Rat Monarch

[Lujo]

I thought everybody knew that about Vicious Steel. It's that dungeon where you can kill one of the bossess supremely easily if you have Taurog/Platemail/EM on board, and both if you also have any sort of knockback to go with it. It's the "default" cheat for that place.

All sorts of things work themselves into it with anything at all, Zot and regen fight the indomitable, Whoopaz + knockback on Blah Blah before you start the whole thing if no zot, pissorff spam... It's really one of those places where, before you write anything else you have to write: you can do this place in two ways, the easy way with DR or the hard way (comparatively) with any other approach. It's not a Rat specific thing, it's been the, well, default thing ever since they added Blah Blah to it...

[chandl34]

[MTaur]

Stay in the same place long enough, and you'll get a skewed idea of what "everyone knows".

[Lujo]

So true

Well, that's one of those (many many) things we just never wrote up properly, I guess. Because it didn't look like it makes sense and it looked like it might get changed, it's so universal and does the dungeon in so thoroughly. Lots of folks were kinda expecting that dungeon to be tweaked not to push you towards it so much or something, too. Since it doesn't look like it's going away it probably ought to be first thing on the page. There's not many (if there is any) that effective particular & universal shortcuts to individual dungeons in the game at all.

And it really should be written up, because Vicious Steel is a nasty ole dungeon if you don't know that, easily serious nerf bait. Blah Blah stats and blink kind of assume that you'll deal with the Indomitable easily that way, knockback (be it actual knocback, pissorff or both) just make them both go down more easily. The reason it didn't make sense was because it just sidelines the Indomitable completely.

And that's why it is/was considered the easiest Vicious Dungeon, it's the only one with a solution. If you don't know the solution you're up against two really fat and durable bossess in an unforgiving map. If you do know the trick, the presence of the indomitable makes the dungeon easier than it would be without him...

[Blovski]

My VHOS guide from yonks ago has it. Shows the forum wisdom needs to get borged into the wiki, though. New info I have is that knocking an enemy back into a blinking enemy won't make them blink, and that the Rat Monarch is thus the easiest way to get the VT on that dungeon.

[Lujo]

^ It's also the easiest way to do it with anyone (knockbacking stuff into blinkers). It's also why pissorf wrecks certain maps, too.

And, err, you can't really bring forum wisdom to the wiki. There's enthusiastic newbies debating everything, including stuff they don't know about. If it doesn't make sense to them it'll get debated. I'm generally not a bit oponent of parlamentarism, but if I had to give a lecture on why it doesn't work sometimes... The problem is it's always them vs. one person debating stuff, they don't really know what's common knowledge so they think they're debating "sensible" versus "strange" because so much is "strange" (they seem to think they know more than what's common knowledge because they seem to know more than what's on the wiki, and wiki's never really was a refference point for anything). They also seem to think they're discovering an untouched game, simply because the wiki is what it is, so they think their opinion is much more solid than it is (or that everyone's opinion is equal as everyone has the same level of experience, which it isn't, but if they knew that they wouldn't even be updating the wiki as they'd know how much they don't know, lol). Which is why debate is mostly pointless anyway. Mostly boils down to not being able to separate personal opinion/prefference from fact, really (or rather not really being fully aware of how much their playstyle is actually a playstyle rather than "the way to do something - and thinking they're just debating someone else who's just got a different playstyle)), and also giving too much credit to the wiki as they found it (not being aware of just how much it was a Darving thing all along, including the structure and perspective). It's very interesting in an anthropological/sociological sort of way, but very counterproductive.

If I wasn't stuck on XP and could get the wikimedia thingy working, I'd be busy simply making a new wiki allready. I really should've wend and did all the prep work earlier and did it on this wiki, the "I'm gonna finally do it one day" was the main reason I went and did the "one more playthrough" thing, and if I just did it earlier then it wouldn't have been a problem, but what can you do...

[dislekcia]

Lujo, new players are awesome. To them, they are discovering a new game. I'd prefer it if you didn't want them to worship your knowledge and rather just hinted at things they'll have fun discovering on their own. This is a support community for a game of discovery, after all.

[Lujo]

I know, I don't want them worshiping my knowledge it's just impossible to write it down in a wiki to just be perused. Who'd even know I wrote something in a wiki (if it was short?). EDIT: And more than half of it isn't even MY knowledge in any sense at all, it's stuff everyone knew a while back but noone wrote down in the wiki. You get plenty of great people feeling great about themselves - great for the game, but you also got a lot of noobs feeling very pro - bad for having a wiki about a complexish game. It's just like that, nothing I can do to change that (or have to or anything). But it IS part of the answer why "such and such" isn't on the wiki...

EDIT: Also, the REALLY bad thing is that they're leaning quite a bit on the Darvin model, which is more about handing out "X class best option" solutions, which isn't really conductive to a wiki about a game of discovery, I got a much better model in mind, but there's 0 chance of implementing it, so what's to tell...

[chandl34]

Great rant. I did the write-up last Sunday, feel free to adjust it.

I wanted to test whether burning had the same knockback bonus as corrosion, but I never got around to it. That could make Whurrgarbl a weaker alternative to Martyr Wraps. Martyr Wraps adds about 200-300 damage. Stone Fist is generally much stronger.

[Astral]

Burning and KB don't really mix well. You do get extra damage on KB, but the burn stack detonates each time, so when using both Whurgarbl and Bearmace you will be stuck at 1 Burning and will only get +1 damage out of it per hit. The only way to make it useful is adding the Avatar's Codex to the combo. This way you will do max burn damage as an extra, too bad this combo is unreliable since you can't prep the Codex with Whurgarbl.