After putting 70 odd hours into this game, I'm finding the game is rather easy. There are plenty of skills I have yet to try, but I thought I'd share some tips and skill recommendations to help you get your first going rogue permadeath win. Please add any additional tips to this thread. 1) XP: XP gain scales linearly while XP requirements scales quadratically. This means you can hit lvl 6-7 by DL 1, lvl 9 by DL 2, lvl 13 by DL 4, and lvl 15 by DL 6, and then it just gets slower and slower and slower. Anything that helps you gain xp early such as burglary or trap affinity from archeology will make the entire game much much easier. Spending as much time as possible soaking xp early wins the game. Later on however the game becomes riskier but reward becomes less increasing the incentive to dive down to DL 10 and kill dredmor. Do every early game quest disarm every early game trap. And after the early game stop taking risks and play safe. 2) Traps. Traps are one of the biggest threats to a character in DoD. Traps scale according to your spell power and haywire according to your haywire stat. Stepping on an acid bolt or bling trap can spell death for a caster. Early game they provide a great source of free xp, however towards the end of mid game they begin to resist disarming even with a fair (5+) rating in trap affinity. The xp from traps scales very poorly so as you enter midgame, if there is a chance at failing to disarm a trap with your trap rating, just leave it! It may be hard to just let it lie, but there really is little gain from triggering the trap and being forced to consume food/use a health potion/zodiac wand. Oh also, if you trigger a bling trap/acid bolt trap or other damage over time trap take immediate action such as zodiac wand, mushroom, food, and/or potion. Food may not be enough! 3) Pets: Pets do not scale well. With your first skill point you can purchase a slime mold from fungal arts and you can use that single skill to clear the entire first 2 dungeon levels and make the third level your leather bound gimp. Late game however, they will fold like wet tissue paper and do little to no damage. However, they remain useful throughout the game for one reason. If an enemy can attack a pet, it will do so instead of attacking you. They also seem to all have a fair amount of hp (more so than most enemies even end game). If you find yourself in a tight situation, a pet summon will let you stand in melee with impunity. Every character should take a skill that grants a pet. I haven't tried all pets but the difference between them seems fairly marginal. The robo in golemancy may be stronger than a free slime mold but it's also expensive and you just want something to distract foes. So yes, in short I'm saying the slime mold is ultimately better than the robot in golemancy. 4) Archeology: Unfortunately this skill is bugged for weapons but this skill is fantastic anyway. The first point grants you trap affinity! Remember what I said about early game xp and trap affinity? Trap affinity at level 1 is epic. I max this skill line before I leave DL 2. Half way through DL 3 I have every slot grant +mana gen as a caster. Rerolling gear is fantastic. On top of that the skill line grants 3 trap affinity. 5) Fungal Arts: The second and last skill set that is so good it deserves it's own paragraph. Fungal arts lets you summon spores that can be placed on enemy corpses for mushrooms. Additionally, you start the game with a bunch of mushrooms giving you a solid early game. If that wasn't enough, the second and last skill point give pets. I recommend fungal arts on every character. If you don't have another way of summoning a pet, put one additional point in the skill. To give you an idea how great this skill line is, imagine having a stack of 20 of each of these... --Fairywodgers: Scales with magic power? This grants a nice instant heal + heal over time. It's the best skill of the fleshcrafting line! --Inky Hoglantern: You go invisible! It's the best skill from the burglary line! --Night Cap: Free mana! --Greedy Blungecap: Have you heard people state vampire is OP? These provide vampirism without the drawback when you need it! This also scales from you magic power. These little guys are like pure gold. On my current play through, I as a mage cleared zoos on DL 2-3 in melee without trouble using these. Oh and the second skill gives you a pet! And the other mushrooms will make your first room a cakewalk and the become far less useful =p. 6) How to build an idiot proof character (non comprehensive) +Archeology: Early game trap affinity + gear scumming = very good. +Burglary: The first skill provides lock picks. Lock picking provides a TON of non trivial xp early game and the second skill in burglary provides additional trap affinity + enemy control. I take it on every character for the gobs and gobs of early game xp. Fantastic skill! +Fungal Arts: I'd take this on every character. This skill line provides you with the best utility in the game for the least amount of points! (Caster) +Blood Magic: If you are a caster, take this skill and max it to solve mana woes. +Mathematics: Xeuclid's transformation lets you teleport for nearly free! Probably the strongest spell in the game. Golden Ratio is my prefered offensive spell as caster. +Promethean Magic: Fireball + Pet. (Melee) ? Dunno, someone will have to fill this one in I just play casters =P. Can you make an idiot proof melee character? Probably. I have yet to test every skill and do not pretend this list is in any way comprehensive. Feel free to add additional tips.
@"(Melee) ? Dunno, someone will have to fill this one in I just play casters =P. Can you make an idiot proof melee character? Probably." For my 3rd character was the @Grey72 build: Swords, Dual Wield, Dodge, Perception, Flesh-Shaping, Burglary, Archaeology. Swords+DW = massive damage potential. Flesh-Shaping for early HP boost and, later on, healing. The rest are utility, with Burglary's Vanish of special mentioning. Traps meant nothing to this build. To play: get a few points into survival early (like Knightly Leap or healing), then max out damage, then finish utility/survival (Archeology, going back to previous floor to anvil after you find better gear). My advice for melee characters: 1. 1hit killing (OHK) means no damage taken and ability to go 1v1 an endless amount of monsters. Ranged items are especially useful to ensure the 1hit kill: Thibault's Trompement, traps, throwing items, and bolts. Buy ALL softballs. 2. Decent kiting, atm, almost guarantees never dying. Dodge's Knightly Leap is absurdly handy when getting out of messy situations. Pair that with Burglary's Vanish whenever you feel like you need the extra escape/free movement. 3. Inevitably, you're not going to be OHKing everything. A reliable source of healing is essential. That could mean vampirism+summon, flesh-shaping, whatever you like. Food and potions alone will not manage it. And space-spamming gets too tedious, see: point 6. 4. Melee characters are super vulnerable to counter-attacks. Prepare for critical damage (especial floor7+): make sure you are fully healed at all times, and have escape options planned when your health gets low (and remember some monsters have ranged attacks). 5. Keep a source of invisibility for extreme situations: Vanish, invisibility potions, and inky hoglanterns. Once I was surrounded by a Witchy mob (got flanked by more when I attempted to retreat), blinded 3 times (which blocks Knightly Leap). At that point, they required ~2.2hits to kill and did a third of my HP in damage. I had to pop two invisibility potions and just wait it out. 6. Don't forget to have fun. Play in bursts. Getting frustrated and tired mean you will make mistakes. 7. You can (and should if necessary) return to previous floors for shops/vending machines/anvils.
Well written post. And i agree with most of your points. I have died a bunch of times while playing, but i have died because i wasnt playing smart and was rolling characters with random skills for the challenge. Permadeath rogue difficulty is pretty easy if you play the right kind of balanced character. Being able to disarm and collect traps early, and being able to pick doors and chests almost seem unbalanced in terms of gaining early experience. I agree about pets being powerful to start, and weak in the late game, but they will still provide enough distraction from enemies to allow you to heal, or block one side of your squishy character from being beaten on by a big monster. Dont know how much damage that boss monster does? Let it beat on your pet first to see if you can take his attacks. Heck, stab him a few times while hes smashing your slime into a puddle... and then summon another one. Fungal arts.. yeah. Im bouncing around between dungeon levels 5 and 7 on my main character who maxed out his smithing skill to start with, and who only crafted 2 items, and then got the slime pet. I feel like i can skip entire dungeon levels and still be safe at this point. Fungal arts gives you so many different abilities, and earns you so much money that if you die as a fungal arts character, you probably were not playing intelligently. It really does have the best abilities of most of the skill trees. About the only thing they didnt include was one that lets you teleport.Thankfully. I havnt played much with archeology because people have said its overpowered and easy to abuse. I didnt want to play a super-easy and unrewarding game, so i avoided increasing it past level 1 on all my characters. I think its important to take a melee skill. Skills that stun, put to sleep, or knock back will often save your life and get you out of a situation that otherwise would end you. Having no crowd control skills makes for a very hard game. I really hope by the time that i reach the end that they have made Dredmor much tougher than other people say he is, cause right now i feel overpowered already. I skipped an entire dungeon level and half of 2 others because i wanted more of a challenge. Maybe that will change, but ive got 26,000 gold, havnt needed to spend much of it, all of my items have 1 upgrade and 1 curse on them, and after selling ~300 mushrooms, i still have atleast another 50 of each type in my inventory. Lets put it this way, the last zoo i fought? I planted mushrooms on atleast 1/2 of the corpses *while* engaged in combat with enemies attacking while planting.. yeah. The next dungeon level down though.. either 7 or 8 is much more dangerous though, i tried it and decided maybe i needed to go back up one. You can only skip so many..
You put 70 hours into a game that takes about 10 hours for a complete playthrough and you're calling it easy? After that amount of time I don't think that's being fair to the games difficulty
@Drog 70 hours isn't that much you know. This isn't some Call of Duty campaign that only takes 6 hours and then you're done forever. This takes trial and error, and lots of strategy and luck. 70 hours is <strong>child's play</strong>. Good job on all the discoveries @jhffmn, I've come to about the same conclusions, though I'm usually far too lazy to use Fungal Arts ^^ (Lots of micro). Always always get the most experience possible from the early levels, I've found Burglary to be invaluable. And with some trap affinity, you'll be leveling up extremely fast. Helps quite a lot, for Melee and Magic.
It took me about 30 hours of playthroughs to beat the game on rogue/permadeath and I wouldn't say it was easy like the OP said. If I spent another 40 hours then I'd probably think it was easy, but again that's not fair to the game's difficulty.
Yea, I've beaten it on GR+PD and DM+PD in 40hrs. Not sure I'll ever play again. I do think that the game is too hard as a melee, though. As a mage my only danger was being an idiot from getting bored.
@jhffmn After about 40 hours of play time, I agree with your skill choices. I mostly play a no-melee caster, so having Archaeology is great for letting me reroll artifacts into ones that have magic power stats. I've found burglary immensely useful, mainly for the free lockpicks and the free invisibility skill. The other abilities are quite lacking, but being able to stay invisible half the time while healing up on food and booze is awesome enough already. Fungal arts...eh. I've played with it, and it is extremely powerful, but I feel like having to manage 2 item cooldowns (lockpicks and spores) is really annoying, and having to plant spores on enemies really bogs me down with tedium. It's awesome, but far too annoying for me to consistently use for my characters. Goes great with vampirism though, since you can still eat fairywodgers. I'm mostly a caster my self, and Promethean, Math, and Blood magic are definitely the way to go. Fireball and blood magic (even at level 1) is enough to create an infinite supply of mana as you nuke a monster zoo to death, and it even works fairly well with the runes of exploding for earlier zoos. Golden ratio is incredibly useful, even more so with the burglary lockup skill that roots enemies in place, letting you take out tough bosses in safety. I've also come to really like the dodge tree. Xeuclid's transformation is incredibly useful and cheap (once you've stacked enough magic power), but since it's pretty far down the mathemagic tree, so I've found that using knightly leap is a lot more useful at low levels, especially since it goes so well with runes of exploding before you get fireball.
@Drog This game is very easy for a roguelike. This game may not be easy for people who play games anyone can beat. Also, I play very slowly. I'm actually at 68 hours. And my current play through is probably 15 hours of that and I'm on DL 5. If this game were a challenging roguelike, none of us here would have beaten it yet.
Still don't think you're doing the game's difficulty justice. If the game was as easy as you claim, you wouldn't be forced to go through the dungeons so slowly
Just because it's easy doesn't mean you can't make extremely stupid mistakes and get yourself killed. It's easy if you're paying attention and not playing kamikaze style.
@Drog I am comparing the game to others of the genre to which this game's difficulty falls short and gameplay becomes repetitive and devoid of risk once you become familiar with gameplay mechanics.
@JHFFM Considering how few people have succesfully beat GR+P I think your advice is helpful to them. I just want to clarify one issue that seems to be getting brought up. Did you spend 70 total playing, or 70 hours playing a single character?
I play melee + support spell. I tried a mage, I just can't handle the fungal grinding. It's too insane for me. I agree with the whole exp thing, but for me I take the route of minimizing the skills I actually need. 1 weapon skill tree + 1 way to stun reliably + 1 way to heal consistently, and I end up with my current dual staves build. Trim down just 1 skill point at the end is enough to account for all the trap disabling/door unlocking for the entire game. The goal is to have everything by level 14 before the exp curve gets the better of me. That is also why I tend to be so against stuff like Smithing or Master of Arm, wasting that 4 level is a huge catch up game from there on forward, and the way exp works in this game ensures you will always be behind. As for traps, I use the mouse click to avoid the need for trap skills entirely. By the way, anyone ever abused the "just quit" feature? I know it gives you a whole bunch of warning but it' won't actually kill your character or delete your last "save and quit", you just lose all your progress. It seem like the easiest way to get out of tough situations.
Yes, I've used the just quit thing to stack anvil of krong enchants one game . If I got a bad one, or one that I simply didn't want, I'd "just quit". Regardless of all the crazy warnings, save stays.
I'm only playing on medium right now but managing lockpick/spores cooldowns is less tedious than it seems at first IMO. Eventually the lockpick cycle was faster than finding things to unlock or I spent so much time fighting or running around shops that I ended up with 200+ picks and I can leave it for a while. It's far less likely that I'll run out of things to kill though, so if I have any spores left at any given moment it's about 10 maximum. I tend towards melee and I'm running Dual, Staves, Fungal, Burglary, Dodger, Archaeology, Astrology. Not getting a lot of OHK but I cleared the DL2 zoo pretty quick. Shops haven't had a lot of useful stuff and I'm not crafting anything so I'm mildly concerned about equipment going forward, but as previously stated there's no shortage of mushrooms and they're all good for avoiding a lot of otherwise stupid deaths.
Astrology seems iffy to me after the first point. The third point skill is not bad, but doesn't consistently stun. The 4 skill buff is great, but you can get that from the pan galactic gargle blaster and that's the best skill in astrology. The 5th point buff is lame and the final skill is far too expensive. Magic skill sets could use some polish tbh, but then so could the rest of the skill sets and combat system in general.
