Least Hit!

Since the beta of the patch is out, I thought I'd go ahead and satisfy my curiosity on the little issue of not getting hit. It's a big priority for most players and 1.0.10 does a lot for players in that respect. Dodge and Counter are both ironclad guarantees now, capable of defending you from all attacks when you roll one, even crits.

So how awesome are my defenses when I set out to max the two stats? If I can get both Dodge and Counter to 50, then I have only a 25% chance of getting hit by any given attack. Throw in a block of 50% or more and the chances of an enemy scoring a clean hit for full damage is suddenly incredibly small.

How am I going to get my defenses up that high?

Obviously, I need a lot of and , so we're looking at a Warrior/Rogue build. Now, you could make arguments for either Swords/Dual Wield or Unarmed Combat, but I chose the latter because A) dual Runed Iron Skjoldrs are nice when I plan on wearing the Poncho With No Name and Parachute Pants in place of, y'know, actual armor, B) it works better with all the traps my rogue skills will be letting me pick up, C) it's fewer skills and D) I like kung fu. Since dual swords gives + 28 and unarmed + skjoldr gives +7 and +21 it's gonna be about even.

I really, really want those Skjoldrs, and Blacksmithing lets me make them for the low, low price of 3 skill points invested.

Archaeology, Burglary and Perception are all rogue skills that will up my nimbleness and, as a side benefit, give me tons of bonus XP.

Artful Dodger is something of a "duh" given my goal.

Assassination helps my low damage output some and gives me procs that are quite useful for staying alive. I made a build with Piracy in this spot, because I'd heard it would give extra , but it currently doesn't and the devs have enough on their plates without me whining about it. While Swashbuckler fits thematically, I think I'll need Assassination for damage output more than eight turns of near invincibility during which I can't kill anything because I hit like a limp noodle. Fungal Arts could work in this spot too, and I hear they've made it less clicky, but I gots ta pick something, and Assassination's it.

On spawning I look something like this:


The first floor was pretty rough until I managed to make myself a skjoldr, which made me immune to the floor's physical damage. Plus, once I had the cash I got a gargle blaster from that booze dispenser there and have been burning my MP ever since. The bonuses are pretty nice, let me tell you.

I probably should have taken more screenshots of this floor, as it was pretty epic, but most of it shows in this follow-up picture from landfall on the second floor:



Yes, that's a Poncho. I'm quite frightened that the RNG has bestowed all its blessings on me now, and the rest of the run will be crap, because between that and the swashbuckling belt my defenses are in amazing shape. Throw in pants with +2 and I'm pretty sure I can legitimately expect this level to give me diddly.

My Syzergy isn't shown here because a gnome nuked my mana shortly before clearing the floor, and it wore off. I wound up having to buy a second gargle blaster, which I haven't guzzled yet. Waiting 'till I have a little booze built up first, to keep it running.

So, if I understand the combat logic of the game correctly, and assuming an EDR of 2.5 for most monsters on this level, I currently have approximately a 58% chance of getting hit on any given attack, and only a 47% chance of suffering a clean hit! Due to my taking a little blacksmithing and a little burglary I haven't even gotten to the big defense bonuses from unarmed combat yet. The dodge bonuses of Artful Dodger and Perception remain mostly untouched as well.

And no hammerpants.

Stay tuned.

 

After battling through the second and third floors I have come to report that...

This is actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. Granted, I haven't gotten into the really deep stuff yet. This is only DL 3 we're talking about. But the raw stats are a lot higher than I thought they'd be at this point. This is partly because some stuff was added that I hadn't anticipated (bronze rings for +3 ? Who knew?) but I'm beginning to wonder if, by the lower levels, I'll have a less than 20% chance of getting hit at all...

I found a mass pitting mechanism on DL 3 that spawned two hordes of undead aetheronauts and a horde of unfriendly AIs. Wound up in a brawl that looked something like this:



Amazingly, I could still counter and dodge almost everything they threw at me. Perhaps Unarmed Combat should have a Sixth Sense or Blind Fight ability to reflect this amazing prescience?

I tried to get a screenshot that actually shows the "dodge" and "counterattack" messages, but alas, my screenshot taking skills weren't quite up to the timing. Maybe on DL 15 I'll teleport into a zoo and try to capture the carnage. Until then, enjoy feasting your eyes on my stats as of the first room on DL4!



For those of you keeping track at home, I have only a 31.36% chance of taking an actual hit. With block, there's only a 20% chance of a full damage blow making it's way through. I don't think I actually took a critical the whole entirety of the third floor. While I've mastered Unarmed Combat there's still plenty of rogue skills left to go, including the entire Perception and Artful Dodger trees. Swashbuckling gloves would be nice, too.

And somewhere out there is a pair of pants that I can only hope to touch. Those mobs better hope they got that's out of this world!

 

Batman achieved similar numbers (thanks in part to finding those wonderful chute pants) before the save game became irretrievable. Kudos and good luck - it's very fun to punch a monster zoo to death without cheatery magic spells!

 

Noted. Hopefully with perception I can avoid that gruesome fate. Although that's by no means guaranteed, if past experience is any indication.

 

I'm loving this write-up. Keep it coming!

 

I hope so, although I finally beat dredmor with a melee build in 1.09b only took me 100 hours to actually finally do it. You can read up on the fight here: http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/finally-bested-dredmor-in-melee-combat.2635/

 

After tangling with the "pull lever, crash game" but a couple of times I finally managed to clear most of floor four and was running with a dodge of 54 (upped it by four when I found a pair of magic striped pants that gave +5 in addition to other buffs and another +6 by taking Perception Level 2).

By this point I was beginning to see the shortcomings of this kind of a build. Low HP and means that those hits that come through hurt a lot more than with a build that emphasizes warrior skills and heavy armor. I found a duelist's buckler and wore it for a bit, because it didn't give me a penalty, but a +1 to didn't balance the loss of and , and the hits that did get through were adding up quick, so I had to switch back to the skjoldr.

In clearing the zoo I wound up using two Infernal potions so I could tank through the Thermoblobbies, who's fire throwing ability really hurts when you're trying to turtle up and hack through all those stone golems that have you surrounded and Grey Heron is cooling down. I adopted a new method for killing unique monsters that is best summed up in this picture:



He will be baked. And then there will be Caketown.

Now, using bolas and a couple of thermite bombs, followed by a barrage of darts, to kill a boss monster may not seem like an ideal way of testing the benefits of upgraded melee defenses. But then, Jackie Chen is fast, not stupid.

Or not. About five minutes after this, I ran across two acid traps back to back. Hadn't completely recovered from the zoo yet so I was about half HP. I slammed on the brakes as fast as I could but it still wasn't fast enough to use my potion of purity in time to save my hide. Oh well, there's always next time.

Actually, I don't really plan on doing anything quite like this again, at least in the near future. It was fun but almost tediously slow. I'm satisfied that melee fighters will enjoy much, much improved survivability in 1.0.10 and, while I'm sure this build probably could have gotten to the point where it pushed 75 and 50+, surviving the first few character levels with it is hard. It requires a lot of cowardice caution and careful planning and I'm not sure that, in the deeper levels, you'd have the resilience to tank through the ~10% of melee hits that would sneak through those numbers plus all the spells that the nastier creatures can throw at you. In short, melee is much better balanced without being overpowered, which is, of course, the ideal.

So if you want to play crazy wuxia badass in comfy clothes with a light step, rejoice! It's now a viable strategy. Something like this character is probably right up your alley. But if you just want to crush things under your inexorable fist, well...

I actually have some ideas about that, too. Maybe in another thread at another time.

 

Personally I prefer to stack counter and lots of heavy armor. That way I still dont get hit as often but when I do I have around 20 pierce resist and 30 odd AA by the later levels. If you look at my melee win above in 1.09 you can see how that worked out. I can only imagine how well it would work with counter attacks being stronger against crits and such in the new patch. I think melee will be even stronger and not require as many precautions.