I lost my character last night to an arctic debuff which caught me by surprise. That means I have no screenshots to share, but I thought the story was worth telling anyway. The build was my "Strongest One In the World" build I added to my strategy guide with the most recent update. The skills are: Maces Thrown Weapons Piracy Smithing Tinkering Killer Vegan Berserker The central idea is to get my melee bonus (which also adds to thrown weapons) as high as possible. There is a lot of great synergy in this build: Maces provide knockback, which gives you distance to throw. Thrown weapons don't trigger Fallen Vegan, so you can fight animals reasonably well if you need to. Smithing and Berserk give significant melee damage bonuses, and both Smithing and Tinkering give you lots of great craftable thrown items. Piracy has great defense skills, but mostly it's there for the infinite number of cannonballs... Killer Vegan is the centerpiece skill - because playing as a Vegan always dominates your strategies. +9 Burliness and Nimbleness is pretty awesome, since it counteracts your penalties from heavy armor, and gives you more health and melee damage. +5 Righteous damage, which applies to throws, makes you an unstoppable peltast with softballs. Your melee bonus damage seems to add to whatever damage type you deal most of, so softballs do just 1 crushing + 5 Righteous plus my melee bonus of 18 means 23 Righteous damage! Only Paladin's resist Righteous damage, and since they are animals anyway, I can righteously slaughter hordes of enemies with softballs alone. The newly fixed Piracy was giving me a ton of gems, which is good because this is a build which spends money at vending machines. I kept any elemental bolts I found, and bought every softball I could. Around DL4 I smithed myself some serpentine plate and a heroic bronze aspis, which increased my survivability quite a bit. Had a few close calls on DL6, which I escaped through a combination of Piracy's counter-attack skill, some Inky mushrooms, and a well-timed monster toss. Speaking of the toss - I found it surprisingly useful. It's very similar to the mace knockback attack, in that even if it doesn't knock the monster back much (or at all) it seems to prevent them from attacking you for that turn. I was monster-tossing anything dangerous, and had no trouble getting back into throwing range. Now obviously you can't find enough objects to throw-kill everything (sad) but I had to adjust my thinking a bit when selecting targets. The question was not "how well can I damage this enemy" but rather "how much damage will this enemy do to me with each hit?" Most physical enemies did only 1-2 damage per hit, so I was happy to melee them to death, even if it took a while. But elemental enemies (fire, acid) could hit me for 7 or 8 damage, which I needed to avoid, because I didn't have very good healing potential. I started to think of my throwing weapons as little healing potions - I'd use them to avoid taking 10 damage or so. Not a bad deal. My eventual goal was to get twin power limbs going on my character, hopefully with a kilt. I was using my Cybercone hat on Krong alters, but an unfortunate -3 Perception made me discard it, and I started enchanting my parachute pants instead. I was sad to see that Berserk still doesn't trigger on thrown attacks. Really seems like it should. To play this build, you really need Animal Friend first (so you can use your friend to kill animals, and get their XP on the first floor!), then grab Monster Toss and get up to Smithing 5 and Vegan 5. Maces is actually not a critical skill at all to level up - I ended up using non-mace weapons for the most part, and Monster Toss was a more useful knockback than the Mace random chance knockback, at least for me. If you really love axes, or swords, those might end up being a better fit. Does the axe crit bonus apply to thrown weapons (assuming you are holding an axe?)
