Alright, I am usually not the kind for boasting but just recently I saw someone making a thread about if no one had killed Lord Dredmore yet on Going Rogue with Permadeath. So yes, someone did. About 10 minutes ago in fact. Steam still shows the percentage as "0.0%" for this achievement, but that only means that still less than 5 in 10000 have made it. So I do not claim to be first, but here are the highscore and the steam achievement screen. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/197/steamachievement.jpg/ http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/59/highscoref.jpg/ For all those interested I will now write down, how the run went. It sure contains spoilers as hell. And even though I will give hints about how to play, I do think that neither my build nor my playstyle are very refined. Either way, let's start. Kieran was my 19-20th char I think. I cannot know for sure, since half of my characters died to crashes as surely many of you have suffered yourself. My build was: Swords Shield Bearer Artful Dodger Master of Arms Vampirism Astrology Smithing So basically I was some kind of heavy vampiric Paladin xD The reason behind this build was simple. I thought for myself that, if I can only regenerate health fighting and killing I should be hard so I won't lose to much health in fights. At that point I did NOT know that the vampirism lifeleech depends on magic power. I thought it was a percentage of meele damage. I only found out about the magic scaling on dungeon level 9. So anyway. Swords: I wanted to be able to use one weapon and I decided for the sword because the active sword style is actually more of a ranged attack. The enemy can counter in worst case, but you can still beat on them 3 tiles away. Shield bearer: Was a nobrainer for hardness. Artful Dodge: It didn't seem to strong in it's passive but knight's leap is so incredibly power, I think it is broken beyond measure. It repositions you like a knight in chess, cooldown is only 5 turns and it costs no mana! Now take into account that by far most enemies only ever attack in meele and the few who are ranged do not do enough damage to be much of a threat. Master of Arms, ... yeah, in the end I only put 1 point in there, because everything else seemed so much important. In the end I would probably have taken something else. Vampirism: If you want to play a meele at all, then this is probably a musthave. It not only spares you carrying around food (poor little inventory), it also is a tremendous infight regeneration if you have magic power later. Sure you cannot regenerate outfight, but this is only an inconvenience not a risk. If you drop low later in game, just return a dungeon level higher and leech yourself up again on weak monsters. Or kite enemies around with knight's leap and kill them with crossbow, magic, traps or the sword style that attacks at range and then eat their corpses. If you are full again, descend further. Astrology: I didn't want my mana to not be of any use at all. I thought it would be simply more effective to use your mana as well and since my aim was hardness I took this skill. Not only does it provide extremly nice buffs (even the first one. better vision, better defence, better hit and you have a chance to stun enemies all around when someone hits you). And a spell which sets a magical trap which I grew very fond of in the lower levels. Smithing: I will be honest. In the very late end I didn't have a single smithed item on me. But! The end is not everything. With this skill you only need some luck in finding the right ingots/ores and you have a 8-star steel blade as early as dungeon level 2 or 3, which is so out-of-depth that you basically start onehitting enemies. But not only the weapons, also the armor, shields etc. are really nice. I didnt find another decent sword until dungeon Level 9! What this skill does is making you independent of drop luck for all of the midgame. If your Ores pile up, you can also make items more than once and use the Altairs to improve your items without risk, If the item gets cursed just take the other one and only try again when you have two again. In the end I must say, that I would have probably need many many many more tries without smithing, it just gives so much stability for a meele. Skill Order: The vampirism skill that lets you consume corpses is your first pick. There is a good chance you won't even live to see it, because the enemies are so strong you drop more than you leech. Use everything you have (bolts if you got them) and play defensively or lure enemies into traps until you hit level 2. When you start consuming corpses you will be much mor stable. After Vampirism I skilled smithing up to 4 (I don't know what 5 is for honestly, as I didnt see any receipe that needed 5. Maybe the last Level unlocks new receipes ? No matter, I did not want to risk it). Smithing doesn't make you much stronger and getting there is a bit tedious but it all pays off as soon as you craft your first item that needs smithing 4. Assuming you don't find any receipes I prefer aluminium Boots, Helm and Armor, a steel sword and the runed iron shield. After Smithing I took up the shield skills because it was increasingly hard to meele enemies. I didnt max out shield, just took the proc and the buff. After that I took up the sword skill to the level where I had the ranged attack and immediatly went for knights leap, this was my basic setup for most of the game. Only then I started in astrology and that probably was a good decision. That is because until then you barely have the mana to even keep up your first astrology buff. You need to find items with magic power and mana regeneration to use the other astrology skills for fighting.
Alright. Tactic was simple, If I had the right resistances for enemies not to do serious harm on a hit, I meeled them dead. I never took more than one enemy at once though, always pulled them into a narrow passage if there are more than one. At that point I would like to mention that the active axe skill is pretty bad. not only does it lack range in comparison, but to really enjoy it you would like to hit a lot of enemies at once, which in return often means that many enemies hit you at once. So either they are harmless and you could do them one after another or they stomp you into the ground in two rounds if you let them surround you, but back to topic. If an enemy did too much damage to meele them, run from them with knights leap and kill them at range with swordstyle or crossbow bolts. A LOT of enemies do to much damage. Golems for example, if you do not have hyperborean resistance. ALWAYS take the canadian helm with you (hyperborean res 6) until the very end of the game and don't be too lazy two switch it with your all purpose helm always when enemies do serious hyperborean damage. Almost all golems do, and almost every enemy on the ice level. That is another tip. If you can spare the inventory place bring different rings/armors/shields with you if they have special resistances. There is nothing like changing to two rings of ash when your enemies is firebased. Ah now that I mentioned it. The inventory Management. Until Dungeon Level 9 (!! I am so dumb!!) I did not realize you could sell items, so I turned EVERYTHING that I didnt use into Lutefisk. Had the advantage that I could take all lutefisk statues on the way down, always had enough. So these are the things to sell or lutefisk: Every piece of food. Mushrooms (I guess, I didnt even try one, since I didnt have the skill for mushrooms and didnt want to risk anything), Every drink until the late levels, every powder, except chalk, weak items, every acid, every tinker part. I took and stacked all gems throughout the game because I knew at least one Smithing receipe that used a gem and thought there might be many more. But it stayed the only one and was not worth keeping 10 slots in my inventory for every color of gems, so I would lutefisk or sell them too. No idea what Price they fetch. Things to keep: Ammo of every kind. There are enemies you do not even want to strike afar with your sword because a counter hit crit drops you to half health even through your heavy armor, you need something to kill them with, so bolt/throw them down. Bolas are especially precious, buy them if you see them at shops, if you hit, they stop an enemy for 4-5 rounds and you can bolt them down at will. Never waste them by throwing more than one, while the enemy is still pinned. You can keep some wands for the same reason you keep ammo. Take every Crystal wand for sure as it is a safe way to regenerate health besides potions and you won't always be able to get out of a bind to leech on weaker enemies. Also take EVERY potion you can. Those things are lifesavers! The most important one by far is the invis potion. 3-4 Times I got in situations where I would have been DEAD for SURE without an invis potion. I was surrounded, low each and could not knight leap or only leap in range of another monster that would have killed me. So I took the potion, stayed calm and waited until a path was clear and walked aways. Do not use knight leap in invis ! I didn't try, but I suppose it will reveal you. Apart from Ammo, Wands and potions and resistance equip you need a smelter and a smithing set of course. Keep your ores until you have smithing 3, because you get an additional ingot out of every smelting! Alright so much for the inventory. When I got into the late game I started to switch from heavy magicpower-reducing equipment to orbs and mage robes, because with the shield skill I still had decent defense against most thing and the leech is just so much more powerful. I also started to use the other astrology skills. Especially the sun-trap. These things are awesome. They do some damage with a nice after burn and have a chance to stun for 6-8 rounds. I was killing most dangerous enemies on dungeon Level 9 and 10 by kiting them through my traps and closing in and killing them if they get stunned. Very viable strategy that was, just be careful about counter hits. I also bought and gathered every booze I could find on dungeon Level 8-10 for the climax and I sure spend a lot of it. Spamming traps and the big nuke. So what about the climax ? I must really say, that at that point I was overprepared. I was on dungeon Level 10 and had just cleared the monster room in tedious and very careful work (I had come so far, I didnt want to lose this character). 3 rooms later suddenly there he was. I took an invis potion and ran away and then I took EVERYTHING. Every Potion there is in the game was active, every buff from every of my skilltrees, my character window was exploding with stats and damages types and my sight was about 13 tiles (no kidding). I downed booze worth 300 mana just in case and because I had it. Then I went close Lord Dredmore. I completly covered three rows of tiles between him and me, each 12 long with my traps and then started spamming my bolts of mass destruction at him at max range. I had kept them all game long just for this. Dredmore came one step closer got stunned and was bolted down by me before he could move again. I do not think he could have done anything bad to me at range as I had about every resistance at 6 or higher 100 hp and magic resistance at 40+ but still I was surprised. I had a lot of pots and ammo left, I could have used a lot of it a lot earlier in order to have it a bit easier. Still the feeling of Achievement, when I got the winning fanfare was incredibly satisfying. Not quite as satisfying like winning ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) after 3 years of trying but still pretty well. I hope that you could take some useful information out of this, especially if you are a newer player. Apart from that let me say. Do yourself a favor and play the game on permadeath. It is frustrating, it can take long, but there is nothing as rewarding as doing it. Playing without permadeath is just work, anyone will win, given enough time. Katerchen
This is an interesting coincidence; I recently beat ADoM for the first time and just started a Going Rogue run with a similar build.
Heh, I still do remember my first adom victory. Biggest victory of my gaming career: http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread.php?t=1088
High five! Sword/Dual Wield/Master of Arms/Astrology/Burglary/Archaeology/Tinkering here. I think we have pretty much the same style of play. I started out wanting to build a very similar type of character to Kieran, but over several iterations I switched out shield for dw, dodger for burglary (I use lockup constantly, also vanish+teleport, free lockpicks forever, and +trap points. Burglary has grown into my favorite skill hands down) , and smithing for tinkering (In retrospect, I really only used tinkering for bolts, which is a level 0 recipe. I was seriously lugging around about 2000 various bolts by the end, though). If I could do over, I'd get rid of master of arms also. I'm a little sad that "honest" melee dies so horribly in this game.
@nwoody Oh, thanks @BloodyMess Oh, good. I was actually surprised to be the first one posting about this. Your build sounds nice too. And yes, I agree to "honest" meeles being utterly obliterated in this game at high lever. To be plain: In order for meele to be more viable in comparison to ranged, the enemies would need a lot more power ranged wise and not do as much damage overall for a balance between meele and ranged. @Nicholas "Total badass" it was I think and yes, I even linked a screenshot to it in the main post My wife actually made me delusions about a world first but I couldn't really imagine it and Bloodymess here seems to have done it earlier, as a few others probably have too.
Oh forgot to answer the question of Nicholas: I am definately playing a full mage character next. Probably Golemancy, Mathemacy and the Fire Skill + 4 magic support skills (staff, bloodmagic, leylines and magic apprentice)
If you sincerely and genuinely defeated Lord Dredmor then congratulations! Unfortunately, since it is so easy to cheat there is no way to tell for certain that you did not cheat to accomplish this goal. I am actually surprised we have not seen more people with the achievement for this reason.
@Drog thanks @Incendax I do not really know what kind of cheating you mean. I didnt modify any gamefiles and didnt use any tools or exploits (well apart from having skilled artful dodger. Knights leap is an exploit all by itself). I suppose I can do no more than give the screenshots that I already have and hope for your trust, especially considering my writeup of how all of it happened.
@Katerchen I do not mean to imply that you DID cheat, simply that cheating is very easy to do and makes it very simple to kill Dredmor on GR-P. There is no way for us to determine if you did or not.
@Incendax I heard of a score cheat, so the leaderboards are not to be trusted. But I just looked through the scores on the leaderboards on steam and though I am only 9th place there is no one before me, who actually has the GR-P achievement ^.^
@Katerchen For example, someone could mod a Diggle to give 20,000 experience per kill, then quickly achieve a very high but not unreasonable level that would grant them all skills and make every monster die in one hit. They could then proceed to kill Dredmor with very little risk even on GR-P. Since their score may not be completely unreasonable they would come in under the radar.
@Incendax Seriously ? ^^ ... you can just modify the game files on a textual basis and there is no integrity check ?
@Katerchen Not yet. Probably something that will be implemented in the near future. However, based upon your responses in this thread I think you genuinely did beat Dredmor the legit way and deserve serious congratulations!
Now to do it again, with a video documentary :3 Then we can not only be sure you actually did it, but we can all enjoy watching the glory happen!
@Lazaretz Heh, no offense, but after investing 30 hours of gameplay more or less straight and having achieved basically everything there was to achieve, I will probably not try myself on this again too soon
