Share Your GR Builds!

Hello.
Doing just fine atm with my vamp dual-wielding craftsmanship weirdo, but I was wondering what kind of builds are you guys playing since 104.

Any new awesome Bow or Thrown weapon builds? Any awesome sneaky rogues? Maybe summoner builds or mages without Mathe and Prome schools?

Share.

 

Still using my 1.0.3 build: Maces, Dual Wielding, Berserker Fury, Burglary, Smithing, Tinkering, and Alchemy. It's even stronger now than it was before. On Run #1 of GR/PD and am at floor 9.

 

Beat GR/PD a few hours ago with: Swords, Archery, Dual Wield, Berserker Fury, Master of Arms, Burglary, and Assassination.
The updated stats on Heavy armor is pretty boss, Arch diggles are surprisingly weak now because of it. Recovery and craft rate still seem too low to use archery as a primary source of damage, but it good enough to have some extra after bosses/zoo clears are taken into account.

 

Well, I have beaten the game on GR with 5 characters since last beta, 3 of which are worth mentioning.

http://www.dredmorwiki.com/wiki/Builds:Necro_Feet
http://www.dredmorwiki.com/wiki/Buildsual_Staves

And a warrior that is Sword/Dual Wield/Burglary/Smith/Vampirism/Assassinate/Wand Lore. Didn't write a guide for it yet.

 

I beat GR/PD with

Swords - max
Shield Bearer - max
Master of Arms - max
Smithing - max
Dodger - 2 points at most
Alchemy - 2 points at most
Unarmed (a mistake and useless, take Assassination or Berserking instead)

Basically the goal is to get >90% block with your procs and buffs running. I had a little over 100 at level 20 with everything up. Block works against most magic attacks too, reducing them to something that's more easily coverable by resistance items, which you should collect and swap around a lot. I still couldn't kill Dredmor in melee though I just lobbed holy hand grenades and chugged health potions until he died.

Get Walk it off and Duck and Cover first, then work on smithing.

 

I haven't won with this guy yet, but he's surviving on level 9 of GR/PD without too much difficulty. Mind, I switched over to the patch at level 7 so I've no idea how viable he is early on.

Unarmed
Berserk
Dodger
Master of Arms
Assassin
Smith
Tinker

I haven't actually been using smithing beyond making one rough iron skjoldr, so it could be subbed out for something else, probably shield bearer. Unarmed gets you two knockback abilities that are tremendously useful for avoiding melee damage -- kick the enemy back, walk away for five turns, kick him back again, etc. Assassin procs reliably, such that even if the knockback gets blocked, I have a good chance of putting the enemy to sleep or paralyzing him. Tinker provides more bolts than I know what to do with -- I currently have over 30 iron ingots, which makes for hundreds of bolts (or can be ground into rust for making thermite bombs). So for the late game most of my damage is coming from archery. Especially since my sneakiness is so high that I'm practically invisible.

Really the only thing I'm lacking is good area attack abilities, and that has more to do with not having stockpiled the appropriate ingredients for tinkering than anything else.

 

@Derakon You use bows without Xbow skill yeah?
I thought Unarmed gets really weak later levels. But ima try it now.

Loving the builds so far guys, keep it up

 

Yeah, as far as I can tell the crossbow skill mostly just makes it less likely that you lose ammo -- the stat boosts are minimal and there aren't any extra abilities/procs. Contrary to what the wiki says, there's no bad-weapon penalty for using crossbows without the skill, at least not as far as I can tell. If there is, anyway, there's no icon that pops up for it.

I seem to recall hearing that unarmed combat boosts also affect your ranged combat damage, so if you want to do ranged damage, take the unarmed skill and don't wield weapons. If you're worried about your ammo supply, Tinker's the way to go, not Archery.

As for unarmed damage in actual melee, as I said most of my damage is coming from ranged now. I'm hitting 45/shot with cruddy copper bolts but only about 35 or so when I kick things.

 

Actually I am pretty sure without xbow you also get the wrong weapon penalty for firing with it. Remember the numbers on the left corner are not accurate and you must test in game to be sure, and let me tell you it's HUGE now.

If you want to test yourself, just go into tweak.xml and put in a really big number for the penalty, then your crossbow will deal no damage (except for the spell stuff).

So that's just something to keep in mind.

Also, am I the only one who notice no one put up a mage build yet?

 

Okay I just died on GR, on level 2, AND IT FELT LIKE AN ACHIEVEMENT.

Skills taken:

Swords, Shield Bearer, Berserk, Artful Dodger, Master of Arms, Vampirism, Assassination.

Shield, Berserk, Dodger, Arms and Vampirism are staying since they mean I survive.

Swords and Assassination I might swap for other skills, do you suggest anything?

 

Maybe maces, for the knockback?

I'd keep assassination, but if you want to replace it, then I'd take burglary.

 

I switched them for maces and smithing, and I've now almost cleared the second floor

 

I'm loving my
Sword-Double Weapon-Berserk-Master of Arms-Vampirims-Psionics-Bulgrary.

Imho you NEED Psionic or at least Fungal Arts if you want to do a vampirism build on GR. The heal is just too good

 

Master of Arms is so very welcome with it's inherent piercing resist now.

 

You get 1 point of piercing resist from MoA when you get Suit Up. Fair enough, that's reasonably useful. I wouldn't say it's going to make or break a build though. The other two points aren't until you've maxed out the tree entirely, which for most characters is going to be pretty late on.

I'm not saying MoA isn't useful, just that the piercing resist it gives isn't a game-changer.

 

My next build is going to be pure rogue, with throwing as the main ingredient. Throwing, Tinkering, Alchemy, Smithing, Burglary, then probably Perception and Artful Dodger. Didn't want to try something like this on GR, but I might give it a shot and see if I can get anywhere.

Going to try and only rely on throwing for kills, but that's probably not going to work. At all.

 

@rederick
The crafting will eventually give you lots of thrown items, but not for a while, and you'll run out frequently. I have an archer build (currently on level 4) that I supplemented with thrown items. The roughest part of the game for me so far was early on, before I found a lot of metal and had tinkering built up (I also had a really crappy bow for a while because there was no zinc or brass on the first two levels, but that may be less of an issue for a thrown build).

 

My last character won with tinkering, basically. Found a nice crossbow, and there's so much metal in the game that you can literally make thousands of bolts if you really want to (50 iron + 30 steel = 1040 bolts, and that's after I'd been shooting my way through three levels). That's bolts, not throwing, though; you don't get as many thrown items out per input ingredient as you do bolts, and you can make bolts out of more ingredient types.

 

I've always played casters but my current build is:

Staves
Fungal Arts
Dual Wield
Psionics
Blood Mage
Assasination
Burglary

It's pretty fun. Psionics seems strong enough to carry you through the game right now I think. The fire spell is cheap and effective. And you can paralyze everything to stand in melee.

 

Regarding psionics, I just won with this build:

Math/Psionics/Necro/Mage training/Blood magic/Burglar/Alchemy

Necronomiconomics didn't really get used that much because I was pushing my magic power so high (so the damaging feedback debuffs were unresistable). I survived by tediously ploinking away at monsters with the first two psionics spells, which were cheap at 1MP apiece, but didn't deal damage very quickly. Eventually I realized that the Math Zenzi buff had gotten cheap enough that subsequent casts of it were free (even overcoming the upkeep by increasing my regen), and that the resulting improvement in my magic power brought Recursive Curse down to costing only 6MP. At that point I believe the term is "roflstomp" for what happened to the rest of the dungeon.

Golden Ratio curse means always being able to afford the squid bolts in a bolt dispenser.