Project: Community Skills Guide

Daggers is definitely getting pared down before it's put into the PDF. Maybe I'll just include a link to this thread at some point... Still, loads of controversy! Contradictory input! Name calling and rotten tomatoes! My purposes with this thread have been accomplished. Still, nothing like beating a dead horse, so let's move on to...

Polearms
Type: Warrior
Role: Engine or Turbocharger
No matter how you slice it Pole Arms is a potent melee skill with a lot of good midrange abilities tacked on.
Theme: Poke. Poke. Poke. Pokepokepokepoke!
Strategy:
Spears are long pointy sticks intended to bring pain to the enemy before they bring pain to you!
Pros:
Tons and tons and tonsof melee power. Did I mention the melee power? Because it's all over the place on this tree. It even gives you a point of extra burl. Being polearm trained means punching people. In the face. If that even makes sense. In addition to the obvious melee benefits, this makes you good at throwing javelins and other such projectiles. Perhaps more importantly than that, it offers two stances, one which makes you good with blocks and counters at the expense of melee power and critical hit chance, the other gives you even more melee power at the expense of block, counter and critical hit chance. Both these stances offer the chance of a knockback on both attack and being attacked, making them amazing crowd control skills. All damage from abilities in this tree scale aggressively to melee power. So they pretty much always hit hard.
Cons:
This tree penalizes your critical hit chance a fair amount to achieve what it does. So while you'll have gobs of melee power, you won't see jaw dropping hits with it as often as you would with, say, axes. Unless you've taken Berserk Rage or something. Polearms aren't particularly common, either, and they sometimes come with fairly unfriendly penalties, particularly at lower levels, where they're more likely to matter.
Synergies:
Battle Geology will give you, you guessed it, even more melee power and will only hurt stats which you weren't using anyways. Master of Arms and Shield Bearer keep you alive as you slog through the dungeon and Communism gives you a heal and the potent Vanguard Party, which will help boost your melee power and offset some of those penalties. Smithing makes many of the best polearms without your ever needing to consult a bookshelf.
Takeaway:
Take Polearms and keep your foes at polearms length! Seriously, we've taken a polearm of the adventurers in the Dungeon and they all agree, for early game crowd control Polearms does the trick without costing your a polearm and a leg.
What is wrong with me tonight?
Ahem, Polearms offers you aforementioned crowd control and a lot of hard hitting abilities and offers synergy in ways that other melee skills don't. It's flexible and powerful and gives you a new attack animation to enjoy! What's not to love?

 

As a throwaway, I think one of the weaknesses of polearms is not just their uncommon nature but that the late-game polearms are pretty wimpy. The best polearm in the game in terms of raw damage numbers is 15 piercing, 15 holy and 1 arbitrary point in something else I can't remember. Those are nice damage types to have definitely but still it's only 31 raw damage. The best sword in the game is putting out 50 raw damage. Now Armor Absorption is going to knock off a bit of that on every monster but still. 50 raw damage, knocked down by say 15 AA to 35, as a high level example, is still doing much better than your best polearm.

 

Still, 15 righteous damage is nothing to scoff at, as it can be a good start against the final boss.

 

Both Vlad and Dredmor can reliably be pounded by whatever means you like. And even one Kronged point of gets you no less than 11 health off Dredmor. (I do not recall Vlad's rating.)

 

Spear of Holy Sacrifice is good, yeah, but Polearms are all about stacking melee damage and the Spear barely deals any physical damage for it to boost. The Spear was a nice gish staff, because it lets wizard/warriors with low melee power break through armor, but as the strongest weapon for a weapon tree focused on boosting melee power to the moon and back? Not so much.

 

On the bright side, equipment shortages are a pretty easy fix for mods and new GLG stuff comes out fairly often, while skill deficiencies are a chore to fix by mods and rebalances are understandably rarer from the devs...

 

One major advantage you may be overlooking is that with lower and , there is a very high chance of dumping huge amounts of into if you have more than the other basic damages.

Give it a try and see for yourself.

 

Yeah, if you manage to make that happen, the results are pretty funky.

 

Yeah. I noticed few of even the deep monsters have much actual , and even though affects that, it is often more potent just because almost nothing has , while almost every deep monster has boatloads of and .

*Edit* I finally pulled my head from my ass and fixed this one. I think...

 

"Affects", Omni. A common mistake ("to effect" means "to create").

But yeah, it is more potent because of that, though I'm sure that is at least partially because they didn't want to confuse players with too many resistances (like in some other roguelikes, where monsters are seldom neutral (ie. neither resist nor are weak to it) to many elements, usually having a lot of resistances and some weaknesses.

 

Yeah. I think you told me that just a while back. But habits can be hard to break.

 

Wait, did they fix Melee damage being split up evenly among all physical damage types? Because if not, having blasting and crushing/slashing damage just means you're dealing less damage that can actually break through AA.

 

Stupid Comment Of The Day:

The Theme for Polearms should totally be
Hai! Hai! Ya! Shine!! (That's shi-ne, the Japanese equivalent of "eat sh!t and die, motherf***er!". Not 'shine'. That would be weird.)

And if you don't understand why, go buy a PlayStation. The first one.

 

There was another thread about this. It appears to be fixed now.

BMandFighter said: ↑

Grey, have you tried this test since the new patch? They said they were working on AA and I wonder if its different now.​

I don't recall any patch notes including mention of a fix, though. I can do some tests myself if I come across the appropiate gear.

Edit: Easy testing by taking dual wielding and communism. 3 and 3 + 2.

A gnome took 4 4. An enraged diggle took 3 4.

Looks like it's fixed. Armor, anyway. Melee power still divides itself between damage types, but hey, that's not a big deal given AA is fixed. It also arguably makes more sense than enhancing the most dealt type.​

 

It's been a while since we've done a wizard skill, so lets start with one of the new CotW skills of the magical variety.

Egyptian Magic
Type: Wizard
Role: Engine or Turbocharger
Egyptian Magic is aimed primarily at the warrior wizard, who wants to be effective at both melee and ranged combat and would rather not spend a whole lot of time thinking about mana management.
Theme: Invoke The Higher Glyphs!
Strategy:
Keep your mana regen up and hammer people with powerful melee attacks and use the occasional spell for crowd control.
Pros:
There's a ton of different resists and damage types offered by this tree, including the powerful Radiance damage. Resists keep you from getting hurt and damage gives you more chances to hit a weakness (admittedly, also more chance to be resisted.) Since these buffs apply to all your attacks, even crossbow bolts and thrown items, it's possible to include Egyptian Magic in a powerful crossbow build as well as a normal "gish" build. Glyph of Anubis can also serve as a sort of healing spell, offering you loads of health regen bonuses that will push you closer to the magical 1 HP per turn threshold. Call the Sandstorm is just nutty, even now that it's "nerfed".
Cons:
Call the Sandstorm wants you to max out the tree, right now, accept no substitutions. If you're not prepared to commit to this tree that ability, and to an extent the others, are all less impressive. In turn, maximizing the tree as a whole will require lots of mana. Heavy armor is decidedly suboptimal for this skill, and that makes surviving as an Egyptian very difficult.
Synergies:
Ley Walker and Tourist provide critical mana regenerating power in a tree that is going to want lots of mana all the time. Viking Magic plays up the buffing theme and gives you another damage type to exploit. Blood Magic offers a couple of different ways to get mana back as well. Vampirism offers both a mana draining ability and has funny comboness with Call the River. Warlocky sounds like it would be fun to use with Egyptian, but only if you want to devote your entire build to mana management...
Takeaway:
Egyptian Magic is a fun new magic skill for the melee mage that offers a nice array of things they might need, but it's really very narrow. Outside of a spell blade or arcane archer, or possibly an astrologist, the skill looks more problematic. Your mileage may vary.

 

I always liked grabbing Egyptian Magic for general use: the first skill or two can be kept up all the time without (very much) investment in mana, and a bit of extra damage and trap sense early on always helps.

I'll agree that to get the most out of it, you have to invest a bit in it across at least two if not three skill lines, but as a fire-and-forget set of spells for a cooldown-heavy rogue, it's not a bad idea.

 

I think a key point to mention regarding Egyptian Magic is the fact that most of the glyphs do three things:

1 - A damage and resistance buff. This is obvious.
2 - A secondary triggered effect, which happens only if you have ANOTHER glyph active at the same time.
3 - A secondary triggered effect which fires when you cast Sandstorm.

The two most obvious examples of this are the Asp poison cloud (happens when you have a second glyph running along with the first) and the 360 attack from glyph of Ra (happens when you have a second glyph running.) Glyph of Ra + any other glyph = AWESOMENESS.

I find it difficult to imagine taking Egyptian Magic without Ley Walker. The two skill together are the core of a very potent wizard build!

 

Actually, for this, I'd drop the wandcrafting, and instead get the crossbow (and possibly unarmed) to up ranged damage and bolt retrieval. Two acid damage fields and the ability to make crossbows, effectively infinite plastic bolts, and enough drill and steel bolts for hard targets gives you Lord Dredmor killing skills (skills that give you + piercing are, of course, bonus to this). Rocket jump with it's extremely low cooldown can help you keep range (or get behind obstacles) if you can get anything resembling 5 fire and 15 explosive damage resist (not armor).
It's a lot of investment, but insanely fun (and probably nuts, it IS based around mad science). It is, however, all these things in a fashion that substantially aids in dealing with some of the biggest causes of deaths (scary boss, monster zoo, Lord Dredmor).
You end up a bit light on warrior skills for melee, but a full suit of clockwork armor and overclocked power limbs gives you a good mix of attack power and tankiness, and between your clockwork bolt thrower/rail gun and your generous supply of cooldown based ranged damage for all occasions, generally, actually clocking something over the head is something you only do to half dead foes that pose no real threat to you in order to save ammo.
YASDs aside, that utterly nuts build, or a tweaked variant of it, is surprisingly effective.

 

After a two and a half week abscence do to stuff, we're back. o_o;

Let's return to the important business of talking about CotW skills!

Tourist
Type: Wizard
Role: Fuel Tank
Tourist is basically a skill that helps you stay topped up on rest, relaxation and good eating. Or something like that.
Theme: Say Cheese!
Strategy:
Tourist is all about moving through the dungeon at your own pace, and as such offers the curious, sightseeing wizard a number of tools to keep a step ahead of the game without breaking into a sweat inducing run.
Pros:
Perhaps the biggest single advantage of the Tourist tree is its versatility. Boosted regen is always nice, particularly for wizards. On Going Rogue, or if you're a Vampire, every bit counts. Trapsight is a must for any character and Tourist provides a lot, albeit at the expense of stealth. Then again, who ever met a stealthy wizard? It's great for casters and warriors who don't want to stray into rogue skills, but rogues themselves probably won't want it. Getting a little health from pretty much any object is a good way to stay healthy if food should run low (or you just don't want to eat a Dire Sandwich to get 8 HP back). Your mileage from the money boost and the floor to floor teleport may vary, but they are useful if you have no other way to get those things. Most importantly, you start with the camera, a wand with an AoE stun and life leech ability. Very handy on early levels.
Cons:
The tree has no one huge, standout ability. Often you'll simply be tempted to take an option with more wow to it, because while interesting, Tourist isn't very exciting. If you only want one or two of its abilities, it might be worthwhile to remember that most of them are done better in other trees (just not all of them together.)
Synergies:
Skills like Viking Magic and Egyptian Magic need tons of mana, and Tourist helps you get it both by boosting your mana regen and giving you a little more cash to empty vending machines (if you should need that.) Vampirism loves health regen for its draining abilities. Perception can always use more sight radius if you plan on doing funny things with eye lasers.
Takeaway:
Tourist is a kind of blah skill, but you may find it working its way into a surprising number of builds simply for its regens/trapsight/teleport/camera. It gives a lot of the bag of tricks feel to wizards (or warriors) who don't mind its tame feel.

 

Tourist is great. A somewhat under-whelming ability, but it's got a lot of utility to it and it fits just about any build, even warrior ones. Sample Exotic Cuisines also lets vampires eat stuff, if I remember rightly, and it gives a good alternate food source to Vegans as well. Get Away From It All is a universal panic button, amazing in any kind of bad situation. Having that camera around can sometimes be the difference between surviving the first floor or dying horribly on Going Rogue.