So my last couple of dudes have been playing with Fungal Arts. It's fun! I do have a couple of questions that I suspect have insanely obvious answers: If I'm not playing a melee dude, is there any point in getting the last two skills? The final pet seems pretty decent, but pets in general seem a little frustrating in DoD. So far I've been concentrating on spellcasters. Given that, which shrooms are the best to save up? So far I've built up piles of wodgers, night caps and inky hoglanterns (hee! love the names.) The defensive buff shrooms don't seem as great, and I can't figure out whether mob bonnets are doing much for me or not. Any advice would be, like, groovy and stuff. Thanks!
Pets are always a hit or miss. It depends on your choice, really. Almost all mushrooms are useful, and Azure Mob Bonnets are supposed to give you a magic power boost, so they can be handy. You're going to want Grunge Ears if you go against caster mobs (and Dredmor) as they give you a big elemental defense boost. Note that some mushrooms stack.
Mob bonnets should increase your spell power by 1.5 (i.e. 1 or 2 points depending on your current sagacity score) and your maximum mana by 6. That's it. The wiki says you can stack it, which would seem to be the only way to get anything worthwhile out of it; otherwise it strikes me as a rather poor mushroom (ditto the plumber's agaric).
Not really. The nice thing about fungal for casters is it will give you a pet early to help, and an escape ability in invisibility. All with just 1 point invested. The bonnet one gives like 3-4 sagacity though. Can't remember if it stacks.
Holy moly, those were some fast responses! I'll see what grunge ears and bonnets can do for me. A dumb follow-up question: do stacks increase resistance/stat numbers, or length of effect, or both?
Stacking increases the numbers; each duration is tracked separately. For example, if you get hit with a Dim Vision debuff (-2 sight radius, lasts 10 turns) on turn 0, then again on turn 2, then from turns 0-2 you'll have -2 sight, from turns 2-10 you'll have -4 sight, and from turns 10-12 you'll have -2 sight. If a buff/debuff doesn't stack, then renewing it just sets its duration back to the maximum. For example, drinking Invisibility when already invisible with 10 turns left on the buff, just sets you back to invisible for 24 turns. Or at least it should; haven't checked that specific example...
For mushrooms I believe it stacks the stats and refreshes the duration. Except wodgers which I believe increase the duration. Don't quote me on this though
I'd be surprised if mushrooms functioned differently from other stacking buffs, which only show you the largest (i.e. most recent) remaining duration. In my above example with the Dim Vision debuff, you'd get 2 points of sight radius back when the debuff said there were still 2 turns left, since that's 10 turns after the first debuff was applied.
