Project: Community Skills Guide

90 MPH winds left me as part of the great mass of unpowered Americans for 30 hours, making this update a bit late. But the show must go on! Since our last skill was Blood Mage, the next logical skill is...

Promethean Magic
Type: Wizard
Role: Engine or More Engine. Or possibly Fuel Tank.
Promethean magic kills things by setting them on fire. It also makes you highly resistant to fire. Really, what more could you need?
Theme: Is It Burning? No? I'll Fix That!
Strategy:
Kill it with fire. Really, that's the bare basics of it. To a certain extent there is deeper strategy. The familiar makes for some interesting tactical situations, especially as your magic power builds, but eventually he just becomes another one hit wonder. The burning rune is nice, but not as brutally efficient as the fireball. The fire dance skill is neat, but not as brutal as The Stars Aligned and really not as defining in the tree, since it has so much AoE spam. The Tactical Pyre, however, does live up to its name.
Pros:
A level one damage spell is massive for mages, who rarely have damaging magic until level 2. The whole tree is basically AoE, with the exception of the wyrmling and the pyre, which makes spamming damage everywhere a simple thing. The scaling isn't the best in the game, but it's aggressive enough, but adding aggressive mana scaling makes the spamming much easier. The burning DoT will often give you the last few points of damage you need to drop an enemy. If you're looking for a skill that wipes out zoos, hordes or even two or three monsters at a time, this is your skill. Fire resist prevents a huge chunk of damage both from you and enemies.
Cons:
There is pretty much no versatility to this tree what so ever. It sets things on fire. Period. Does it resist fire? You're outta luck. Do you need a shove to keep monsters off of you? Outta luck. Need a spell that won't blow up in your face because you've outscaled your fire resist and don't have the pyre? Outta luck. It's gameplay isn't that varied either. Think about taking some different flavored skills to break up the monotony.
Synergies:
Promethean eats mana fast, particularly if you haven't bottomed out all the costs yet, so Ley Walker and Blood Mage are great fuel tanks to keep you going. Magic Training will help you bottom out those costs. Alchemy helps you upgrade your booze to keep in mana and makes you mana potions for emergency recharges. Mathemagics will let you keep your distance for tactical nuking. Or, if you prefer, Psionics will let you push them away for a nuking, and heal yourself.
Takeaway:
Promethean is the damage skill of all damage skills, and you should probably play with it once, just to know what's possible in that direction. If you really enjoy spell spamming, this is your tree. But if you want something else, you might wish to look elsewhere.

 

If this is supposed to be a guide, you might want to flesh out the strategy section by actually stating what situations are good for which skills rather than make vague comparisons. It feels more like you're rating the skill than explaining it.

 

I originally meant "Strategy" to indicate how the skill tries to win. Collectible Card Games have a number of basic "strategies": Aggro, where you overwhelm with cheap fast creatures, control, where you deal with threats as they come up and mop up the game with one or two powerful win conditions when you draw them, combo, where you assemble a handful of cards that interact in powerful ways. They all have a gameplan, but explaining that game plan is not a question of x vs. y, it's a question of what am I trying to do? In general, I use these definitions:

Strategy = setting your goals with your constraints in mind.

Tactics = how you will overcome specific obstacles to reach your goals.

Every skill has a basic goal. That's defined (for me) as one of the four basic roles: Engine (drives you down the floors, typically by killing monsters), Turbocharger (makes your engine better), Fuel Tank (makes sure your engine can keep going) and Payload (delivers the finish once your engine gets you there, but can be ignored until you need it, typically something that has one big ability that you only need on later floors). Strategy is how the skill wants to accomplish that goal.

Not pairing skills with conflicting strategies is important, and can only be remedied by making a new character, which is admittedly both frequent regardless, and part of the games appeal. Tactics are something else entirely. Other people discuss them, but I find working out the best tactics to be half the fun of playing with a highly synergistic build, which you can make by skimming this thread.

Now, if you want a really quick overview of tactics, I'd recommend The Art Of War by Sun Tzu. One day, probably far into the future if the rate of new official DoD content is any indication, we'll be done with this thread and I'll make an The Art of Dungeon Delving thread, for rambling about DoD tactical concepts (Chapter 6: The Teleport) and note which skills play into which tactical ideas. But I don't want this to be that thread.

TL, DR - Skills Want To Do Something, and that is their Strategy. It is usually pretty vague. What you do with it in particular situations is really the topic for another thread, which I won't have time to think much about until this one is done. Sorry. =(

EDIT: Yes, I've kinda gotten away from my original purpose in the Strategy section. It's a combination of a lot of things and I'll try to reign it in. Also, "Theme" and "Strategy" are really meant to be extensions of the same concept, so if some of them seem similar to you, that's why.

 

A polished version of the above explanations would be great to append to the start of the PDF. I've been reading through the whole thing and had only a vague idea what the terms you were using for "role" actually described. Also, knowing the gist of your style would have helped me parse all the rest of the entries more easily.

 

I actually prefer Rune of Exploding to Tactical Fireball. The reason I say this is, Tactical Fireball is a projectile spell but the rune works on any square you can target. This makes the Rune much, much more useful against monster zoos; with the fireball, you have to either teleport backwards or set it off in your face, but with the Rune you can just find the nearest unoccupied space in the zoo, set the mine, and repeat, and watch the carnage. I beat Dredmor on GRPD with the only Promethean spells I regularly used being Runes and the Wyrmling. Didn't even use Tactical Pyre once.

 

I am with banjo2E on this. While Obvious Fireball rules for steamrolling through masses of lesser beasties, the Rune is more tactical than the Tactical Pyre.

About the only way I can see TP being better is if it's damage scaling was doubled.

But in general about Promethean Magic: Since people to this very day still say it is vastly overpowered and argue back and forth on this subject, I say it is a solid choice for a skill. OP? I do not give one flying Diggle "Eff about it possibly being OP.

It works remarkably well until those aforementioned enemies that resist it. If there was one single thing I wish I had on a Promethean build, it would be a stackable debuff to spam on those resistant enemies. Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think it is currently possible to even hurt Dredmor with this skill.

 

Pretty much said it all about this straightforward skill tree, but for two notes:

1) The Wyrmling casts an AoE fire spell when summoned, so it's kind of like it's own fireball.

and

2) Smithing provides a few extra points of Fire resist, and Alchemy provides one. Not really major since Smithing doesn't really synergize with Promethean Magic in any way shape or form, and Alchemy is only one point - but hey, you'll probably want Alchemy anyway, right?

 

Perhaps surprisingly, Dredmor (the Tougher) only shows as having 15 Fire Resist in the Dredmorpedia. So he is assuredly damagable, it just requires a sufficiently high Magic Power. If I'm reading the damage formulas right, a Magic Power of 53 will damage Dredmor via Obvious Fireball (for example).

 

Only 15 ? That cannot be right. I could swear it is 30 or more. If it is only 15 then he must have been lucky enough to use his insane to negate the damage I last tried dishing out via OFs.

I am glad you caught that one about the Wrymling Essence. I somehow forgot that while typing the above. Back when it was possible to reach a point where it cost nothing to summon the Wyrmling, I was actually using it every turn most of the time and my mana was just barely keeping my wall of buffs up. But that exploit no-longer works.

 

I'd have sworn I did that at the beginning of the thread, but apparently not. I edited the OP to fix that, and I'll try and squeeze it into the PDF the next time I update it (which should be in December 2013 given my current level of regularity in that department.)

 

Speaking of which...it's Tuesday!

 

Essence is correct! I'm running a bit behind schedule today, but to make up for it I've brought a skill that may (or may not!) prompt extensive debate! That's right, it's time to talk about...

Vampirism
Type: Wizard
Role: Engine? Fuel Tank?
Honestly, I'm not sure what Vampirism is meant to be. What it serves as is a poor fuel tank for melee characters, or a decent one for rogues. Not entirely sure why its a Wizard skill...
Theme: Blood Is Power!
Strategy:
Vampirism is a strategic balancing act, trying to stay in melee enough to get keep healed but attacking at range to keep from needing healing. And trap skill. You'll need lots of that.
Pros:
The Drain Life proc is actually kind of appealing on the first floor, and there's enough animals on later floors to make it still somewhat relevant. Corpse Drain can actually heal you for a decent amount of life if you really push your Magic Power. The sparkles aren't a great AoE, but they do stun and they do deal Righteous damage, a very useful type. And they do drain. Transylvation lets you fly, the only skill in the game that does. Necro damage is common enough that the resist is nice.
Cons:
You can't heal by eating, nor do you heal over time, and the skill tree's powerful activated abilities and drain proc aren't enough to overcome that. It's really that simple.
Synergies:
Vampirism's Necro resist makes it a great partner for Necronomiceconomics, allowing you to spam Deathly Hex for a bit, until your magic power gets too high. Of course, by that point you can have Pact of Fleeting Life doubling your drain on some targets and giving you a bit of drain for everyone else. Magic Training will give you more raw spellpower to throw around, Master of Arms more HP as a buffer against damage. And Psionics or Fleshcrafting will make up for that loss of healing.
Takeaway:
The ugly truth is, Vampirism as a skill is somewhat underpowered. While it presents an interesting challenge for experienced players, it really isn't a great choice as a skill. There's talk of the skill being rebalanced for the Wizardlands expansions, and if it is it will be revisited at that time. But for now, I'd recommend it only if you enjoy frustration.

 

Vampirism... Currently awful. If it gave health on every last kill, it would probably be well suited for ranged and caster characters. But only on melee kills means you will want to do this number...

 

Vampirism: Because GRPD Wasn't Hard Enough.

Interestingly, vampirism is actually a slightly better pick on GR than it is on EE, because you lose less (in that on GR, you regen health approximately 250% slower than on EE, so the 'no natural regen' hurts about 70% less.) Vampires have a variety of hidden benefits that don't even start to make up for it's drawbacks. For one thing, you're likely to get at least 4 extra Lutefisk God artifacts over the course of the game if you dutifully grind up and fisk all your meat and cheese. For another, vampires actually make better use of defensive stats than other characters, because for a Vampire it's all about maximizing the number of times you hit and minimizing the number of times you get hit -- so going Dual Swords (i.e. Max Counter) + Max Armor + High Resists on a vampire is going to serve you a little better than it will on a mortal meleer.

If you luv mods like I luv mods, any mod that gives you <multibuff> (Drunken Boxing, for example) makes vampirism that much more effective, and any mod that gives you high resists (Bushido, perhaps) supplements the Max Armor builds very nicely.

(Sneaky alpha-tester note: the current alpha-test build of CotW features vampirism that scales fairly strongly off of Health Regen. Moar as developments continue to occur.)

 

Vampirism sucks. There is literally no build that is better off with vampirism that another skill doesn't do better. It is like the tourist class in elona. It is the hard mode of this game.

 

Is that where GLG got the idea for the Tourist skill that's trying to get done in time for the CotW release?

 

Additional note: Vampirism is the only way a player character can drown in DoD to date. That's right, Vampirism gives you a unique way to die!

 

As far as I know, the original Tourist class in a game was Nethack. They were challenging.

 

If getting a new way to die is a bonus for taking a skill tree that was supposed to make it easier to survive, then it does say much about its potential.

 

Just like we did the weapon skills all together, I'd like to do the defensive skills Shield Bearer and Master of Arms today.

Shield Bearer/Master of Arms
Type: Warrior
Role: Fuel Tank or Turbocharger
These skills revolve around the idea of making you impervious to harm, one relies on shields (or will soon) the other makes you a walking suit of armor.
Theme: Go Ahead. Make My Day.
Strategy:
These builds encourage the player to build for invulnerability by providing high block and damage absorption upgrades, plus piercing resistance.
Pros:
Both skills provide huge block bonuses. When maxed, the two skills together give a 35% chance of blocking. Before gear. Plus, each skill starts you with a piece of defensive gear, which is a huge plus for characters on the first floor. The Master of Arms rollout is particularly beefy, pretty much negating DL 1 damages all on its own. Shield Bearer provides more powerful procs when maxed out, and the defensive shield bash is really sweet too.
Cons:
The Tortoise Maneuver and Suit Up abilities will never really do you much in combat, although they're great for walking around the dungeon. Neither skill line provides you with much depth, they just let you tank even more hardcore.
Synergies:
Oddly enough, these are skill lines that provide the biggest benefits to someone who doesn't plan on clearing the game with many warrior skills, as they provide you with the HP, the block and the AA to make your way through most melee situations. Thus, they go well with Viking Magic, Astrology, Vampirism, Necronomiceconomics and most rogue skills. This way, you can have some block and AA without sacrificing nimbleness or magic power.
Takeaway:
While these skills aren't necessary to be a tank, they do make it a lot easier, and the starting rollouts will save your life time and time again. Well worth looking at for tanks, gish and swashbucklers, but probably not that useful for "pure" rogues or mages.