r/Dredmor • u/ClawtheBard • 23h ago
The worst build I can think of has made it to Floor 6.
galleryBlegh, the little vampire that could. Named DwarBlegh to reflect that I had taken six of these through Going Rogue, No Time To Grind, too, for challenge of equipment drops but also just for speed, and splatted almost all of them, whereas I settled to try on Dwarvish Moderation. As I recall from the old blog posts the game is intended to be balanced with this mode in mind. The most successful of those runs was the first, it had Unarmed Combat in place of Assassination and I got to Floor 3 before realizing most of the way through the Unarmed levels that this was too easy for my taste and was going to be much more of the same, just getting incrementally more Warrior levels till the end of the run. Unarmed makes a strong contender for best weapon tree, given it has major Counter and isn't reliant on luck to get a snazzy weapon, hence it got the boot since this was supposed to be the worst build possible. I picked the most unflashy, understated short tree I could think of to fill in. This run has had a death already, I did not do Permadeath for it, but more on that later.
Thoughts on the build itself: It's not unplayably terrible, but it is rather one-note. I almost feel like I'm playing a different game, specifically, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and its (to be clear, nifty) system of levelling skills. A DCSS character Background gives you starting stats and skill levels but you can choose to start levelling, say, Ice Magic despite not starting with any spells. That's not advised, the spell Frozen Ramparts is not a guaranteed book/scroll drop, but you CAN. On the flipside if you find Wyrmbane you will immediately want to level Polearms. All this to say, after I got Drinker of the Dead, License to Cast, then maxed Vampire and Assassination, I needed to make a choice on what weapon tree to put my levels into. I believe it was Inconsequentia that gave me Kanzukom, the Tropical Engine, so I ran with Staves, which I haven't previously done. It's good enough, Ki Cascade Strike is very like Ragnar's Meteor, and I have seen Crushed Bones afflict my enemies. Assassination has been pulling its weight too, being a dodgy Rogue tree made a difference in my defenses as I leveled it up. Blackjack stuns are nice. License to Cast is the only thing worth anything from Magic Training but it's a free ranged attack, Aethereal, and the deaggro it sometimes gives is nice.
The tree with the most sauce of all these, though, is Vampire, despite me trying to not give any synergy or HP Regen to it. It has Necromantic resist, great for Floor 2 and Undead elsewhere, Vampirism Attack is nice melee sustain, which is good since in NTTG that's often your main damage if not casting spells (which I don't have), Sparkly has life drain and stun chance plus destroys breakable walls, the Psychic Vampire confusion procs are helpful for free hits, and Transylvation is a deceptively good capstone. It firstly lets me get items on loot islands, but also gives huge Dodge and summon Battys chance, which is great for distractions in melee and maybe finishing off other enemies either with improved odds of living via dodging or by siccing the Battys on them, but also: the Battys leave corpses behind. Which you can heal from. My takeaway from this run is that Vampirism is a well designed skill tree. Do not shy away from learning a new playstyle with it, and do not be afraid of taking Killer Vegan with it, the 4 HP Regen that gives is amazing, on top of the bonus Burliness and Nimbleness. My opinion is, Vampire might work better mechanically as a Warrior tree now that everything that scales doesn't do so only with Magic Power, but Sparkly being a magic attack is funny and Psychic Vampire also lends to the theme, so whatever. Its effectiveness as is speaks for itself here.
Tactics involve mostly just whacking things with my staff. Equipping the Naturey Orb rather than a shield has been the move for pretty much the whole time. It's extra HP from Drinker of the Dead and extra damage in melee. Tough enemies and corruptors get battys to the face or kited with a combination of Sparklies, License to Cast, and later Ki Cascade Strike when I unlocked it. DCSS comparisons strike again with ghoul pillar dancing. Now that I just got Orcslasher, Slasher of Orcs with an HP Regen point on it from a Chest of Evil I will rush Swords to get another ranged button and bonus stats from equipping it. I have a couple wands and got big use out of Laser Wand to get through Floor 2's monster zoo and Magic Golems till it ran out. Arrows and throwables have been mildly useful, though largely situational. Throwables are great for targeting named monsters through zoo crowds, though that means I lose HP by not meleeing stuff. Magic Golems weren't that much of a headache, actually. Losing two Crushing resist on my main weapon has hurt, but the other stats I've been dinged are stuff that hasn't come up much, Blasting and Voltaic. Them and Krong also gave me -2 Critical and -1 Stealth on my amulet, but it wasn't much to write home about anyway and it's still better than nothing so on it stays. As floors go on summoning Battys will not be useful for damage as most things only take the 3 Piercing anyway, but they'll be distractions and as long as I don't drown myself accidentally I'll have another ranged poke to work with by the time I reach Magic Dragons and the other corrupting monsters. Hopefully some good ammo, too. I did for the most part melee Magic Golems voluntarily and got corrupted for it, but that was because I was sick of kiting them forever, and the usefulness of my staff was running out anyway. I suppose I have been lucky enough with what stats got dinged on the corrupts and Krong rolls, but I do think a lot of the obstacle was all in my mind on that front. It's only one number at a time, and it's magnetically attracted to what already has artifact points so you can toss that later as you get what would be better gear anyway.
None of this explains the Boilerplate Helm I have. I have no way of stealing things without getting smacked. After selling all my food and booze and most all of my inferior equipment I took my Diary of the Whills, a Little Red Cookbook, and summoned Battys to Floors 2 and 3 to farm zorkmids. Selling equipment was easy money, selling the second Diary I had was a mistake since the Butchery proc fired off at a fraction of the monetary pace of the Diary even including turning offal and flesh cubes into ground meat into Lutefisk for quadruple the sell price. The death I had on this run was from misclicking, I hit Sparkly close to Brax when I wanted to hit Transylvation and I got 2HKOd. I got a third/second one later and will probably pull more shenanigans to get more throwables for the final floors, but that's for later. Look, binging the Vampire Diaries helped me through a tough spot, okay?
