Advice for my Unarmed Warlock

So I've come back to Dredmor after a long sojourn, and I've been delighting in the expansion packs. After a bit of fiddling around I've come up with a build that I'm quite enjoying: Unarmed / Warlockery / Blood Magic / Berserker / Psionics / Burglary / Archaelogy. The last 3 I find it hard to play without, and Unarmed I just love in general. Warlockery + Blood Magic is turning out great for a battle-mage style of play. I'm level 16 now, on dungeon level 6, and here's a shot of my eyebrowed fellow after he's tanked through a monster zoo:



Well, I say tanked - I did have to chow on a cheese sandwich halfway through. Lots of damage absorption (praise be to Krong!) has meant few monsters have been able to hurt me in a while. Now in spite of my success so far I'm mindful that the furthest I've gotten in the past is level 7 or 8, so I wouldn't mind a bit of non-spoiler build advice, especially relating to the higher Warlock talents. So far my advancement is:

Unarmed 6/6
Berserker 4/5
Psionics 3/6
Blood Magic 1/4
Burglary 2/6
Archaeology 2/5
Warlockery 4/8

The traditional skills are well-documented on the various wikia, but solid info on Warlockery (including what is or isn't buggy) seems hard to come by. As I understand it:

Puissant Touch - supposed to add extra damage to my attack, but it doesn't seem to work for me
Mage's Mana Maille - awesome extra resists for no real charge when I have Blood Magic
Warlock's Challenge - brilliantly useful "Get Over Here!" for those annoying ranged enemies
Essence of Battle - nice stat boosts for zoos at the cost of some booze, but supposed to affect other Warlock skills?
Chronomantic Twist - ??? Freeze time for a short while, but with some drawback effect?
Puissant Veil - ??? Extra counters when dodging? Would certainly be handy, but I read elsewhere that it's bugged.
Arcane Capacitor - ??? Extra damage to attacks, which builds up to a suicidal nuke, which I've read buggily doesn't drop off if you have magic resist?
Manacalypse - ????? No idea, except it drains mana for a big effect supposedly.

I'm also not sure on the usefulness of the higher Psionics, or if the other trees are worth maxing out. Any advice welcome, though as said I'd rather avoid spoilers on what the future floors hold. I'm just looking for clarity of mechanics and general gameplay advice.

Edit: Oh, and I'm on GRPD with all expansions enabled and smaller levels on, in case that matters.
Edit2: And the lutefisk god (praise his glorious gills!) has just given me a tome which infests things with thaumites on hit - this is my new favouritist toy ever!!

 

Puissant Touch doesn't show up in the ticker; you have to count the damage floaters to see it's effect.

Mana Maile -- yep.

Warlock's Challenge -- yep.

Essence of Battle -- has a minor positive effect on almost every Warlock spell. It ups the damage from Puissant Touch (and thus Puissant Veil). It reduces the amount of mana drained by Mana Maille. It adds an extra turn of paralysis to Warlock's Challenge. It adds one more turn of paralyzing-nearby-enemies to Chronomantic Twist. It doesn't actually do anything for Arcane Capacitor, and of course it allows Manacalypse to work at all. Along with the buffs, as long as you can keep casting Warlockery spells each turn, it's easily worth 1 mana per turn to upkeep.

Chronomantic Twist -- currently has an XML issue. Replace your Dungeons of Dredmor/Expansion 2/game/spellDB.xml with the one at the end of this post if you want to fix it. It's in your favor, as it keeps the spell from paralyzing you successfully if you resist it. Tparalyzes (unresistably) everything within a large (template101) area each turn for 3 turns; at the end of which it paralyzes the player for three turns. Basically, if you can kill the bad guys before the spell backlashes, it's pure gold.

Puissant Veil -- currently broken. When fixed, you'll counterattack with a Puissant Touch every time you successfully block.

Arcane Capacitor -- currently has an XML issue. Replace your Dungeons of Dredmor/Expansion 2/game/spellDB.xml with the one at the end of this post if you want to fix it. It should, when activated, start charging a spell that adds huge numbers of small packets of random damage to your melee attack. It's safe on turns 1-3, mildly dangerous on turn 4, highly dangerous on turn 5, and explodes on turn 6. This works well with Chronomantic Twist for taking out CoE mobs and minibosses.

(Minibosses? Did I just let something else from CotW slip? Aw, man.)

Manacalypse -- the Big Nuke of Doom. Does nothing unless you have Essence of Battle up, in which case it basically kills the shit out of everything around you, drains you of all your mana, and eats Essence of Battle. It's the 'oh, crap, I don't have much mana left and I'm still being surrounded by uglies' get-out-of-jail-free card.

 

What a wonderfully helpful reply - thank you very much!

A shame Puissant Veil isn't currently working, but then I guess it would be immensely overpowered if it was... As it is it seems the whole tree is pretty damned overpowered when paired with blood magic and a melee build. Not that I'm complaining

I presume with Chronomantic Twist you can go invis at the end and be fairly safe when paralysed? I'll have to play around with it...

 

Ok, you NEED the next 4 levels of Burglary. Right now. Ninja Vanish and Move in Mysterious Ways are going to be your best ways to avoid death when you start hitting things you haven't prepared for!

You'll need solid fire resists for the fire floor, and then you need to start thinking about Dredmor. To fight him you need very high . Voltaic potions are a good start.

Puissant Touch gives a few points of damage, but I find it most useful for making me "not miss" when it really counts.

 

Puissant Touch never misses? My, now *that* is immensely worth the mana cost.

I'll follow your advice on the burglary line. Been eyeing up those skills anyway, but direct power always tempts me away from utility :/

Another little question - I seem to keep randomly teleporting in battle. Is this the effect of monsters, or some skill I might be running, or an item I might have? So far it hasn't landed me in trouble, but I can foresee terrible incidents coming about...

 

Time Lord's Scarf?

 

It's the gnome cap.

 

Ah.... hmm, well that's a bit of a dilemma, since my gnomish cap rules! I'll have to think hard about this... At the moment I seem to be tanking well enough, and I'm liking the stat bonuses from the hat, but I can easily see myself ending up in a spot of bother from this.

 

The attack itself can miss, but the bonus damage from the spell always hits.

It scales based on your max , by the way.

1 (+ 0.15 ×) normally
(so with your 70 mp in that screenshot, 11 damage)

2 (+ 0.25 ×) when transformed

 

Hmm, that is good. It's hard to tell how much it is from the fly-outs. Unfortunately as a separate hit it seems to get resisted alongside my regular aethereal damage.

I'm now rocking two thaumite tomes. I am the bee-doombringer, mwahaha!

 

Dude. I just noticed the grue reference in your sig. Mad props. Mad, mad, mad props. No time today, but I've downloaded Gruesome, and I am totally going to play it the next time I have free time.

...which might not be until I get back from my road trip in September, but I WILL play it, and when I do, I'll tell everyone why they should do the same.

 

Heh, that was the first roguelike I made, a few years back. I've made better since

 

Uh-oh... So you know I said that teleporting gnome cap would likely get me into trouble...? Well, this just happened...



Um, I'll report back on my progress in a minute or two :/

 

Survived! Downed some potions and herbs whilst invis, then let rip with some AoE, but then the gnomish cap kicked in and took me to a safer location. 1 on 1 nothing could hurt me much (I do love the phrase "The attack has no effect"). Mid-fight I picked up the rogue teleport talent, letting me reposition at will too. With that and the rogue invis I see myself being fairly immune to future screw-ups

And as a reward for my endeavours I got a steel crown with nicer stats than the gnome cap - hurrah!

 

Fortunately very few floor 8 monsters deal exotic damage - I think it's just some asphyxiative from the Moustaches and Potatoes, and some occasional transmuatative from the Gold Golem's Midas proc - so most characters with high AA can tank that floor easily. You're lucky this didn't happen on floor 7, where most monsters deal a solid chunk of armor-ignoring hyperborean damage.

 

Wow, sorry for going wildly off-topic here, but I just added two and two and realized who you are. I love your podcast! I know it's very niche-y and all but, for me, coming home from work and chillin' to a new episode of roguelikeradio beats any major network programming in the same time slot. Regards to the rest of the crew, many thanks and keep it up!

Ahem, carry on.

 

Cheers, Blue - glad you enjoy the show! I'm always amazed that people enjoy our rambles It's mostly very fun to make, and its great to be able to talk about roguelikes with some of the top developers.

Back to Dredmor, and I've found an armour (clockwork something or other) with insane damage absorption but about -50 dodge. Is this worth it? I've been concentrating all game on Block over Dodge, and it would help with the fire demon guys causing a bit of damage on the 9th floor (been a while since anything regularly damaged me in melee :/) But giving away my 35 Dodge seems a bit wrong too.

 

This is a case of simple math. Look at the most damaging enemy on the floor you're on. Which reduces more damage per hit, subtracting your armor from their damage or multiplying their damage by .65?

 

Magnetronic? That stuff is good in situations where you are likely to be hit anyway. Since it can nullify the damage of most attacks.

The heavier the , the heavier the penalty to . Block can be better than dodge in the late game where you are going to be hit even if you have over 100 .