Finally defeated Lord Dredmor for the first time

I'm not sure this game was meant to be "balanced". One of the things the developers list in some of the supporting material is a suggestion that you abuse the game system (not bugs, mind you) to win the game. That said, I generally build magic users, and I've been punished horribly when I tried to exclusively rely on magic skills. Unless I mixed in some survival skills, used crossbow bolts and thrown the odd weapon, my glass canons never lasted beyond the 4th floor on the highest difficulty setting.

I'm not really convinced that having to use crossbows really detracts from a 'melee' build. It's just another weapon and without the archery skill, you aren't maximizing the damage. It's just another tactic. And honestly, with my magic using fencer, after I maxed out assassination and swords (for counterattack), it was actually more effective to engage and kill most monsters in melee rather than use spells. My build was assassination, swords, astrology, psionics, magic training, ley walker and perception and I was at level 12 before a glitch destroyed my game and I lost the file.

I'm thinking that if you focus on maximizing your survivability by choosing skills that fit your play style and are fun to play versus a notion of a "pure" build, you might have more success. That said, I don't really get the complaint. It is possible to go pure melee and be very successful, but certain monsters, especially with ranged attacks should tear you apart since you chose to limit yourself. It seems similar to "Diablo 2" complaints - after the last patch, if you built a sorceress and wanted to maximize magic damage, you needed to focus on 1 element out of the 3. The problem was you were essentially helpless if you came across a monster immune or highly resistant to that one element. The solution the elite players gave were simple: run, have your teammates kill it or try to get a mercenary to take care of it. Essentially, the balance was that specializing in one thing to max effectiveness wouldn't allow you to kill certain enemies.

 

@drewt:

It is possible to follow a "pure" build *while* trying to maximize your survivability. A warrior build with everything or nearly everything that gives you defensive buffs when in combat, for example. Mine is Vamp-shields-mace-armor-smithing-dodger-berserker.

(I guess you could take unarmed instead of mace and carry two shields to be even more defensive)

 

I just beat floor 10 with my pre-patch character and could competently melee Arch Diggles to death, occasionally running if I had been counter hit too many times. My skills were Mace / Dual-Wield / Berserk Rage / Mastery of Arms / Fleshmithing / Fungal Arts / Archaeology, and I only ever got Meat Shield with Fleshsmith, and didn't abuse the heck out of TTiAW. With my heavy armor diggles only did 7 pierce 6 slash (or so) on normal hits. At about floor 7 yes I did finally drop the cash for a Clockwork Bolt thrower and tinker all the ingots I found, but I didn't go 100% archer, not even close. I used it to soften up enemies before they came into melee range, but even without that I could fight an Arch Diggle 1-1 and come out with half health or better remaining without any healing.

I'm not even sure what you mean by 'Melee destroying foes', aside from the corrupting monsters anyway. Anything dealing high elemental damage is dangerous no matter what, so I don't see why softening up said enemies and then melee'ing the finishing blow would be archtype breaking or a problem at all.

 

Arch diggles are always a problem, pre-patch or not. Even in Serpentine Plate/Albrecht's Helm/Rocket Boots, they can hit/counter/hit you for 50 damage in a single turn. It's pure RNG to kill them without taking a ton of damage - unless, of course, you abandon your Archetype and all those skills you spent points in, in favor of using a Clockwork Bolt Thrower and *insert ammo type here* to whittle them down, taking 0 damage in the process unless you get impatient and start using melee attacks to finish them off.

The answer to every problem in the game right now is "Use AoE bolts or flasks or spells on it." It's very frustrating to have to completely change your playstyle for the final 2 floors because you cannot continue to fight the way you were able to for the first 8 floors and expect to survive.

Another example: I made a 1.0.5 melee character - Vampirism, Dual-wield, Burglary, Assassination, Berserker Rage, Swords, Artful Dodger. Guess what killed me? A Brigade of 10th Floor Djinn that chain-cast poison and ??? spells at me until I died from it. I would have survived if I had just bit the bullet and... wait for it... used my last Bolt of Squid on them and then used Move in a Myserious Way right after, finishing off any stragglers with my Brimstone Flasks. Instead, I tried to lure them around a corner and pick them off one at a time with melee attacks, and they still overwhelmed me! A poison DoT finished me off after I used Ninja Vanish but before I could heal back up.

I didn't answer the question of "How do I kill this nasty pack of monsters?" with the Universal Answer of "Fire an AoE uber-Bolt at it!" and I paid for my "wrong answer" with my character's unlife.

 

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect every character to encounter situations that are best handled by abandoning their archetype. That demands resourcefulness from the player, which is one of the hallmarks of a good roguelike. Just look at how many contingency items your average NetHack / Angband character is carrying around just in case. Squidbolts, flasks, etc. are your "bug out" items that you pull out when your normal abilities just aren't up to the task. This is balanced so long as those items are in a strictly limited supply so you can't just spam them in every remotely threatening scenario.

I do think it's unreasonable if an entire floor can't be handled effectively by a given archetype, but it's not clear that's the case.

 

It's pretty clear to me. I've gotten 5 or so melee characters to Floor 10, either in 1.0.3 or 1.0.5, and every single time they would die if I didn't bring along enough crossbow bolts - Squid or otherwise - to kill any monster that wasn't a Far Darrig or Fell Carrot. If I shot every non-Darrig/Carrot to death and used my best bolts on Dredmor/Zoo/Brigades, I would beat the game. There's no grey area here.

 

Something I think might work for a pure melee build is staves + assasination + possibly shield bearer + master at arms + fungal + smithing + dodger/berserker.

fungal gives you all the escape tools you need + access to vamp if you need it. Staves + assasination + shield bearer gives you multiple ways to paralyze to prevent counter attacks. With full armor/skills you get something like (+6+1+2+3+1+1+3) 17 piercing resist and (+11+3+3+7+1+3) 28 armor so a 60 damage hit is only going to do 15 damage to you when you don't block or counter it. Then you can add another 3 armor from suit up to reduce the damage to 12.

I'm not sure what is meant by 'pure' melee. Consumables are part of the game so using things like squid bolts/wands/bombs seems fine to me to handle zoos.

But something worth considering is fungal + staves. As staves give you another paralyze proc + paralyze activated ability and fungal gives you more escape options + vamp.

 

Fungal is just such a pain to deal with though. Way too fiddly for my tastes, even moreso than the other crafting skills. I'd much rather get specific mushrooms from planting spores in specific enemies, than get random mushrooms and have to roulette over and over again to get the effects I actually want.

 

Heh. I managed to kill Dredmor for the first time on DM/PD yesterday. This seems to be the thread for that. Technically, I even did it twice, because the game crashed when I defeated him the first time, and I had to replay the last 10 minutes to see the ending and get the achievement. I did it with Swords, Dual Wield, Master of Arms, Berserker, Assassination, Archaeology and Smithing. Melee was nice, but I think I will go with something more wizardy for my first attempt at GR/PD.

@Melee discussion: If I understand Marak correctly, he's not complaining about having to use the occiasional bolt or potion to deal with an exceptional situation. His problem seems to be that not being able to defeat enemies in melee combat becomes the norm for him on levels 9 and 10, even when his character is heavily focused on melee. Which would annoy me too (and not only because I like playing melee characters).

 

Depending on your equipment and build, as well as the difficulty level, you almost definitely need to do other things besides melee. And I don't see this as an issue, since the game DOES give you the tools to do so. That's my issue with Marak's point of view.

Imho, Marak's issue is less about the strength of melee, and more about the strength of the other methods, even while unskilled. Bolts and other thrown weapons simply rule if you have a method of keeping out of range (burglary, dodge, mathemagics, Psionics to name 4). The truth is that bolts and thrown weapons are plentiful and highly effective. If you have them, you are going to use them. And by the deeper floors, you should have an awesome bow such that even the quality of the bolts will not be that relevant.

Even if you could go toe to toe with any critter, with the appropriate amount of risk, bolts and thrown weapons would STILL be awesome, because they remove so much of the risk.. That's why I claim that the problem is less with melee, and more with the strength of the other available tools, and I totally agree with that part of the argument. In order to be very effective with missile weapons, perhaps one should be required to have the appropriate skill. Then balance everything else accordingly.
You'd still use those weapons to soften up your targets, but they'd be less of a do-everything kind of tactic.

But my main problem with Marak's argument is that instead of nerfing ranged weapons, it sounds too much lik ehe wants to put melee in the same exact position that ranged attacks now have. I may be misinterpreting, but that's what it sounds like to me, and that's why I object to it.

 

Got my first Dredmor win, DM/PD.
Melee build (or maybe Rogue/Melee): Dual-Wield, Axes, Assassination, Archelogy, Burglary, Smithing, and Tinkering.
Outfitted with Albrecht's Helm, Serpentine Plate, and two Krong-enhanced Clockwork Chainaxes. I got the axes at 4th level & rolled through everything until I hit 10th.
Used crossbow on corrupting foes, and, yeah, at 10th level, to wittle down the arch-diggles a bit.
Lord Dredmor was anticlimatic - I piled all the traps I had in one location (probably about 200+ of them ) and BOOM. I never got around to using BoMD .

GR sounds scary. Next build will be Wizard-based.