After further review: Melee still sucks

I thought Crit will still go through block, so you are still running some risk at floor 10. For this reason I actually have more success with dual sword since it delivers the kill before too many critical happens, giving me the time to heal up in between.

I made Dual Shield Unarmed Necro, only 77 block but 17 life leech, plus rift to kill zoos. You can probably guess how that went. Just another one of those "only dies in floor 1" build, but you can solve all floor 1 issues with wand lore/coral wand.

Oddly enough both dual staves psionic and dual shield necro got pretty low rating when I put them on wiki.

 

What seems to be the case is that crit is still blocked, but it counters the block. I'd get crit but it'd be for the damage I'd take if I hadn't blocked.

So you crit and block but you only see the message for crit. Anyway, I was taking 5 damage from an arch diggle crit. The highest anything could hit me for on floor 10 was 10 damage or so on a crit.

I think i got up to 22 piercing resist, 37 armor, and 113 block with about 50 crit chance and 35 counter or at least roughly that when all the defensive procs triggered.

I think arch diggles do 64 damage or so? So on a crit they'd still do 64 damage if you block, if I'm correct. So that seems about right if I was taking 5 damage, at least roughly.

 

If you have 37 armor, I am pretty sure that has more to do with how little damage you are taking. You are most likely not even taking normal damage to begin with and the block is only there to cut exotic damage in half, which shouldn't be boost by crit to begin with. If you want to be sure, try getting hit by dredmor, since his normal damage is actually high enough to bypass the armor, you will see more than 2x damage when he crits.

So that is probably why you are seeing the 2x damage. It simply bypass the block that reduce exotic in half, while your armor absorbed all normal damage.

Another interesting but unrelated note, exotic damage is also unaffected by bad weapon penalties.

 

How much does an arch diggle crit hit someone with no armor resistance? I was thinking the normal damage was something like 64.

Oddly enough, I don't think I've ever taken a hit from an arch diggle outside of that character. There simply is no reason to on any build with spells.

 

I suspect I know why. At least the shield one. I've never tried stave psionic melee so can't be sure, but the issues are probably similar. I do sword psionic myself.

The problem with shield/necro is probably how hard it is to survive with early on. And I think some people don't fully abuse their surroundings to survive early on. Abusing reusable traps, runing into brax to split up monster trains and using his items to kill stuff. Just the little things to get you up to level 2. additinally the best way to survive early on is basically as a caster(level 2 --> get nightmare), and they probably play it excpeting it to play like melee right out of the box.

Also did the dual shield necro have uanrmed, too? Cause that will also throw people off thinking they shoudls start out meleing in unarmed from the get go, when they should be using weapons with good secondary damage until later on.

It's a very unintuitive type of character.

 

I listed the specific build order for them, necro is to be maxed first, nightmare gets you to character level 4, pact/rift owns the rest of the game. From then on the amount of defense you get off from smith/unarmed/knightly leap provide more than enough defense to survive. Recently I even swap out magic training for wand lore (specifically ask to remake for a coral wand). Unless you run into multiple floor 2 stuff there's no way you can die on floor 1 with rechargeable coral wand.

Rather or not people follow them is an entirely different matter.

 

Here is the new one I'm trying. Built to do crazy DPS.
Dual wield
Swords
Math
Necro
Vamp
Smith
Bloodmage

It's based ont eh theory that you shouldn't have pact running unless you are going to be fighting, and if you are fighting, more magic power will always be better, regardless of the additional damage taken by necropain. 20 magic power(about what you get for math stacking) will give you like 3 additional damage from necropain every turn for while, but it will make you drain over 12 more life per hit during that time.

And who was saying that dual wield doesn't work? stat bonuses all work for me.

 

That was prior to the current patch

 

Well, I'm going to finally give a dual wield pure melee a try.

I don't know why anyone would ever make a pure dual wield melee without any spells, but whatever.

 

Na it just means you need to keep 2x mark of chthon up, or find an Ankh Amulet/vamp hunter hat. There are no reason why you cannot resist 50 or so magic power worth of necropain with a little luck.

The problem with the build though is very "investment heavy". Everything except vamp need to be max and thats a lot of skill points. It has a certain "self contradiction" to it until you actually max everything.

Because it's "different".

It doesn't feel the same as OMG I got Staple lololol stunlock over and over and over and over and over again...... It only takes so many staple hit hit staple before you get completely sick of the build.

I can tell you that dual swords was a lot more fun for me than dual staves psionic.

 

Ehh so far it's more boring than mathemagics -> curse, step, step, teleport, step, step, step, step, collect gold.

Auto Attack, Auto Attack, repeat, ahh crap a named mob, plink plink plink.

 

Well, do you want to steamroll over the entire dungeon? Melee's not going to do that.

Mathemagics is the new Promethean Magic. Who needs Obvious Fireball when you can kill any monster for 6MP, while recovering all that mana back in a handful of turns and having a spammable precise teleportation spell?

 

Don't need to max smithing
Don't need to max necro, only need pact.
Don't need to max math, only need zenzen, but proabably would feel obligated to get the teleport.
Don't need to max bloodmage, just 2 should be good enough.

I'm prioritize counter attack items and magic power, not necro resist, as it goes back to the theory I shouldn't need any.

 

@jhffmn
Yeah that's true for the first 6 floor, it only start to get interesting when you are at risk.

@moof
Believe me, pact can outlast your combat, and if you are taking necropain in between with no mean of heal, you will find yourself stuck with half life in the next fight. And with mage equip just to keep magic power up, you will find yourself forced to use pact every time, even against 1 or 2 monsters, so you better be resisting the feedback.

Besides Rift is awesome, why would you even consider skipping that?

 

if you really MUST fight a small handful of enemies, you can always cast pact and avoid combat for a couple turns. Usually you don't have to do that though. You can just pull a train of enemies behind you and throw pact on when it's time to dice them up.

Using ebulent would disqualify it as being melee based - IMO.

 

@derakon I kinda like min maxing. So if I build a character I want it to do something awesome and have cool tricks up it's sleeve.

 

Well, I just roflstomped GR/PD with a pure caster (Psionics/Promethian/Astrology/Burglary/Blood Magic/Magic Training/Alchemy), still haven't beaten DM/PD with a pure Melee character. I'm glad some of you are having better luck with melee, but I can't seem to pull it off.

 

I just hit floor 9 on my new melee. I'll try to beat GR/PD with a dual swords build tomorrow. So far, it's a bit scarier. I've found 1 potion of steeling so far...

Build is swords, dual wield, shield bearer, master of arms, vampirism, fungal arts, smithing.

If it gets tough, i'll just roll up a stack of 300 hoglanterns and stealth my way through DL 10.

 

Aren't fungal arts and vampirism "mage skills"?

 

I think Fungal is rogue.

I tend to just call my runs "no spells" so anything that doesn't take mana is fine in my book.