1.08 Theorycraft - Minelayer/Trapper

Given the news from Gaslamp dealing with ground fields, come 1.08 what would be the thought on making a special build relying on grenades/flasks, landmines, and all the variant toys, and lockup/root methods to just slaughter hard monsters.

What would be the basics of this beyond burglary/alchemy/engineering? I'd say it could be interesting to melt monster zoos through aoe and lockdown manuvers.

 

Smithing to turn 100s of softballs into bolas. Thrown weapons to recover them (especially if thrown weapons get some love like Crossbows apparently are with the death of Deadshot.) Tinkering to make mines.

 

Deadshot barely even helped crossbows you know. It didn't do anything but give some stats they liked.

 

Deadshot dead? Ooh... better play my character a lot these days then, love it and it has deadshot as a theme

EDIT: to avoid misunderstandings: I love *the character*. ... Well... It's purely a platonic hyperbole anyway. But that's the 'it'. Not deadshot. But it's the theme of the character (yeah NOW it's deadshot (it = deadshot, too)). Along with assassination and perception etc... wanted to give my char all the buffs for melee possible (did this make it better? <_<)

 

I tried using crossbows and thrown weapons on my first guy and it wasnt fun. I eventually ran out and was useless. Unless anything changes, i cant see playing ranged ever.

 

Yeah, but we're talking about 1.08 here. Things change.

 

Actually excluding that this is a theorycrafting currently it's less viable because of non-implementation.

So assuming for the sake of theorycrafting these are our crossbow and throwing skills for those without the actual expansion, I'm not going to give specific stats because they're more subject to change. Note that each of these gives recovery buffs:
Crossbow
L1: Bolt Thrower: Basic stat boosts
L2: Maverick: Fire multiple bolts in one round
L3: Fairly Quick Draw: Ability to counterattack w/ crossbow
L4: Bullseye: More Stat boosts
L5: Impossible Shot: Shot that pierces through enemies until it hits something and stops (This probably requires mundane bolts without spells, otherwise tentacular bolt through a zoo)
L6: Prince of the Crossbow: Stat boosts

Throwing
L1: Peltast: Basic stat boosts
L2: Australian: 50%! chance for thrown mundane items to return and not use up ammo (mundane very likely meaning things that don't cast spells, anything that couldn't be covered normally wouldn't be returned)
L3: Dual Pitcher: Two throws in a single turn
L4: Monster Toss: Knockback ability
L5: Trap Throw: Throws a trap; trap affinity boost
L6: Regent of Throwing Stuff at People: Stat boosts

So, since everyone here knows that for a discussion let us discuss.

Bolts seem like they'll still have the problem of burning through ammo really quickly, even more so with faster firing. The impossible shot though will be amazing, and save plenty of bolts. Can you imagine firing that through a monster zoo?! Especially with a strong enough arrow and crossbow.

Throwing's level 2 ability seems really strong. I'm thinking there might not be recovery for throwing items if it's that high, meaning you just randomly don't use up ammo rather than any thrown on the ground. That's much better due to not requiring getting into melee range when the numbers are low.

 

Well i look forward to ammo getting recovered or something like that

 

Well, it looks like Australian will be the answer to your dreams -- though I'm looking more forward to Impossible Shot.

...And someday, getting the ability to attach particular stat boosts to the wielding/wearing of particular item types (a la Swords and hopefully one day Shields) yanked out of the compliation zone and put out in the open in the XML. But that's probably just me.

 

Well you might be able to by putting them in the tags for weapons, since the xml for those has changed a bit and they're part of another tag for weapon skills.

 

I don't follow. Can you give me an example of what you mean?

 

There are tags,

Code:

<weaponSkills>
...
<swordSkills>
...
<!-- You can probably put sword skills in here, and the same with all the other ones -->
</swordSkills>
...
</weaponSkills>

 

Oh, right. That's an interesting theory. I'll try that.