ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I don't think I've ever been stunned on escape from Reknor, I have however been blasted by enough magical damage/turn to pretty much leave me dead before I can even see the source, a cure magic wild might give dwarves more of a fighting chance.

I often use the cure physical wild on the blindness from the orc's sun infusions. Beyond that...? Well, Im not saying that you're wrong.

I keep banging my head against the dwarf start, and, well....

Brotok punishes you for wanting to be a dwarf. A large chunk of his damage is magic, which means that if you're going for a nice, tanky, heavily armored build, it does you basically no good at the time you need it most. He, in turn, has some very nice defenses against melee (being a partially melee character of notably higher level - you'll only get one level of combat accuracy, so if you're not going dex, good luck hitting him). In the meantime, melee characters are more gear-dependent at the beginning, so the fact that you have exactly two floors worth of stuff and no accessible shops is working against you there too. Yes, you can run past him in most cases, while letting your partner Norgan die a horrible death to save your cowardly hide, but that just feels wrong - and it's not that he's hard, it's that he's hard for the classes people ought to be thinking of when they're running dwarves. I ran a series of dwarven mindslayers, focusing on Mindlash, and as long as they didn't try to engage him in melee, he was a pushover. I'd suspect that other ranged caster classes would do just fine too. There's something a little wrong with this picture. I'd suggest making him something like a cursed or a berserker instead - a high-mobility melee character with poor melee defenses. It seems wrong that the wyrmic answer to this guy should be "invest heavily in lightning speed and run away from him really well (possibly looting the room while your buddy dies if you're feeling brave)"

Sirrocco wrote:I keep banging my head against the dwarf start, and, well....

Brotok punishes you for wanting to be a dwarf. A large chunk of his damage is magic, which means that if you're going for a nice, tanky, heavily armored build, it does you basically no good at the time you need it most. He, in turn, has some very nice defenses against melee (being a partially melee character of notably higher level - you'll only get one level of combat accuracy, so if you're not going dex, good luck hitting him). In the meantime, melee characters are more gear-dependent at the beginning, so the fact that you have exactly two floors worth of stuff and no accessible shops is working against you there too. Yes, you can run past him in most cases, while letting your partner Norgan die a horrible death to save your cowardly hide, but that just feels wrong - and it's not that he's hard, it's that he's hard for the classes people ought to be thinking of when they're running dwarves. I ran a series of dwarven mindslayers, focusing on Mindlash, and as long as they didn't try to engage him in melee, he was a pushover. I'd suspect that other ranged caster classes would do just fine too. There's something a little wrong with this picture. I'd suggest making him something like a cursed or a berserker instead - a high-mobility melee character with poor melee defenses. It seems wrong that the wyrmic answer to this guy should be "invest heavily in lightning speed and run away from him really well (possibly looting the room while your buddy dies if you're feeling brave)"

I have nothing to add. Thumbs up.