by Sidestepper on Thu Apr 25, 2013 1:06 pm
Strat time again!
I wanted to make a build that could basically ignore all of the annoying effects on Cursed Oasis and have a direct answer to every threat on the board. This is what I came up with.
Priest
Halfling
Trisword
JJ Altar
Black Market
Extra Attack
Bear Mace
Compression Seal
Health + Mana + Burn Salve + Fortitude
Veterans have probably already guessed what I'm up to.
Early game: Explore the entire map. We aren't going to do any wussy regen fighting. This is a strat for damage spiking he-men (or she-women) only. As you go, use JJ's guaranteed WEYTWUT to capture every single monster on the map. If you find WONAFYT, GETINDERE, or BYSEPS use those too, because they also accrue JJ piety and are more efficient. Carefully arrange your monsters in anticipation of future knock back games. Make sure that every Animated Armor can be knocked into another monster, and have the bosses and very high level monsters aligned with a long set of walls. Also, make sure to expose the walled in subdungeon. With WEYTWUT + Bear Mace, you have a 100% percent chance of accessing it.
JJ will almost certainly curse you before you complete this project. That traps you in curse world, but that's okay. Don't bother fighting things or trying to clear your curse stacks until after you have Petition, which should happen somewhere around the 25% explored mark.
With the whole map explored, you have defanged the Shades and their irritating Life Steal. It may seem like a horrible waste to burn your exploration at 1st level, but with Life Stealers on the board, you never really had that blackspace to begin with. Do leave a few odd corners unexplored. Basically, anything that you know for sure is going to be a wall tile or part of the lake should be left black if you can help it. We aren't going to regen fight, but we will need a few scraps to manipulate our health levels.
Now, vacuum up all of the resources. Buy and convert shop junk. We need tons of potions. The Fireheart is the only item that might be worth keeping. Trash most of your glyphs except for Fireball , GETINDERE, and IMAWAL. Don't leave anything on the ground because we are about to dive into the curse world and aren't coming back until the very end.
Take two levels of Boost Health. You do not want the third level and you will not benefit from Boost Mana. Keep everything else for Chaos Avatar and Last Chance.
Now level up with as few kills as possible. Take on the biggest thing that you can while only using one potion. Aim for 3 or 4 levels higher than yourself. Use every bit of health and mana during every round. If a monster knocks you down to 49% of your health, don't drink your potion like a chump, explore a tile to get up to 52% and then let the monster knock you back down to 1% and THEN drink your potion. If you find yourself in the middle of a level with your heath and mana empty, just eat popcorn to get back up. Use Choas Avatar when your piety is in danger of overflowing. Since every monster is exposed and positioned by you, you should be able to use CA with zero waste of xp.
Keep going. Your goal should be to get all of the 7+ level monsters off of the board, as well as wear down the mid level AAs. You want to get all of the 'hard xp' off of the table. Kill the Shade boss the moment that you can do so with only 2 potions or one potion + a level up.
When it's time to square off against the Dragon, you should have enough pre-slowed popcorn to level up twice. You should also be approaching 100 piety again, which means that you have Last Chance as an option. Don't pop your potions until you hit level 10 for maximum efficiency. Every single hit on the Dragon should be a knockback through a wall, or maybe into a level 9 monster that you left hanging around just for this purpose. You should win with plenty of leftover potions.
This strat works because it brutally screws almost every monster type on the map:
Thrall: Priest + Trisword lets up pop those guys like balloons. Their mana burn and poison abilities don't matter as much when you are relying on dings and potions for all of your refills.
Animated Armors: Because you explored the map, you will always have the Fireball glpyh. With that and the Bearmace and guaranteed ideal positioning you can tear through their death protections.
Shades: Exploring at 1st level preempts Life Steal and makes Blink irrelevant (notthat Blink works against the Bearmace anyway). Their physical resistance is little help against a Priest with a Trisword.
Bandit: You don't care about curse. That's the advantage to health stacking versus resistance stacking. Without curse, bandits are nothing.
Dragon: Okay, so you don't have a direct answer to them, but with your piles of health you'll be okay.
Not so sure if this will work in VICIOUS. Leveling is a lot less efficient in VICIOUS. The spiral of having to spend more potions for less xp is pretty nasty.
Last edited by
Sidestepper on Thu Apr 25, 2013 2:32 pm, edited 4 times in total.