Been playing for a bit and while I'm nowhere near an expert, I've seen a few things mentioned here and there on the forums so I figured I'd try to help out with some quick tips! - If you use the mouse to move, your character will never willingly walk into a trap (even ones you can't see when you click). Since (barring curses) you will never have a trap view of less than one tile away, this means that there is never any reason for you to ever walk into a trap, even on accident. My last character had absolutely no skill with traps and when he finally died on Floor 7, I had yet to trigger a single one. - I suspect this is a glitch, but if you have a skill that causes knockback, you can use it to knockback obstacles (statues, candle holders, etc.) and traps. This will probably be fixed in the future, though, so I try not to use it too much. Alternatively (and this is probably intended behavior and wont be patched) you can summon your... Uh, summons directly on to traps to trigger them. - Vampirism seems like a largely melee skill, but it is still very useful to Mages. For starters, the health drain scales with your Magic Power stat. Even better, you can attack your own summons (don't worry, they will never become unfriendly and will not fight back even if they proc a Counter) to drain health. Finally, while Vampires cannot eat normal food, they can still eat mushrooms as well as drink potions and booze. - Having trouble getting started with a Mage build? The first skill of the Psionics tree, "Narcosomatic Induction", is amazing, because it is a low-MP, no cooldown, ranged sleep attack. Creative use of pre-placed traps, kiting, and using this sleep to only fight one enemy at a time is very helpful, and the skill never stops being useful. Psionics is an amazing skillset in general. Viking Wizardry's first skill is also very useful for surviving the first floor, though the mana cost is much higher. - You can swap places with your summon by walking into the same square as it with the keyboard. Clicking the square it is in will make you attack it instead, so be careful! - You can walk over zorkmids to pick them up, but you can also click on them from a square away like items, which is handy for snatching gold that's on a trap, or in a tile with a nasty effect (like fire). - There seems to be no penalty for staying on a floor for a while aside from the monsters respawning, which is actually a good thing. If you're feeling nervous, it's perfectly possible to stay on a higher level and grind out that next level on respawning enemies before heading down into the more dangerous zones. If your build uses vampirism or is heavy on mp regeneration you can pretty much do this indefinitely, and later floors wont scale to you. - You don't have to fire at enemies in only straight lines of cardinal directions! Line of sight still matters for most spells and anything that's a projectile will hit the first thing it comes in contact with (including friendly summons and obstacles), but you they don't have to be squarely above, below, left, or right of you. This goes for spells, thrown weapons, and bolts. - You can close doors by clicking on them again. This is handy if a room leads to a dead-end that you've already looted, because if monsters respawn in that room, they will stay there instead of wandering into you at an inconvenient time (enemies cannot open doors). - You still can't see shrines on the map (yet, hopefully), but if you've revealed it once, you'll be able to see it even when you don't have line-of-sight to the room (unlike items, enemies, and obstacles). Kind of handy for running back through a level to find a shrine again. - The "Knightly Leap" skill (second skill in the Artful Dodging tree) is very useful for any kind of character. It takes only one turn like moving would, but moves you multiple tiles at once. The cooldown is short and it has no MP cost, so it's an extremely handy way to put distance between yourself and a (probably item-corrupting) foe. It also allows you to reach items surrounded by water and lets you escape when you're surrounded. If you don't know what to pick for your last skill, Knightly Leap means that Artful Dodger is never a bad choice. - Even if you are a pure melee character, hang on to the best crossbow you can find and a few stacks of high-star bolts so you can finish off item-corrupting enemies from a distance. - The "class levels" shown in your character sheet are more than just pretty and a summary of your character, you gain stats each level based on what "type" of skill you put a point into that level. There's a section of the wiki on this if you want to know exactly what stats each class gives you. - You can dual wield shields, even without Dual Wielding or Shield skills. This is handy for Mages who can sometimes get better bonuses from Orbs than Staves, or for extra defense on Unarmed-melee or Bows/Throwing characters. For the record, attacking with two shields uses your Unarmed skills if you have them, but can ALSO apply the Dual Wielding tree skills (though this will probably be patched out). - Boss monsters and regiments for Inconsequentia's quests do not spawn until you accept the quest. If you're not confident about your abilities or your situation is quite dire, don't talk to her statue until you are ready and less worried about yet another wandering boss. Some of this may be obvious, but who knows. Maybe together we can lower DoD mortality rates!
"- If you use the mouse to move, your character will never willingly walk into a trap (even ones you can't see when you click). Since (barring curses) you will never have a trap view of less than one tile away, this means that there is never any reason for you to ever walk into a trap, even on accident..." That seems not working as intended.
Really? Hm. Regardless I pretty much always move one-tile at a time, and even if you accidentally click a trap you can see the game just prompts you to try and disarm it.
If you move with WASD or with the arrows,it won't ask you that. Mouse Clicking on a tile should have the same effect, otherwise the two movement methods are inconsistent and moving with the mouse gives an unfair advantage. If you have no vision of the trap before giving the command then it should not ask you. Nice tips btw, sorry for steering the subject a notch xD.
Yeah, well that's why I brought it up. People keep mentioning that they walked into traps, and yet if you use mouse movement it's basically impossible to, so I figured they didn't know. I hadn't actually considered that it was unintended, but you're probably right. Thanks!
How exactly does the trap vision work? Someone else in another thread remarked that every character has a vision of 1. Does that mean when you are right next to the trap you automatically see it? Or that you now have a chance to see it? With the mouse movement, you get to move multiple squares at once. So if you click a square that doesn't look trapped, the game tries to move you onto it. When you get close, the trap becomes visible, so the game instead asks if you want to disarm it. When you use the keyboard to move, you can only move 1 square at a time. So if you can always see traps from 1 square away, it shouldn't be an issue if you are watching for traps. Still, maybe it would be better to have the game ask if you want to disarm the trap when you try to move onto it with the keyboard, IF you have detected the trap's presence. I haven't played the game long enough to know exactly how trap detection works, so any enlightenment is appreciated.
Generally great tips, however I would like to note that there is a penalty for staying on the same floor. The respawn timer spawns monsters on ALL LEVELS so the longer you spend time on a floor the more monsters will be in rooms at later levels.
Are you sure that is true, Incendax? I did a stealth/speed run and all the floors had crazy amounts of monsters even though I was only always looking for the stairs down.
- Being able to knock back objects is the intended use of the skill. The devs have talked about how it used to work on stairs and doors, and THOSE they had to fix. But the ability to kick just about everything else was left on purpose. Kick away. - Has anyone actually confirmed that vampirism drain scales with magic power? Every test I've done has failed to bear that out. - If you want a 1-point-wonder magic skill, use Astrology. Its first buff has no ongoing mana drain, is relatively cheap to cast, adds an AoE damage/stun when you're struck, adds unblockable damage to your attack, lets you see two more spaces, and increases your stats (sagacity, I think). Yes, that's all one spell. - Short version of the "class level" stat increases: if you put a point into a warrior skill, you get six attribute points; rogue gets eight, mage gets twelve. It's probably a bug.
@AverageJoe - As far as I can tell, you've basically got it. You start with a trap vision of 1 (or maybe it's 0, but acts as 1? Can't remember), which means you can see traps one tile away (right next to you). It seems that every point of trap vision after that lets you see traps from an additional tile away. As far as I can tell, this is a 100% chance as long as you are in "range". My last character was a brute with no trap skills whatsoever and I always noticed every trap. @Incendax - Really? I hadn't noticed. Well, more meat for the exp grinder if that's true. > @mwoody - Oh, hadn't read the knockback thing, that's cool! I haven't done strict number crunching, but I'm noticing it on my current build. My last character was pure melee with Vampirism, and at level 14 was leeching less than my level 6 pure mage is right now. I think. The official wiki agrees, and most of the information on that comes from the devs or people crawling the code/configs. Also according to the wiki, the stat spread is, I though, 8-Warriors, 9-Rogues, 10-Mages. I agree that it's pretty unbalanced, though, and probably needs to be looked at. I'll have to heavily consider Astrology for my next character!
@Rikkard I'm not positive, but if you sit in level 1 and spam the space bar for about ten thousand turns then go down to level 2 and open a door there will be about 25 monsters behind it. And the next door. And the next door. And the next floor. And the next floor.
Didn't read the whole forum, maybe someone mentioned before me: If you lack gear, just kite mobs to a shop, pick up items, and murder your enemies with them. Once you are done with the bloodbath, just place back the items, and braxx will let you go, like nothing happened.
@Incendax I didn't do that though. I have gone down as fast as I possibly could and still found 8 monsters in every direction.
@Rikkard I first noticed it happening after I tried to play a character using Necronomiconomics as his only source of offense. I kept rolling and rolling Wrong Translation to try and get some Necrotic Resistance. Boy was I surprised to see the masses of enemies that awaited me! I've tried to repeat the process because I like experimenting and the results seem about the same each time I do it.
@Incendax - Interesting, I'll have to test that. I only questioned it because I've been playing my first full-mage that had any success, and I was on the first floor for ages, grinding up to level 6 and tracking down some wayward Inconsequentia quest mobs before even thinking of going to floor 2, and it seems to have about the normal amount of enemies. Maybe it's a "trigger" that happens only after you wait an EXTREMELY long time?
Great points in OP and others! I've already discovered these myself. Especially helpful was the 'respawn enemies to level up' trick. -Even if you dont use the crossbow, having in your characters equip slot will give you whatever stat bonuses the crossbow has. -Wait until you have gear with many star ratings before you start to use anvils of krong. Youll be wasting it on gear you end up replacing. Normal gear will definitly get you through the first 3 levels, and as mentioned once ur able to kill first and second floor enemies with one hit its better to grind until u have gained the skills most key to your survivability and then progresss. On the point about enemy respawn - mass enemy build up will only occur on the level/floor you are currently on. I know this because I rapid fire space bar all the time (thank you macro software) to let enemies build up and also fly through archaeology cooldowns. If it were true that enemies build up on every floor every single tile of each floor would be packed by now.
@Waitwhat I think there is a hard cap on the number of enemies. When I build a powerful melee character and fly through the levels I usually only run into about 6-8 enemies in a room unless it is a Zoo. When I sit around fiddling with Archaeology or Fungal Arts for thousands of turns I run into about 20-25 enemies per room.
