Basically, be this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY-QBvy3lR8 Become what your sister always thought you were: a physical incarnation of bugs! Verminator is a warrior skill tree designed to overcome some of the shortfalls that warriors experience, namely their inability to heal themselves, and their weakness in the art of area-of-effect warfare. Thus, Verminator allows one to engage in toe-to-toe combat against groups of enemies in a manner more fitting a warrior gone dungeon diving. Also, because you're really gross, all the abilities scale off of Caddishness. [Also available on the Steam workshop.] Skills time!: Chitain Mail: -1 blasting resist, -1 conflagratory resist, +1 putrefying resist, +1 caddishness. When you get smacked around enough, the bugs crawling around inside of you get roused from their nests. Whether their crunchy exoskeletons provide armour or the enemies just really don't want to touch you depends on your ego. Note that the insects will continue to be angry until you stop getting hit! Infestationalized: -1 blasting resist, -1 conflagratory resist, +1 putrefying resist, +1 caddishness. Now the bugs are just being opportunistic! Whenever you kill an enemy, there is a chance you'll coat the ground in crawly carpets around you. These carpets can create more carpets when stepped upon, heal you slightly when you step on them, burrow through enemies painfully, and their infestations can even leave more carpets behind them after a time! Maggotami: -1 blasting resist, -1 conflagratory resist, +1 putrefying resist, +1 caddishness. You can fold maggots into useful and interesting shapes! Upon killing an animal, a vegetable, or the undead, there's a chance you will grow a punchy, munchy, or crunchy maggot. Punchy maggots are throwing weapons, munchy maggots create a Meatshield effect, and crunchy maggots are sort of like healing potions but utterly revolting. Sharing them will get you kicked out of just about every Adventurer's Guild ever founded. Swarmour: -1 blasting resist, -1 conflagratory resist, +1 putrefying resist, +1 caddishness. You are beginning to fully integrate with the swarms inside. Now you can don the antiblative chitin on demand! Fly Hive: +1 putrefying resist, +1 caddishness. Gnarly, dude. Really gnarly. Give yourself a fly hive! Surround yourself in an aura of flies that damage adjacent opponents, but beware of getting near Brax because he REAAAALLY hates gnarlies. I don't blame him. Be aware that the gnarlies suck back mana like a sloppy joe on a bad date, though. Crawly Carpet: +1 putrefying resist, +2 caddishness. Your mastery over the infestation is becoming quite obvious to your ex-loved ones. You can launch a crawly carpet excursion when you want to, instead of waiting for them to be lured out by the promises of fresh corpse-hosts. Verminator II: Pestilent Day: +1 putrefying resist, +3 caddishness. You are truly an unstoppable buggernaut sent from the Kingdom above. Your mission: kill Sarah C-, err, Lord Dredmor. When you seem to be damaged, just pop the sequel in and you'll be in top fighting form. It takes a while to develop the next hit in the franchise, though, so remember the wait! Arthropodacalypse: +2 blasting resist, +2 conflagratory resist, +6 putrefying damage. You have become one of the Horseflies of the Arthropodacalypse. Just about everything you do blacks out the sun with ravenous, flesh chewing, life chugging, spawn-spawning spawn. The Verminator hath come!
Not too sure how i feel about this - will have to test extensively to be sure - but my experience is that a penalty to hurts VERY bad. The exotic damages thread is a bit dated, but if you want the low down on what has changed with the expansions, there's more damage outside of level 9. That's not even considering traps and Diggle Hell. In fact, the best way to balance an otherwise overpowered tree is just to throw in some -. As the tree stands, i'm not sure it does enough at the lower levels to justify the cost. Even more so when the first level forces some on you. Secondly, this a tree that doesn't leave much in the way of a halfway point. Yes, the level 0 effects are great, but the falls off fairly quickly, and is dependent on you taking damage to boot. Once you clear the first floors, you can't really walk around with -1 -1 and no major benefits to show for it. Logically, that forces you to take more points, but they come with more -. Sure, the effects are great, but they are very much focused on doing damage at short range, and will very quickly involve you taking more damage than you deal if you leave it at non-capstone levels. So you are pretty stuck with a tree that forces you to rush the capstone with your first 7(!) levels. Given how quickly the rate of level up falls off post level 5, even on GR, you basically have a tree that greatly limits the ways in which someone plays the game. Thirdly, Assuming you stop halfway, +2-3 helps early game, but falls off very quickly when monsters with +>6 start showing up (which is as early as level 6). I recommend concentrating the + resist on the lower levels, rather than over the whole tree. The way it is now, you are greatly increasing your vulnerability an already hard hitting exotic damage, and only getting a moderate increase in resistance to somewhat less common type of exotic damage. Imo, aim for something like 6 to go with the -4 at the halfway point, then add maybe 2 more points at the capstone or pre-capstone. Fourthly, Passive swarmour does too much for the first 2 floors, and not enough later on. This greatly mitigates the value of on-demand swarmour. My Two Cents? Make a "lesser" swarmour for level 0, and a "greater" activable swarmour. Make them separate buffs that can stack with each other, keep the refreshable mechanic on both, and voila, problem fixed. Fifthly, it would be nice if you could stack the from picking up crawling carpets. It seems to make sense to me. Also, it would be add a lot of value to being able to cast carpet on demand (which, btw, also suffers from the problem as swarmour - consider solution for 4, above). Also, crawly carpet on demand is nowhere as strong as Fly hive, so i recommend swapping them around. Long story short - Great skill tree, just needs a bit more pizzaz to compensate for the - at earlier levels, and rebalancing via taking some power away from passive swarmour/crawly mat and adding some of that their activable versions.
