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[Frumple]

Maybe give shalore marauder a go? They're a bit more varied than 'zerkers iirc, and from what I understand the timeless+unstoppable combo is basically an "I Win" button.

[Robsoie]

I remember having some fun with a Skeleton Marauder i won with, though it was in normal mode .
I wonder how marauders can do in nightmare.

Though i'm not sure which race i'll use, the skeleton was awesome, but i have read often that the undead starting place is a horrible hell in nightmare.
Hopefully the Shalore route will help

edit
I went with a Shalore Marauder, and for the fun of it, Insane difficulty.
Of course this time i immediately exited the scintillating cave and went to trollmire.
I press autoexplore, and i'm shot with poison by giant venus flytrap.

I go back to safety of a corner and notice my health going down very fast. my character has no wild infusion (to my surprise, instead i have shield and phase rune) so i waited and the poison disappeared when i was at 1 of health !

wow, that's starting greatly

edit 2 : hilarious, i managed to defeat 2 trolls and both of the fights have been boss-level (and those weren't even rare, just regular monsters) type of fight, with lots of pillar dancing (tree dancing in that case) , hitting while i'm protected and with my skills back, then pillar dance more etc...

Then i ran into a wolf, and unfortunately a rare that shot me with some beam to death before i could do anything else.

Lisildara the bee swarm hits Terriblos for 71 mind damage.

Insane difficulty indeed let's focus more on nightmare then

[Darkmere]

My main two issues : not as OP as I'd like to feel; not as fun as Arcane Blade - Darkmere bow your head in shame right this very instant.

I should point out that I'm apparently the lunatic fringe of the player base because I really enjoy wyrmics and thought temporal wardens were a lot of fun. People should probably just ignore my opinions based on those two facts alone.

Nonetheless, I am shamed. 

[Dr Feelgood]

I've splatted dozens of characters on insane, even characters that I used to win on nightmare roguelike. The main difference between nightmare and insane is that rares/uniques/bosses are much more common on insane. It's like a toned down version of 'Everything is Unique'. You level-up incredibly fast and get tons of loot, so that's nice.

Tips for insane:

- Don't use auto-explore, unless you have cauterize or bone shield. Getting instant-killed is easy due to the amount of rares on each level. Using auto-explore is my main cause of death, but I refuse to play without it.

- Immediately leave your starter dungeon. Go to all the towns and drown all the rares. You'll gain several levels and loot for free.

- Go to the town near Norgos' Lair and buy a psychoport/psionic shield/mindblast item from the totem shop. They're dirt cheap.

- Don't bother with ghouls or skeletons. Surviving their starter dungeon is basically luck-dependent.

- Head to Dreadfell at level 1, then leave. You don't want to face a bunch of level 40 rares, while you're level 28.

Shalore marauder/berserker is probably the easiest combo for nightmare and insane. Unstoppable+Draconian Will+Timeless means you're completely invulnerable for 10 turns. I don't play them, so I can't say much else.

[Frumple]

... though, to be fair to ghouls, while they are incredibly luck dependent to get out of the starter dungeon, if you can their tier 1 passive is incredibly attractive for the higher difficulties. Not being able to take more than half your max HP in a single hit is damn good when one of the major risks is being one-shot.

It's just the getting out, and surviving the global penalty...

E: And retch is also a guaranteed status stripper, which is very nice for classes that don't have access to such.

[Oneir]

And I'm never taking Flexible Combat again. Everyone always raves about it, always saying 'Oh no, with THIS class, it's totally OP, honest. It's crazy'. Then I take it and it's crap. I need to hack in some kind of option I can enable on chargen that'll keep that prodigy permanently locked for me, just to resist the temptation of listening to the ubiquitous recommendations.

I have no honest idea how useful it is, objectively speaking, but it's pretty satisfying on a brawler. You'd need...really good procs to make it worthwhile on someone who wasn't already mashing people with their face, though.

In other news, my doombringer who was steamrolling high peak is facing off with a currently >100% resist all runed bone giant rare. So that's going to be interesting. I've already eaten one death to it (because I am not a very good player and got over-confident due to aforesaid steamrolling). I may need to resort to strategy.

Actually, though, it might be a good wake-up call. I have a ring of the dead and hadn't died since playing badly against Borfast (very similar circumstances, honestly), so a win is still possible.

[Robsoie]

On Brawlers Flexible Combat is completely awesome as a prodigy, but that's because the whole class is dedicaced at punching things and have enough skills and talents that makes punching a weapon of total destruction, so a prodigy allowing you to give more punches by attacks is extremely good.

For other classes i never really understood the interest or why it's recommended in so many guides, punches are weak on non-Brawler classes as they lack all the bonuses to them given by skills, i always found other prodigies much more interesting.

Good job on winning a Wyrmic, and nightmare , never managed to get a wirmic really working for me, even in normal, it seemed i had much more difficulty to keep them alive than other classes.

mentionning wyrmics, i noticed there were a "Wyrmic tweak" addon :
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=41739

[Frumple]

Yeah... I'd probably say the only classes that are going to be normally attracted to flexible combat are brawlers and ABs. Everyone else just doesn't have much in the way of incentive to use it. I mean, glove procs can be pretty nice, but... that's all you're really getting from it if you're not one of those two. Wyrmic after more damage would probably be better off with... a lot of things. Even carry the world or superpower would probably net you more overall dakka boost.

I think the big thing about it is it's flashy. Even if you're not actually getting much out of it, the glove procs are both noticeable enough and infrequent enough to both be attractive and not become boring. So people notice it, even if it's not really doing all that much.

Definitely wouldn't recommend it on higher difficulties, though, for pretty much anyone. Draconic will is generally your go-to, there, along with... one of the other defensive ones. D. Body, spine, whatever. Might even recommend temporal form if you're non-AM and fairly mono-type damage -- the staff doombringer I'm running on normal took it, both for the immunities and the ability to diversify damage on command. Wyrmic probably wouldn't hate windtouched speed -- passive +20% global speed is pretty nice... there's a bunch of stuff to take instead of flexible combat, basically

[Frumple]

Could have taken Meteoric Crash, but sadly it's only triggered by spells or mind attacks.

Minor point: Wyrmic's basically everything is a mind attack. Everything dragon related, at the least... if the tooltip says "is mind power" and it does damage, it qualifies. The biggest issue with meteoric crash (beyond qualifying for it) on a wyrmic is you're going to spend a lot of time turning the ground underneath you to lava. It'll very happily trigger off of things like ice claw, heh.

[Satarus]

Could have taken Meteoric Crash, but sadly it's only triggered by spells or mind attacks.

Minor point: Wyrmic's basically everything is a mind attack. Everything dragon related, at the least... if the tooltip says "is mind power" and it does damage, it qualifies. The biggest issue with meteoric crash (beyond qualifying for it) on a wyrmic is you're going to spend a lot of time turning the ground underneath you to lava. It'll very happily trigger off of things like ice claw, heh.

Yeah, all wilder skills count as mental powers. 

[debvon]

Haven't played this in a long time. I'm not familiar with transmogrification. Do you get more gold from selling items to merchants than you do with through transmogrification? I understand that it's more efficient and all that. But I'm wondering if I should take my uniques out of the box to sell to merchants.

[Zireael]

I used to think there is some change, but then I looked at the code and unless I missed something (situational bonuses or something), there's no difference.

[Dr Feelgood]

I managed to get a ghoul mindslayer out of the starter dungeon on insane. Thankfully, no dangerous rares spawned. Currently, my ghoul is level 15 and doing surprisingly well. I haven't touched mindslayers in years, so this overhauled version will take some getting used to.

[beorn080]

The only time you get more money for transmog is when you shove gems in. I can't recall, however, if you automatically convert items to gems when you autotransmog stuff while having that skill.

[Frumple]

You can set it to auto-extract before t-mog in the fortress, for... some amount of energy. 15, I think?

I forget if there's still gold caps on... anything. If so, it might be slightly possible to get more gold out of selling to something with a cap higher than the t-mog chest has, but I forget what the numbers involved are, or if they even still exist. Generally the chest gives you the same price as a shop, though, yes.