Halflings - all shennanigans all the time

[Lujo]

Seems like every halfling build is a troll build that somehow ends up working. Back in the day we used to think of them pretty much only in terms of the triling (which, now that I think about it, was also pretty much a troll build), and only rather late in the beta when the trisword was finally put in a sensible place in terms of power level did I really get to discover the million and one silly stunt you can pull with halflings. Most of these do require various item and deity unlocks and while a few were discovered by thinking about it and then trying it out, most were discovered by screwing the PQI when it tried to screw me by setting me up with a halfling in various silly situations (also the Grimms Grotto quests had a LOT to do with it, they put me in the right frame of mind. Big, BIG props to the devs for those!).

So many people know about one or two of these, but these are all that I can think off of the top of my head, but there's probably more:

- A Halfling Bloodmage of Dracul is the only guy who blows the Bloodswell at low levels and laughs. He can also afford to, since he can convert for piety (convert something then convert the potion) and doesn't really need much besides the lvl up boon and it.
- He can also spike like you wouldn't believe, from really early on. (REALLY early on. I've walked up to bosses at lvl2 or 3 and only stopped chucking fireballs to munch of popcorn)
- A Halfling Priest with Naga Cauldron essentially IS Dracul.
- A Halfling Priest of EM with Avatar's Codex is absurd.
- The Halfling JJ Bloodmage is beyond absurd.
- A Halfling spellcaster going JJ into EM breaks the fabric of time and space apart.
- Any halfling spellcaster is probably either picking up extra health for the codex or casting a ton of stuff off of B2P (and the sillier ones do both). So fire heart and Crstaly ball sinergize, obviously.
- A Halfling EM Monk with Avatars Codex is pretty much the same thing as the Priest except you level up using the codex and then you can probably kick some ass.
- A halfling thief can get up to various Codex shennanigans, too.
- If you put an Alchemist Scroll on a Halfling he's also a Dwarf. If you put a Trisword on a halfling, he's also an Orc.
- If you have Naga Cauldron, 2 debuffs and a Cydstepp on a halfling he's also a Warlord on top of anything else he is.
- Halflings and Gnomes convert for GG piety, but only Halflings convert for Drac piety (and at a better rate)
- Bloodswell, the Drac boon, is one of the strongest refills in the game (100% health restore). Your average halfling can actually spike at least one boss down using health potions even at rather high levels (meaning no god use). I've done this to Blah Blah who's about as fat as a Super Meat Man, with no trisword so rather average damage. This is a LOT of spike.
- That's if you hoard potions, but you can still probably afford to blow a few to spike stuff while leveling.
- The only thing besides the warlord (who ignores health entirely) in the game which can do "self-cannon" on the Labyrinth AFAIK is the halfling monk. This means tanking hits from a frenzied high-damage boss in order to be knocked into another boss enough times to kill the other boss. And then kill the first boss.
- This means that spikey combat healthmonstering (a-la dwarves) is actually quite doable with halflings
- I've done lvl1 boss kills with halflings without the tri-sword even back when it was broken (because it was so broken it took all the fun out of doing it). They lack the damage of Orcs and Humans, but an endless supply of health potions means a bigass supply of TT potions.
- TT halflings also have the distinct benefit of being able to use health potions while leveling and still always have enough to get a load of TT potions.
- Halfling Transmuters can go infinite somehow, I ought to dig up that Astral's thread. I think it has somethign to do with The pactmaker boon which gives extra CP. So you get conversion for you conversion because you can convert while you convert.
- Any halfling with B2P can be a scary ole spellcaster. On top of whatever he is allready, as is always the case with halflings. Because they're their own GG, except one which lets you use B2P.
- A binlor Halfling with Bear mace has a ton of knockback damage but can get a load of mileage out of Stoneskin effortlessly. This is probably the cheapest boon spike in the game in terms of piety costs. Only works on bosses who don't do magic damage, tho. Works with any class, but you could probably get even Rogues to work.
- A binlor Halfling Priest with Bear mace needs more stoneskins but fewer potions. They CAN however prep the Zombie Dog. There being a cap on max piety puts a bit of a cramp on this, as you can only ever have 6 Stoneskins available, but you can get 2-3 more with knockback, and pissorff/endiswall during the fight if that's your thing.
- A halfling Berseker with Elven Boots hits magic damage stuff at a rate of 1 potion = 1 hit.
- So does a Halfling Taurog Berserker, except you do more damage and you can prep the trisword or whatever else. There's a lvl1 boss kill in there somewhere. With so few elements that it's hilarious.
- Not to even get into the Binlor Halfling Berserker, who'll do anything to anything.

I can't think of any more right now, but I've come up with the Halfling Taurog Berserker lvl1 boss kill just by writing this list, so there's probably more out there.

I could go into more detail, but no time right now, might do a proper textwall with detailed instructions somewhere down the road. If you guys got any, feel free to add yours!

[Blovski]

Halfling Transmuters can spike VHOS without shenanigans, believe it or not. Stick JJ or EM for bonus health, XP + free level up or bonus health, XP and DR on and you've got two different viable interesting builds with it. I think that given how players tend to unlearn using potions as a crutch as they go the power of health potion spikes gets a bit overlooked but y'know it's not like halflings are broken compared to Orcs/Humans/Gnomes/whatever. Just viable and better than you might expect.

Are halflings worth lockering Dwarven Gauntlets on? The much needed damage boost and health thus healing potion power boost seems very viable.

Also, nota bene, Alchemist's Pact from Pactmaker synergises really nicely with halflings. In Lujo speak it makes them Goblins too

[Lujo]

^ Yeah, and they used to get distracted by the trisword. It's also that some of these are enabled by Vicious rewards and many are enebled by good deity and boon knowledge (often of obscure boons), so all the health spike stuff does kinda get easily overlooked. And some of it is plenty ridiculous (the bloodmage stuff can get way out there) it's just not nearly as clear-cut and obvious as orc/human/gnome w glyphs. You don't really go looking for shennanigans with halflings untill the PQI starts setting you up with weird combos.

The devs DID give them a lot of love, though. Some of these might be accidents but most look like deliberate plants. There's probably a story behind all this, but as with most stuff the devs ever did - we don't have a clue about it. Best we could do in most cases is dig up stuff like this and then wildly speculate what might've been going on behind the scenes and whether it's a good thing or not... Not that anyone would mind knowing, ofc. Then we could sing praises and all that...

I think the Gauntlets would be pretty good. Allthough the early explosion caster builds which don't have a vicious reward at the core probably preffer the +10 HP pendant because of the way B2P scales. If you plan on punching stuff, then by all means, I just never lockered them I think.

And VERY acute observation on the Alchemist pact! Halflings - stealing other people's gimmicks since whenever the devs started putting tools in!

[Kami]

Hm..

I think halfings main purpose is to get regeneration without exploring. The rest like alchemist scroll, god piety etc....
was a buff to them.

I thought it was only for boss spiking, boy was I wrong.

Could you sugest a starting class to learn halfling shennanigans?

[Astral]

@Lujo: Those lvl 1 bosskill stats sound very interesting. How do you do them?

The tips you wrote are great, but there's one I don't understand. On halfling bloodmages of Dracul, why do you use Bloodswells for restores? Drinking the potions before worship looks like the better option than converting them for piety.
Also Bloodcurse sounds counter productive since it decreases B2P efficiency.

As a silly random thought: people often say GG and potion chucking halflings priests don't mesh well. You just have to look at it in a different way. They have an amazing health refill 'boon' that has a flat 10 piety cost. Protection has nothing on it.
Same for Dracul worshipppers

On a more serious note halfling palas are the best CP based GG/Dracul piety generators. And when you have your wanted boons, you can drink your remaining potions without punishment.

About the halfling infinimuters, I did a pretty bad job writing them in a comprehensive way - it was bundled with a lot of other stuff and it's hard to follow - so I'll summarize it.
The classical approach is boosting health with EM (not JJ, because EM into JJ works better than the opposite, also she can corrode stuff) at lvl 1 so much, that an imawall and pisorf cast heals enough with Fireheart, that the several B2P casts can be negated by the newly gained health potions. If you have the Cauldron and some debuffs ~70 HP makes it work.

The newer versions incorporated the spirit sword bug (which refills your mana completely every cycle), so max mana which was previously meaningless helps further decreasing the HP requirement (in theory possibly below 10, but not because of overheal limitations). Core god is JJ, items are up to your preference, glyphs changed to Burndayraz, (Lemmisi, Halpme), B2P. It's way more reliable, but harder to use.

If you want to see some details here's a topic:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3182

@Kami: Very good classes are Priest, Thief, Paladin, Transmuter.
Also as a general tip, try using some of your potions in the leveling phase to score even higher leveled kills. The bonus experience will translate to more dings, and since your reach higher levels sooner, it saves resources too. You can spend less piety on refill boons as others, so better character building potential.
On higher difficulties the potions kills could be the difference between reaching lvl 10 or not, or if you're good enough and pull off high level kills naturally, this allows you to play more casually.

If you can't judge how many potions you can use during leveling, play some matches where you save your potions till the end and count the leftovers. When you know the average value, you can spend 1-2 less without worries.
You'd be surprised, but this will result in more leftover potions than regular, since the early potion drinking let's you build your character and save resources more easily. This applies to goblins and xp, and bloodmages and sanguine too.

[Tinker]

[Lujo]

[Tinker]

[Lujo]

[Astral]