This requires the FaxPak and Essential Skills mods, but this combination is absolutely jawdropping: 1. Be maxed out in both Warlockery and Executioner. Have a decent amount of spellpower for scaling. 2. Open a Monster Zoo. 3. Toss in a Holy Hand Grenade or Squid Bolt to weaken the room somewhat. 4. Teleport (somehow) into the center of the room. 5. Pop your Empowered Form. 6. Drop a Mana Crush. Mana Crush kills proc Bloody Murder, which then immediately hits everything within a 7 square radius of you - for about 20-30 damage on my character. Anything that dies to this procs more Bloody Murder before the Mana Crush resumes, which chains up even more kills and procs until almost everything within that radius is dead. Mana Crush is obviously a Zooclearer, but combining it with multiple Bloody Murder attacks pushes it into the realm of the insane. Whatever is left is easily cleaned up with a crossbow or melee. Wicked. I just took a zoo on floor 13 from 58 monsters to 7 monsters in one attack.
^I'm not sure why I didn't think of that, although an early Diggle God of Booze buff (thanks again FaxPax) made mana largely a non-issue. That does answer my "How to get more than 1 mana a turn" question, however! My build is Axes-Dual Wield-Burglary-Archeology-Warlockery-Bushido-Executioner. My initial intent was to have an absurd crit percentage, which I've succeeded at. This trick was a... pleasant side effect.
This is why Bloody Murder uses a randomized template: if it had a fixed one, it'd be predicable enough to be completely nuts. As it stands, it's still a very powerful ability. I got the idea for Bloody Murder from this: ...which can set up a ridiculous combo in itself.
I have been taking Avenging Executioner on all my characters. This with any build can be insanely potent. But it is actually balanced in that you absolutely will piss off Brax with this eventually. Without that it would be absolutely game breaking. (It still is, but it is double edged at current.) *Edit* I even take Avenging Executioner on my Radiant Wizards. Lol. It is great fun to spam kill radius stuff everywhere all the time.
@OmniNegro: It does seem odd that it activates off of attacks that aren't related to physical hits. I was curious if it applied to spells, or if Mana Crush was just weird in some way. And yeah, I ended up nailing Brax with it on floor 9, I think. I eventually ended up abandoning it and escaping downstairs to floor 10, although I was handling the Dread Collectors fairly well.
It triggers anytime you kill a monster. Nope. It triggers when they die on traps too. You are really freakishly unsafe standing next to Brax with this on.
