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I beat Dungeons of Dredmor
2014-Sep-13, Saturday 09:51
Finally, after sixty hours, I did it:
I'm not calling this a review (though I did tag it as such) because all I really want to talk about is the actual fight with Lord Dredmor and how boring it was.
In those sixty hours, I've gotten to Lord Dredmor twice. The first time, he brutally murdered me with that lightning spell before I even really knew what was happening, and I think that was in 2012 before all the expansions had come out. This time, I got lucky and in a couple hundred turns of fighting he only cast that lightning spell once.
Yes, a couple hundred turns, and that's the huge problem--fighting Lord Dredmor isn't hard, it was just tedious. It was a lot of "cycle cooldowns, scarf down an Inky Hoglantern so I can move away from Lord Dredmor even though he'd follow me a lot of the time, stop scarfing Inky Hoglanterns when cooldowns were back, repeat" while running up and down the dungeons and slowly whittling away at his health.
One of the problems is that a lot of my skills didn't work. From looking online, Lord Dredmor has incredibly high resistances to a bunch of magic, so using Sandstorm from Egyptian Magic and filling the whole room with screaming winds that, like the flora of Australia, is both poisonous and on fire, does nothing. Occasionally the fire did a bit of damage, but mostly I had to use Pyrokinesis from Psionics to damage his 2100 health ~40 at a cast.
It's not like I just picked a bad build and shoudl have gone melee or something. Lord Dredmor has really high block and evade stats and then on top of that, only 16% of hits that get through that actually hit because as Skyrim taught us, ineffectually flailing at each other makes for exciting combat. All over, the advice I found for melee characters was "don't melee, throw things at him." Or some build involving dual-wielding magic shields to increase magic reflect over 100%.
The whole fight, I was reminded of the aphorism about something being hard vs. something being challenging. An old man in a dungeon in front of a door who says he'll unlock it if you guess a number between one and a million isn't challenging, since it's entirely based on luck, but it's certainly hard. Dungeons of Dredmor is much more on the latter end than the former, and now that I've beaten it once and know how the fight goes I'm much less interested in trying again.
Maybe ToME, ADOM, or Unreal World (drink!) next. I haven't beaten either of the first two, and I haven't survived a winter in Unreal World yet. I could probably play just roguelikes for the rest of my life, honestly.
Edit: Duh. Spelunky! That's the roguelike I need to beat next!
I'm not calling this a review (though I did tag it as such) because all I really want to talk about is the actual fight with Lord Dredmor and how boring it was.
In those sixty hours, I've gotten to Lord Dredmor twice. The first time, he brutally murdered me with that lightning spell before I even really knew what was happening, and I think that was in 2012 before all the expansions had come out. This time, I got lucky and in a couple hundred turns of fighting he only cast that lightning spell once.
Yes, a couple hundred turns, and that's the huge problem--fighting Lord Dredmor isn't hard, it was just tedious. It was a lot of "cycle cooldowns, scarf down an Inky Hoglantern so I can move away from Lord Dredmor even though he'd follow me a lot of the time, stop scarfing Inky Hoglanterns when cooldowns were back, repeat" while running up and down the dungeons and slowly whittling away at his health.
One of the problems is that a lot of my skills didn't work. From looking online, Lord Dredmor has incredibly high resistances to a bunch of magic, so using Sandstorm from Egyptian Magic and filling the whole room with screaming winds that, like the flora of Australia, is both poisonous and on fire, does nothing. Occasionally the fire did a bit of damage, but mostly I had to use Pyrokinesis from Psionics to damage his 2100 health ~40 at a cast.
It's not like I just picked a bad build and shoudl have gone melee or something. Lord Dredmor has really high block and evade stats and then on top of that, only 16% of hits that get through that actually hit because as Skyrim taught us, ineffectually flailing at each other makes for exciting combat. All over, the advice I found for melee characters was "don't melee, throw things at him." Or some build involving dual-wielding magic shields to increase magic reflect over 100%.
The whole fight, I was reminded of the aphorism about something being hard vs. something being challenging. An old man in a dungeon in front of a door who says he'll unlock it if you guess a number between one and a million isn't challenging, since it's entirely based on luck, but it's certainly hard. Dungeons of Dredmor is much more on the latter end than the former, and now that I've beaten it once and know how the fight goes I'm much less interested in trying again.
Maybe ToME, ADOM, or Unreal World (drink!) next. I haven't beaten either of the first two, and I haven't survived a winter in Unreal World yet. I could probably play just roguelikes for the rest of my life, honestly.
Edit: Duh. Spelunky! That's the roguelike I need to beat next!
