Stealth Run: Awesome Challege

Discussion in 'Dungeons of Dredmor General' started by Rikkard, Jul 20, 2011.

  1. Rikkard

    Rikkard Member

    TL;DR: No combat skills, sneaky down to floor 10, kill Dredmor.

    So I decided, for fun and challenge, to try a no-combat skill run of the game. I did it on Elvishly Easy at first as a proof of concept, and it is definitely fun and possible. The basic premise I came up with is you can do all the killing you want, but since you have no combat skills you likely aren't making it past floor 1 without obliterating your supply of bolts or wands. So on both my runs I almost full cleared floor 1 then gunned it for Dredmor.

    Here is the build I used:
    Artful Dodger - Knightly Leap, mainly, but having extra dodge is definitely useful.
    Mathemagic - Last resort teleports can be a life saver
    Psionics - Early game the sleep is very useful and lets you loot chests and get your food supply high. Late game it is resisted too much unless you get lucky with loot.
    Burglary - Obviously. Lockpicking is a main source of experience, and Lockup, Ninja Vanish and Mysterious Ways are necessary for maneuvering around hordes of angry enemies.
    Wand Mastery - Really. You have no starting equipment and even if you get a wooden sword or something early on you are going to do 1 damage a hit. You need wands to do any damage whatsoever. Tentacle wands in particular are necessary.
    Archaeology - The fedora is awesome enough for the dodge/counter, but mainly you want the trap affinity early on in the game since traps are a main source of experience (and deadly).
    Tinkering - Again, trap affinity. You can make traps if you want, but whatever. I saved up about 50 traps I plucked off the ground and subsequently laid down in the small room Dredmor was in (although I only got 5 or so down).


    An hour or two of jumping around later I found myself on floor 10 with quite a bit of traps, a few wands, and very few healing items left. Floor 10 was definitely the worst. I had to explore nearly the entire floor until I found Dredmor:
    **spoilers, if you care about his sprite**
    http://i.imgur.com/6zVO1.png

    I got him in a room with one stealthy gnome guy (only 1 guy = lucky, imo). A few jumps and vanishes later I had a few traps down and proceeded to start blasting him with the Tentacle Wand and stay out of his way. I don't know if it was luck, but he didn't use spells very often for the first half of the fight. Just kited him around while the curses spread around. At the end I jumped away to find myself with 3 health due to that whirlwind spell he uses and some of the curses propagating onto me. Did one last hit and saw him die (and did the victory thing)... then one more turn happened for some reason and I died and he ressurected, but I assume it was a bug because it put me to the victory screen afterwards.

    I can't remember what level I ended up as, but you get an awful lot from random enemies dying to traps and lockpicking. I don't think I killed an enemy intentionally after floor 2 (where someone died when I tried to use a rock wand to push them out of the way).

    All in all, this was probably the most fun I've had with the game. I recommend it. Had a score of 45948, btw.
     
  2. Sounds like alot of fun. I think i might start a lets play on this.
     
  3. Rikkard

    Rikkard Member

    My friend tried it out earlier, but made the mistake of heading down before level 5 (leap, lockup, vanish AND mysterious ways).