Abyss Ambulator
Posts: 1189
Joined: Friday, 28th January 2011, 21:45
Monday, 17th September 2012, 09:25
Twilight's Uber Amazing Guides!
Welcome to first of my ultimate, amazing guides. These guides are the absolute best at making sure you win the game. If you follow these guides properly, you will win every game ever and never experience another death. Even if you play an Ogre or a Felid! No other advise out there can even begin to imagine coming remotely close to the sheer quality of the advice contained within these digital pages. So prepare to have your mind blown out of the water as you discover my tricks for winning every time you touch this game, ever.
Disclaimer: This guide does not offer advice on avoiding suicide or stupid mistakes. It is also not endorsed by anyone with a blue or orange name since they're simply jealous of the amazing quality of the advice here and will decry it as terrible.
This particular guide is about pure casting backgrounds. Specifically, it'll focus on the Wizard, Conjurer, Elementalists, Venom Mage, Necromancer, and Summoner. Though they can cast magic, Crusa… err… Skalds, Tranmsuters, Enchanters, Stalkers, Revears, and Arcane Marksmen are not covered. I'll have a warrior-mage guide for them later, which I promise will be so awesome even Chuck Norris will be put to shame.
The Wizard is the more flexible guy with lots of Spellcasting and a few spells. It's nice to have the extra mana, but Wizards suck. Seriously, their only offensive spell is Magic Dart, which does little damage and is no fun spamming while running away from something, which in turn requires using Slow for most species. Random Blinks tend to put you next to Ogres, Imps just wander around and do nothing, monsters won't walk into Conjure Flame, and Centaurs will kill you through Repel Missiles anyway. All the Wizard has is Mephitic Cloud, which the Venom Mages has along with actual useful toys. Seriously, don't play a Wizard.
The Conjurer is better off, but overlaps a bit with the Ice Elementalist a bit too much. But he does have steadily increasing spells, mostly cold related, on top of Mephitic and Freezing Cloud with Lightning Bolt to kill anything that resists. But you won't need that, you can spam both Mephitic and Freezing Cloud and make monsters wander circles in it. Besides, with Lightning Bolt, you might bounce a shot back into your face and die, so I usually never use it. Also, always aim Freezing Cloud in open areas. If you target a corridor and you are in it, you die.
The Summoner is kind of cool, but a real pain. You can summon stuff to do everything for you, but they don't listen real well and you'll often be running away, screaming, while out of mana because your rats got ganked by a Kobold (and because Imps suck). So get to Canine Familiar ASAP, it'll get you all the way through Lair. Even Hydras and Dire Elephant packs will fall to the amazing power of Hounds. You could skip Summon Scorpion because they almost always are hostile and will kill you. Ice Beast is good, but expensive, so save it for tough targets, such as Dragons, Efreets, Fire Giants, Hell Hogs, and especially Fire Crabs. Their cold damage will make quick work of all of those!
Necromancers suck. Pain hurts you, Animate Skeleton is like summoning mammals, except weaker and you have to kill stuff. Lethal Infusion is worthless (you're a caster, not a melee guy) and Vampiric Draining also requires melee range. Regeneration will make you get hungry faster, so it sucks since food is hard to come by when your spells cost hunger. Both Control Undead and Animate Dead are meh.
Fire Elementalists used to be beast. Then they nerfed Sticky Flame. So now they have four crappy spells (Flame Tongue, Conjure Flame, Inner Flame, and Sticky Flame) and two good ones (Throw Flame and Fireball). Flame Tongue and Sticky are too short ranged to be useful, Inner Flame will just make stuff explode on you. But if you can make it to Fireball, you'll be good to go. It's even noisy, so all you have to do is stand in an open room and let the level come to you!
Ice Elementalists are like terrible Conjurers. They trade all their awesomeness for a couple of worthless buffs, Freeze (which has a shorter range than Magic Dart), a Summon, which is not what you're doing, and a pretty decent upgrade to Throw Frost, but doesn't provide the diversity having both Lightning Bolt and Freezing Cloud grant.
Air Elementalists are fun, but hard. They can run from anything with Swiftness and can even fly, but are prone to killing themselves with Shock, Static Discharge, and Lightning Bolt. So, you have to be really, really, really careful when playing them. The damage is good and rarely resisted early on though, so long as you don't die. But at least you can avoid traps with Flight. Avoiding traps is very important since you have low defenses and HP, so even a dart trap can kill you if you're not careful.
Earth Elementalists suck. Sandblast does very bad damage and has low range, (which is why I guess you get rocks at the start so you can throw them at the monsters). So, you're stuck without a decent spell until Stone Arrow as Stoneskin is useless and Passwall is only good for getting into some of the vaults. Petrify is funny, but not terribly good since the monster will take less damage when petrified. Lee's Rapid Deconstruction does good damage, but can kill you if you aim it too close. It can also be annoying since you have to lure monsters close to the walls.
Finally, the Venom Mage, the most awesome caster in the game. They can poison stuff with Sting and then walk away while it dies. From level 1. If that's not ridiculously amazing, I don't know what is. They also have Cure Poison, which means they can take on Snakes and eat poisonous corpses without any side effects (for long at least) and lets them use-ID potions sooner. Mephitic is awesome, as always, and Venom Bolt is a natural upgrade to Sting. Olgreb's is normally terrible, but with Cure Poison it's very good! Just swap back and forth between the two so you never are poisoned long.
So there you have it! Now you know which background the play when you start a new game (aka Venom Mage, the rest suck in comparison). However, this is only just the beginning! Stay tuned for more awesome, amazing guides of uber excelent 1337ness! Next time, I'll go over some more backgrounds!
If you think this is a serious guide, remember which section of the forums you are in right now...
Disclaimer: This guide does not offer advice on avoiding suicide or stupid mistakes. It is also not endorsed by anyone with a blue or orange name since they're simply jealous of the amazing quality of the advice here and will decry it as terrible.
This particular guide is about pure casting backgrounds. Specifically, it'll focus on the Wizard, Conjurer, Elementalists, Venom Mage, Necromancer, and Summoner. Though they can cast magic, Crusa… err… Skalds, Tranmsuters, Enchanters, Stalkers, Revears, and Arcane Marksmen are not covered. I'll have a warrior-mage guide for them later, which I promise will be so awesome even Chuck Norris will be put to shame.
The Wizard is the more flexible guy with lots of Spellcasting and a few spells. It's nice to have the extra mana, but Wizards suck. Seriously, their only offensive spell is Magic Dart, which does little damage and is no fun spamming while running away from something, which in turn requires using Slow for most species. Random Blinks tend to put you next to Ogres, Imps just wander around and do nothing, monsters won't walk into Conjure Flame, and Centaurs will kill you through Repel Missiles anyway. All the Wizard has is Mephitic Cloud, which the Venom Mages has along with actual useful toys. Seriously, don't play a Wizard.
The Conjurer is better off, but overlaps a bit with the Ice Elementalist a bit too much. But he does have steadily increasing spells, mostly cold related, on top of Mephitic and Freezing Cloud with Lightning Bolt to kill anything that resists. But you won't need that, you can spam both Mephitic and Freezing Cloud and make monsters wander circles in it. Besides, with Lightning Bolt, you might bounce a shot back into your face and die, so I usually never use it. Also, always aim Freezing Cloud in open areas. If you target a corridor and you are in it, you die.
The Summoner is kind of cool, but a real pain. You can summon stuff to do everything for you, but they don't listen real well and you'll often be running away, screaming, while out of mana because your rats got ganked by a Kobold (and because Imps suck). So get to Canine Familiar ASAP, it'll get you all the way through Lair. Even Hydras and Dire Elephant packs will fall to the amazing power of Hounds. You could skip Summon Scorpion because they almost always are hostile and will kill you. Ice Beast is good, but expensive, so save it for tough targets, such as Dragons, Efreets, Fire Giants, Hell Hogs, and especially Fire Crabs. Their cold damage will make quick work of all of those!
Necromancers suck. Pain hurts you, Animate Skeleton is like summoning mammals, except weaker and you have to kill stuff. Lethal Infusion is worthless (you're a caster, not a melee guy) and Vampiric Draining also requires melee range. Regeneration will make you get hungry faster, so it sucks since food is hard to come by when your spells cost hunger. Both Control Undead and Animate Dead are meh.
Fire Elementalists used to be beast. Then they nerfed Sticky Flame. So now they have four crappy spells (Flame Tongue, Conjure Flame, Inner Flame, and Sticky Flame) and two good ones (Throw Flame and Fireball). Flame Tongue and Sticky are too short ranged to be useful, Inner Flame will just make stuff explode on you. But if you can make it to Fireball, you'll be good to go. It's even noisy, so all you have to do is stand in an open room and let the level come to you!
Ice Elementalists are like terrible Conjurers. They trade all their awesomeness for a couple of worthless buffs, Freeze (which has a shorter range than Magic Dart), a Summon, which is not what you're doing, and a pretty decent upgrade to Throw Frost, but doesn't provide the diversity having both Lightning Bolt and Freezing Cloud grant.
Air Elementalists are fun, but hard. They can run from anything with Swiftness and can even fly, but are prone to killing themselves with Shock, Static Discharge, and Lightning Bolt. So, you have to be really, really, really careful when playing them. The damage is good and rarely resisted early on though, so long as you don't die. But at least you can avoid traps with Flight. Avoiding traps is very important since you have low defenses and HP, so even a dart trap can kill you if you're not careful.
Earth Elementalists suck. Sandblast does very bad damage and has low range, (which is why I guess you get rocks at the start so you can throw them at the monsters). So, you're stuck without a decent spell until Stone Arrow as Stoneskin is useless and Passwall is only good for getting into some of the vaults. Petrify is funny, but not terribly good since the monster will take less damage when petrified. Lee's Rapid Deconstruction does good damage, but can kill you if you aim it too close. It can also be annoying since you have to lure monsters close to the walls.
Finally, the Venom Mage, the most awesome caster in the game. They can poison stuff with Sting and then walk away while it dies. From level 1. If that's not ridiculously amazing, I don't know what is. They also have Cure Poison, which means they can take on Snakes and eat poisonous corpses without any side effects (for long at least) and lets them use-ID potions sooner. Mephitic is awesome, as always, and Venom Bolt is a natural upgrade to Sting. Olgreb's is normally terrible, but with Cure Poison it's very good! Just swap back and forth between the two so you never are poisoned long.
So there you have it! Now you know which background the play when you start a new game (aka Venom Mage, the rest suck in comparison). However, this is only just the beginning! Stay tuned for more awesome, amazing guides of uber excelent 1337ness! Next time, I'll go over some more backgrounds!
If you think this is a serious guide, remember which section of the forums you are in right now...
The best strategy most frequently overlooked by new players for surviving: not starting a fight to begin with.
