Add a cooldown to healing pots but make shops to get them. 1 for 250 Zorkmids, 15 rounds cooldown on Dwarfen Moderation, lets say 25 on Going Rogue. I mean it. I keep dying because I can't heal myself properly during a fight. Eating does not heal you enough. Relying on finding them or the ingridients is not a very good way. I have never been to floor 3.
Learn to retreat. Close yourself in a room to have time to digest food. Take psionics and get the crystal healing skill. Be happy the hunger system hasn't been implemented yet.
What kind of build are you playing with? Because right now, the only reliable healing options come from Skills - Alchemy, Fungal Arts, Wand Lore, Vampirism, Psionics. If you want reliable healing you're going to have to replace one of your current Skills with one of those.
Alchemy sucks - because you first have to find copper to make Healing Potions. Finding Ingridients is generally pure luck and not reliable. I usually have smithing and that really sucks if you don't find any minerals early on. Makes it complelty useless. Vampirism sucks even more. You cannot eat anything if you have it. Don't know about the othes, did not try them yet. Normally I take Axes, Dual Wield, Berserker, Burglary, Assasination, Archeology, Smithing and I am playing on Dwarfen. But the Game needs a reliable source of healing if a fight takes longer like Monster Zoos.
@jareddm He's talking about in-combat survivability, not just generally staying at high health. Here's some suggestions: Have you tried Vampirism? That heals you for at least 3 hp per hit. Necronomiconomics has a spell that's similar to Vampirism but gets a lot more powerful (and heals you for more) if you have high magic power. Wand Lore can give you an unlimited-use Coral Wand that heals you for 23 hp (2hp/turn). You can only use it every 80 turns though (unless you want to risk a burn out). Fungal Arts gives you unlimited Fairywodgers which heal you similarly. Melee is all about minimizing the damage you take as much as possible, either by maximising your offense or defense. If you don't want to take Vampirism I'd suggest focusing almost entirely on defense - unarmed, dual shields and smithing will give you enough defense to take 0 damage from enraged diggles when you first encounter them. Try to beef up your counter and block as much as possible. edit: Another tip for floor 2: craft a copper ring. It will negate all damage from Electroblobbies.
Melee is playing on Hard Mode, that's your first problem. Playing as a Melee without a Skill that provided healing is your second, larger problem. Trust me, I've tried similiar builds in 1.0.5 and it's a nightmare. The best tips I can give you are: 1) Find a crossbow, any crossbow, and stock up on the best AoE bolts you can find or buy out of the vending machines. You want to save Bolts of Squid (the best item in the game, peroid), Bolts of Mass Destruction, Acid/Poison Bottle Bolts, and any Poison/Brimstone Flasks. Remember: the correct answer to literally any situation in which you say, "oh shit, I'm in trouble now" is to back off a few steps (using Inky Hoglanterns, Invisibility Potions, Ninja Vanish, etc. is recommended) and then fire your best AoE Bolt(s) at it until they die. These situations include Monster Zoos, Named Melee Monsters, and Lord Dredmor himself. 2) Get the heaviest armor you can. The more Armor Absorbtion, Block, and Piercing Resist it has, the better. Forget all other stats and get those 3 as high as you can, and you'll be far more difficult to kill. 3) Greedy Blungecap stacks with Vampirism and is generally a great way to keep your HP up when fighting large groups of monsters or Monster Zoos. This is assuming you're out of AoE attacks. Fairywodger, Lively Regeneration Potions, and Coral Wands have solid heal-over-time effects that will stack with the benefits of eating. Remember that you will NEED a way to escape at some point, so you NEED to have Inky Hoglanterns or Invisibility Potions or an escape skill (Ninja Vanish, Knightly Leap, Move in a Mysterious Way, any Knockback ability) if you want to survive a situation where you're surrounded and low on health/healing/AoE attacks.
Melee is totally doable. You do have to learn to manage your combats, though. You can't expect to just stay in a fight indefinitely and have food keep your health up. Keep your fights limited to 3-4 monsters at a time and heal up in-between. As Marak said, heavy armor makes a big difference; a properly-equipped melee character can find himself taking no damage whatsoever from many of the dungeon's denizens. The biggest problem you're probably running into is that the early game with melee can be very difficult because you have so little equipment starting out. Smithing isn't going to help here. Alchemy isn't either. What you want is cheese. Not the food; tactics. Find an arrow trap and lure your enemies onto it over and over again; each time they take 6 damage and they don't hit you back. Consider grabbing Golemancy or Fungal Arts and putting one point into it to get a pet (moustache golem or slime beast) -- the summoned pet has infinite aggro, so monsters will always attack it instead of you. Go Unarmed and put your first skillpoint into it to get a knockback skill with a 6-turn cooldown. Then use the skill, walk back for five turns, use the skill, etc. Basically anything you can do to avoid getting hit until you find some decent armor. Otherwise, it definitely does help to have an alternate source of healing in addition to food. Vampirism is not this, because you can't use it between fights -- so if you end a fight at low health, you're in trouble. Otherwise: * Alchemy, for healing potions. Contrary to what you said, you need iron to make healing potions, not copper. Iron is by far the most plentiful of the metals in the game. Grind iron to rust, distil sewer brew to gutrot to aqua vitae, combine aqua vitae with rust, and you have a 23HP instant heal. Get to level-2 alchemy and you get 2 potions each time you do this, which means that one iron ingot and two aqua vitaes is four healing potions. * Psionics, for Crystal Healing. Requires 2 skillpoints; returns 36HP for 14MP. Can't be easily used during a fight, since you have to walk over the crystals, but when you have a few spare rounds between monsters it can make a big difference. * Fungal Arts, for fairy wodgers, greedy blungecaps, and inky hoglanterns. Eat the latter for invisibility, eat the wodger for healing, eat the blungecap for vampirism, then get back into the fray. Biggest problem here is that the process of getting new mushrooms is pretty tedious. * Wand Lore, as mentioned earlier, though personally I'm not all that impressed by wands in general past the very early game. Though, Wand Lore can make a decent skill for just getting over the early game hump, especially if you start with a Wand of Laser or Tentacular Wand.
Lol guys he is having problem beating floor 1 and 2 on dwarven. You are telling him to do the things he never get the level for. Just pick wand lore and vampirism. Remake until you roll a "coral wand", charge it at start and after every use. If that is not enough to get you past floor 3, then pick golem and get it to level 5 right away. The robot should at least get you to floor 6. Contrary to popular beliefs, Coral wand scales just fine. By end game you should have spare coral wands so you can easily take the chance and use it 2 to 3 times between each recharge. 69 hp every 80 turns is enough even at floor 10. And if you save some 5 burnout wands and put 2 skills in for wand reroll sometime during the end, you will have more than enough healing.
I used a similar build, and won with little trouble on Dwarven. I used swords instead of axes, as high counter is almost a must for a pure melee dual wielder, and master of arms instead of archaeology. I was able to tank very effectively. The only things that made me worry were caster mobs, which is how it should be. Food was usually enough to sustain me, and I only used potions and wodgers on levels with a high number of caster mobs. I never even used a single escape item until I hit Dredmor himself. I used some bolts to clear out the level 8 (or maybe it was9?) zoo, but that was for kicks, as I went back down a level just to do that. You do not need a healing skill. They are nice, but they also take away some melee viability, in my opinion. Some luck is required, but only in that you get enough iron to make a hjalmr somewhat early. Once you can make a runed hjalmr, that will be the only helmet you need, unless you find Albrecht's helm, or a good artifact. Also, make bronze weapons if you don't have enough iron to make weapons and armor. The bronze weapons are quite good for the first few floors. Also, make sure to save all diggle eggs, bread, and cheese. Omelets, and grilled cheeses are great for prolonged battles. And as already mentioned, pick your fights, and your battleground. Always use traps when available, since you still get the XP. I often find myself walking out of my way just to make the mobs path into a trap. It's effective, especially for the first character level or two. Also, your first level up should be Assassination. Sneaky shiv is a life saver. After that, I'd pump smithing.
Umm... copper has nothing to do with it. The formula for standard healing potions is Rust + Aqua Vitae. The main problem with rust isn't getting it, it's that iron (which is your main source of rust) is used for too many different things if you are a meleer. But there are alternate sources like rusty items. Aqua Vitae also is not much of an issue --you get it from distilling high-end drinks. Only issue is if you are depending on alchohol for mana, or you are crafting other potions (most of which also require Aqua Vitae). That said, only VERY early in the game will it be difficult to have enough healing potions. Heck, with alchemy, I end up using potions of replenishment far more frequently, as they also give you mana (which if you are using Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters, can be very helpful). Alchemy is a VERY dependable as a healing source past level 1 or 2 of the dungeon.
I think you mean "smith". Smiths need gobs of iron, or steel for preference. Everyone else doesn't care a whit.
I beat the game on DM/PD difficulty with an almost identical build. I could give you the roadmap to accomplishing it, but in general, you need: 1. The ability to hold your own against regular monsters on a level using minimal resources and NO FOOD. 2. The proper method to Healing yourself without using Food. 3. Having the ability to escape from being surrounded and times when you are near death. 4. Knowledge and skill to create the specific items that maximize your chances of success as a meleer with those particular skills. Success as a meleer is all about tactics and resource control. If you want more detailed steps with that build PM me if you want.
I'm just going to say what everyone is thinking. It's you. It's not the game. Try lowering the difficulty. There is fungal, alchemy, vampirism, psionics. If you take the right skills like master of arms/shield bearer you start with enough armor mitigation to make the first level pretty easy. Yes there is some luck in finding gear/ingredients. But those issues are only manifest like character level 1-2. After clearing the first dungeon level if you are having that much trouble, you are doing something very wrong. Honestly, I don't even need to eat much food on the first level.
