Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
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Re: Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
I don't think you'll have too much trouble with Nightmare, especially if you have previous experience with roguelikes. It's very fair. I only played one game of Normal before moving to Nightmare, and I'm doing better than I did with my Normal character (almost level 45).
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Re: Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
This. I stayed away from Insane for a long time thinking it was way out of my league, but in the end it's easier than NM, since the loot is just so.. well.. insane. I just won with a Dwarf Bulwark, something I could never do in years playing NM.ster wrote:insane assumes drowning to start which is a bad tedious mechanic, other than that it's pretty fun because it keeps you thinking and your character is very strong compared to lower difficulties.
(imo nightmare is harder than insane but not in a very fun way)
Re: Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
It's just a 1-player game so you can do whatever you want.
I play roguelike only and move up in difficulty immediately upon beating the game once. I've got exactly one winner in normal, nightmare, and insane. Now I'm tackling madness.
Imo, you won't learn from umpteen playthroughs on one difficulty how to withstand the next. You just need to dive in and get acclimated. The reason is that each difficulty is effectively very different from the previous one. It's not just that you have to know more, it's that you have to defeat new challenges you never had to consider before.
Just to choose an easy and non-spoiler example, in Normal you don't have to avoid the wandering patrols. In Nightmare you do at low levels. No amount of playing Normal would prepare you for that. That's kind of a silly example but I don't want to reveal anything if you want to be surprised by what other difficulties do.
I play roguelike only and move up in difficulty immediately upon beating the game once. I've got exactly one winner in normal, nightmare, and insane. Now I'm tackling madness.
Imo, you won't learn from umpteen playthroughs on one difficulty how to withstand the next. You just need to dive in and get acclimated. The reason is that each difficulty is effectively very different from the previous one. It's not just that you have to know more, it's that you have to defeat new challenges you never had to consider before.
Just to choose an easy and non-spoiler example, in Normal you don't have to avoid the wandering patrols. In Nightmare you do at low levels. No amount of playing Normal would prepare you for that. That's kind of a silly example but I don't want to reveal anything if you want to be surprised by what other difficulties do.
Re: Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
Nightmare is indeed boring, but I'm not sure how people are supposed to beat insane/roguelike without some insane luck. I've been running a character with over 1700 hp, 57% all resistance and 70% in all the standard resistances, and yet I've still managed to get hit for over 1000 damage in a single blow. I'm getting the feeling that winning basically involves never having the game generate a deadly rare, or making sure all enemies are always CCed.
Since I couldn't manage to win Insane/Roguelike with standard classes, (it always ended when encoutering a rare with high level Assault or Greater Weapon Focus), I decided to give it a go with the tankiest thing I could design and came up with this adventurer:
https://te4.org/characters/216564/tome/ ... 8354e4c9fd
And yet my life was ended once again by a single blow dealing 3500 arcane damage. If even this build can get one shot, I've lost hope on ever winning an Insane/Roguelike run. Any tips on how I could improve my build would be greatly appreciated by the way
! (I probably should have taken a talent that prevents taking more than X% of your maximum health in a single blow).
Since I couldn't manage to win Insane/Roguelike with standard classes, (it always ended when encoutering a rare with high level Assault or Greater Weapon Focus), I decided to give it a go with the tankiest thing I could design and came up with this adventurer:
https://te4.org/characters/216564/tome/ ... 8354e4c9fd
And yet my life was ended once again by a single blow dealing 3500 arcane damage. If even this build can get one shot, I've lost hope on ever winning an Insane/Roguelike run. Any tips on how I could improve my build would be greatly appreciated by the way
! (I probably should have taken a talent that prevents taking more than X% of your maximum health in a single blow).Re: Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
Maybe investing in crit mitigation?tabc3dd wrote:Nightmare is indeed boring, but I'm not sure how people are supposed to beat insane/roguelike without some insane luck. I've been running a character with over 1700 hp, 57% all resistance and 70% in all the standard resistances, and yet I've still managed to get hit for over 1000 damage in a single blow. I'm getting the feeling that winning basically involves never having the game generate a deadly rare, or making sure all enemies are always CCed.
Since I couldn't manage to win Insane/Roguelike with standard classes, (it always ended when encoutering a rare with high level Assault or Greater Weapon Focus), I decided to give it a go with the tankiest thing I could design and came up with this adventurer:
https://te4.org/characters/216564/tome/ ... 8354e4c9fd
And yet my life was ended once again by a single blow dealing 3500 arcane damage. If even this build can get one shot, I've lost hope on ever winning an Insane/Roguelike run. Any tips on how I could improve my build would be greatly appreciated by the way
Re: Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
I was running over 70% crit mitigation thanks to indiscernible anatomy, all the blows that killed me where non-crit (unless I'm misreading damage logs, but I assume crits are the numbers in bold).
A couple of images, the first one is my character's defensive sheet before hitting the 57% all resistance thanks to another cat point from wyrm bile. The second is me taking over 1000 physical damage, non-crit, through all the mitigation while I still had my sustains up. The 3rd is just a warning that, no matter how strong you think your character is, Athamathon is stronger (3560 arcane damage taken in one hit).
https://ibb.co/jm9hbQ
https://ibb.co/nLtm35
https://ibb.co/hmmTGQ
A couple of images, the first one is my character's defensive sheet before hitting the 57% all resistance thanks to another cat point from wyrm bile. The second is me taking over 1000 physical damage, non-crit, through all the mitigation while I still had my sustains up. The 3rd is just a warning that, no matter how strong you think your character is, Athamathon is stronger (3560 arcane damage taken in one hit).
https://ibb.co/jm9hbQ
https://ibb.co/nLtm35
https://ibb.co/hmmTGQ
Re: Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
Crit mitigation or crit reduction? As I recall, one lowers the chance of being hit with a crit, the other lowers the damage multiplier of crits that end up hitting you.
Edit: nevermind. You mentioned Indiscernable Anatomy which is the crit damage mitigation one.
Edit: nevermind. You mentioned Indiscernable Anatomy which is the crit damage mitigation one.
Re: Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
@tabc3dd: If you look at the log, that 3.6k arcane damage is from your own attack being reflected back at you. You basically need to remove Atamathon's reflective skin or be immune to to damage in other to survive that. In any case, I don't consider that part of the real campaign. He's just a bonus boss to fight after you win.
Getting hit for 1k+ damage per hit definitely does happen on Insane though. It doesn't usually happen multiple turns in a row, but that's also possible. You need a way to mitigate spike damage (such as %damage reduction), and a way to escape from the fight if you take a huge hit. Don't rely only on resists since they can be completely nullified by resist penetration.
Getting hit for 1k+ damage per hit definitely does happen on Insane though. It doesn't usually happen multiple turns in a row, but that's also possible. You need a way to mitigate spike damage (such as %damage reduction), and a way to escape from the fight if you take a huge hit. Don't rely only on resists since they can be completely nullified by resist penetration.
Re: Is it considered a convention to move up in difficulty?
@Effigy: Yep I definitely don't consider Athamathon as part of the main campaign, I decided to challenge him for fun and to see if it would work. However, I was trying to run away from him and wasn't attacking him, so that 3560 was not due to reflection (especially since the reflective skin doesn't scale that high in % damage reflected and I was playing a tank, no way I would do even close to enough damage for that reflection).
Good call on the resist penetration, not sure how I'm supposed to deal with that efficiently but I'll try to come up with another builds. Talents that cap damage taken seem pretty nice, but looking at the source code they apply after other calculations so they might be useless (For exemple, they occur after damage to psi has been taken so you can't try to do a fun build around low-life/high-psi + capped damage taken from %health).
Good call on the resist penetration, not sure how I'm supposed to deal with that efficiently but I'll try to come up with another builds. Talents that cap damage taken seem pretty nice, but looking at the source code they apply after other calculations so they might be useless (For exemple, they occur after damage to psi has been taken so you can't try to do a fun build around low-life/high-psi + capped damage taken from %health).