Please Recommend a Rogue Scientist Build

Really, I'm looking for a philosophy. I just tried a Rogue Scientist, and I nearly cleared a mysterious portal before I died. Had I been a bit more ranged in my approach, I might have survived it with some great loot to show for it.

I still feel like I was doing something wrong with my build. I was using:

Crossbows
Perception
Psionics
Rogue Scientist
Wand Mastery
Alchemy
Tinkering

This approach, gives me three different crafting skills. Balancing that can be tricky. Do I boost those evenly? What about Rogue Scientist? How hard should I be boosting that? Typically, Force Push can land me some extremely good items early on if the stores are generated as such that I can steal from them.

Any advice? I'd love to look at a really well tested Rogue Scientist build, and experiment from there.

 

I just beat Dredmor with one earlier.

Rogue Science, Tinkering, Alchemy, Perception, Piracy, Shield Bearer, Burglary.

Wandcrafting is a huge waste, especially with alchemy, ESPECIALLY if you're only using it to boost the final death ray skill.

Alchemy covers your healing needs, perception makes sure alchemy's exotic gem hunger is well fed. Piracy gives you even more gems, but I took it solely for swashbuckling. Shield bearer gives you health and block, burglary gives you burglary. Because burglary.

I rushed rogue scientist to the penultimate skill first, and used those attacks to keep me going while I built up everything else as needed. I played mostly as a caster-style, with bolt support and a shield for when things got rough. Since you have alchemy, you can spare the diggle eggs to make brimstone flasks. Very little can withstand a gas canister and brimstone flask. Pelt whatever is left with bronze bolts.

Shield bearer and piracy were my "comfort" spells. I like the ability to take a few hits. They could be replaced with other stuff fairly easily, but I was able to, near the end, get the diggle fertility buff and switch my emerald encrusted gold rings for 2 artifact shrike rings and get to 88%/ to 35%/ to ~50% with imperial boilerplate helm/chest and clockwork regulator belt.

You don't need psychic shove, the sonic cannon shoves and can be targeted anywhere. Also the gas canister destroys destroyable walls.

Things I noticed: The exotic resistances from alchemy and the rebreather were VERY nice against acid bolt traps, moustaches, blobbies, gas clouds, my own gas clouds, corpse explosions, cloned heroes.....

Later on when things get stupid high dodge chances, your sonic gun spells are still handy for applying the "dazed" status effect which lowers enemy dodge chance. Early on, the upgraded form can clear a path to the heart of a zoo in one cast, letting you gas the entire crowd if you're lucky.

You can fire the acidical projector through closed doors. Open door, throw gas grenade, close door. Acid splash through door. Win.

My first scientist died when the gas canister bounced off a monster and landed on her. 1-shot from full to dead. The tooltip says don't aim at monsters. It's not kidding.

TL;DR I rushed Scientist early, played like a magic user and took advantage of being independent by wearing thicker armor for some meleeing.

 

I've heard from several people that death ray sucks, perhaps it needs a buff. or perhaps you're not playing it right. I can't decide.

Have you ever tried a build devoted to maxxing out the death ray?

 

Yeah, the tooltip on the gas canister is a non-fourth-wall-breaking way of trying to say "this item works by creating an invisible monster enchanted with a spell that triggers the actual gas canister explosion on its death, then killing everything on its tile, and 'everything on its tile' includes the player".

 

Ignoring the self harm possibility for the moment:

Cost in mana is 35-0.25.
<effect type="damage" burn="1" voltaicF=".34" primaryScale="5" affectscaster="1" />
<effect type="damage" burn="1" aethereal="10" aetherealF="5" secondaryScale="23" affectscaster="1" />
That's .34 voltaic / savvy (e.g. ~60ish lategame? I tend not to keep tabs on savvy, have known to get to like 80 when I was shooting for it). If we assume full focus, like 100? That's 34 damage.
Similarly, with capped out wandcrafting we're looking at 6 W/C, 2 W/C, 1 THE HAT and maybe like 2 more from mods? maybe? Overall it's like 9 core anyway, so overall 89ish damage in a line. To compare with something vaguely comparable, say, astro capstone (a large AoE):

<requirements mp="40" savvyBonus="0.30" mincost="6" />
<effect type="damage" aethereal="28" aetherealF="0.71"/>

That's like 99 damage with just 100 MP - not unreasonable at all. I'd also argue that the AoE style is much more versatile than death lazer.

 

Thanks, Darkmere, that's exactly what I was looking for.

So far, this build is awesome. I got caught stealing, managed to kill Brax, and fight my way to floor two through the dred collectors. Awesome.

 

For me it's not the death ray that's the problem, it's wandcrafting. It doesn't offer much that I don't already have from alchemy, tinkering, or rogue science, but the minimal wandcraft gains come with lots of added inventory space and take the place of another skill like I could pick for more versatility. If I had chosen to get by on the alchemy levels granted by RS and not take the alchemy skill itself, wandcraft and deathray would have been a bit more attractive.

Also, glad to help.

 

Well, my latest build, which I'm using to test out hermetic gadgetry is:
Tinkering
Alchemy
Wand Lore
Rogue Scientist
Clockwork Knight
Hermetic Gadgetry
Perception

I've also finished the game with a build that used wand lore and rogue scientist before, and made plenty of good use of the death ray, both for just killing random mobs, and for zoos. I had no other use for mana, so it was essentially a zero-cost proposition, and the self-damage is low enough that I resisted all of it anyway. The self-silence didn't bother me either because that just turned off the death ray, which was my only mana spell.

 

Is Hermetic Gadgetry a mod? I'll go check it out. It sounds interesting.

 

Yup, my latest creation.

 

So Brax apparently can sometimes recognize stolen items from a different floor. Dungeon Law is complex.

Also, I have died. R.I.P. Ivy Clockhart, you fought to the end rocking those Parachute Pants.

 

I have. The mana cost and overload kills it with its unimpressive scaling. By the time you've made the neccessary investment to make it worthwhile it already is obsolete because you're too deep down in the dungeon and at that point even with 8 or 9 wandcrafting it mostly just removes a slither of HP and sets stuff on fire. The beam aspect of it does nothing to save it.

This is a particularly bad double whammy because at that point, wand lore has also become obsolete.

If you could spam the death ray to take full advantage of the AoE from the beam, it might be more reasonable, but you can't.

 

have you tried using blood magic?

 

Meanwhile, after investing *3* skills to do the work of *2*.

 

Well, the mana cost goes down to 12, and I had like 150 mana, so it was spammable for a while... (also diggle god of booze helps mana regen nicely)

I could definitely make decent use of it.

 

The death ray has a trigger that forces an undispellable anti-magic field on you, which also drains your mana very quickly.

Also the diggle god of booze is one of the reasons I don't run FAXPAX.

 

If it misfires yeah. 5% chance.

 

If you run it with Maslech there's more diggle god to dilute it.

 

This means you can on average use it about 14 times in a row before it overloads. The antimagic field it punishes you with is longer (30 turns) so you're gonna be spending more time without being able to cast it than being able to. This means that slightly more than one half of the time, you'll have only 1 out of 3 available turns being able to cast Aetheric Death Ray.

About one fifth of the time, you'll have 1 out of 2 available turns to cast aetheric death ray.

About one twenty-fifth of the time, you'll have 2 out of 3 available turns to cast aetheric death ray.

EDIT: this is probably wrong. I'm going to redo some stuff

EDIT: Doesn't seem wrong. To be safe I'd say 8 to 14, rather than 13 to 14 like I assumed originally.

 

So more often than not you can empty your mana pool without overloading. I never said I've used it as my only means of attacking, just mostly as a resource saver, and for the aoe effect in zoos after my cooldown abilities were expended. It is useful, it's not the be-all-end-all attack. If it's your only mana spell, at least it isn't using up finite resources(like throwing weapons, bolts), and mana does regenerate over time. Quite often it was more efficient to kill 2 or more enemies with it than to kill them one by one with throwing weapons.

But maybe we should get back on topic?