So I actually finally did it. I killed Lord Dredmor, On Going Rogue, With Permadeath- ... as the title suggests. I'll tell you my build, what I thought of each tree, line of progression, tips for people who read this, the proof, and suggestions for Gaslamp on various abilities. (also, apologies for any mispellings.) So lets start this off! //: I was a Necronomiconeconomist. :\\ My full skill build: Staves. Vampirism. Magic Training. Blood Mage. Archaeology. Golemancy. Necronomiconomics. Staves- Got this for the sole purpose of gaining increased magic power. The haywire/vamp glitch was merely a plus. I hardly went into the tree though until the very end, not even one point, as the other trees proved to be more valuable. Vampirism- This is a lovely skill tree. You basically negate any need to carry food, and thus lutefisk it all, which proved very helpful. I know Necro skill tree has a spell similar to this, but it Can stack... I however, never used it... Hell, for the most part- I stayed out of range of enemies past lvl d4 (except going in and hitting them with my stick of doom, while their asleep or near dead to regain some health). Magic Training- Leveled this after everything else (besides staves), as didn't want to waste the skill points on it... Probably could of used this as something else, but went with it any way as free magic power is helpful in the beginning. Blood Mage- Essential to keep mana high. Got all these quickly at the start. Very useful. All of them. Archaeoloy- Probably the most OP skill tree out there, in my opinion. It gives Trap Affinity, lets you get Free XP on useless magical items you don't need (selling usually proves pointless), lets you reconfigure a magical item (especially if its a stacked Krong one), and revamp the Krong for more-- well, Krongage! (although the last spell I think should be with blacksmithing.) Golemancy- The 2nd essential part of my character. At first I hated it because it kept taking away my lovely & precious Fedora... but I soon grew to love it. The first spell is vital to help you get to level 2 for the consume corpse spell. The mustache is useful to regain free health from wacking it. The Summon Rock spell is useful to get items off islands (and turn them into xp) and to wall off the opening to a Monster Zoo so you can rain havoc onto the poor innocent diggles. The Swarm ability is splendid and coincides with the Necro Black Hole, basically clearing a room in less than a minute. The Robot can take many hits, even on dlvl 10 which is used as a useful protection and distraction. The final spell helps you combine close rooms together so you don't have to waste 10minutes walking all the way around (and to find quest items faster). So all in all, Golemancy is absolutely fantastic. It would even be viable for a center build for a character-- although waiting for Swarms+Walls to dissipate would get rather annoying. Necrono-- blagh. The Main Spell Tree of Pure Awesome- The first spell? Useless. I've tried many different ways to consider this spell. I tried it with astrology for the necro resistance, I've tried stacking necro resistance early, I've tried waiting for the Curse of Chthon, etc... It's just pointless to consider if you end up making it to your second spell. Nightmare Curse? Too Good. It's completely overpowered I believe. (I'll go into more details and suggestions in a sec, at the bottom of this page). Third spell- Mark of Chthon. I used it a few times before forgetting about it... I tried to make it work with the first spell but ended up not being able to spam it too much else the debuff on me stacks, so I ignored it and went back to the first spell, I also took off Chthon as I was easily able to spam Nightmare curse continously. Pact of Fleeting Life, I ended up never using it... never needing to as I hardly took damage, and when I did, the Vampirism tree quickly put me back to full. Eldritch Inhabitation- The Tentacle Wand spell... I loved the awesomeness when I saw this in effect when I used the tentacle wand a few times, couldn't wait to be able to use this spell a lot.... However, ended up not using it at all. Nightmare Curse is just too good over this spell. Eldritch hurts my fragile necro too much, and I couldn't necessarily eat food while being hit, not to mention I think the debuff gets stronger the more magic power you have, and it also didn't seem to work against necro resist, as none of the debuffs really tell you whats completely going on. Tenebrous Rift- An awesome spell to use. Just awesome. Once I got this, I spammed it on every monster zoo I could find and would eat a Twinkie (replenishment potion) in joy as I watched (mostly) everything die. Whatevers left, I'd spam Swarm on them and let them die off too. This spell seems perfect, and awesome- Highly recommend everyone trying it at least once.
//: Line of Progression :\\ Drinker of the Dead - (Essential for any vampire) v Nightmare Curse - (THE spell that you'll use constantly, although at first it's not as spammable.) v Spirit Stealer + Soul Collector - (Now Nightmare Curse is Almost spammable, and used often.) v Mustache Spirit - (Started taking a little damage and felt like getting a little friend to help out in killing stuff, not essential at all.) v It belongs in a Museum - (Had about 6-8 saved magic items that I wasn't using, so I took this to quickly get to the next level.) v Unliving Wall - Found a monster zoo, wiped it, got scared for my next one as I almost died at one point, so I got this to be prepared. v Invive Thaumite Swarm - (Found another monster zoo, walled up the entrence and used this to wipe it clean. at this point I was able to spam this on half the monsters in the zoo and then the rest died from hopping in the leftover swarms.) v This Translation is All Wrong - (Started running into traps I couldn't pick at, luckily I got a +2 trap affinity item or I may have gotten this sooner.) v Ancient Kronian Ritual - (Found a 8 star quality emerald amulet, grabbed this and began stacking buffs onto it, then I retranslated it until I had +2 trap affinity to continue on which allowed me to pickup traps and sell/lutefisk them) v Mark of Chthon -> Teneberous Rift - (I went for the awesome spell of awesome. And began using it on Monster zoos. Be careful though, it does hurt you a bit.) v The Mortal Machine- (Grabbed this, Mr. mustache started being 1 shot...) v Digging Ray- (Became annoyed with a stupid "Find an item" quest. Started looking around for it in the cleared dungeon, and I never did find it- gave up and deleted the quest. -_-) v Wizarding Associate + Master of Magic- (My Nightmare curse stopped being so effective, grabbed these to help. ended up finding a +5 magic power staff of awesome that helped even further) v The rest of the Staves skills- (Went through this tree specifically for the final skill to increase magic power, hardly hit mobs with my staff if at all...) v Sparkly Glamour- I'm NOT for Team Edward~! (Or for anything Twilight -_-) But I ended up never getting this spell before I killed lord dredmor, when I did use it before, it was resisted A Lot- so I didn't even bother with it... Besides, Unliving wall seems to be better with no possible way of resisting...) And that's what I did ^_^ I was very lucky with magic item drops, as whenever I started to need it, that item would generally drop //: Random Tips to fellow Adventurers! :\\ At the start, Grab EVERYTHING. Find a shop and sell most of it, and keep the food/drinks for lutefisk if you don't need them. Keep all softballs and most/all thrown weapons for lutefisk. Lutefisk all 1star quality items. Spend 100 on each shrine, no more-no less. Buy extra softballs from Throw vending machines if you need to. Lutefisk whatever you can. Save the stacks of 100lf in the ingot press/blacksmithing item so they don't combine if you Sort your inventory. Keep lockpicks in the blacksmithing item if you have less than 10, and only use those on chests. If you have more to spare, keep them in inventory to get free xp from doors. Attempt to disarm all traps. Its generally free xp until around dlvl 5+ (Except Acid bolt traps!) Acid Bolt Traps. Their Deadly. Never attempt to disarm unless you know you can get it. One thing I generally do is put my golem in front of the shooter, and then me infront of the trap and try to disarm it- if golem dies, resurrect. You can do the SAME thing with an aggro'd mob, except that mob would be also hitting you, but usually be killed anyways! On Going Rogue, there's many more traps set. If you disarm them all quickly, you won't have to worry later for when your on a quest to find a mob or item. You can also use -/+ signs to speed up/slow down game speed. I generally speed up 1 tick until I need to. Ingots, Unless used by a crafting skill, should be sold as they waste inventory space. Lutefisk them if you run out of room or if you're low on lutefisk for a shrine. Mushrooms and all potions should always be saved if your melee, otherwise only save the invisibility and mana shrooms, as generally they won't have any need. Save all coral wands, health potions, replenishment potions, etc. and use whenever your in dire need. Never waste them or sell them. Save all Bolts of Mass Destruction//Squid. Use them in Dire situations, or if possible, Save them for Lord Dredmor Himself! Mudwen, all the Aqua potions, oil of virtriol, and verdant poison are Dangerous! Avoid! Sell or Lutefisk though. Root of T'Char. Eat it if you haven't. You will enjoy it.
//: The Proof I did it! :\\ So, for some who think I maybe didn't do it, oh I did. I know there's some way to hack your character and give you 100000000000 xp on some low diggle, but I didn't do this. I died and retried over 200 times, and played various different ways and playstyles. I know there is harder ways to go through the game, but I wanted to enjoy myself all throughout (which is why I chose Necro, as it seemed the most entertaining.) I got a score of 1,154,172 on my 7th try of this build on going rogue-permadeath. Some screenshots: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/43/unledlce.png/ http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/146/18997835.png/ //: A Few Suggestions... :\\ Note: some of this is already being worked on, but these were the main concerns I had while playing. Nightmare Curse- is far too overpowered for the cost it requires. I can literally use it an an entire monster zoo non-stop at level 10 with hardly any worry. My suggestion is to Switch the debuffs with the Necro's First spell. This allows the beginning necromancer to have a bit of worry on the spell (as mana is a bit of a worry at the start) but still be okay, while nerfing Nightmare Curse tremendously. As of right now, once I get the spell I can almost spam it, and later I can spam to my heart's content. Also- Nightmare Curse can basically kill ANYTHING it's put on without worry. You click it on them once, and then you can Literally forget about that mob and do other things. Most of the time I would just click it on all mobs in the room, and then start walking around picking up stuff as they couldn't attack me, and if they could- they go for my golem... so it was a cake walk, especially dlvl 4+. The few things Nightmare curse Couldn't kill, I would just double hit it on an enemy, since it stacks, and they'd die just as quickly... Blood- Should disappear after 5 turns or something, similair to the corpses of enemies. After you slay a monster zoo, there's blood and multiple stacks of it-- Everywhere!! Also, in the settings you should be able to just tick a checkbox to not have Any blood, for if you don't have too great of a computer. Autosaves- Should save more often. Every level, every time you switch dlvl, everytime you enter a shop. Unless a player alt-F4's to cheat the game, the autosaves generally lag far behind... I crashed once in my latest playthrough and had to go back a whole dlvl and replay everything (which none of it was the same) Was just a mild annoyance... But an annoyance nonetheless. Music- The music in this game seems to lagg it, I don't know why... An option to just completely disable it would be great until the problem to it is fixed. Whenever the music changes, the game laggs 2 seconds. Especially noticeable when entering shops. Debuffs (and other things)- ... Some tooltips in the game just simply don't have enough information. When being hit by the necro curses, I was unsure what I could do to stop some of them... It would be nice to know how you can counter some debuffs without looking into the game's code. However, it might be intentional- in which case I'm fine with it. Add one more Skill Tree- This might be weird, but I ask to add 1 more Skill Tree that is persistant in all characters. And this tree would be to simply add +1 Mage/Warrior/or Rogue Stats (the player being able to pick which)... Several abilities I would of easily of skipped if I could just add stats in instead, and for some class builds, you end up NOT being able to put skill levels into as you maxed out all your 3 skill levels quickly... Having a persistant infini-level Stat Skills Tree would prove useful for this. And if people wanted to start the game with 0 abilities, they could put all their skills into the Stats tree. Just a thought. Quests- After the dungeon is mostly cleared or a certain amount of turns, I think the location of the quest should show on the minimap... It gets annoying after clearing a dungeon to then search around trying to find one small little item or one small little monster... Maybe even start it with where it is on the minimap or something- it was just an annoyance I had... ended up canceling on 3 quests because I couldn't find the item/monster and so I gave up and moved on... And that's about it! I thank Gaslamp for this game, as I never really got into rogue-likes until DoD. Thank you for all the humor within the game too. Soooo~ Muuuuch~ Caaaaaake! =^_^=
Congrats. There are some people on this forum who deluded themselves into thinking there are no viable Necromancy builds so this should help shut them up.
You're confusing complaints over Deathly Hex with the ability to have Necronomiconomics in a viable build.
Grats, though I'm surprised you didn't run into the Nightmare Curse bug that boosts your stats to ridiculous levels. Also, @Drog just so you know, he took all the bugged skills in the game, whether or not he used the bugs is unknown, due to most being very tough to avoid or notice. Necro has a game breaking bug, that it looks like he didn't come across based on his mana regen. But Archaeology is widely known as overpowered and also has a bugged skill to make ridiculous items. Then you have Vampirism, which is the most bugged of them all, and I assume that's what made his first few levels trivial until he got the really good mana regen and Necro spells. Also, we know late tree Necro is really good, but early tree is fairly trashy, making it completely useless until later levels. I'm not sure how you spammed Nightmare Curse as much as you did, as it reduces max mana (Along with every other magic stat), which is unavoidable. Specifically monster zoos. (I can see how you did it on the standard mobs in the levels) I prefer Recursive Curse to Nightmare Curse though, just harder to get. Regardless, fantastic job!
The Golemancy + Necronomiconomics combination was honestly the first spellcaster I ever beat GR+P on. Of course I ended up relying almost exclusively upon my Golemancy for the majority of the play unless I had nowhere to kite Thaumites and had to Nightmare Curse. Ultimately, I really feel like I only used Necronomionomics level 2 and 6 and none of the other skills for anything but goofing around with,
@Patch Lol I can post again. I can confirm that Necromancy, specifically Nightmare Curse and Tenebrous Rift, are totally awesome. The leech spell was used from time to time, namely for the next two levels. As dual staves I was easily leeching 30+ life a hit bug free. Once you hit Tenebrous Rift and has the proper necro resist, you can just use that to kill everything. Having enough necro resist isn't that hard either. Early on grind 1 necro resist on each rings/ammy with anvil/this translation is all wrong, mid game pick up a vampire hunter's hat, grind one more necro resist on the hat, and I have all the necro resist I needed to spam Tenebrous Rift at 37 magic power. And yes you know I didn't use the super magic stats because I was never able to get it to begin with, and ended the game with the exact amount as I planned from start. See Nightmare Curse is bugged like Vampirism. But here if you cast on monsters standing on corpses it actually curses you multiple time, causing your mana to plummet to 0 in just a few cast. As for debuff, only the -1 max mana last a while. So as long as you avoid that bug, you will have enough to kill a whole zoo with it when combine with melee. This also means that Vampirism Bug is actively being avoided because you want a clean tile to curse the monster, which puts it to sleep, before you move in for the kill.
Honestly it seems like every Magic school that has one reasonable DOT spell is usable as your solo offense skill. I'm trying Viking Wizardry now and Arctic Wind is just like Nightmare Curse/Curse of the Golden Ratio. I wish magic didn't boil down to 'right click every enemy on the screen and then walk away a bit'. I remember once I encountered a boss that had massive resistance to Transmutative damage, enough to resist my Golden Ratio. It was fun being forced to use 'Animate Blade Being' and run around a lot. Steamrolling the late game just by stacking magic power sucks the fun out of the last few dungeon levels. --- On another note has early game mage always been this depressing? I've started picking Golemancy just so I don't have to deal with 8 enemies crowding a doorway on level 1.
