How do you get better at DesktopDungeons?

[Daedin]

Cross-posted on /r/desktopdungeons at https://www.reddit.com/r/DesktopDungeon ... pdungeons/

Hi all,

I've been playing DD for quite some time now (I have ~50% of the silver challenges done, and only the Vicious dungeons left to beat), and absolutely love this game. It's for me one of the best designed games ever, with so many possibilities and different strategies that can work, as well as a constant need for adaptation.

This also makes studying DD very rewarding. Watching some videos of high-level dungeons (the latest being the Naga City by Jay), I saw that some of the moves I would have done differently, and may have taken different decisions.

Being a former Go player, I was wondering if there were a way to have someone review one of your runs, to get advice from someone better than you and learn from them. We used to do that a lot in Go, and that was definitely helpful.

Is this a common practice in DD? How do you study DD to get better at it? Do you have any advice / tip to reach the top?

Thanks!

[fall_ark]

One difficulty lies in that, in DD, many early moves are just setup for later strategies, so it's kind of hard to pinpoint if one specfic move is "wrong". Sometimes you want to take risks early to conserve blackspace, sometimes you don't pick up glyphs or don't worship/desecrate in hope of better return later. These expectations don't always come true, and decisions can often backfire, especially in Vicious dungeons where victory isn't really guaranteed.

I'd say check out the General-Purpose bragging topic! and look for Vicious D.E.R.P. runs. The random race/class/challenge combo usually pushes the player to the limit, and could be very rewarding to read through.

[Blovski]

Well, if you put videos up I'd be very happy to have a look over a couple. I think I mostly got better by being on the forums where you see all these odd little tricks then can stick them into your own playstyle.

I'm planning on putting up some new kingdom stuff with commentary sooner or later but I'm not really happy with the audio quality yet and playing/talking simultaneously kinda hits both.

[Daedin]

Thanks for your replies
I must admit I haven't lurked a lot on the forums, and have tried to figure everything out by myself for now. Time to catch up

And for the videos, have you tried recording your play, then adding up audio on top of it afterwards? That also would allow you to speed up passages where not much interesting happens and have something more compact.

I'll be looking at posting videos myself once I get a little less busy with work, so probably around September. In the meantime I'll stay around and look for advice on the forums

Thanks!

[kente]

Hi again! In my experience, challenge class can improve your affinity with that class. For me this was true specially for Bloodmage silver and gold. Before the challenges i was pretty bad with bloodmage and now bloodmage is one of my favorite class.

As pointed by Mtaur, play the dailies and reading the daily thread is a very good way to improve yourself (for me it worked).

Also, i suggest you to try the vicious. Even after reading the annotated playthrough in the wiki, i had many problem to figure out how to win, but by the end i was able to beat some vicious in different way (class/race or gods) than the walkthrough.

[Blovski]

Yeah, I recommend the Vicious ones. Gives you a good idea of just how much the classes can handle.

[Tinker]

Here's couple of points that I mostly kept and that helped me learn more about DD:

1. Do all puzzles and class challenges. Some are hard and some have specific solutions but they all teach you to get better at a specific game element. Try to do them (especially the puzzles) without any help; though if you really get stuck with a class challenge, the wiki can give useful pointers.

2. Never give up a map until you die / literally can't do anything. I've won a couple of seemingly lost games and learned a lot from them. Here's one example from one of the Dailies.

3. If you win a map... But it feels that you were really lucky to win... Replay that exact setup. You'll see how much was luck, and how adaptive your build really is. If you feel dreadful about a map or build... Play it every second game. First time I saw Naga City it sent shivers down my spine and I thought it was unwinnable. Now I kind of like it, and replay it just for fun every once in a while (and definitely whenever I get a PQI there). Rogue Gold challenge seemed very hard and I felt totally lucky to win it. So I replayed it 3-4 times, always with different approach.

4. Challenge yourself by trying things you haven't tried before. When I caught myself auto-purchasing some items, I vetoed them to start using other items. Surprise: other items are also good! If you catch yourself auto-prepping / auto-picking some stuff (like, some folks will auto-prep Binlor), stop doing it, use an imaginary veto. Best if you do as much as you can Purist, to get you out of the prep-reliance habit.

...and if you post some games, I'll be happy to watch and comment.

[Daedin]

Thanks a lot for all the advice!

#4 is especially meaningful for me, as I (wrongly) tend to rather quickly view some items / glyphs / builds as "best" and then completely dismiss alternatives (I unfortunately still almost never use Pyscorf or Halpmeh if I can spend my mana on other glyphs).

[Rob1221]

PISORF (and knockback in general) does its highest damage while hitting two enemies at the same time, which is especially good when you can knock a low damage boss into a high damage boss. It's also a good option against magic resist enemies. While ENDISWAL is easier for wall breaking, sometimes the only way to access the hidden subdungeon is with PISORF, so avoid converting it too early if your dungeon has one.

In the cases where your net damage (after resists and other effects) is higher than the monster's net damage, HALPMEH is often a better choice than BURNDAYRAZ. In other cases it's still useful against poisonous enemies.

My under-used glyphs are probably BLUDTUPOWA, BYSSEPS, and LEMMISI, which I tend to autoconvert except for the classes that start with them.

[Blovski]

Halpme is superb in any situation where you need sustained damage, so, against Super Meatman and other lowish damage bosses or if you have high resists to compliment it. Pisorf is extremely good for damage with the right race/class combo. The general use is A) having it to break the wall to the secret sub and B) bypassing magic resist as a not especially punchy character. You can also use it to damage multiple enemies at the same time, and it's a fantastic utility glyph for some of the Vicious dungeons where you want to move a specific enemy around.