Tuesday, 7th May 2019, 07:40 by sanka
While any spriggan can be considered strong, there is a simple reason that makes such a build weaker than other spriggan stabbers: sleep stabbing is not good.
Sleep stabbing, even with lunge's extra range, while fun, is not strong in the sense that while it gets rid of some monsters, it gives you absolutely no help against others, and usually these are the hardest challenges. You may feel yourself strong when you kill a strong sleeping unique or orb of fire with one hit. But what will you do when one is awake? If you are strong enough to deal with non-sleeping ones, then you do not need to kill the sleeping ones with one hit in the first place, so it is a spectacular, but useless power! (Not completely useless, ok, but not strong.) Lunge's range is nice, but it still won't make sleep stabbing good, since many monsters will be awake from the start, or wake up before you reach it even with lunge.
So if you want a strong spriggan stabber, you need two things:
1. A way to use stabbing against non-sleeping enemies. It has been mentioned: start as an enchanter. With really minor XP investment you can put enemies into sleep or confusion and stab them, which will remain strong till the end of the game.
2. A way to deal with enemies which cannot be hibernated/confused. (High MR, or immune, etc.). While heavenly storm may help with the low damage of short blades, and Wu Jian could certainly be won with spriggans, other gods give you much, much more help with this. Kiku, for example, gives you pain melee which kills most monsters with a dagger, and zombies/simulacra with corpses which kills the few rest (actually you can kill almost everything with just that, but that would be awful to play).. Makhleb lets you summon demons that kills anything. Usually spriggan enchanters do not need a help with stabbing, but abilities to use when you do not stab.
Also:
While I do not have excessive experience with heavenly storm, slaying and short blades are not so "synergic" as you think. While faster attack speed gets more from slaying, there are two things to consider:
1. Slower weapons deal *much* more damage in the first place, you need really high slaying for short blades to even catch up! And slower weapons gives this extra damage without your god ability.
2. Quick blades are extremely rare, you cannot rely on finding one. Other short blades are not that fast: demon whips are better for spriggans than any short blade: it has the same speed as any non-quickblade short blade, and much higher damage.
- For this message the author sanka has received thanks:
- duvessa