Hi everyone! So, yesterday I finally made it to Dredmor on level 10 (so I didn't use RotDG as I first want to beat the game without) It was a fun game, I only found my horadric lutefisk cube on level 9 and had tonnes of money because Brax decided to sell only Swords and daggers that game. My skill build was Unarmed, Shields, Smithing, Tinkering, Big game hunter, perception, clockwork knight. Unfortunately I died when Dredmor had only a sliver of health left. He seemed to suddenly get 2 or 3 turns in a row on which he all cast his lightning spell which quickly reduced my life to zero (before that, every time he cast that spell I would take a inky hoglantern and a potion to heal up). Some observations and questions arose during that game: - Are builds without 'trap affinity' viable? I was really happy being able to get rid of every trap I came around. Would be a huge hassle to have to teleport around every one. - Is the dredmor in RotDG equally strong as the one that I fought? If so, it might be good to do RotDG so I can get more items/exp before fighting him. - I played on NTTG...crafting was indeed somewhat of a problem. Not necessarily because of lack of ingredients, but more because I didn't find any recipes. Maybe it would be an idea to find 2 recipes per bookcase in NTTG? I also seemed to find a certain encrust multiple times (Galia's or something like that? The one where you put a lot of meat on your armour ^^ ). - Tinkering/smithing seemed a bit useless, at least in this game. I just crafted all my clockwork armour things...and then I found all those items on the 9th level just lying around. I think I'll do a non-crafting character now, because I feel I wasted a looooot of time doing inventory management. Maybe I'll do some sort of mage with alchemy for potions of invisibility and healing. Would I need 'anti-trap skills'? Hope this very confused post makes any sense at all! Thanks a lot!
1) It depends on how careful you are. Personally, I can't play without having trap affinity or at the very least a high trap sight so I can avoid them more easily. 2) Lvl15 Dredmor is stronger. But so are you by then. 3) Gaga's Encrust has multiple slots. That might be why you feel like you're getting the same one. As for getting more recipes per bookcases on NTTG, I wouldn't mind, but I usually play with room mods (one of which adds a room with around 20 cases) so that's usually covered. And if you play with Paranormal, you get Alien Authopsy which gives you recipes randomly. 4) Crafting skills can somewhat fall off in the game. However, some items have an artifact quality which means that you gain some bonus stats automatically on crafting. And crafting also helps you deal with corruption, so you can replace your corrupted equipment in a pinch.
Being without trap affinity is quite viable if you have a knockback skill, just target the trap space and watch it move (assuming it has somewhere to go). Psychokinetic Shove from Psionics, Unarmed's two knockback attacks, even the rocket punch from Clockwork Knight can do it. Pushed traps can also slide under doors that are closed... For me, trap sight radius is the one; my Stupid Death Probability gets exponentially higher the less of it I have.
I've not had trap skills the couple of times I've won, and it hasn't been a huge problem. It's not *that* often you can't go around them, and there are numerous other ways to deal with them. Teleport or using knock-back as mentioned. Some traps can only trigger once, so it's possible to have enemies (or a summoned monster) 'disarm' it. You can always just tank through most of them when you're healed and out of combat, though be warned that the damage inflicted by many apparently scales to your character's spell power, so take off your magic hat first if you must! Trap sight radius isn't really an issue if you move via mouse clicks, since it'll always stop you with a confirmation dialog box. Getting surprised by an invisible monster can be nasty for a mage though, so have a plan for that.
Yay, now an answer from someone as lacking in sanity department as I am. - It is possible to play with no trap affinity at all. It means you will sometimes find yourself in situations where you won't be able to proceed unless you have either a knockback ability (to move the trap), a teleport ability (to move yourself over the trap), a summoning ability (for as long as it's not you who gets hurt...), or a lot of resistances and some spare healing items (not recommended, but if there's nothing else...). Playing without trap sight, on the other hand, requires a lot of patience and by "a lot" I mean "complete your Jedi training" amount of it. - He is stronger. Also, stack on magic resistance (to resist the stunning effect of his bolt attack) and on voltaic resistance (because this one is also his strongest attack, and it deals a lot of voltaic damage). - Generally speaking, crafting is often more useful for crafting usable items, whether it's bolts, potions, throwables, wands, or whatever else. Occasional armour or weapon piece helps a lot, but on NTTG it's usually less of a boost while usable items are always useful (with the exception of damage-dealing wands for Dredmor himself, but emptying a few wands on zoos tends to yield good results). - Well, crafting equipment for yourself on NTTG tends not to be worth it. Crafting usable items, on the other hand... Craft yourself some bolts/throwables so that you would be able to leave the best (hint: not the most expensive ones, but the ones that deal the most of one type of damage at once) for Dredmor and you'll see that it is much more useful than now (because on NTTG using it purely for equipment crafting is stupidly inefficient, it's like going on an epic adventure for diamonds in Minecraft only to find out there's already a lot of diamond picks ready for taking in a chest near the spawn point).
