by Lujo on Mon Apr 27, 2015 11:11 pm
Tinker, you're not taking into account strats which can make half a yendor on the map extra go a long way. If the point isn't reaching lvl 8 or whatever, but having a really easy time dinging and not fighting stuff that takes effort to kill (such as if one of your bars is tied up with the bossfight) the dagger is still kick ass. And I also notice you tend to prep the Titan guitar or remove all the walls on mazy maps in other ways - when you don't do that you run into level-appropriate monsters more than ideal targets and stuff. It's still a perfectly legit prep, and does wonders with the right strats (and matches it's price and size far better than the +3 version did). The +3 version was ridicuouls, you could go from lvl 1 to lvl 2 with one single slowed lvl 1 guy killed. Then you could go from lvl 2 to lvl 3 with 2 lvl 2 guys. That's like killing 3 invisible lvl 3's. Without it it takes 3 slowed lvl 1 guys, and 4 slowed lvl 2 guys. It made killing 1 lvl 1 guy give as much as killing a lvl 2 guy at lvl 1. Without it, it would take killing 5 lvl1 guys, and you have to even find 5 lvl1 guys to do that. It seriously messed with how monsters are distributed, both in terms of the layout and in lvl tiers.
There's good reasons why you can't prep the pactmaker. Alchemist pact is one of them. No need to have that as a prep. Yendor is what it is because it was never adjusted for the locker system and it's one of those things which are the way they are more for style than for sense - it can give you a full ding when you're level 10 and it's supposed to be a super rare thing not somethign you can have on every run. It's silly by design, but takes a large investment to get from the shop, the dagger could be snap picked (and was) by anyone. There's still plenty of combos in plenty of places where it's fine if you don't want to go full-Yendor on it.
And I'd prep it on Vicious dungeons if I was looking to save exploration space as I would on VT runs. What Darvin said is a bit screwed up in logic - it's not that it gets better with the difficulty increase, because it doesn't change. It's that lower difficulties have a bigger margin of error / margin of wankery, so you can more easily get away with oversteping the games boundaries and overgreeding your plays. I see all that as wankery, really, you can do it, but the game easy enough at those stages that you don't have to do it even if you can. Killing a lvl 8 monster at lvl 3 is less worth it on lower difficulties than killing anything at all is on higher difficulties because what you gain is far more likely to just spill over into overkill. The moment the game gets serious - you have more opportuinty to notice that you can't really always do what you want, and then the value of the dagger, even as a prep rises quite a bit.
I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!