Dwarf Bulwark! My goal with this character was to try out a couple of disdained concepts; namely going all in on saves (ignoring immunities) and making heavy use of shield block & eternal guard.
Insane Adv mode (no deaths), vaultless. The only gameplay-changing addon was my
combat veteran rework, which kinda felt like it was handcrafted to fit bulwark specifically.
Building Saves instead of ImmunitiesDorf Bulwark has one of the strongest collections of all save you can get: +50 passively from Dorf, ~30 phys/spell from dorf active racial, ~30 from Daunting Presence, and another 25/70 phys/spell from class. That's a pretty heavy heavy swing in your favor, and that's all before gear comes into play. Yes, the stats are rescaled, but the raw numbers here are huge enough to be telling in the end. You only need +20 over the enemy to reach max benefit.
The growth of your saves on this character is pretty neat. Daunting Presence comes online early, and when it maxes out, Shield Specialist starts up. Then, Power is Money opens up, then Danger Sense. There's decent growth to invest in from Lv8 all the way through to about Lv40 or so, but it's pretty brutal to drop 15 generics for this.
Here are some screenshots of various randbosses and such throughout the run. I snapped SS's whenever I remembered. One or two don't have Intimidation applied and I have Dorf Resilience applied in a few, take note.
Saves vs Power Early GameSaves vs Power Mid/LateSaves vs Power Final BossesThe main takeaway is that, well, there honestly aren't a lot of enemies sporting massive power. Given your growth throughout the run, it's really easy to stay way ahead on the power vs save curve. My experience in this run was that I could basically ignore that enemies had detrimental effects at all, for nearly the whole run. By endgame, enemies had caught up enough (no real save boosters in talents after 40-ish) that they could start landing effects sometimes. After getting a few pieces of equipment with all save (I was wearing about +70 all in the end), I'd pulled ahead again until the final battle.
That said, there's a couple scenarios where megasaves don't match up to immunity. One, is that saves carry a minimum 1/20 fail chance, some hits will go through anyway. Second, there are a number of no-save abilities...notably runes, which show up in number in certain Prides. The first problem is partially solved by Danger Sense - an effect you are +20 against but fail anyway is gonna fail 45% of the time thanks to Danger Sense's double check, bringing the save min fail down. The second just sucks, but Bulwark has Unflinching Resolve. Anything that punches through your wall of saves is gone in one or two turns. In practice, this wasn't really anything to worry about.
There's a lot of side benefits of high saves. Necromancer minions can't stun you, corruptors can't hex you, inner demons isn't a thing etc. A lot of annoyances that pop up regularly in normal games you can just act as if don't exist. It's pretty nice.
I think only a few character combos could use saves really effectively: You want a large +all saves in your talents and some kind of cleanse handy (unflinching was perfect) as part of your kit. Then you gotta to make room on gear for saves. Most dwarf classes with Conditioning would work pretty easily.
Blockin'Block is a lot different than how I remember it in 1.4.9, and the most current bulwark guide has mean things to say about it. Since it's been touched up I went heavy to try it out.
After going a run with it, I think it's pretty good.
Defensively...I don't remember if it worked like this before, but normal Block applies its value to
all hits during its active turn. It blocks all damage types except mind, and gets a 50% Block value boost against any element the shield has resistance to. That's a pretty substantial effect, and can effectively be considered a flat damage resist to everything for its active turn. This is a lot better than it seems, since the most dangerous junk in the game isn't single overwhelmingly powerful attacks (although those exist), but rather many high damage hits all at once, each of which will suffer Block reduction. Double turn attacks, Dual wielded flurries, Assaults, telekinetic smashes and so on, are all way, way less dangerous when you deduct hundreds of damage from each of the 3~6 individual strikes. It's nice that the damage prevention is reliable now. Fun fact: This character would have died at Assassin Lord after winning the fight, since the last lingering poison tick would have killed & I had no more healing/cleanse. Instead, I blocked it.
Offensively, counterstrike (looking at its behavior in log files), doubles damage as the tooltip suggests rather than adding a +100% damage modifier as the talent suggests. This means that offensively it's fundamentally
always a good idea to Block & Counter, since it allows you to effectively doublecast your heaviest damage talents. Riposte at 4+ grants 3 double damage strikes. That doubles Assault/Shield Slam damage, but other talents get doubled while still leaving Counterstrike up for following strikes. One Block grants three tripled bumps.
Between the defensive & offensive bonuses, I think it's more or less optimal to block all the time. With that said, Eternal Guard brings block uptime to something like 60% and provides what is effectively infinite counterstrikes. Bulwark's super durable, massively so once EG is up. I didn't really take many screenshots, but here's
one example of the kinds of fights I'd just stand around in and slowly beat crowds to death from behind the shield. (this is partly thanks to the anticrowd talent in my mod though)
MiscWith that said, I think it's complete madness to not take a damage-boosting talent like ICCTW or Arcane Might as prodigy #1, bulwark's sheet damage is just completely awful and they get completely shut down by other bulwarks. Grushnak had more armor than I had weapon damage and was effectively invincible. I ran around the world for a while until I collected another +90 damage/APR before reattempting that fight. Even then, I could barely touch him with my shield and relied on Assault and normal weapon strikes.