I have a love-hate relationship with this game. I love it, but sometimes, it's just so confusing. Playing a game with perma-death makes trial and error discovery a bit unpalatable, and the game's functioning isn't exactly reliable. While I'm perfectly willing to forgive the occasional bugginess, especially given the small staff size and that the game is still being worked on, it can get infuriating that I so rarely have the information I feel I need to be able to play GRPD and die more often to my own mistakes than to misinformation. The wiki is horrendously out of date, and Dredmorpedia is more of a really nice source dump. Is there anywhere I can get all the information I might need in a reliable, detailed source, complete with knowledge of currently known bugs? As it stands, I find myself too frequently wanting to post a series of questions on this board for things that I should be able to look up easily. This is a great game, but I just feel left in the dark more than I should be. More than I should for a Roguelike, I mean, which is pretty problematic.
I understand your plight. As it is right now, everybody's just been using Dredmorpedia instead of the two wikis. Unfortunately, there isn't any other place that I know of, but we'll see about making a new "known issues" list once the patch is finally out.
Well, since I'm here... are the effects of Vegan Shame / Guilt / Purging removable by remove curse abilities? A better question, I s'pose, is whether there are any skills with debuff drawbacks (Anyone where you get an icon in the debuff window) that can't be cured with de-cursing? I was thinking of doing a Vegan Fighter next, and was looking at either Emomancy or Fleshsmithing for a magic school. While I prefer Fleshsmithing, if The Cure also cures vegan shame and similar, that gives Emomancy a leg up. Oh, and one last thing. If I can't get reliable numbers and exact mechanics, is there a nice place that has a solid and accurate overview of all the skills in general? A lot of abilities I'd like to see in action first, and some have utility I never imagined. Unliving Wall, for example, lets you take your sweet leisurely time disarming Gargoyle Traps. I also have limited experience with Warrior classes, so I'm a bit curious as to how they handle Monster Zoos, given my mage solution is 'wall off the room, release thaumites, don't laugh so hard you miss randomly spawning monsters behind you'. EDIT: I'm currently checking out the stickied guide, but it's a few patches out of date, and it doesn't look to go into enough detail for me to be able to conclude whether the recommendations are something that may have altered in the intervening patches.
For the time being, i'd definitely recommend going to the patch beta test thread here and using it for your game (even if you dont plan on testing anything). It fixes a lot of the really bad crashing/save corruption issues, as well as some other minor bugs that might be annoying. It is much more stable than the current 1.0.09 build.
Emomancy's The Cure will also remove all those nasty Vegan punishment status effects. In fact, IIRC, there are currently no skills in the core game with debuff side effects that cannot be removed with a curse purging effect like The Cure, Potions of Purity, Zodiac Wand or Lv. 5 Vegan. As regards Warrior builds: Be prepared for a much harder game. Warrior is riskier and has more limited resources than Wizard, as you can't just go "BloodMana/ThaumaTap" for full mana after every encounter. While you can take more, harder hits, attrition hurts you a lot more. And someone should really try and assemble an overview of the existing skills so people can get the latest dope on them. Maybe there could be a subforum with a thread for bandying about each skill and potential combos? Dunno if that would have any life in it or not.
That would be the kind of thing I'd like to do, but playing enough to get that kind of knowledge of skills is way out of my options right now. It takes a long time to complete even one characters skill set, and that's assuming you don't die on permadeath. Still, a more up to date skill-by-skill breakdown would be nice. It's the kind of thing I could write about for pages if I knew enough, so I'm almost a bit frustrated by my inability to do so ^_^ I can tell there's a lot to this game, but it's not very conducive to practical spading, at least not without hacking the game.
Hmm... one more question... is there any topic where I can get a good overview of Necronomics, a concise description of the skills, and what combos well with it? I know Astrology does, thanks to necro reduction, given that two of the spells encourage melee, staff skill and vampirism are nice, and some source of decursing could go far, perhaps Emomancy providing that and it's own source of necro-resistence. Heh, that's five skills, almost a complete build right there. Throw in Blood Magic and Archeaology, and BAM. Still, I'd like a bit more insight than what I can throw together in one minute ^)^.
http://j-factor.com/dredmorpedia/#1411 Dredmorpedia gives a list of skills, items, crafting, even what's in (some of) the various mods. That's a direct link to Necronom...Nec... Necronomiconomics. Yeah, okay, I had to copy/paste it to get it right. JFactor's done a brilliant job, although it does take quite a while to load...understandably, since there's a lot of information there.
FYI Sines is already aware of Dredmorpedia, but as he said it's not a complete substitute for human written wiki. That said, I'm planning on adding some of my own notes in places where it'd be useful (e.g. tooltips on the various status effects that point out lesser known facts like 'paralyze duration can stack'). I should also add an indication for whether a buff can be uncursed...
Yah, I know of Dremorpedia, but it's pretty poor for looking up Necronomics. It tends to divide abilities into their components, which makes reading what necro spells do... VERY painful. Also, there's more to using necronomics than just know what they do.
While the game is in the flux of development you're unlikely to get a reliable, human-written information source. That's one of the reasons I made Dredmorpedia - the normal wiki was so frequently out of date on spells that I ended up reading the XML manually. Take Necro for example: the game files indicate the devs want the debuffs to reduce , but that's currently broken because they wrote the tags incorrectly. If the debuffs worked as intended suddenly uncurse abilities would be significantly more useful for Necro.
You know, I promised myself I'd stop posting while under the influence of cold medicine, and yet here I am, having to apologize yet again for the -5 that has my at an all-time low. Somebody, please loan me some spare points so I can get the good potions.
We really ought to put a job up on Mechanical Turks or something: someone human-validate this XML for us.
Actually I only noticed the broken penalties because Dredmorpedia's 'resistance tag' parser catches both item/spell <resistbuff /> tags and the monster <resistances /> tags. The debuffs are incorrectly using the monster tags.
