Lessons from First Nightmare Win

[lionhearted]

I got into TOME about three months ago -- I had my appendix out, and some free time. I've played hard games and roguelikes reasonably enough and ascended in Nethack, and I was looking for zangband which had been recommended by a friend of mine a few years ago. I found TOME instead, the graphics and music and interface are amazing but it's still very roguelike-ish, so I went with it. I just won for the first time, and it was a great experience.

Here's some lessons from my first win, which was on Nightmare/Adventure with a Thalore Wyrmic. Yes, I switched to Nightmare quickly after getting the basic hang of the game on normal with a bulwark... I figured I wanted more challenge, and didn't want to learn bad habits on Normal that don't apply on Nightmare.

The last fight on High Peak, I barely won -- 0 lives left at the end, including using the ring that gives an extra life. It was intense. Okay, here's some thoughts/lessons --

1. You should build your character with winning the "choke point" fights in mind. Every character is going to have fights they fare badly in; which fights will depend on your mix of race, class, abilities, and the equipment you find and get from the artifact merchant. A few fights are going to be problematic no matter what -- High Peak is obviously the biggest of them; The Master and the harder required battles in the Far East to a lesser extent; Urkis might be a difficult chokepoint for an anti-magic character that really wants fungus.

Basically, I suspect at the highest difficulties that this is true -- any ability that doesn't help you get through these "chokepoint"/"bottleneck" fights is definitely a luxury and probably a waste. That's because you need some serious firepower to handle High Peak; I had a reasonably well-made character that had reasonably good luck on items (without Spellhunt Remnants, I don't think I would have won), and I barely made it.

2. Learn the mechanics and what's important; this takes time to do. I learned around the slime tunnels that +15% darkness damage didn't add 15% darkness damage to all attacks, but instead increased only darkness damage. Yuck. Dumb, I could have tested it in five minutes, but it is what it is. Likewise, the difference between defense and armor. What armor hardiness does. If you want to actually win on harder difficulties, I'd recommend something like 20 minutes of studying particular mechanics for every hour you play.

3. Learn the value of excellent tactical sequencing. For most of the game, even on Nightmare, you're really tough enough to not pay attention. But then you get to the harder fights and you're entirely lost. For instance, you're a wyrmic there's a tough melee enemy three squares away. Bellowing Roar is on cooldown. Do you use Quake, Sand Breath, Acidic Spray, Corrosive Mist, Corrosive Breath, Venomous Breath, or something else? Any one of those could be the correct call, but it's worth thinking about in not-that-hard fights, so you can test different theories and combinations. I'd often play kind of from level 42 onwards -- there weren't many hard fights at that point -- but I really should have been testing tactics against different enemy types and learning from that.

4. Learn solid tactical movement. I'm an okay tactical player, but if I want to continue on to beat Insane and Madness, I'm going to need to get much better. Say the enemies look like this --

ooooAoo
oooooBo
oo---oo
oooooUo
oo--ooo

"A" and "B" are nasty enemies with ranged attacks; "U" is you; "o" is empty space; "o" is cover (wall, tree, etc) that you can't see through. You're badly wounded. Where will the enemies be if you move west one square? Southwest one square? What's the best pattern of movement to run around and waste five turns for your important cooldown to come back? I still don't know this stuff, I'm an adequate tactical player at best, but I imagine it's critical to beating the highest difficulties.

5. Learn the standard tough enemy repertoires. At High Peak, I couldn't understand why the two endgame bosses were sometimes consistently slamming me for 800 arcane damage per turn, and sometimes couldn't touch me. I still don't know. I'll have to get some experience with arcane characters and learn the basic abilities they're using to really get when they're dangerous or not.

6. Know how equipment and abilities play together, and keep an eye out for the right stuff. At any given time, there's different good builds your character could specialize into; unless an item is overwhelmingly good, there's quite likely less a "best" item to be wearing and more like a best set of stuff for the situation. Healing modifier items are great if you're healing through lots of damage with fungus; or do you want to stack up on speed and damage items with a Timeless/Unstoppable mix? I should have paid more attention to this.

7. While learning, get items, prodigies, and abilities that are forgiving and flexible. "I Can Carry The World" is great if you're learning and your character benefits from strength and maybe even if not. You can pack any armor/items around that look even possibly good. This doesn't benefit your character directly as much in battle, but lets you as a player compensate for not knowing yet which items really combo well later in the game. Items that increase max hit points are good for just about everyone except builds that try to never take health damage (or make it irrelevant like Unstoppable)... even then, they give you a margin of error.

8. Play slower. There's no timer. You can sit and think about a really bad situation for quite a while. The best advice I ever read about Nethack is: "Remember this isn't Quake."

9. Stop playing when you're on tilt. I played a couple berserkers to learn my way around the game before committing to try to win with a wyrmic. I found deaths often came in bunches, when I was playing sloppy. As soon as I start mashing buttons, I take a break. I took a break at High Peak on my last life and really carefully thought through how I'd fight the rest of the battle, and played for max safety (fleeing after using even one of my three big heals, and fleeing liberally until Spellhunt Remnants, Wrath of the Woods, and Nature's Pride were all off cooldown)... if I'd kept grinding away with the initial strategy I used to lose five lives, I'd have lost the sixth. Instead, I won on that last life.

10. Flee earlier. You only want to commit to sticking around if the battle is mandatory, if you have no way to improve before coming back to this battle (no way to flee and return while higher level or better equipment), and if sticking around longer makes you more likely to clear the fight immediately. So if you've got almost everything on cooldown but this brutal boss with regeneration is down to 5% life, maybe you stick around and cross your fingers. But otherwise, run. Running is usually correct; you fights thousands of fights in this game; a 0.1% chance of dying through risky play means you're losing a life. In the later game, I'd always flee if Relentless Pursuit was on cooldown unless there was no safe place to flee or I was about to imminently take out the biggest threat there. Seriously, run much earlier. You don't get bravery points in this game, so flee early and stay alive.

Ok, I still consider myself very much a newbie, but I tried to write a post that would be useful if I read it when starting out. Good luck racking up those Nightmare wins.

[Groggeneral]

Excellent advice, thanks!

[Zenavathar]

Thank you for the post. It got me to thinking about things a bit more

[donkatsu]

1. You should build your character with winning the "choke point" fights in mind.

This is such a good point, and one that's not readily obvious when you're new. Backstab from the Dirty Fighting tree looks really good-- it gives you massive crit rate against stunned targets, and a huge passive chance to stun. Until you realize that any enemy that can be reliably stunned was never a threat to begin with, so by taking Backstab you're not winning any fights that you wouldn't have won anyway, which means that actually, it's completely useless. There are a bunch of "win more" talents out there, but they're just newbie traps.

[Call]

2. Learn the mechanics and what's important; this takes time to do. I learned around the slime tunnels that +15% darkness damage didn't add 15% darkness damage to all attacks, but instead increased only darkness damage. Yuck. Dumb, I could have tested it in five minutes, but it is what it is. Likewise, the difference between defense and armor. What armor hardiness does. If you want to actually win on harder difficulties, I'd recommend something like 20 minutes of studying particular mechanics for every hour you play.

I enjoyed your post, thank you.

However, I would greatly appreciate if you could write a post explaining these referenced mechanics so that others can learn from your experience.

I am constantly battling questions as to what benefits on items I should be favoring at any time. Resists? Immunities? Saves? Damage types? Health or regen? Etc.

Cheers!