Sidestepper's Newbie-Friendly Annotated Playthroughs

[Darvin]

[The Avatar]

True, but I still feel lame. I want to see him do a vicious dungeon so I can see how he does them, and amply compare to my runs.

[Sidestepper]

[xspeedballx]

The only vicious dungeons I am able to consistently pull off anything better than a +1 kill are dragon isles and naga city. Usually done with early GG.

[The Avatar]

That works. You can get 4+ higher level kills as a level 5 berserker v a level 9 druid.

[gjaustin]

I have a lot of success getting higher level kills in Vicious Halls of Steel. If only because I'm already going in with a class and preps setup to abuse burning.

[Sidestepper]

In this run, I use an unlikely combination of hard work and unholy magic to stomp the berserker camp. If my luck had been slightly better, I would have had the opportunity to use the even more unlikely combination of hard work, unholy magic, and holy worship.


My bloodmage starts out right next to an altar of Binlor. This is too good to pass up. You should always take Binlor if you find him during the exploration phase, even if you have no interest in his boons.


This is why. Look at my piety, and look at how little black space I've used. Granted, I'm using the almost perfect combination of BLUDTOPOWA and the crystal ball, but this would be amazing even if I were getting half of that piety.

Incidentally, the absolutely perfect scenario would be to be playing wizard with the crystal ball who just happened to find a BLUDTOPOWA laying next to Binlor's altar. I've had that happen once, and it was glorious.


Look at this. I'm almost at the piety cap, and I still haven't even found my first suitable monster. At this point, I am periodically dumping piety into Stone Heart. Each usage costs me 10 piety, reduces all monster resistances by 5, and grants me 3% magic resistance. It also destroys 10 walls, so you don't want to go overboard. It would be a shame to waste black space because you couldn't find anymore walls.


I still haven't found any level-2 monsters, but it doesn't matter anymore. Check this troll out. Ten successive Stone Hearts have dropped his resistances from 50% each all the way down to zero. Moreover, I now have 30% resistance against his attacks. The frozen trolls have gone from being super annoying to being under-statted xp piggy banks.



I chase the troll into a corner using fireballs. He heals the damage incurred during the chase just fine, but now he has ten levels of burning built up.



It turns out that I needed to use a mana potion to completely finish him off, but it was worth it.



For my next trick, I corner and kill a troll-6. The troll-7 would have been an even better target, but I didn't find him until I had already invested piles of mana into the 6, and just didn't feel like starting over.

I'm also feeling a little frustrated here. Binlor has nothing left to offer that I want. I'm using my spare mana to dig out walls to offset the piety loss from level gain, but I really, really want to find a different god and cash in on all of this piety that I'm sitting on.

I really wish that the last patch hadn't broken JJ. Right now, I'm stuck at 2 altars per map, when I could potentially be having 4.



from here, I target a Warlock-7.



After which, I am able to target a Warlock-8.



No point in screwing around now. I can end the game from here. Since I've given up on finding an alternative god, I go ahead and use Binlor's Stone Skin boon to give me some easy physical shots against the boss. I make the physical attacks first, then start regen-fighting with fireballs. Doing it the other way around would have exposed me to his berserker attacks.



While the fight is going on, I find an altar to Glowing Guardian just north of my starting point. If only I had found that from the beginning! I'll talk about what could have been at the end of this story.


The boss is about to be toast.



And Lord Gobb isn't very dangerous when he's been stripped of his magic resistance and is facing an all-fireball strategy. I didn't even have to use any of my blood pools.


I really wish I had known about Glowing Guardian from the start. Usually, he is a terrible choice for a bloodmage, because he punishes the usage of literally every single one of your class powers. But this is a special case. With Binlor+BLUDTOPOWA, I had so much piety that I could have bought 10 levels of Stone Heart, rebuilt my piety back to 100, and then converted to GG, all at 1st level. While GG gets mad whenever you turn BLUDTOPOWA on, he doesn't punish you for merely having it active. Since I never needed to turn my bloodmagic off to begin with, I would have been able to fly under GG's radar.

With the 50 piety left over from conversion, it would have been easy to take a level-2 Absolution + Humility, followed by a mid-game Enlightenment, and then a conversion back to Binlor. The whole thing is so deliciously perverse; I wish I could have pulled it off.


Epilogue:
Right as I was posting this, I ran into this situation:


I'll leave it up to the reader to guess what my strategy was for that level!

[The Avatar]

Dang you got lucky there. If only that was annotated, you could teach newbies the definition of CRUSHING a dungeon.

And nice berserker camp run.

As for Vicious runs, it's a practice thing. I have spent so much time trying to get monster classes that I naturally became good a Vicious dungeons. And the only reason I had the dedication to do that is my perfectionist nature. Just keep hacking away at them, it gets easier and easier. Heck, I have 5 naga city wins!

[Darvin]

[Sidestepper]

No, but that would have been awesome. Really, with a start like that, you could pull off a post-enightenment conversion with a berserker. I know, because I've done it before.