Since I was sort of doing this as a challenge mode for myself, I decided on a few rules. If you choose to try this as a character building challenge you don't have to use the same rules as me. But this is what I was working with in my head:
Rules
- Only the Player AIoo addon can control the character. The only thing you are allowed to do is press your hotkey to activate Player AIoo at the start of each level, and when it gets stuck (which is every time it opens a door or picks up a yellow artifact).
- Exceptions to the above rule are: You can control your character freely on the world map and choose whatever zone you want to do in whatever order. You can control your character freely in towns to do quests and visit shops. You can control your character to perform actions that are essential to completing the game that the addon can't do by itself: for example, using the orb of many ways, hitting the switches in tannen's dungeon, hitting the switches in the prides, etc. You can control your character freely in the ONE level of tannen's dungeon that is underwater (because the addon gets stuck when it suffocates and you can't progress). You can use autoexplore and wait turn at appropriate times (being blinded).
- You have to open any chest, sack, vault, or vor armory danger room that the addon bumps into. If the addon doesn't bump into a chest, sack, or vault. Tough luck, you don't get it.
- You have to do every random encounter (hidden tunnels, dark crypt, godfeaster, etc.) as soon as it appears.
Shadows the Level 50 Cornac Adventurer
This wasn't a planned build. I didn't really think it through, and I kept changing my mind about what I was doing or just throwing points out randomly, but in terms of Player AIoo bump attack idiocy, it actually is practically unkillable. I probably threw about 100 attempts at this challenge before this one finally succeeded, so even on Normal I don't think this is an easy challenge simply because you have no control over what the addon does, and it will put you in situations where you will die. I will probably start trying to get it to brute force nightmare now, but I'm not sure if this build is exactly what would work. Some talent trees that I picked started to feel anti-synergistic.
Some notes and considerations from my (100s of) attempts:
- I never did sandworm lair. Not once. I assume it is automatic death. Most of the time I am antimagic so can't wear a belt of unlife. I don't even know how the addon handles that zone because I just didn't even try. Same deal for places like temple of creation and the underwater zone in the yeek starting area.
- You will fail every single escort. Sometimes you get lucky and the escort spawns right by the exit, and that's a great feeling. Probably don't try and use a build that relies on escorts in any way.
- You will fail every single timed mission. The addon tends to rest until full after every single fight (which is also why you fail most escort missions).
- I skipped the zone where you fight your clone. The addon can get stuck in a loop when it ends up fighting an enemy that you can't kill and that can't kill you. It just bump attacks for ever. Since you have to try and make an unkillable build, I figured it would just get stuck in a loop fighting the clone, and it's far enough into the game that I didn't really want to test it.
- Blind is the most annoying condition to deal with because the addon just stops doing anything and you have to just press wait turn until you can reactivate it.
- The addon will completely refuse to do anything if you drop below a certain percentage of health (I think it might be 60%). There's a certain threshold where it will pause, but you can reactivate it again, but I think 60% is the threshold where it will outright refuse to continue, which means if you're following the ruleset listed above, the run is essentially over if you ever drop below 60% life, since you can no longer activate the addon.
- You can right click your character and set "priorities" for certain skills, but this didn't seem to work very well as far as I could tell. There's nothing in the documentation that says this, but I started to feel like the addon actually uses skills in a priority order based on where they are positioned on the hotbar (1, then 2, then 3, then 4, etc.) I can't confirm this. Anyway, the point of this is that if you have your infusions in slots 1, 2, and 3 on your hotbar, the addon will actually use them!!! but if they are further down the hotbar, the addon rarely if ever uses them. So positioning infusions on your hotbar can help fend off the 60% health threshold softlock.
- If you have a teleport skill/infusion, you can get the addon to use it and I think that can make fights safer because the addon will continually teleport away and rest to heal, but I didn't really test this much at all because I figured the better strategy is to just never go below 60% life.