Another bloggy playthrough diary :)

[Tinker]

[Lujo]

[Tinker]

[Lujo]

You're not hijjacking it, I'm interested too! And I remember you saying that! I hated Dwarf Assassins in particular because the PQI used to streak them on me HARD (I avoided Assassins because there seemed to be no point testing them - they were what they were, and I avoided Dwarves because everyone did). It's kinda like with the Goblin Thief now, except Goblin Thief is easier to play, and I didn't really get Dwarves. I was about dwarfs kinda the way you were about Goblins. Also, because I didn't really get the point of Drac apart from the way he destroys everything without dedicated worship with resist stackers, which was also keeping me away from Dwarves.

IDK, Dwarves maybe seem to play the "wrong way around", no immediate early benefits, big payoff later, and when people are thinking about race/class they usually think "how does this race benefit the class" instead of the other way around. Maybe? And maybe the idea of Assassin + Dwarf sinergy was being judged against the sinergy assassins have with spellcasters / gobbos?

Because if you think about it, Dwarf Assassins are not necessarily extra powerful, just sinergistic. Same as Dwarf Warlords - from the dawn of time everyone's been trying to make the Warlord even more of a single minded caster, and the dwarf does the oposite, uses the Warlord to level up the Dwarf. Funnily enough I remember Darvin actually trying to point this out back in the day, saying that Dwarf Warlords are great, which seemed to make no sense because the Warlord also had the glyph which lets you ignore health even more than usual. Turned out it kinda works great.

It happens all the time - most of the stuff I'm playing these days is basically dredged up by the PQI because I haven't played it at all compared to other stuff, and plenty of it is actually really strong. Some of it is there because I avoided it as it was obviously broken, but a lot of stuff isn't. Halfling Bloodmage, Halfling Berserker, Elf/Gnome Priests, Dwarf whathaveyou's, Gobbo Sorcerer, Gobbo Monk... Orc Fighter o.O There was always a "strictly better options which thus invalidates the very concept of basic viability of attempting to even consider any other option" sorta thing with those guys...

Allthough looking back at this playthrough, the one thing that's kinda apparent is that the repercussions of adding Pissorf to Binlor were not properly tested at all (which is why I have so many things which uttery destroy everything as my least played stuff), and that CB is very likely the strongest item in the game bar none by a wide margin vs. most other stuff (which makes perfect sense, it's a keg of schadenfraude and anyone who's been around for when you could buy more than one schadenfraude from the alchemists knows that there was a short time that you could that and that we're not allowed to do that anyore for a reason XD).

Just think of how perplexed I am more people haven't caught onto that? The sentence "there are no Pissorf specialists" has been written rather recently, and "Orc Wizard doesn't seem to be problematic" as well. And then you look at this playthrough and it's all just PoS, PoS, PoS, Dagger, Dagger, PoS, PoS, Dagger, PoS, Dagger, PoS, PoS, PoS, etc... Tricky dungeon? PoS! Tricky badge? PoS! Tricky race? PoS! Tricky class? PoS! Warmonger? Dagger! Want quick cash? PoS! Want quick completion? PoS! Want to do heart surgery and play at the same time? PoS! People ask how to beat Namtars with anything at all, I say PoS, they go "Naaaaah", you suggest Orc Warlord, "Yeah! I totally beat it! Orc Warlords are great!".

Now if that fellow went to write a guide on how to beat Namtars Lair after that it'd be about how you gotta be the Orc Warlord. Then the next guy reading would try that etc. etc. And all the while you can basically be a guard and just prep CB and Pissorff and beat it way more often than not (and any race/class just adds a bit of flavor to the run but if you're not going for badges either is of little concequence).

I find that odd.

[Tinker]

[Lujo]

[Lujo]

Ok, so I uploaded the grotesque Vicious Steel Gorgon PoSjob up there, the game crashed before registering that one, which is a bit of a shame because i'll have to do it again, but here are the rest of today's runs:

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It was a stright up Gorgon game, no CB no Pissorf shenanigans, because I wanted to try to play her striaght. It worked ok, but only really because I was in Binlor and overprepped agaisnt a dungeon with 100% stats. I think the poison rework hurt the Gorgon because she was designed to fight upwards which she can't really do effectively once stats go above 100%. She could use an actuall buff.

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Then I had a bit of fun with this. I know it's not VGT, but it's just so fun to see things I never saw in that dungeon. And it doesn't come up on the PQI and flames so it's manual completion. I don't mind playing PQI Gobbo Monks too much, but the PQI is kinda shoveling them on me, so I guess any place I can dump one is good.

It could've been a lot easier if one of the floors wasn't the no-xp floor, but then again, it's really good that the no-exploration floor didn't show up.

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Then I decided that the Vampire is his own PQI all the time and I was missing Faithless on DI so I decided to take it out and prevent the PQI from trying to tack it onto everything until I do it. And also I thought it would be tricky for some reason and didn't want to get saddled with another badge with a Vampire. Funnily enough I ended up getting 3 additional ones, and pulling off a respectable "late game monster" Vampire. Everything in the dungeon apart from the Druids being fat without the VT obviously helped.

Could've probably had Cheeky too ^^

--- FAILED VICIOUS PQI: Elf Crusader - Naga City - Miser ---



It's funny how I failed this - I accidentally bought the Yendor instead of translocating it. Facepalm. Then I decided to just get on with it anyway and bought the kegs just because. -.-' Naga City may be the only place besides VGT where CB doesn't effectively fully counter Miser (on a non-Tinker anyway).

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Decided to take Faithless and the Vampire out of Gaan'Telet, too, ended up also picking Parched up. The Vapire is REALLY all over the place in terms of power and playability depending on what Glyphs spawn IMO. That's what I get from all the Vamps I played recently.

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Woot, rainbow magma mines and my last non-vicious Goat! Was quite tricky, honestly, the Goat pwned most other places rather easily, this place took a few tries.

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And that's that for today, not much, but it was fun, and stuff is getting done Full Badges on all Vicious but Naga City and VGT. I think I'll do the remaining Naga City badge manually, not sure yet, but it's a nasty ole dungeon and I've kinda blown all the stuff I'm sure that can easily do the missing ones. Regular Gaan'Telet though is a complete blast to play, never was aware of that

[Tinker]

[Lujo]

Right, when you look at it that way it sounds legit, but there are 2 catches to it. Pissorff lends itself really well to chaning level ups regardless of stuff that supposed to make it difficult, because you damage 2 things at once. One is the boss, and one is something above your level which you then easily kill to level up. If you're casting fireballs, doing damage to the boss and leveling up are 2 separate things, if you're using pissorf they're not.

When you combine that with the fact that Pissorff evades abilities which make monsters tough to kill (resistances, debuffs, first strike, whatever), lvl 9 Wraiths in Namtar's Lair become popcorn when you're at lvl 3-4, while you're doing damage on the boss which you'd do anyway. A lvl 9 kill at lvl 3 gives something like 45 XP, and you're kinda guaranteed that if you're using the tactic. Then add the full mana restores from CB that only take money and what you get is broken. (And I actually rarely use the CB because just using Pissorf that way is silly enough).

You can't do that with fireballs because dmg on the boss and dmg on stuff you level up to restore with aren't a result of the same thing, and it takes some effort to build up a mana pool to cast many fireballs (and they charge the ball more slowly). It makes a big difference, even compared to just hitting the boss into walls - if you do that you don't get free Yendors, which you do if you slap the boss into other monsters for the same mana investment.

Demonic Library is probably the best example of this, because you do damage to one Demon Lord, while the other/s drop as collateral without you actually investing anything in it (as none of it would happen if you just slapped the one you wanted to kill into a wall or fireballed him), all the while ignoring stuff that's supposed to make them challenging. You do need more Pissorffs than you would fireballs, but with CB and, say, extra mana, anyone at all can do it, and sinergistic guys can do it at startlingly low levels. Chaining level ups isn't something you "go for" with Pissorff it's just something that happens naturally if you just move a few things around before you start the fight.

It's so crazy that it's actually better to first slap the boss into a few lower level monsters before you kill the higher level ones so you don't ding through too many levels at once, so you get to kill more stuff (and get more refills) for "free".

Which I why I think the real problem with Pissorff is that it evades resistances, blinks and stuff rather than anything else, as that contributes a lot to always getting virtually effortless level up chains with it regardless of the monster composition. And that the tooltip is also the problem because too many people are using it to hit things into walls which is a significantly worse deal than hitting stuff into stuff (walls don't randomly drop for big xp out of nowhere, you're effectively wasting half of the glyph that way).

The CB just gives too many cheap full mana refills, the first 3 uses alone give the effect that would be worth 45 gold and 3 hits from monsters if it could even be purchased, and it can't be purchased because it was broken when you could do that. And it does that for 18 gold. If you're a spellcaster, you sorta only take the Chaos Avatar for a mana refill, but even if you made the mana refill 1/3 of a CA, that's worth more than 4/6/8 gold (or whatever the scaling is, it's so low it's irellevant). And you can only take the CA once. It would be a strong item with fixed 15 per pop (would be a terrible shop item though).

B2P is arguably simmilar, but you can't prep B2P, and this stacks with B2P when you run into it. Anyway, Pissorff turns refills into more refills too easily (via easy spam and collateral kills), and CB gives big refill which rely on gold which is easy to come by, and the whole thing snowballs too reliably off of just 2 things while ignoring more factors that even other reductive stuff.

[Lujo]

Anyway, a few runs for today, will add more here when I do them:

--- Vicious PQI: Unstoppable Gorgon on Dragon Isles ---



Well, Binlor really does solve all her problems, but creates another one - there was very little Gorgon in this whole thing. The auto first strike when the opponent is a simdge of health away from dropping and 25% physical resists, but that was about it. Blackspace ran out well before I could use poison strike on anything meaningful, and but I got a lot out of going into Drac and simply using lifesteal and his resists to good effect (and also Blood Curse and Sanguine, ofc). Later I converted back into Binlor to get rid of statues so I can acess the blood pools. Also, used a ton of CB Pissorf, obviously, even though I didn't really set out to do it. Bought the CB from the shop, weighted it against everything else combined and it won.

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This was interesting - I failed a Gnome Crusader Vicious Steel run several times in a row due to missclicks, and then I failed the daily due to missclicks, so I went and did this and rainbow up the Berserker Camp. The interesting thing was that I used Apheelsick here to level up, which I don't really do on Crusaders, and then for the boss fight I used Cydstep while in Dracul. I don't actually do this very often and I wasn't aware it only takes 5 piety off you which is... not that terrible at all. If you're in Drac from the get-go and you take a hit of Lifesteal, you can totally do it. Since you can use sanguine to refil your health and get piety that way, it's even more interesting.

Looks like something I'll play around with sometimes, a Drac Cydstep guy. I remember old "get punished so your health is always 1" nonsense but I'm wondering if there's an actual legit way to play it.

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Then Slime Pits flamed up, and the PQI wanted an Elf Berseker somewhere else, and I thought, wth, I'mma either fireball or PoS this place. Pissorff showed up so I PoSed it. Except I played so slopily that I had to use the fireball for the end strike due to a lergeish number of highly avoidable circumstances, so I didn't get Specialist. I also didn't get full mileage out of PoS because I didn't start out with Pissorff (I didn't even know I'd have it) so I leveled up as I was exploring, otherwise it would've been easier.

I'm kinda enjoying the situation where Pissorf costs 5 mana when they happen, whether by accident or by being a Berserker, makes the whole thing a tiny bit more fair and makes it feel like you have to put a bit of thought into it.

Also, I'll have to do a Goat here, looks like the Magma Mines one wasn't the last one.

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More to come.