So I'm thinking of trying a build around Rogue Scientist and Clockwork Knight, but since I tend to try new things or die or lose my saved game or get bored after around lev. 7, I don't have any idea what's required of builds deeper into the dungeon. The cornerstone skills I would imagine would be Rogue Scientist, Clockwork Knight, Smithing, Tinkering, and probably Alchemy. From there, I'm looking for advice in how to proceed. I thought about dual wield to take better advantage of all the encrusted fun weapons I could make, paired with paranormal investigation to help out against casters. I considered master of arms and shieldbearer with the mentality that I would just turtle while waiting for fun cooldowns to come back. Magical Law has some interesting possibilities with the cooldown-resetting, but doesn't seem to go well with heavy armor, without which I'd question my survivability. Is a weapon skill (polearms maybe?) advisable? I'm also concerned that, since it's so focused around tradeskills, at deeper levels the whole thing will fall apart. Collaboration is at the heart of all good mad science, so please, colleagues, advise me!
DIY Clockwork Scientist: 4x crafting skills Clockwork Knight Rogue Scientist Perception You may not have as many fancy-shmancy skills as your fellow eyebrowed brethren, but who needs skills when you can have infinite loot, no equipment problems ever, EYE LASERS, and tons of consumables. Your clockwork knight skills, rogue scientist skills, and wands will do absolute tons of damage to whoever you're facing. My advice is to play this build like a gish (a warrior who uses spell effects to up his melee damage with them.) Primary stuff you'll be wanting to do here is up your tinkering and perception like a madman. Max those out first. Throw in a point or two into CK or RS if you're having survival issues along the way. My advice is to get 3 in all crafting skills as soon as possible after that, excepting Tinkering which you should have maxed out already. Don't rely on heavy armor unless you really are having survivability issues. An armored mage's robe is stupid good for the early levels of the game since your magic power and other related stats won't go down the toilet because you're using heavy armor. Upgrade to armored archmage after that (my preference actually since the x-pack came out was either enchanted encrusted AA robe or EE cloak of Sagan. If you must use shields see if you can luck out on getting an enchanted orb with some block and AA bonuses. Otherwise an enchanted artifact invisible shield is a good start if you can find it. Upgrade this to either a Shield of Caketown or an Ensigiled Shield, both of which only give a magic power malus of -3. I think Caketown actually debuffs this to -4, but this is only 1-2 points of damage on your attacks. Since your Tinkering is maxed out you'll want to make a flashy staff of Godewijn ASAP. It's only mid-class but procs blinding flash, which can stun enemies if you're unfortunate enough to face more than a few at once. The only boots you'll ever need are Rocket boots. Parachute pants (an artifact version if you get lucky enough) are your best legwear choice. Then continue maxing your skills as desired from this stage though I would suggest Smithing to upgrade your gear even better (lots of nice weapons), making a clockwork rail-launcher from your maxed tinkering, etc. Save a couple of mirror shields for magic reflection, that's a must for this build. Above all: do not expect very fast results. This build takes some time to get off the ground and does not support stupid mistakes. my current character however, is a testament to how overpowered this build can get. You never have to worry about corruption either if you're not averse to making your own equipment from scratch occasionally. Though in theory tinkering provides more ranged options for such things anyway, as does Wandcrafting. Your consumables are your crutch in the beginning levels. Do well to remember that.
Warlock, why avoid heavy armor? Is it for wands, potion effects, something else? I thought that if I wasn't using spells, then it wouldn't matter if my magic power was in the toilet, but I don't know what all magic power affects.
It affects most spell effects too, including wands. This makes a lot of your wands a bit more powerful. Some wands scale exclusively off of magic power and not just wandcrafting levels (like, IIRC, the Rock wand, and it scales decently too.) It also affects a lot of your on-hit effects, like Godewijn staff's blinding flash proc (which if I'm lucky on my current character at present can do 15-20 damage if it procs now with stun chance.) And your Squid bolts and mass destruction bolts suddenly became stronger. As does your Tentacular wand, but only because it doesn't scale directly with wandcrafting. If you max out wandcrafting though, and have a lot of magic power, a Naarwhaand can do enough damage to rival even Dredmor's version of the fulminaric bolt. Some thrown weapons also scale well to magic power, like brimstone flasks and their even better counterpart, brimstone cloudburster mines (why can't we craft those?) and Thaumite nest traps kind of become funny too with ~40-50 magic power leave alone 100+. Also, just as a point for you to know - this build only became viable because of this expansion. If you're patient enough to go through all the wizardland codes you get (or have available as a result of our code sheet.)
Would you have any suggestions for a clockwork/scientist build that's more melee oriented without wandcraft? I tend not to like using things with charges - I conserve too much and get myself killed in the process. Or is a melee clockwork scientist not viable?
If you want to go the melee route, you'll have slightly limited options but here's an alternate - chuck out wandcrafting for Magical law and keep the rest of the build the way it is. You will be using the tree for its debuffs and the Irrefutable argument - You just won't do as much damage as a pure mage with the skills. Otherwise if you want to go more tanky hit up Master of Arms or Shield Bearer.
I suppose I'm just having a hard time imagining how to play a non-melee rogue scientist. What constitutes the primary attacks? Crossbow? Wand? A combination? Magical Law sounds like a ton of fun with all the powerful cooldowns RS has, but would alchemy be enough to fuel its mana? Would it also be a build that catered towards light armor? I certainly don't mind farming the wizardland portals, on my last guy I ran about ten or twelve off the bat, then did a constant 5-6 per level as I progressed, sometimes more. However, as much as I love the brutal power of gas canisters and steam fists and the various knockback/ae abilities of CK and RS, I just don't see what their general day-to-day fighting style should be like when all my abilities are either long cooldowns or crafting skills. I'm not 100% attached to melee, but with all that smithing and tinkering it seems a shame not to make some of the nifty clockwork armor. Maybe a clockwork scientist crossbow strategy focusing on knockbacks? CK, RS, 3 crafts, perception, and archery? How much of a difference does archery make? Hell, at this point I'm not even totally sold on the CK... it seems like more of a melee skillset, and if I'm not wearing heavy armor and jumping on things, then maybe that should be the one to drop. Ah, I dunno! I suppose I just have to go play more.
I'm playing with the idea of combining rogue scientist, clockwork knight, and archery. Tinkering provides an unlimited supply of bolts and new crossbows, rogue scientist and clockwork knight provide knockbacks, clockwork provides escape tools, alchemy keeps me healed, and there's encrusting everywhere. Since there's no wand use, I can just use clockwork armor to my heart's content and not worry about my puny intellect. Perception would, of course, fuel the madness. That's at least one idea that'd let me be all steampunky, anyways. However, I don't know how archery scales at endgame. Will this kind of build fall far short of the wandcrafting one, or the magic law one? If it has fatal, or even significant, flaws that will hold it back, I'll just give the ones you recommend a try, and abandon my lovely imperial clockwork armor ideas.
Archery sucks. You can get the on-hit effects the tree gives you via equipment procs/encrusting. All it adds is some extra bolt recovery, which you don't even need when you max out tinkering, CK, and RS. This nets you some ~16-17 ingeniously scythed anything bolts from any material and a good amount of other types of bolts too if you decide to make them. edit: whoops. accidental double post deleted.
Archery's most prominent bonus is that it allows you to recover more bolts than you would normally do (as its activated abilities are kind of "meh" since they just add some damage and that's it), but most of the end-game bolts can't be recovered either way.
Would the magical law build be one that favors light armor as well, or would it be a build that could work with heavy armor? I don't necessarily need to melee, I just want some survivability and don't want to have to worry about wand charges constantly.
Magical Law is mostly a utility tree - only Polymorphic Injunction actually scales to Magic Power. Gag Order scales to Savvy, and nothing else deals damage. I wouldn't worry about MP here. Paranormal Investigator would be pretty useful here. Rational Explanation shuts down those obnoxious aetherial missiles, Xenobiology makes Haematic Phylacteries out of Aqua Vitaes, and Alien Autopsy gets you quick recipes. I also really like Perception in this sort of build, to help fuel more early-game steel. That said, though, if you want to be a serious heavy-armor bruiser, I wouldn't overload your build with rogue skills. Block chance scales off Burl and Stubbornness, so rogues get block at half the rate of warriors. Plus a character in full Clockwork gear loses about 12 block compared to a warrior kitted out in full Serpentine armor. (Which is a fair trade, IMO, since you get + 11 Melee Power and a bunch of nice resists, but it can still leave you block-lacking.) If you want to be able to go toe-to-toe with your enemies, I'd grab Shield Bearer. It works even if you're not using a shield, has a passive +20 block, and gives you yet another knockback skill (which never hurts). Otherwise, if you want to focus on softening up your enemies with Alchemical Toxin Cannisters and thrown weapons/bolts before one-shotting them when they get to you, I would take a look at Dual Weild. It helps you kill your enemies before they can get a hit in and maximizes your damage bonuses from awesome encrusted clockwork weapons, plus 15 CA never hurt anyone, but you do lose even more defenses by foregoing a shield. ((P.S. I really don't like combining weapons skills with tinkering. There's some really nice clockwork weapons, but which recipe you find first is a bit of a crapshoot. Tying yourself down to, say, maces leaves you stuck if you never find the recipe for the Mace of Windu.))
It looks like the way the build is shaping up, my main strategy is softening things up with thrown weapons and crafted bolts, knocking them back when they get close, and just using melee to deal with insignificant things to conserve ammunition. Of course, I don't have any Magical Law yet - I imagine its capstone skill will really determine whether or not I should have gone with the wand crafting/light armor route. There are just a lot of skills and stats I'm not familiar with yet, so it's a learning process. I am, of course, playing permadeath going rogue.
Oh, another question (and I appreciate all the help) - how well do rogue scientist and crossbow attacks scale later in the game, compared to, say, wands? If wands scale from magic power, but bolt attacks and steam fists and poison canisters don't have a similar base ability to scale from, will they fall significantly behind in damage? Will this build (I can't resist) run out of steam deeper in?
