OK, just had my best game ever with a relatively unorthodox build. I don't recommend this build to anyone who's just trying to get a win -- this was just me trying something I thought might be fun. That said, I came INCHES from actually winning. . Going Rogue/Permadeath Tinkering (maxed) Smithing (maxed) Alchemy (rank 4) Unarmed (maxed) Burglary (rank 4) Vampire (rank 2) Archeology (maxed) This is Neither a good offensive nor defensive build, BUT it does have the advantage of giving lots of fast levelling (through archeology and trap affinity), and lots of bolts, potions, and explosives, and lots of chalk for making steel. I did have really bad luck with Anvils of Krong (many, many negative enchantments), but got some decent artifacts (including a crossbow that routinely would do 54+ damage on a hit even with tier-1 ammo. That said, I cleared all of levels 1-9 (including a bugged 200-monster double-zoo on level 9). On levels 6-10, I sweated my way down, with lots of close calls. This was FAR from an ideal build, and I was struggling. BUT, I had lots of ways to get out of trouble, with all my potions and (eventually) skills (I didn't work on burglary until very late). I FINALLY stumbled on Lord Dredmore -- I managed to teleport away, to an island, and started hitting him with grenades, holy and otherwise, and other ranged weapons. Whenever my health got too low, I slipped into the shadows and drank up healing potions. His health was slipping very slowly downwards. I was in absolutely no danger of running out of ranged attacks, and in addition my burglary skills, I had plenty of invis and teleport potions should I need to use them while my burglary skills cooled down. I thought that victory was guaranteed. And it should have been... Then, I completely blew it. I got overconfident and started spamming attacks... and lost track of my health bar, and the fact that he started spamming attacks as well... and I died. Well, at least I got the achievement for dying at Lord Dredmore's hands. This would have been my very first Going Rogue victory. But no Despite dying, I did make it to level 12 on the Steam leader board (grahamz1). I am really pissed off at myself. The game took me like 4 days to play. I was SO close, and so careful, up until the end.
Deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed that you skipped fungal. FOR SHAME. Nice build. Goes to show that anything is viable.
Getting total negative >= positive is "normal", not "bad luck". Mathematically speaking you should end up with unusable items roughly 85% of the time.
The bad luck was the streaks of negative enchantments. I'm not saying that this doesn't happen -- I'm just saying that this particular run was worse than normal. But 85% doesn't sound quite right to me. I'd love to see the math behind that.
First the known factor is the ratio of good vs bad is 5:2. Someone dig through the source code for this so I just took it as is. This game has 20 anvils, omitting the floor 10 ones (because you really shouldn't rely on those), and you have 18. Archaeology will result in 36 total chances. The rest of the constants are derived from play tests, which may/may not be accurate. However, the structure of calculating expected payoff should be correct. Among the positive, you have a chance of +1 and +2, with 1+ appearing about twice as often as +2, or 4/3 average. Among the negative, -4 seems to be the constant Therefore, 36*[(4/3)*(5/7) - 4*(2/7)] = -4 Now without going into charting every single outcome, these types of simple probability with 36 rolls should follow very closely to the bell curve, with a negative expected payoff. I then suspect to actually get "good enough" items (thing that are better than what you picked up) would have to fall on the right tail, 15% or less. I will solve this more accurately if someone can dig the source code for the exact positive/negative payoffs. But until then an estimate will have to do.
5:2 is what I've heard as well. But I don't think the negatives are as bad as you say, but I guess I could be wrong. Without actual numbers, this is all subject to confirmation error, etc., but it seemed to me that the most common negative results were a -1 and -2. I also thought (at least with the previous version -- not sure if it's been changed) that the number of negative (or positive) results was based on the dungeon level, and the number of enchantments already on the item.
In my Archeology/Krong experience I've found that: You can get more than +2 positive (I once got +3 mana regen in one Krong) This Translation Is All Wrong! can still wipe negatives. Just one reroll after a bad Krong seems to turn 4 negatives into either 0 or 1 negative.
My latest Archaeology build ended up with these buffs from the Anvils: Ring 1 (8 positive, 1 negative) Ring 2 (11 positive, 0 negative) Amulet (7 positive, 0 negative) Helmet (5 positive, 1 negative) Crossbow (1 positive + proc, 0 negative) Sword (2 positive + proc, 0 negative) Either I am unbelievably lucky, or that 85% chance of getting unusable items is way off.
Even with negative enchants, I still rarely get an unusable item. It happens, don't get me wrong, but most of the negatives either don't apply, or are very minor. But I haven't ran with archaeology since the update, so I haven't been using more than 18 anvils. And I've been spreading the love around, since I don't want to ruin a great item.
You are lucky. even if we ignore the amount per positive/negative, it deviated a lot from the 5:2 bonus/corrupt ratio. Look at it this way, with the amount of people playing this game, a few of them are bout to get good rolls like this. There's nothing unbelievable about being 1/7.
I agree that that is very lucky. With 18 to 20 anvils, hitting each twice, you should end up with (on average) about 10 negative enchantments -- you got only 2. I really ought to keep track of my Krong results on my next run, but for me, that would be too much like work. If only the game would do that for you (hint hint). Honestly, without keeping a continuous and accurate count as above, anecdotal evidence is far too subject to what's known as 'confirmation bias' (being aware of possible bias doesn't actually eliminate it). So I admit that I MAY be completely wrong about the unluckiness of my Krong experience. But I did FEEL unlucky (especially since my negative "krongings" seemed to come in streaks).
I've had the same experience with negative streaks. Perhaps a negatively enchanted item has a lower chance of being subsequently blessed? Sure would be nice if a dev could clear this up.
Yeah, it's completely random (nvining confirmed it) there's no pattern with how many negatives your item has or positives.
