Brand new vampire here

Just picked up the game yesterday, and had a few fun hours playing it. I'm a fan of Dwarf Fortress for several years now and that just makes it better because it's obvious from the dozen or so obvious DF easter eggs that I've seen that the folks here are on the same game design wavelength as Toady even though the genre is very different.

So after reading through a bunch of skill info and buying the whole bundle of Dredmor for about $3 USD last night from Steam, I cranked up the game with a Vampire swordsman berserker bloodmage perception assassin and something else that I can't remember off the top of my head.

A couple of my choices didn't add up like I thought they would, so I spent a bit more time digging into things that would seem to fit a Vampire.

Can anyone point out any grevious errors in my thinking?

Vampire - because healing in combat is wonderful
Unarmed - can wield two shields and great passives
Berserker Rage - great passives
Master of Arms - more great passives (have I started a trend here?)
Psionics - ability to do magical healing, plus the charm ability
Assassination - Tasty passives
Perception - because traps are bad, loot is good, and Vampires with frikkin laser beams are even better than sharks.

I thought about a pet class for self healing, then realized I should be able to do the same thing with Psionics, since vampires can drink alcohol.

 

No grevious errors. Assassination seems mildly tangential, because it's offensive and almost everything else here seems more defense-driven. I would probably replace it with Burglary (invis and Teleport are gamesavers) or Alchemy/Tinkering for either healing/mana pots or Supreme Trap Power, respectively.

 

Hrm, I didn't really consider this a defense heavy build. Vampirism, Berserker Rage, and Assassination are all aggressive, especially Berserker and Assassination. I was trying to develop a strong passive defense and strong passive offense, in melee, while still having some ability at high levels to do ranged damage (unarmed with thrown weapons and Perception with eye beams)

 

Ah. I suppose I consider Berserker defensive because of the huge stacking armor bonuses, which are a lot harder to find than the Burliness/Melee Power bonii. And the 3rd level. Vampirism isn't terribly offensive either, short a few extra dmg on a few taxa. But either way, the build is solid.

 

You did that on purpose, did you?

 

Yes, he did. Because it's an unofficial spelling and stuff.

@Farmerbob:
The problem I see with this build (please keep in mind that I am horribly biased because I mostly play "rogue" characters in DoD) is that outside of Psionics you don't have many abilities you can use for things other than just hitting things.
As Essence said, replacing Assassination with Burglary (additional trap sight, ability to teleport, ability to go invincible, ability to lock your opponent in place while you deal with another opponent) can do a lot of good to this build.

If anything, I consider builds with no skill-granted teleport and no source of invisibility to be suicidal.

 

I thought about it and swapped out Master of Arms for Artful Dodger to get the teleport ability.

I just got finished with a L3 zoo, which was fun - I have to be careful for the named ones, but anything else three of four at a time is fine. I'm using the Psionics for crowd control when needed. Don't have the artful Dodger teleport yet but it will be soon.

This is a great deal of fun After I learn a bit more I'll start playing the permadeath version.

 

It is a defensive build because of unarmed/dual shield. Your damage will scale poorly as you progress. It should be a good beginner build though. You won't have issues with damage scaling till later on and then you can always swap out a shield for a tome.

 

The real question is, is he playing with the ESRII:Electric Bungalow or at least a fixed spelldb.xml so that he gets the passive life drain on melee hits against undead/constructs/plants?

 

I had a good time using master at arms for on my last vampire, since that's what the life steal scales to. You take less damage and heal more, so it's win-win. The charm in psionics doesn't draw aggro from you, so it's tedious to use and point-intensive as opposed to just tanking stuff yourself in a narrow hallway. IMO, stop when you get the crystal healing. The loot from perception is varied and largely useless without a crafting skill, so you might get more utility out of taking tinkering for crossbows/bolts/trap removal. As said, assassination doesn't give you much on its own aside from a few procs that work better on a sneaky character.

All opinions of course. There's many ways to play this game; find what you like.

 

Yup, that is the universal truth here.

It's hard to make a build you absolutely can't win with. Some of them just require more skill, a little luck, and a load of planning, but you would be really pressed to find a build awful enough to be unplayable. It just comes with experience - the longer you play, the more builds will be available for you to play without dying on floor 1 every time.

 

Hrm, I'm playing the most up to date Steam version with all the expansions. I haven't had any real difficulty with undead, constructs, or plants. The hardest thing I've fought so far was an invisible named diggle assassin which I actually had to run away from four times using the psionic shove & buffalo kick before I got sparkle to stick.

Sounds like the charm is not really worth getting other than as crowd control then, I'll put buying that skill towards the bottom of the list.

 

The skill in the latest version of steam is bugged. You are supposed to gain 2 life (aka 2) every attack regardless of monster class. Then if it is Demon/Animal/Other you can drain a bit more based on your health regen life_regen. I am impressed that you are using the sparkle to stun. The stun, is great and all, and gives you quite a few free turns, but the chance on landing it is fairly low.

There is a code fix for vampirism in the 'buff vampirism thread if you are interested, but if you are doing great without it and you don't want to mess with the game code, then don't worry about it.

You can read about abilities at the dredmorpedia if you are interested:
http://dredmor.stosic.org/

It isn't flawless but it is pretty dang good for information.

 

It's not that low -- it's 50/50. It's interesting to me that they coded it in such a way as to make the stun an all-or-nothing thing; either every enemy gets stunned or none do, from what I can tell. I would have gone the other way on that.

 

Going to try replacing Perception with Burglary, since the ability to get away is also very handy for a Vamp, as I found out when dealing with invisible named diggle assassins.

Vampire / unarmed / Berserker / Artful Dodge / Psionics / Assassination / Burglary

We'll see how this goes

 

It's for builds like this one that I support the idea of different vampire spells scaling with different stats. Only is far too limitative.

 

Well, with the new build after finishing level 3, I tried typing in "Boatmurdered" in the teleporter and ran into some muscle beach diggles which pummeled me flat. Permadeath option is not enabled yet, fortunately, or I would have been a bit irritated, lol.

The Burglary build is working very nicely. Something about that build, or my gear, is automatically generating some sort of smoke or concealment effect around me during every single fight. When it first started happening I panicked, thinking it was a gas effect or trap that was actually attacking me, because I don't recall seeing anything about proccing smoke for concealment automatically every fight.

It's working very well though, this build. With Burglary and the ring I found with enhanced trap disarm on it, I'm picking up gas and flame traps and using them on zoos.

I finished the L4 zoo easily with the psionic crystal healing ability, Artful dodge leap effect, collected traps, and the smoke effect.

I need to figure out what that smoke effect is though, and how I am generating it, because It's certainly very very handy, and needs to be in all my future thiefy/magey builds.

*edit add* I cannot find any reference to a smoke-based AE triggered concealing effect. I'm playing vanilla, no mods, Steam bundled version. Anyone else seen this? Are there undocumented random effects in the game that are unlocked by certain skill combinations, or something?

The smoke is awesome. I can sit at the door of a zoo and melee for several kills in a row before running away to heal, which speeds up zoo killing with this build dramatically.

 

That smoke effect is probably coming from a tome you have equipped. Cloud Formations?

 

Ooh, yes, I do have the cloud formations tome equipped. Seemed like a nice item Now I know it's an awesome item! Will have to dig and see what is actually creating the effect so I can recognize upgrade equipment with the same effect.

*edit add* It seems as if this is just a special ability of this tome, not some sort of universal effect that can be generated by a whole class of items. Still a sweet item for handling zoos, this one will stay with me a long, long time I think.

 

Yeah, every tome except the Little Black Book has some sort of special effect added to it. Diary of the Whills, for example, casts Touch of Midas on hit. Bee Culture casts Thaumite Infection on hit, which can be pretty dangerous if you walk over the corpse of the enemy you just killed. Universal Principles I think is the best, with a pretty solid straight-up paralysis proc on hit. Dual Wielding those is nasty.