early on, but which only gave 4 light radius. And since I never really found any light source that gave good light radius AND something else good, I wasn't going to let go of 30% physical bonus just for some quality of life... So I walked around with like 5-6 vision for a good portion of the game. It was quite painful, but maybe that made me powerful enough to survive to the end? Archers get track anyway, which I used a lot.

For the race, I chose skeleton. Which I think is just one of the best races overall, and a particularly good fit for archer since archer scales off dexterity and strength when using bows. The "skeleton" talent itself is huge here since is basically gives free dex and strength. The only thing that annoyed me here is that I maxed this talent BEFORE getting adept, and adept doesn't work with passives until you level them up... So even though I should have had 21 str and dex, I only got 17. Not a huge loss though. And bone armor from the skeleton is such a sweet 10-turn shield that you can just pop before opening any door or even going into line of sight of any enemy.

For the prodigies, like I said, Adept. It's literally my favorite prodigy that I have picked, I believe, as the first pick on all my winning characters thus far (maybe the most unorthodox choice here being necromancer). But it just levels up everything so I don't think you can ever go wrong with it.

For the second prodigy I wasn't really sure what I was going for. I had a vague idea of ethereal form or that one that just gives 50 strength for example. There's also too many prodigies to keep track of, so I kind of just wanted to get to level 42 and see what's actually available at that stage. And the one that caught my attention was "Pain enhancement system" which after dealing a critical hit, increases all stats by 50% of strength for 6 turns (18 turn cooldown). Now, as you can see from my character sheet, we have 175 strength and 88% crit chance. So that is basically 87 + to all other stats except strength for 6 turns after the first hit. And keep in mind that dex is more important than strength for damage as arrow ammo uses 70% dex and 50% strength. So 87 dex is HUGE. The other stats doesn't really do that much, you get some saves, crit chance, stammina - it doesn't hurt at least. The only slight annoyance with this prodigy constantly activating is that because you boost constitution so much too, it looks like you've taken some damage even when you haven't. So you just need to get used to looking at absolute health numbers instead of relative.

When I reached level 42 though, my character was far from that strong of course, so it wasn't that obvious of a choice. I had less than 50% crit chance I think and maybe 120 strength, but I built my character into the prodigy to make it insanely good.

"But it's only 6 turns bro, that's not good", ok, but need I remind you of the insane speed bonuses archers have? You get tons of attacks with this prodigy being active as archer. I think it's a great one.

Character sheet: https://te4.org/characters/286762/tome/d340af5a-8ffc-444b-b5b2-4b4435c75518

The only thing the character sheet doesn't show AFAIK is the crit multiplier. I had 245% I believe, you can see I am wearing Dakhtuns gauntlet that gives 50% and a cloak that gives 45%.

Ok, that sums up my experiences with the archer. I completed it a couple of days ago. Let me know if anyone actually read these.

Right now I am playing a Yeek Summoner, which I am having a great time with thus far. I have made it to level 27, chosen adept again as always, and kind of feel I might be over the worst early game difficulties. The summons does actually seem to scale very well, so that is promising. Even after taking adept the difference in the bonuses a level 4 summon get compared to a level 5 is still noticeable. For my second prodigy I am already eyeing blighted summoning, which makes the summons even better, so I think this is a character with a lot of potential.