Strategy Thread for talking about Strategies

[Lujo]

Yep, it's a general purpose CP monster prep. Transmutation seal + fewer glyphs works on it's own, and the stone works as an "extra glyph" (lol), which also gives you money when you transmute it (for more conversion fodder). And it starts in your inventory so you don't have to find 2 (scarcer) glyphs to get rolling. Now, whether you can get anything meaningful out of all that CP is a fair question. Or rather how it compares to other possible preps.

However, I'm not sure there is a stronger CP centric opening, and this came as an evolution of my regular fabuouls treasure routine. And it can also be backed up in a few ways (extra shop / quest items for more CP, extra gold if that's the issue, bear mace to get more out of you base damage, Drac/GG for potions races quick piety gain, Taurog because why not, and so on). It's nice for an inventory hassle free expirience and those times where you know exactly what you set out to do but burns enough prep slots/resources to not warrant nerfs.

Also Vampires (maybe, they do benefit hugely from getindare, halpmeh and cydstep) and half-dragons for sure (I've yet to find a better strat for them).

Oh, and Balanced Dagger + Wonnafyt is one of the staples of sucesful vicious token runs. Very strong combo ^^

[Darvin]

[The Avatar]

Very true. I love the goblin assassin, but when you don't use it in Vicious mode things get very interesting. Makes for some great purist games.

[justAZombie]

Stumbled upon an odd strategy that I like to call the 'dragon cannon'. It's based off the idea that the dragon's natural magical attack and knockback allows it to push around the magic immune plants. In other words, these plants actually become a source of damage for a dragon.

Since no strategy is worth its salt unless it can take a vicious dungeon, I attempted this in the only one that allows you to spawn plants around the bosses: vicious halls of steel. I prepped the earthmother (obviously), a bear mace for extra knockback, the transmutation seal/sensation stone massive cp combo, and a smugglers dungeon just because (no extra potions).

To my surprise, it worked like a charm! Admittedly, I got pretty lucky: I found weytwut pretty early so I could avoid getting trapped by the earthmother's plants. I bought entanglement out of the gate and the alternated between shots of vine form and greenblood to fill up the map with plants as well as alternating between stoning slowed popcorn (or plants) and killing the highest level monsters I could to maximize experience.

Then, I got extra luck and found Binlor! I blew through the rest of my piety, took plantation, and converted in. From there I took stone fist and then a couple of shots of stone heart, not because I was worried about resistances but because I wanted to clear out the walls to make paths I could push plants along. As icing on the cake, the secret subdungeon had a second bear mace! When all was said and done, my knockback was at 220%.

At level six I began push plants into count blahblah and got him down to < 50 hp, at which point I finished him off with fireball. I was about out of plants, so I took on the indomitable the old fashioned way, knocking him into a long line of walls and fireballing/discharging burning stacks when he was down to 1 hp to peel off the death protections. I figured with vine form I would be able to plow through him no problem, but I forgot that I had accumulated something like 15 curse stacks while clearing out non-magic immune paths to send my 'dragon cannonballs' down. I didn't have nearly enough popcorn to clear that, and I thought that might be the end, but fortunately the regular subdungeon I spawned was the Pa'an labyrinth, which was pure black space for a dragon that can see the hellbois before revealing them. In the end, I pushed the Indomitable up against a warlock and just kept smacking until he went down. Success!

As I mentioned earlier, most of the vicious dungeons are set up so you can't spawn plants around the bosses, making this a useless strategy for anything but the vicious halls of steel. You might be able to pull it off in Naga City, but I imagine that would be much harder since you have to start the plant spawning from scratch when you descend to the boss level. If it's possible, it'll probably take a better player than me to pull it off. Still, this proved a fun and novel way to clear the VHOS with a half-dragon (and it makes the southern swampy levels a piece of cake).

[Sidestepper]

That's crazy! I can't wait until I get a chance to try that. What about prepping a Titan Guitar to clear the walls? That's what I normally do when prepping EM on HoS because of all of those hallways, but I'm also not usually playing a half-dragon. Do you think the mobility makes up for the loss of walls for knockback?

I can see that piety management is going to be tricky with this. You want to spam plants as hard as possible, and then keep your piety low to control the cost of your plant murder. It seems like a plant missile + fireball only approach would be the best approach, with an eye towards dropping Plantation later on and escaping from EM.

As for porting this to other VICIOUS dungeons, keep in mind that token runs totally count. VICIOUS Ick is probably going to be a real pleasure.

[The Avatar]

Yeah. Now I wish there was an item that spawned plants (actually, that would be interesting as you would be able to get SPOONS, but for a price) because that would be great for this strategy.

[Sidestepper]

This would have been hilarious when Avatar spawned plants and is probably still hilarious in the Western Forest.

[justAZombie]

Just did vicious ick swamp this way. It was indeed super easy! I did it on level seven after fireballing away a bunch of resistances from the naga boss, but there were still TONS of magic-immune plants on the map, so I'm sure it can be done earlier. At this point the only challenge with this strat on that map seems to be leveling up enough for your plants/cannonballs to do reasonable damage, but even that isn't hard because you can use lesser cannonballs to level up.

Not sure about the titan guitar tradeoff; the sensation stone/transmutation scroll combo nets you HUGE amounts of knockback damage, but it might be worth it if you could double the amount of useful plants on the map.

As far as piety management is concerned, I'm not even sure it's that much of a worry. You can always plantation and convert out before you start the plant slaughter, but even if you don't, you theoretically don't need to melee at all using this strat, making corrosion a moot point. Just make sure you spend all your piety before you piss EM off. (Not that you need her for the ick swamp, obviously)

[justAZombie]

Ok, clearly I'm having too much fun with this. Just did a Labyrinth run with the vicious token using the dragon cannon. Once again, piece of cake. I prepped the titan guitar as per sidestepper's suggestion, and to keep the crazy cp boost, i also prepped the transmutation seal and fewer glyphs and then just transmuted a glyph instead of the sensation stone. No gold, but the cp you net is the same.

This time I stayed in EM and just forgot about corrosion. By the time i was flinging plants at enemies, i wasn't doing any more melee fighting anyway. I stopped keeping track when i hit 143 corrosion.

At the end, I bought plantation and then filled the screen with a bunch of entanglements; by far the cheapest way to buy plants. I was nowhere near running out of ammo when I took down the bosses (the other boss was a wraith).

[Lujo]