General-Purpose bragging topic!

[chandl34]

Melee + Bear Mace + Whurrgarbl takes away 3 death protections per hit. If you're a sorcerer, that makes it 4. I still keep Whurrgarbl lockered for that.

[Tinker]

[chandl34]

The knockback damage breaks the burning. I know it works against walls; can't remember if it works against monsters. So, if prepping Whurrgarbl won't hurt your run, it's worth taking on either Steel dungeon.

[MTaur]

Yeah, maybe I'll consider the whole Bear Mace thing. The halls are awfully narrow though...

[Lujo]

[Tinker]

You don't really need Binlor, though. Just knockback, and a Bear Mace gets you almost where you want to be. That leaves you to pick a less chore-heavy deity (like JJ).

[Blovski]

I really like VHOS, since it's the vicious dungeon which probably teaches you the most about the mechanics of your bosses and where the mobs represent the most serious challenge. Yes, the easy mode is Binlor for resist stacking and knockback but there's a lot of other strats a decent player can fairly reliably beat it with whether that's the Assassin Fireball train, a straight up Halfling or Gnome Transmuter spike, Earthmother Paladin with a soul Orb, Taurogzerker.

[Tinker]

[Lujo]

True, true, the first 3 runs to unlock the Vamp this time around were all fireball guys (one of them, the Gobbo Bloodmage did it all with fireballs). I was actually sorta avoiding Binlor and Pissorff in general before the VS rainbowing, but the way that place is stacked vs monk just broke my will to experiment. What's more, I actually went for Binlor (and then just CB Pissorf) because I didn't want to "just solve it with platemail/EM/Taurog DR gimmick every time". That turned facepalmy in a hurry.

It's hardly undoable in plenty of ways, but that's only if the mobs represent a serious challenge for whatever you're playing, except there's a few cases where the mobs are just... well, it looks like a secret-camera or a troll job on part of the game. Didn't feel like I was forced into pure gimmicks with so few effective solutions like I did there almost anywhere. The huge difference between it and the regular HoS is that it's missing one monster type, and regular HoS has one (it's the same as the other boss), but VS doesn't have vampires. And you know what it's like when adding vampries would actually make a cramped dungeon easier for the monk (but not for the vampire).

It sounds funny, but the "easiest Vicious dungeon" status VS has is actually mostly down to there being commonly accepted gimmicks like the DR or magic resists or knockback, but if any dungeon could really use a nerf that one can. Simply to discourage slipping into degenerate crap spam and then developing bad habits. Namtar's Lair has shades of this too, the topside forms are sorta prohibitive in terms of what you can approach them with (the first guy especially), so it was just way easier to cookie-cutter it using Binlor with everything than trying to come up with specific solutions and moves for whatever I was given. Not that I couldn't, but it would've been a huge difference in time investment (I'm certain because I've done a few runs in a non-pissorfy way, and the difference is enormous). If it was just a bit less prohibitive, I would've tried to actually play it as "the most difficult challenge on the map" rather than "that place that always folds to pissorf spam". (Incidentally it's also another place where you start prepping Binlor for Binlor reasons and discover that just Pisorf does it anyway and that you're not gonna even need the resists after a few runs).

It's also kind of indicative that on this run I rainbowed them first, well before the other places simply because of that.

[Tinker]