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Not to mention that Degree 2 gives you Tinkle and Alchemy, which means efficient rust potion production o ce you get the right toolkits.

 

It seems I have an old version of Bushido. Have you not updated the Steam workshop?

What does Tinkering have to do with rust potions?

 

I haven't, you'll have to pick it up from the thread.

And Tinkering means 2 iron ingots from each ore, thus 4 rusts & therefore more healing potions.

 

For the longest time, I didn't understand Ninjutsu. It seemed like it was full of dead levels. A level that demands dodge, a level that demands crit, a level that demands casting spells in combat... What the hell, Essence? I thought. Throwing weapons? A random magic-ish level? What kind of marshmallow pony semen were you Mana-Blasted on when you made it?

And then I tried it.

And dear Faust this might be the most elegantly designed skill I've ever seen.

I am playing a character who is packing:

>Ninpo
>Kung Fu Chaser
>Sonic Rainboom
>Tatsumaki Senpukyaku
>Neurotoxin
>Puissant Touch (mostly to trigger Genjutsu)

Her name is Rainbow Stabs.

She is *invincible.*

I can stand in the middle of 4 enemies all attacking me in melee and systematically kill them all. If I'm in over my head I can use items while invisible, then the Unarmed capstone, and if that isn't enough I can use one of my two godly escape maneuvers. The last time I was this much of a melee god, it was as a Vegan with the Drunken Boxing capstone and pre-nerf Fluttershy. Literally the only things that scare me are Octo missiles and having my limbs bitten off by rabbits.

What really makes the build is the insane synergy between Drunken and Ninja is. Again, we have a level that demands dodge and a level that demands crit, and Drunken gives both. Unfortunately, post-nerf Drunken has nasty drawbacks to the point of being a liability, so there's that. Leveling up Unarmed fixes the problem.

I have only a few regrets.

One: This is total overkill; there was no damn reason for me to take so much synergizing craziness. Should have taken Archaeology, because I have a huge pile of useless artifacts now, which leads me to...

Two: Pony was a total mistake. Everything good in the tree except for cider/rust potions is redundant. Applebucking is for those who are desperate for a knockback, and I have overkill in knockbacks. Fluttershy isn't very helpful because after the nerf she usually only manages to get a Mana Hunter debuff off me. Sorry, but you always were my least favorite, Fluttershy. Sonic Rainboom is obviously amazing but I already have something like it!

Regret number three: Dlvl 8 and still no trapsight at all. *Really* should have gone with Archaeology.

Four: It's lame that Unarmed anti-synergizes with Drunken Boxing!

Five: I have *two* Ninjato swords. I could be dual-wielding them to see what they do if I had the right build! but then I lose a double digit amount of Dodge, and some other nice stats too... not to mention Monk Stance. What features of weapon skills work when you have the wrong weapon, anyway?


Ima start another Barrier Maiden once I finish a Gatherer spell list have written ALL the clopfics stop fuming over the run where I was owning but I maxed the Freed Souls stacks on level 2 am done with finals.

 

Well, levels with abilities that require you to get a critical or a dodge are only dead levels if your character never does any of these. Otherwise, they are random but nice bonuses, and a skill which provides a couple of different things is usually (not always, though, as it is better to specialise in something) more welcome than something that gives you more of the same thing but only that (*cough* weapon proficiency skill trees *cough*).

And what works is the stances, I think. Or at least it was like that in the past, I haven't checked due to plainly being busy. The rest of the stuff you get only works if you have the appropriate weapon.

 

The deal with weapon skills is that you can only activate the abilities if you have the right weapon in hand. There is a pretty obvious exploit insofar as you can open up a stance with the appropriate weapon and then switch weapons with the stance active, but in most cases if you're not planning on using a particular weapon, you're not going to waste 1/7th of your skill trees on something you'll never use. the only 'reasonable' stance to abuse in this way is Staves +10 Block/+10 Magic resist/20% stun proc stance, which is nice, but again, not really worth blowing an entire skill tree on. If you're planning on having a throwaway skill tree and you're willing to make it a Wizard tree, you'll almost always get more out of Alchemy than you will Staves.


Also, thanks for the compliment on Ninjitsu. The basic design philosophy was inspired by the whole "ninjutsu/taijutsu/genjutsu" thing from Naruto along with the idea of "avoiding melee combat at all costs" -- thus invis/stun/substitution/throwing weapons. I can't decide whether I like Ninjitsu or Degree in Dungeoneering best, but it's a close contest.

 

And yet here I am doing the exact opposite, laughing off hordes of out-of-depth ASCII jerks with Drunken Boxing and Unarmed.

What I find really cool about the tree is the way it taps synergies. It demands melee, but helps you avoid melee. So it gives you throwing weapons. It demands spellcasting and a little bit of mana, but it burns your Savvy, but it helps you with things that aren't spellcasting.

These are things that SOUND like dead levels, but are actually asking you to find loopholes.

 

It may be, then, that each of the skills needs to be toned down just slightly.

 

I disagree. Kazu has literally perfectly synergised every skill together perfectly - it's going to demolish everything.

Edit: Omni you don't get to like both Essence and my posts. Hrrngh. *paradox explosion*

 

This build is amazing for one main reason--Ninjutsu 2.

With Unarmed, Kung Fu Chaser, Genjutsu, and the simple amount of Rogue levels I'm packing, my Dodge chance is crazy.

The first time I dodge, I go invisible. This makes it so that anything else I'm standing next to gives up on me, Octos don't shoot at me, and none of the dozens of sadistic ASCII jerkwads in the game debuff me. I am SO hard to hurt that it anti-synergizes with things like You Know That You're Toxic.

So:

Spoiler

Thanks to Kung Fu Chaser plus a bunch of other stuff, my dodge chance (over 70!) gives me arguably better damage mitigation than a pile of armor/block/magic resist would.

Unarmed gives me rogue stats AND ass-kicking power, and I've managed to overcome every single drawback of both Unarmed and Drunken Boxing, including the anti-synergy between the two.

I can use this ass-kicking power totally recklessly because Ninjutsu inherently gives enough escape and keep-away to power a keep-away build on its own. Add it to the keep-away of Unarmed and you have an incredibly safe, overkill amount of keep-away. Add it to the keep-away of Pony and you have a badly-designed-build redundant amount of keep-away.

I can throw stuff when it suits me, and unlike a hardcore keep-away build, I have the power that throwing weapons demand.

If I live long enough to start Staggerstepping around along with Ninpo... I think I'm going to try to pick up a Hotfoot Vial and a red gummy diggle for the express purpose of seeing how incredible that'll be. I have a dragonscale shield; I can probably get away with that.

Icing on the cake? Absolutely none of this depends on items. I'm on dlvl 9, and thanks to rust potions I have a single digit amount of armor and it suits me just fine. Helps that I have a decent amount of max HP.

Again, one of my main regrets is how much overkill this is. I actually have Viking Magic as an early game zero point wonder to mitigate the obvious difficulty of Unarmed and no early game carry, not even a level 2 early game carry except for maybe Kung Fu Chaser. I wish I had tried to tough it out and used something else that also synergizes hardcore. Overkill is putting it lightly. Again, Pony is meaningless, and I could totally go without Poisoneer.

Next mission (along with re-doing the Barrier Maiden War Weaver now that I'm not going to get killed by The Fallen on floor 2): Make a build that's totally based on procs and stances and whatnot, so as to have as little anti-synergy as possible with Sailor Senshi.

Actually I've never played a Werediggle before so maybe I should try the actual, y'know, CORE version of that whole idea first? Nah. What fun would that be?

... after finals.

One last thing.

Fuck that Omnipotent Vortex.

 

Well it's one I've only just started... but have high hopes for it.

Dark Magic Economist:

Bankster - Banks, evil, nuff said.
Necronomiconics - The trading of souls and making deals with extradimensional entities is an essential part of magical economics.
Flesh-Shaping - Late payments may be extracted and payed for with a pound of flesh.
Blood Magic - Such contracts are always to be signed the same way, in blood.
Mathamagic - The calculations for magical economics are incredibly complex.
Magical Law - Section G, sub-paragraph 32Z, clause Kappa states that all practitioners of magical economics must be registered and competent with requisite knowledge of all laws pertaining to such practices.
Perception - With the complexity of contracts involved in magical economics it always pays to have a sharp set of eyes for fine print and other traps.

 

The flavor of Bankster+Necro is so amusing that I'm tempted to try it for myself. Add Magical Law and it might even work.

...

However, that's going to be insanely difficult under the best of circumstances, and I almost feel like you're intentionally making things hard on yourself there.

 

it's Flesh-Shaping that gives it a boot up the ass.. 1st skill = an army of Zombys. 2nd skill = self heal and regen. 3rd skill = single target damage and DoT.

Having Zombys around means that if your High Interest Loan or killing the last target with Dump Toxic Assets bites you with a debuff, you can just dump it on one of the zombys with DTA again.

 

So.

Bankster. I don't understand this tree at all. Its damage trick is not going to stay deadly for long. A glance at the skill's wiki entry tells me that this skill is going to burn its resource--money--a lot faster than it is going to generate it. Charm effect would be cool if charmed monsters had the "aggro" effect that summoned monsters do. Without massive, endgame amounts of money, its best trick--Fiscal Hedge--is not going to last long. Wow. This is an all-or-nothing skill that doesn't seem to reward me for going all-in. Its capstone sucks too.

Necro. One of my favorite skills not despite but because it's designed so badly. I'm not talking about Necropain either. It has two levels that demand a gish. Then its capstone is the best pure-caster spell in the game by miles. It approaches the Radiant capstone on a good day. The killing-yourself drawback is funny and everything, but in practice it just demands that you take another skill specifically to mitigate it, and then you never need to think about it again.

That's why I'm going to do a Necro Warweaver. It's funny and stupid and is going to get me killed, but I want to see just HOW hard I can slam myself with Necropain.

Now. Magical Law. Three utility tricks that are beyond broken--Injunction, Objection, and the capstone. What do we want the capstone for, exactly? I don't friggin' know. Maybe to double up on Bailout. Magical Law is otherwise totally uninteresting--it's a utility skill first, last, and only. Whoop.

So what do I do with this?

Fuck if I know!

The first thing I thought was Egyptian because the random-ass synergy with Bankster is funny and costs next to nothing. This led me down an interesting path. See, Egyptian is one of those things that begs to be your core, driving skill. I quickly stopped thinking Bankster + Necro and started thinking Egyptian + War Weaver. You wouldn't think it, but Egyptians actually love Magic Power. This would be really cool actually. But I digress.

So, screw Egyptian. Let's make this even harder and do a build where the goal is to make a character where our best course of action is to use Banker and Necro skills a lot. Why? Again, I don't know. Because it's funny.

Necro has, in order: spammable missile, keep-away, gish, gish, nuke, nuke.
Bankster has, in order: nothing, nuke, nothing, charm, tanking, removing its own drawback.

There is nothing "core skill" about Bankster. It's cool with whatever we want to do, unless we hit ourselves with its drawbacks, in which case it wants us to get rid of them. So, seriously, there is no reason not to just take Astrology and go melee gish.

But we're not being practical here, we're forcing skills upon ourselves. We're going to be necros first, last, and only, and we're going to find a reason to be happy about Bankster too. So let's maximize the terrifying power of Tenebrous Rift by refusing to wear heavy armor. This theoretically also gives us Savvy, which helps with Banksterism. Dodge/nuke is a weird build and I sure as hell would never use Necro for it, but here we go.

Necro: Our mode of ass-kicking.
Magical Law: Has overpowered utility tricks and fits the flavor so meh.
Bankster: A weird thing with one awesome trick (Fiscal Hedge) that will drive the next few decisions.
Burglary: Perfect for squishy wizards and probably the only good synergy with Bankster that exists, except for the random-ass thing with Egyptian. This is slightly abusive due to the wonky prices of mod items.
Warlockery: Gives a little bit of survivability without wearing any armor. Gives me a little bit of deadliness without any melee skills. And makes me *feel* a little bit like a proper gish even though I'm not.
Mycology: IMO the best one point wonder in the game. Level it once and be astounded. We need this. Badly.
Dagger: The weapon of choice for melee characters who don't do melee power.

I might consider dropping Mycology or Warlock for Little Pony because I've come to realize that the main reason you'd take Pony is if you're desperate for a utility skill. It's like a two level dip into Degree in Dungeoneering--it gives a couple of nice basic features while only taking up one skill slot. However, without the ponies this skill is 100% core, which is cool.

I'll be honest. I have no idea what I'm doing. Still, after putting all that thought into it, I want to play it.

Other builds that came up while I was writing this post.

Spoiler: necro warweaver funny times

Necro
War Weaver
Astrology
Blood Magic
Staff
Blood Knight
Bushido

Spoiler: full on egyptian

Egyptian
War Weaver
Leylines
Alchemy
Dungeoneering
Staff
Dunno what else

 

Core
Egyptian Magic (sandstorm omg)
Ley Lines (wizard levels + mana + last skill is awesomely life-saver)
Magic Training ( power + mana + silencing magic at level 2)

My run
Dual Wielding (i always had awesome weapons of different types)
Swords
Staves (didnt help much)
Warlockery (didn`t help much)

My thoughts about it:
Tinkering and/or Crossbow since what i lacked was ranged damage against Dredmor (sandstorm killed EVERYTHING until him, but he took no damage from it).

Astrology or some magic that can really hurt Dredmor. I`ve been thinking about using the runes and just teleporting away whenever he got close with Invisible Geometries. (i don`t know many spell trees yet)

How i did beat Dredmor was that i spent all my items on him (wands and bolts), equipped some baddass armor and started attacking the hell out of him with my dual wielding of 50+ damage swords. Whenever i`d get low i just Geometrically teleported away from him and then eat something and thaumaturgic tap and concentrate my mana right back. The License to Cast renders him spell-less against me. Maybe i`d add perception, because i missed a lot - and also destroy traps early on.

All but Dredmor was SO easy: get sandstorm, get thaumaturgic tap, max egiptyan magic, get Extra Planar concentration and by this time you can kill any amount of enemies from afar VERY easily.

The amazing part of my run was that very soon in the game I was able to kill Brax and any amounts of those red demons that show up, so I had acces to incredible items (hence the dual wielding - you will always have awesome weapons, but the types will be random).

Overall: very easy dungeoning but very difficult Dredmor with the run I made. I`ll let you know as soon as i do some more testing.'

Cheers

 

Warlockery seems like it would help a lot vs. Dredmor. Puissant Touch never misses, Arcane Capacitor makes your first attack after each escape a big one, and Puissant Veil is free counterattacks. Staves will help a lot more when the new skills come out, too.

 

Magic Training is universally terrible.

Dual Wielding should imo be taken with only one weapon skill so that the other weapon can be whatever OP piece of wtf you happen to find.

Warlockery should've rocked the house with that build idk what you're talking about.

edit: even on my best days. I leave Brax alone. I've had bad experiences with the poison clouds that the collector demons use. Now that I know that a sufficiently badass build can take him, though, you might have just handed me an interesting piece of advice.

 

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Warlockery should've rocked the house with that build idk what you're talking about.

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Warlockery seems like it would help a lot vs. Dredmor. Puissant Touch never misses, Arcane Capacitor makes your first attack after each escape a big one, and Puissant Veil is free counterattacks. Staves will help a lot more when the new skills come out, too.

Oh, maybe i was a bit unfair to warlockery, puissant touch did help me a lot, especially while unleashing arcane capacitor (i had really low hit rate without it), even though the never miss only applies to the damage based on mana. I think i forgot it being part of warlockery since i never attacked without it xD.

I just was really sad with empowered + manacalipse combo being so weak and also spending all the mana. My point in "not helping much" is that it could be replaced without much trouble (i think - im still really new to DoD). Overall i liked that tree very much (hence the avatar and me updating the wikia page) and found myself having fun with the skills (warlock`s challenge is so handy).

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Magic Training is universally terrible.

Didn`t know that. The silence guaranteed my victory against dredmor. And that mana regen skill made my entire build viable (i could mantain indefinitely the buffs/glyphs + syzgy from the pangalactic drink and could mantain the empowered form for a very very very long time). I`d like to know why it`s terrible and what you`d reccomend instead - cant imagine surviving Dredmor without License to Cast

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Dual Wielding should imo be taken with only one weapon skill so that the other weapon can be whatever OP piece of wtf you happen to find.

I totally agree with you, now that i`ve played the game entirely with those skills (it was the first time i killed dredmor and the frst time i got melee skills). But since i ended up not maxing staves because of my level ( i got it to 3 i think) and, even so, they were the last 2 skills that i maxed, i think it was ok. I might not take any weapon skill and get something ranged that can actually damage Dredmor (sandstorm cant).

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edit: even on my best days. I leave Brax alone. I've had bad experiences with the poison clouds that the collector demons use. Now that I know that a sufficiently badass build can take him, though, you might have just handed me an interesting piece of advice.

Lastly, the nice thing about this thing is the amount of ranged wreckage you can cause. I could kill everything, including those Demons! And if something ever went wrong (which was rare), I could just Chronomantic Twist and Invisible Geometric away from any situation. I also had nice resistances from the buffs and glyphs.

p.s. I forgot to mention that on the last floor i got 2 Logs, so i could switch between equipping them for max magic damage (i think it made me like 90 Magic Power) and equipping my weapons for Puissant Touching the baddies.

Thanks for the attention and for being so discussional (is that a word?) with me even though im such a newbie!

Have a nice day

EDIT: I messed up all the quotes, I`m sorry!

 

Hey Omni.

Can you explain the fact that you hit Like on every single post? Is it a game to you or is there some system in place that makes it so that it lets you track something, or what? Because I logged in to see 44 alerts, and almost all of them were you hitting Like on my posts.

 

Yes I can. Essence got 427 of them. You were just caught in the threads he was being like-spammed on. Sorry for the friendly fire.