Finally Beat Dredmor - Thoughts

He was in a lutefisk room with a single Djinn Fizz. I drank Hyperborean, Voltaic, and The fire potion right as we started. Shot the djinn up a few times with some bolts, and ragnars finished him. I then shot Dredmor once, and let him melee me once to see how much he would melee me for with my gear (13). I then used that wonderful super wonderful teleport away dust on him. I popped him a few times while he approached and cast stuff on me, and he chased me while i ran and shot him the times he chose to cast on me instead of shoot. He probably wasn't much harder than the 2 named muscle diggles i met (i thought those were expansion only).

86 Hours played so far on steam. It was fun. And that is not counting playing 1.07 Humble Indie Bundle. Here

Dwarven Difficulty. Permadeath. - No Magic Version 1.09
Melee abilities have been greatly improved. I kept hearing about people winning with no spells so i wanted to try it.

Things I grew to hate:
Anvils of Krong - I got cursed way more than I got any real benefit out of them. A chance to have 1-2 stats is ok, but in the long run that damage is crap compared to the punishment you get from negative resist. At least Negative Site can't go below zero from items in 1.09. Was that to make the game easier or was that an accident?
Corruption Monsters - Do casters suffer so badly from corruption? Being completely dependent on a weapon, I ended up carrying around TONS of weapons just to discard as they got crappier and crappier.
Opening a Zoo from Top or Bottom - If you open a zoo from the side, you can run away to shoot across the screen. Opening it from the top or bottom, you have 1/3 the distance site wise making it much harder to shoot/attack. Being in the middle of the screen, the UI obscures targets just a few blocks below you, and dependent on the bow kinda stinks without a way to teleport.
Invisibility not working - Used to be great. Now it only works if you are far away from mobs. Maybe balance so you can't just get away from guys right next to you, but ranged mobs shouldn't be nailing you across the screen.

Skills - At time of death
Maces - 6/6
Burglary - 5/6
Berserking - 5/5
Engineering - 5/5
Master of Arms - Level 1/5
Archery - Level 5/5
Assassination - Level 1/5

Maces
I maxed maces last, because I kept finding really good non-mace weapons. Really though the game has a weird tendency to drop and reward you with pretty much crappy items from quest and Zoo rewards. So much so that the only weapons I used the entire game were from evil chests... the rooms where you pull a lever to produce evil chests REALLY paid off. Having a sword that does 20 more damage than your current mace is a no brainer... especially on level 3 or 4. Eventually though I got good maces. Ragnar's Meteor is great and saved me a few times.

Archery
I maxed archery very early, But one of the HUGE fall backs to ammo recovery is that if you are shooting a mob that is on top of a bolt, there is no way for a second bolt to also fall on that same spot. This was a Huge deterrent to using my crossbow as I had rooms literally covered in valuable bolts that I didn't want to shoot anymore because I knew that I wouldn't be recovering any more of those bolts. The knockback was very very good throughout the game and I loved that. Ammo was no problem as I almost ran out.

Engineering
I got the recipe for the power limb (level 6) early and was quite excited. Sadly, the entire game I never once got the prerequisite power limb to build it. I did get the goggles and make the level 6 crossbow, but a few floors down I started finding them constantly. Really the best part about it was NOT getting hit by traps. For the most part, quite dissapointed in engineering, but having never played deep while disabling traps, maybe it was more valuable than i give it credit.

Assassination
at 3 levels it was overly powerful. Now though, levels 2 and 3 kinda seem underwhelming so I never got around to getting it.

Burglary
I was working on that when I beat it. The free item out of a shop is GREAT except that if your inventory is full, you get nothing instead... which happened to me every single time except one.

All and all, definitely worth my 5 bucks I paid on the bundle to get it. Plan on beating it on GR permadeath next, but with a caster this time, and RotDG.

 

Same here. These days I only use anvils on high-quality items I don't want so I can then send them to the museum for the XP.

Corruption is a melee thing, and a pure caster should never get in melee, so no, casters don't normally suffer from corruption at all.

I find this deeply frustrating in general. My sight range is halved purely depending on whether I'm moving horizontally or vertically, which artificially limits my options. Maybe the devs should consider an auto-hide UI option.

I don't know why invisibility was nerfed in the first place. It's now practically useless in melee, plus no-one will ever choose to escape by turning invisible if they have a teleport option available instead.

 

One other thing about corruption. Does magic resistance and Magic Reflection reduce the chance for it to happen? What does reflection do. I came across a mirror shield but didn't bother to use it since I had no idea if the stat was worth getting.

 

At the moment reflection isn't implemented so it does nothing. Magic resistance does reduce the chance of corruption though.

 

100 makes you immune to corruption. Yet another reason why Demonology's Celestial Circle is a must-have for melee users.

 

Good to Know, thanks Jfactor. I haven't played around with demonology yet. Planning on it though

 

Something tells me it's not supposed to do that :3

For something, well, useful to contribute to the thread, I agree on the Anvils. I'd say I get cursed around 50% of the time. (small sample size, personal bias, I know, I know....) And YES playing the game north-south is incredibly frustrating.

They shrunk the inventory... maybe an option for 2x sprites? Or.... hmmm... I don't even know how they'd go about that..

 

I finally finished my first win!

Went for pretty much pure wizard, Fleshsmithing, Promethean, Golemancy, Ley Walker, Magical Training, Blood Mage, Perception.

I agree with the north-south thing, there should be a way to scroll the screen around once your visions is large enough to go beyond the edges of the screen. Maybe shift+wasd?

The game was quite easy with this build, I just used UnlivingWall to block off any monster zoos while spamming exploding runes, corpse explosion and invive thaumatage swarm. Otherwise use a summoned wyrmling to hold them in place while tactical pyres killed them. Oddly I found the Wyrmling much better than the Mortal Machine; probably because the machine kept walking onto fire and dying while the wyrmling was much cheaper to replace, and the summon did damage too.

Invisible Geometries is very powerful, but is sometimes worthless thanks to the restriction. Combined with DiggingRay you can normally escape though!

Was quite a fun playthrough, my previous melee ones have suffered from lack of AoE quite badly.

 

Yes, you can resist corruption.

 

An odd nerf indeed. Even when they couldn't attack you before, while under invisibility, they still seemed to somewhat follow me around so it was only a temporary respite on most occasions.

 

I agree with you on most points and your frustrations only get worse in GR. I don't know why anvils were changed not to near-guarantee a bonus on first attempt anymore, I only anvil items which I have duplications or replacements for now. It's pretty much dropping them in knowing I'm going to get my item cursed or made marginally better.

I wouldn't mind Corruption as a mechanic if melee builds weren't so weak compared to mage and rogue types. As it is, it just adds to the misery in a very painful way.

Chests of Evil are pretty much the only thing carrying melee-heavy builds in GR. If you don't get an awesome weapon drop of your class from a CoE, good luck for the upcoming floors. Mages are much less affected by this since magic power on items is pretty easily obtained compared to the amount of damage a melee type needs to keep up.

Assassination's new skills definitely feel like filler.

 

Not anymore. Krong likes to reforge my weapons into a metal called "shame and disgrace."

 

I was playing on Going Rogue permanent death. After many tries going melee, I decided to go mage like with massive defense.
Staves: 6/6 at the end
Shield Bearer: 5/5 at the end
Artful Dodger: 5/5 at the end
Master of Arms: 1/5
Vampirism: 4/5
Promethean Magic: 6/6
Archaeology: 2/5

I went straight into getting the wyrmling after I get the drinker of the dead which greatly helped especially against monster zoos. I just have it tank damage as I burn the place down.
Fireball and landmines were my friends until I got firewall around.

Lucky for me, at the last stage I found out lord dredmor was in this one room where I entered the stairs but he was near the bottom of the room and didn't see me. So i spammed land mines all over the place, sniped him with a fireball and ran back upstairs to find another stairs to go through. I entered one and just killing some arch diggles and dinjo fizzes, and suddenly it said that lord dredmor has died and I beat the game, lol.

I guess he ran into all those fire land mines and died or something. I didn't even get to see his death.

I didn't like the corruption monsters..corrupted two of my equipments that were artifacts so I replaced them later with other artifacts .

Since I had alot of defenses I didn't have to heal much but I needed drinker of the dead to keep my hitpoints up.
BURN BURN BURN! I can kill alot of mobs easily.

Dodging and blocking with the shield and artful dodge made me didn't even need master of arms for the moment.

The Archaeology helped me avoid traps as well as send some artifacts for exp.

I had alot of booze to keep me alive to spam spells, especially wyrmlings to tank those corruption monsters as I smack them with the godly stick.

Now I need a way to get points and max my skills but I killed everything mostly. Waiting for monsters to spawn takes too long and well, I even killed Brax and his minions at the 10th floor. hehehe

=]

 

Do the rules change for different items? I've gotten my Fedora cursed on the first try IIRC.

 

On the first try in the whole game?
That is a bug, then, as the first try was supposed to be a free ticket.

First try on a given item, on the other hand, is perfectly normal (though certainly not pleasant)