Necronomiconomics Builds.

So basically this comes down to:

<moof> Golemancy sucks, use wands
<123stw> Wands suck, use golemancy

Allow me to suggest a third view:

<Derakon> Golemancy and wands both suck, use psionics.

 

No you cannot use him "until you get teleport". Even if you burn all the recharge on bone wand it's not fast enough to maintain a zomby, and the corpse requirement means you can't even just use it in an emergency. You probably never touch that wand again past floor 1.

Basically the pros and cons are already obvious.

Wand Lore - Zomby for floor 1, healing for later (but redundant due to alchemy), no point investment

Golem - Mustache for floor 1 - 3, wall for later, 1 point investment at start (which means build is delay by 1 level), 1 point at the end, requires blade spam through first 125 exp.

Conclusion: Wand lore is faster, golem is safer after the first 125 exp.

Rather or not people "should care" doesn't really matter, but teleport kiting is definitely no replacement for wall spam. They are 2 completely different style of playing and no amount of kiting is as safe as blocking up the door before even opening it.

Hey now that's not what I said.

I am just saying a zomby decoy once every 80 turns that requires a corpse to cast on doesn't work. I am fine with using wand as healing.

Psionic also works. Gets you through floor 1 consistently enough and rift + shove works. But since you will probably get shove right away you will be asking yourself why you even need necro half of the game. Nothing wrong with that though.

 

You are comparing apples to bowling balls. Coompare zomby + nightmare versus mustache.

By simply viewing you zomby as damage spell and no longer a tank, you can can keep him around well past the first floor.

You highly underate wands. Horribly, horribly underate them. You can have a handful of offensive wands and fry bosses manalessly, which can save you a lot of mana trouble, especially if the boss resist the damage type you are using against it. You get AoE pushback and walls, which can quickly allow you to establish a strong position against zoos. You say healing wand late -- what's wrong with healing wand at any time? It's good whenever you get it.

it boggles my mind how you can so easily use mustache golem on floor 3, yet can't use zomby on floor 2?

This all speaks more to your lack of knowledge of the game in general.

 

Either that or I don't waste 80 turns charging bone wand and all the other offensive wands as though you can use them all at once. The recharge can't keep up unless you deliberately tread for the recharge. You start with 3, you don't get everything. You can only restart for 1 in specific without massive grind.

So really, give me a good reason to recharge a bony over a rock past floor 1.

I think you are just throwing personal insults because you have nothing better to say. It doesn't give you much creditability when you claim to be using 10 wands at a time and only get 1 recharge every 80 turns. You don't have to recharge them sure, you can let them burn out, but you can also do that with any character with or without ward lore. You could have "spam wands for boss" with whatever you picked up off the floor.

The only advantage of picking wand lore is 80 turn recharge and 3 wands at start. Any "key wands" like coral or zodiac you won't burn beyond once without a backup, and disposable damage wands can be spammed 3-5 times before recharge. But it is definitely not every single wand in the game spammed limitless.

Also, I don't see where you got the idea of mana problem. With a mustache you can safely walk up and melee stuff with pact and a dagger. Need a heal? Hit your pet with pact. 1 point on golem and rush necro max, which lets you comfortably melee everything on floor 2. Skip floor 2 zoo til level 7 then you can go back and blast it with rift. Alchemy to lv 3 and you will have all the mana you needed just when golem is obsolete, and you can play the mage game from there on out without the mana problem.

Point is, you can play with Golem, you can also play with Wand Lore, but they are very different in terms of styles. Golem is consistent and easy, wand lore takes a lot more juggling work for the 1 less level, both get through early game just fine. Just because you can or like playing with wand does not mean everyone must play with wand.

 

Okay, we're getting rather insulting here. There's no need to say someone lacks experience with the game just because they don't like your favored skill.

Personally, my experience with wand lore is thus:

* "Oh hey, Laser Wand one-shots enemies on floor 1! Awesome!"
* "Okay, all my wands are at non-zero entropy and my recharge skill is still timed out for another 40 turns. I could sit around and wait for it to cool down, but bugger that."
* "Whoops, my wand burned out at 10 entropy. Whelp."

Combine that with attack wands scaling with your magic power (rendering them very quickly useless for non-mages), and you end up with the only non-mage worthwhile wands past the early game being coral, zodiac, and stony. And mages tend to have attack spells that they don't have to grudgingly dole out once or twice every 80 turns. Sure wands don't cost mana, but mana hasn't been a problem for my mages past the early game anyway so who cares? I will grant that a few tentacular wand shots will kill just about anything up to and including Dredmor. Is that worth 1/7th of your build? It's not to me.

Bottom line is, wand lore lets you do two things: 1) use wands without them burning out, so long as you don't use them very often, and 2) turn wands into other wands, after you've invested two skillpoints. Long-term this is not very impressive, unless you're willing to wait the 80 turns needed to recharge a wand between every room you open, and I'm not. Yes, they'll get you through dungeon level 1, but plenty of skills do that without requiring any invested points. Yes, they give you a 23HP heal every 80 turns with no ingredients required, but the other healing sources are better (Alchemy: 23HP instantly at the cost of the almost-free rust and booze, and you can build up a stock ahead of time; psionics: 36HP for 14MP i.e. spammable; fungal: fairy wodgers out the wazoo i.e. spammable).

Anyway, mages don't need healing. It's the melee classes that need healing, and they don't have the magic power to make effective use of the offensive wands.

Personally, if I were to modify Wand Lore, it'd be to give it a buff something like this:

* Little Blue Pill: "Is your wand just not giving you the satisfaction you deserve? Down one of these and it'll never let you down!" Buff, duration 10 turns, cooldown 80 turns. For the duration, wands do not burn out unless they hit 100 entropy.

 

This is just you not knowing what you are doing. I usually have all my wands 100% recharged and ready for emergencies. You don't need to spam wands. Using when you need to and recharge them between the times you do. Sure, you only start with 3, but you usually find ~5 wands per level counting shops on the first couple levels.

Cause a rock wand isn't going to save you from popping open a zoo on floor 2/3 ? Cause if you are tanking, the zomby pet will do far more damage for one recharge? It's a free 6-7 damage every turn. Cause if you are low on life/mana and you come across a boss, a single rock wand recharge won't save you, but zomby will give you time to get away? Cause if you run out of things to kill and you were particularly unlucky with procs from pact, you can zombify a corpse and regen a fat wad of your life?

What the heck are you even talking about. You compared mustache straight up to zomby, which is unfair because zomby is a starting ability and mustache needs a skill point. it's really not rocket science to see it's not a fair comparison.

 

It's pretty clear he doesn't know anything about wands or how useful they are beyond simply a bottomless health potion. it has nothing to do with whether or not he likes any given skill.

My "personal experience" is that wand lore is the most powerful zero investment skill in the game. That doesn't mean every build should have it, though, which brings me to your comment about mage/non mage. First, this thread is not only about mages, it's about mages with necro.

Wands aren't intended to be uber super duper pooper scooper the entire game man. Listen very carefully -- they help mages out when they are at their weakest. This is very good for PD/GR. You spend no skill points on them, and mages always have plenty of extra "optional" skill slots. So why not take the one that makes life easiest when it usually is when life is the hardest for a mage.

 

Well here's the thing. Since 1.05 to even play a nightmare necro on floor 1 and 2 kinna sucks. It's far easier to just pact one for the first 3 floor to death until you get the 2 dark orb to lower nightmare down to a manageable cost, and even then it's still easier to pact things to death with mustache decoy.

If you want to go mage on floor 2 and 3 anyway and deliberately give yourself a hard time just to make those damage wand useful, that's your call. Even if I go wand lore pact/bottomless coral is still easier for floor 1-3. And like I said, if you only want to use damage wand for bosses or early dangerous situations, you don't even need wand lore for that.

I still don't see how the zomby is saving you on floor 2/3 against a zoo when you need a corpse to cast it on to begin with.

 

Uhh, I like how you forget the whole getting to level 5 in order to even get golem and pact. pact is awesome, and the earlier you get it the better, all the more reason golem is a waste of time.

Cause the zomby will be standing right next to you without need of a corpse? And if it dies. Well, there's your corpse to rezomby. It's just a speed bump to seal off the zoo until you re ready for it. Sounds like you don't use wands and you don't play on PD.

 

You get to level 5 on floor 1. Golem, unlike zomby, can actually kill everything on floor 1 by itself. You can pact/golem on floor 2 when it actually matters.

Another one of those baseless assumptions. You assume people can't beat the first 3 floors because they choose golem over wand lore?

And now here again, assuming you have a zomby while entering each and every room, meaning that you are keeping zomby alive the whole time through floor 2. I don't see how you can do that and still have recharge for all those damage wand you claim to use without some seriously treading. That or you are exaggerating the amount of wands you actually use relative to someone who didn't pick wand lore and just burn the ones they find. I use wand lore enough to have to call BS on that.

And for the sake of argument I just got through the first 4 floor with golem without dying. Nightmare sucks so hard now I am still golem/pacting my way through. That golem is giving me all the decoy and healing need.

 

You do not get level 5 on floor one unless you spacebar spam for an hour on respawns. You'd be lucky to get level 4, especially since I notice you don't seem to care for burglary or archaelogy . Ya, you made to floor 4. Good for you. But I know all the times you restared on the first floor cause you opened a door on level one and it had 4+ enemies and you had no way to deal with it. I also know how much slower you killed cause golem sucks a ton of mana and having to wait so much longer to get pact. And now I know it will take you even longer to get teleport. cause while levels come quick early, they don't come that fast later on, and you pay the price for wasting points in golemacy.

 

Nope just 1 run. blade golem/bolt trap lure got the job done. Call me lucky but I didn't run into those 6 bats for the first 125exp, and that I find a rusty sword half way which means I can actually melee the last hit to save mana. From all my golem runs I have a 80% consistency of getting through the first 125 exp. And as said the ones that do kill are those rooms with 6 bats or 3 floor 2 stuff, anything else it can handle just fine.

I get to level 5 on floor 1 on every single run. It might be because I play on GR so more monsters spawn, but I never tread for them.

 

Then I must kill way faster than you. That's no surpise to me but really shows how much slower you are with golem. I usually take one or both of arch or burglarly, and I still don't hit 5 unti I hit floor 2. I explore everything and do all quests.

 

You do play on GR right? Because even when I use my vamp dual sword wand lore, and pretty much just run through everything on floor 1, I still hit level 5.

And I don't even do quest on the first 3 floors. Spawning an unique is an unnecessary risk for the kind of trash items you get.

But I am done arguing with it on paper, since I already did it in game. First 3 floor with golem/pact is not just doable, but easy. Nightmare by contrast totally sucks since 1.05 so using a caster early on is no longer worth the effort. I am on floor 5 now and still have to cast it for decoy/healing. If you want to use something else that's your choice.

And because nightmare suck so hard now while pact so good with the innate resist, you are far better off making a hybrid than a pure mage. If you rush necro you will find yourself melee through the first 5 floor anyway.

 

On paper, or in the game, whichever doesn't change that golemancy is a waste of a skill and a waste of any skill points with necro/math. The end.

 

Well, while I prove golem can be done, you still got about 0 creditability at this point. I don't know why I am even arguing with you, it's almost like you are living in your own little world or something.

Now onto wand lore. Assuming you only spend time to roll 1 wand, why on earth would you roll a bone wand over a coral wand? You can easily be stuck without a coral indefinitely. I gotten through games where not a single coral dropped for the whole game. You should still be able to get the first 125 exp with a coral and 2 other random wands, and coral/pact are far more stable than zomby/pact.

 

Spend your time rolling for coral wand, get it, pat yourself on the back, open the first door and there are 6 dingles/bats. Pat ourself on the back again while you reroll.

i don't actually find it that overwhelmingly good at level 1, actually. It's more of a luxury item that doesn't really help me kill much faster. It's especially luxury after you get pact. Take your weapon off and leech off your zomby if you really need a bit more life for whatever reason.

 

it's not overwhelmingly good on floor 1, it just totally sucks if you still can't find 1 by floor 10.

And given that happen on my last 2 golem/math runs, which uses wand in place of alchemy, I am glad I rolled for it.

 

Well, there is big difference when you have zomby + pact.