Beating the lich in melee

Yep. I made a Suggestions thread for new Warrior skill trees to help alleviate Sniktch's (very apt) points. Any feedback would be appreciated.

 

Concussive Bombs are about as powerful as Telekinetic Shove - stun, knockback, fair damage, and a cap-skill Tinker gets them from black powder at a 2 to 6 ratio. There's also Thermite and the various grenades, which pack some serious oomph(IIRC, the Frag Grenade is about on-par with Rockburst, except AoE) - thing is, their power isn't based in their actual per-hit damage, it's in their AoE plus special effects that they shine. ALL of the bomb weapons at least ignite enemies; Iron and Concussive have Knockback and Stun, Thermite leaves a burn patch, Frag and Hand grenade cause Bleeding IIRC, etc.

The other things I think you're missing are that 13 bolts per ingot is double what a Smith gets for the "strongest" throwing weapon, the Nzappa Zapp - 6 per ingot at max skill. And an Nzappa Zapp does 10 slashing, 10 piercing, +Melee Power damage - and CANNOT ever benefit from artifacting on themselves - not sure if any damage buffs on armor or the like will apply, but as throwing a weapon seems to be a "physical spell" for the game's purposes, I'd think it's much like the melee procs - not changed by anything else. Clockwork Bolt-Thrower plus Cruelly barbed Steel Bolts is 28 damage, almost all Piercing(thus punches through most critter resists) plus any artifact bonuses, and as it has an equip slot check, I know for sure ALL damage buffs work on it, save for proc effects on the crossbow itself, which is as many have noted bugged right now. So on base, "Best" Thrown by a Warrior specialist vs. "Best" shot by a Tinker, the Tinker wins - the Tinker's quantity maps out to about an extra 150% base damage vs. a target with neither Armor Absorb or Piercing Resist. But most critters have at least SOME AA...and minimal Piercing Resist. And while the bombs are not UBAR AoE damage on par with Squids or BoMDs...they are still spammable AoE, which is something no "pure" warrior has or can get aside *drumroll* stockpiling found/bought bolts and thrown weapons.

Tinker gets the same 2 ingots per smelt, 7 more trap skill, trap sight, the ability to make traps if the collected ones get sold or just run out, the ability to make AoE effect thrown weapons, several decent/acceptable melee weapons, a fair amulet, decent rings - also, anyone who JUST relies on Cruelly Barbeds isn't playing to the strengths of Tinkering; Fire Bolts are EASY to make in stacks of 10 and do solid up-front damage and minor DoT(1 Iron ingot, 1 Brimstone, 1 Copper Tubing = 10 Fire Bolts). Pump 3 into a named boss, watch him melt. Acid and Poison bolts are just as easy to make depending on bottle drops - heck, add Alchemy and have stacks of 50+ with minimal issue, plus a use for all that plastic. While Tinkering is not on-par with Alchemy for "all in one plus a bag of gold for free", it's still MILES above Smithing in terms of adding capability. And to be honest, "getting caught in your own radius" is NEVER an issue for a Rogue who was smart and didn't open the zoo door until at least one of MiMW or Ninja Vanish had cooled down - because NO Rogue is gonna go running without Burglary.

But back on topic...a way to make Dredmore more fair for melee characters is gonna be hard to find, since a double-staff Necro can dish out just as much melee pain as your average warrior, while being just as well defended; part of the reason for that is the way Magic Power builds compared to Melee Power. I've never seen my personal Melee Power pop much over 15 unless I'm stacking berzerk or artifact buffs like crazy; Sagacity/2 scales up a LOT faster than (Burliness-5)/3. A mage can start with Magic Power right on the verge of double-digits (full Sagacity build gives 7, +1 for Magic Training, +1 for Coat Of Tweed and the bonus Sagacity from Alchemy = 9; first levelup will immediately push you to 10, 11 if you pick Alchemy, 12 if you pick Mage Training), a Warrior cannot in any way get over 3 Melee Power at start, and when levelling anything but Smithing it takes 2 levelups for 1 Melee Power. And as we all know...Magic Power is the important trait to so much it's not funny, especially Vampirism, Pact, and Greedies, all of which add double-digit melee damage with good Magic Power....or a mighty 3 if tanked by armor.

Also, Marak: RE Walk It Off, do you mean the level-up bonus, or the proc? The proc already gives a +10 Regen Rate - but it only lasts 5 turns, and on Going Rogue with no other buffs, that only brings you to 1 HP per 3 turns. As a level-up bonus, +5 might be a bit extreme overall - for Dwarven, which SHOULD be the median point, that would push your average character to a regen rate of 1/4 turns, permanently. Yeah, on Going Rogue it'd bring health regen back to where Mana regen STARTS...but that wouldn't be QUITE enough to make it vaulable.

 

Yeah, I didn't look up the specific numbers for Walk It Off, and I was getting the Level Up and On Proc numbers mixed up in my head. But really, it doesn't last long enough to matter what the exact stats are. It's like Berserker Rage in that regard: you like to see the little Icon(s) pop up, but by the time you engage the next monster, it's long gone. Whoops. Not so helpful, is it? The point is, it could use some love, perhaps by lowering some of the on-proc stat gains in favor of a longer duration (12+ turns?) or a higher chance to activate... or both. I mean really, you get 1 Health per turn, but only while things are smacking you in the face. So you gain 1 Health/turn while losing a lot more than that from the blow(s) you're taking, and then you get, like, 2 Health back after the battle but before it wears off. These are poor numbers at low levels and just laughable once your Eyebrows is Level 12+ and his health pool is creeping up over 75.

Personally, I like the idea of adding another point in Berserking - probably at the end, your 3rd point in the tree - that would let you leech some health per kill. Say 1 + Melee Power/5 or somesuch, so that you could get something roughly equivalent to maxed-out Blood Magic by the time your character is Level 18 or so.

Also, why does Drinker of the Dead (Vampirism 2nd point) not scale? Would something like 4 + (Dungeon Floor)/2 be so broken? 9 Health back from an Arch Diggle or a Djinn Fizz doesn't sound too horribly broken to me. Even 4 + (Dungeon Floor)/3 would be better than what you get now, which is "you're wasting your time with this once your max health exceeds 60".

At any rate, all these threads boil down to a few basic "problems", which I hope they can work out something for:

1) Bolts, of Squid in particular, and AoE thrown items like Noxious Brimstone Flasks, deal the same damage regardless of who is throwing/shooting them. They do too much damage to begin with considering the huge amount of real estate they cover, and ANY build can use them with equal effectiveness. While this sounds like it would be a good idea - gives any character an "oh shit!" button - what really ends up happening is that you hoard them for Zoos and abusing Dredmor's AI to force them to eat several damage-over-time effects at once (Brimstone Flask, Poison Flasks/Bolts, Acid Flasks/Bolts, Bolt of Squid, Clockwork Drill Bolts, any lingering Burning effect, etc.) so that he dies while you use a single Invisibility consumable/spell to avoid being attacked at all and he simply dies before you re-appear. If he somehow survives, rinse and repeat.
The low down? Any time you get into a fight you consider less than trivial, the correct answer is NOT to wade into Melee, but to get some range and pelt the problem with AoE Spells/Bolts/Flasks/Whatever until you don't have a problem any more. Mages are never penalized for using their spells effectively; Melee are continuously punished for engaging in melee combat, especially if there are Caster Mobs present.
My fix? Make all AoE Bolts and Flasks deal far, far less damage if you didn't take the Crossbow skill (Bolts) or the Thrown Weapons skill (Flasks). Viola, you just made 2 currently worthless Skill trees worth a damn for Warriors and Rogues and made it so that pure Mages have to rely on their Spells and not Crossbow Bolts and thrown AoE stuff to win.

2) Mages don't take damage unless they are careless or encounter a pack of casters with no Pet out. Melee has to constantly absorb damage from both melee and ranged monsters. Clearing a Zoo with a Mage typically involves spamming their best AoE or DoT until they win. This process - assuming booze and consumables - takes about 5 minutes. Melee, on the other hand, need to find a solid chokepoint and take damage from melee attacks and from spells cast by the monsters creeping towards the character. They then smack all 50-100 Zoo monsters down, one at a time. Assuming food and consumables, this takes about 45 minutes. The only way for Melee characters to "pull a Mage" and clear a Zoo in 5 minutes is to expand 2-6 powerful AoE consumables, which - unlike mana - are not reliably replaceable. Bit of a disparity there.
My fix? How about some Archer enemies that deal some piercing damage - Melee with any armor at all would shrug their attacks off, but a pure Mage would need to focus them down because they typically have little to no piercing resist. While the Mage is worried about the Archers, the melee monsters are creeping ever closer. Mages might actually take damage once in a while, although Pets would still be too good for the purposes of tanking, as the Mage would only have to worry about the Archers while the Pet keeps any and all melee monsters 100% occupied. Oh well, it'd be something.

3) Melee special/active abilities should be every bit as powerful as spells are, considering the considerable point investment they require to unlock. Instead, they do set damage and don't scale with anything and therefore NEVER become stronger. On top of that, they can never be spammed (like spells can) because they ALL have cooldowns.
The fix? Have active abilities scale somehow. Why can't my Thilbault's or Axenado deal 50+ damage at Character Level 18+ to 3-4 monsters at once? Spells can certainly deal that kind of damage late-game.

4) Healing from sources found within the Dungeon and not your Skill Trees don't keep up with the damage you take, and your health pool at the end of the game. The 60-health-over-60(!)-turns Deep Omelettes are very rare, cannot be crafted reliably past Floor 3, and still only restore about half your health pool. Health Potions restore about 30 Health and you have a max of 120+ Health by the time you reach Dredmor. Arch Diggles or Lord Dredmor or a pack of Djinn Fizz - all can deal a hundred damage to you in 2-3 turns - that's almost your whole health pool. Then, if you stop to heal - at 1 HP/turn from food or 30 HP/turn from Potions - they will kill you anyway, easily outpacing the in-combat healing you have available to you. If only you were a Mage, you could have just killed them all with 2-3 AoE/DoT spells and taken maybe 20 or 30 damage.
The fix? Adding new ways of healing in the Master of Arms, Berserking, or Shield Bearer skill trees (see above and previous posts) would be ways to help Melee keep up on the lower Floors. Adding some stronger Food that restores more than 16 Health, or more than 1 Health/turn, and that typically only spawns on Floor 7-10, would also be helpful. How about better and more numerous Sandwiches made in the Ingot Press? All options.

Ugh, you got me rambling again. Oh well, I'm bored and it's fun.

 

Why has no one suggested the most obvious solution to health regen: bring the base health regen on GR up to 8. Why is it so low to begin with?

 

True, but at 1 HP/turn you can reasonably expect to start most fights at mid to high HP without having to use consumables to do it.

 

A few comments / corrections. No insult intended.

1) Area-of-effect consumables (squidbolts, brimstone flasks, etc.) do scale...with magic power. A mage can kill half a zoo with a single squidbolt, while the warrior will get 5-10 kills. Personally I'd say the solution here is to peg the damage from these things to a fixed amount. After all, how good you are with shooting bolts has no effect on how powerful of an eldritch abomination is summoned when the squid on the end explodes.

2) Monsters with ranged attacks will never target your pet with them. Even if they're in melee with the pet at the time, if they decide to use a ranged attack it'll be targeted at you instead. Not that mages need pets to steamroll everything anyway.

3) Health potions restore a flat 20HP every time. It's generally-accepted wisdom around here that you need some kind of extra healing in addition to food / vampirism. None of the options on offer currently are very warrior-like -- psionics is a spell tree, alchemy is a mage-oriented crafting skill (and is absurdly overpowered specifically for its nigh-infinite healing potions / invisibility potions), and wand lore healing is not very good (and the other wands all scale with...your magic power!)

Essence: health regen is so low in GR because the devs don't want you to be recovering health by standing around doing nothing. They allow it in the lesser difficulty levels since it'd be too hard otherwise, but their solution in GR was to just nuke the rate to "very slow" so people wouldn't bother. And I can't say I disagree with them. IMO the right approach here is twofold:

1) Nuke base mana regen rate. It's way too easy to get to 1MP per 2-3 turns right now as a mage, at which point mana just stops being any kind of going concern. Mages are much harder to play without bottomless mana pools, and this would help a lot.
2) As others have suggested, replace the "boost your health regen rate for X turns" procs to "get minor regeneration for X turns".

Even then, regen of any type probably won't really hold up in the face of late-game melee. But it'd be a step in the right direction.

 

1) Didn't realize that, but it (sorta) makes sense, since pretty much every damn thing in the game that isn't a direct Melee attack scales with Magic Power. Either way, my fix (must have Weapon skill or damage = shit) would still work.

2) Pets still keep ALL Melee mobs at bay while your Mage picks off the spellcasting (or proposed Archer) mobs off in relative safety.

3) Is it only 20? I thought it was 24-30. Well, that makes them even more worthless when you need them most. And yeah, with 2 Orbs it is far, far, far too easy to reach 1 MP/turn or 1 MP/2 turns, even on Going Rogue. And, like you said, once you reach that point you might as well just inscribe "Defeated Lord Dredmor!" on the character's "tombstone".

That idea of things giving the Minor Regeneration buff out from more than Lively Regeneration Potions is intruiging. You could have that as the final Berserker skill instead of the X health/kill I suggested. It could replace or supplement Walk It Off from Master of Arms. It could replace "Well Fed" when consuming "end game" food(s). Lots of possibilities there; I like.

 

If the whole "archer/rogue" archetype deal with seriously limited amount of ammunition, then we don't have "2 of 3 types have it easy".

We just have the "mage is easy late game due to positioning advantage and infinite long range". Which I guess everyone who made a mage with math probably know already. You can kill mana regen if you want. Booze + Blood Mage is more than enough to keep most mages going late game.

I see mages as too easy late game, but I don't see warrior being too weak except against those super out of dungeon named (which should be fixed at 1.07) and dredmor himself. All normal monsters can be handled with melee reasonably.

That saids, yes health regen is an useless stat for GR.

 

Melee is viable for everything except Named monsters and Lord Dredmor, mostly because of their ridiculous damage, counter, critical and block. I also agree that the Warrior trees need more health regen skills.

Dealing with the first issue: Warriors do not have the 'single target takedown' ability that the other classes have:

• Wizards can blow through their entire mana pool on a single enemy if needed
• Rogues can use special bolts and expend various escape abilities to prolong the fight
• Warriors have a couple of token AOE skills but otherwise treat big baddies the same as every other monster - walk up and slap it until it dies

To fix this I'd like additional 'single target takedown' skills added to the Warrior trees. For example, each Weapon tree could have a thematic skill:

• Swords: Fencing Stance - Massive increase to Counter for 10 turns.
• Axes: Wood Chop Chop - Guaranteed critical hit.
• Maces: Hammer Time - Guaranteed knockback for the next 5 turns.
• Staves: Way of the Stick - Guaranteed paralysis.

Maybe Berserker Fury could be given an active skill that involves beating your chest (losing health) to gain a buff. Once the 'magic power' factor is fixed all the AOE skills will be useful too as they can factor off 'melee power'.

 

Even if there was a new active ability in each of the weapon trees that would cause a decently powerful Bleed effect, coupled with a short Stun or Knockback, with a suitably long cooldown, that would at least give you Mage/Rogue-like tools for dealing with Uber-melee mobs: put a DoT on them and keep them away from you a bit.

 

Actually, the "Lively Regen comes from more than just consumables" idea could be quite excellent - I was thinking on my work shift about a potentially crazy idea. Berzerker right now, as noted, gives good "in-fight" bonuses, but doesn't last long. And all three levels stack.....so do this: all 3 procs also apply a 1/turn healing effect. In theory, this allows for a max healing in battle of up to 9 HP/turn if all 3 have stacked 3 times; very possibly broken. But! You'd only GET that size of a heal when dealing with a TON of incoming and outgoing at once - zoos, basically. Wherein that 9 HP would be much like Vampirism - not a "heal", just extra damage mitigation.

And scarily enough...I would have to actually somewhat naysay the idea of a "blood mage for health" skill, unless it was SPECIFICALLY tied to Melee Power/Burliness - otherwise, it becomes "just another mage supporter" skill.

Also, I fluffed the Nzappa Zapp's damage - teach me to post tired; it's actually 5 piercing, 5 slashing. Which, I'm sorry to say, STW, makes archery MILES better than chucking. A "full" warrior, at absolute max level, will have: 6+5+5+5+3+3+3 = 30 levels of Warrior(weapon, Smithing, Shield Bearer, MoA, Throwing, berzerker, Deadshot - the maximum possible number of Warrior levels without duplicative/counter-productive skills). At 2 Burl per level, that's 60, plus a "bonus" 5 from Smithing, for 65. Minus 5 equals 60, divide by 3 gives 20 Melee Power. So an Nzappa Zapp - the best "reliably available" thrown weapon - thrown by an absolute max-level warrior does 5 Piercing, 5 Slashing, +20 Melee Power damage(not sure what its type is, but I'm guessing it's Slashing or Bashing, not Piercing) - only 2 more than a Rogue with a Clockwork Bolt-Thrower and Cruelly Barbed Steel Bolts, except the Clockwork Bolt-Thrower can be artifacted, when they fix the bug it will be able to fire procs, you get twice as many shots per craft, and you don't have to be at the max level cap of your character to get the max damage. Overall, Archery has it far better than Throwing; yes, I could see a "pure" archer having issues early on due to limited ammo, but once the drops start collecting, I've never found myself lacking for bolts of ANY type, any run. Hell, if I've made all the stuff I want that takes plastic, there's 16+ bolts per craft right there - yeah, they're meh grade, but the Bolt-Thrower is the primary source of damage, and with effort, you CAN have one by the end of level 1, 2 at most.

*edited for after-work braindeadness.