Friday, 7th September 2018, 23:17 by Implojin
So, about your skilling: For a spiderform > blade hands rush, your skilling up to about XL 10 was okay-ish. You were missing Fighting and Dodging in exchange for quite a lot of early Tmut, but if you knew what you were doing that is a choice that could be made, although an experienced player generally wouldn't neglect Fighting quite so heavily as in this dump.
The thing about rushing blade hands early, though, is that you're trading your defense for excessive offense, during a part of the game where you mostly don't need the raw output of blade hands yet and you *do* tend to need the defense. It's a bad trade to make during earlygame on most characters. It's usually safer to push blade hands back until midgame, and carry yourself until then by either abusing spiderform's tiny size modifier + dodging to reach insane EV, or to go for ice form as your lair target.
Doing a blade hands rush and then hybridizing a bunch of low-level utility at XL 11 before bringing your primary defenses online? This is where your problems came from.
To your credit, you quickly realized that you needed to bring Fighting and Dodging online. That was a good choice, although you could still use some more Fighting. (Fighting boosts your melee damage in addition to increasing your max HP, and should be kept near the level of your highest skill, or not too far behind, on most characters.) However, you've still neglected your other defenses.
Where's your AC? You have blade hands online, which should be your go-to form at this point. While casting BH will meld your gloves and any shield, it still leaves your body armour equipped. You should use this! You need to equip some better body armour and train a bit of Armour skill. You have an encumbrance rating reduction from your demonspawn muts. Use that, too! In your position, I would *immediately* equip the swamp dragon scales, but I'd then also go on to ctrl+f for some heavier armour to wear, if any exists in your game that will still leave blade hands reliably castable.
Your strength is also really low for a UC/Tmut character. Your primary offense on this dude is melee damage from UC + Blade Hands. Strength significantly boosts that damage. If you find any jewellery that adds 3-6 strength, you should probably equip it. I'd start taking str at levelups on that character, too. Extra strength will also help your AC, by reducing your spell failure penalties when equipping heavier armour.
Regarding Shields: Personally, I prefer to equip medium shields, with enough skill training to not nuke my form failure rates, on many tmut characters so that I have some extra defense available at the moment of form expiry. This often helps as at that moment your character tends to be weaker and maybe you want to read a scroll or something. It isn't strictly *needed*, considering you'll be doing most of your dangerous combat with blade hands active, but it gives you a choice of not (re-)activating your form in exchange for some additional layered defense. You could consider picking up some Shields skill after you've fixed the situation re: your Armour and Fighting, but as above, this is just preference.
Regarding your XL 11 hybridization:
You're trying to do too much either too early or too late, depending how you want to look at it. Many of those skills would have been fine to dip very early in the game if you had found a thing to make them useful. You could then have adapted your offense around the thing, and skilled accordingly, with less of a heavy focus on Transmutations.
Many of those skills are also fine to dip later in the game, when your offense and defense are already online and you can afford it. But doing so immediately after you've committed to an early, heavy, Tmut offense while your dude is stretched thin and missing Fighting/Dodging/Armour is not great.
Give up on skilling the longbow. You've already spent experience in two whole skills for dealing damage. This isn't what your dude needs right now. [If you had found the longbow early enough in the game and enchanted it, it could totally have been a better path to give up on Tmut/UC entirely and focus Bows instead. You were already past that point when you first started skilling bows in this game, though. I see what you were going for, here, using it as some free initiating damage, but you really just needed to shore up your defenses at that point.]
Conjure Flame is a great spell. It would have been superb if you had picked it up a few levels earlier in the game. Picking it up at XL 11 when you already had decent offense and were missing defense was probably not the best play. [This could be argued either way, given the small experience investment required, but you already had Sticks to Snakes available as a gap creation tool and your existing offense was solid. I would not have chosen to skill for Conjure Flame, given the information available in your dump, at that point of the game.]
Picking up some Invocations was fine. With Okawaru in recent versions you really want somewhere around 8 invo generally speaking (on a Demonspawn, probably closer to 10 to 12 due to aptitude!), to conserve piety by increasing Heroism duration. Regarding your Heroism invokes, you should probably be using this more often. With Oka, you want to be using Heroism any time a fight looks even *remotely* dangerous. You want to be popping Finesse on top of that if you're sure that it's actually dangerous.
A piece of advice that I used to give /rlg/ about Tm hybridization? You're not a primary spellcaster. You're a meleedude that situationally uses forms to rip and tear. Hopefully this helps.
- For this message the author Implojin has received thanks: 5
- Eyesburn, mrbobbyg, nago, Vajrapani, Yermak
