Diablo, Warcraft, Warcraft 2 coming to GOG

Man, door and corner luring is such a key roguelike skill. Far cry from “jack your movespeed up as fast as humanly possible, beeline to objectives while delete an entire screens of enemies at a time,” heh.

You have excellent taste, sir!

Yep. Still have MoM and MoO2 on my system.

I thought about it for a bit and maybe this is why at least some of the more modern ARPGs just do not appeal to me these days. At first I thought maybe I had just grown out of the genre and changed, but perhaps it was instead the genre that evolved and in not changing with it we grew apart.

So where was my Warrior when we last left him?

Ah yes, unable to defeat The Butcher because of getting locked into an endless cycle of blocking and not blocking his hits. So I jumped back in last night and went to Level 3. After clearing most of level 3, I’d been finding a few magic items that I didn’t need. This meant I was able to sell it and get gold. And Griswold happened to be selling a two-handed axe that did 6-16 damage, as well as having the special property that it knocked enemies back. Woah!

I figured that was exactly what I needed against The Butcher, so I bought it and went back down to the dungeon. I went up to level 2 and opened the door. The Butcher approached, I hit him with the axe, which knocked him back. He approached again. I hit him with the axe which knocked him back. He approached again. I hit him and knocked him back. Woohoo, I took him down pretty quickly like this.

His Cleaver actually did even more damage than this Axe that I’d bought that knocked enemies back, so I switched to it as I went back to Level 3. I went down to King Leoric’s throne room and I have to admit, when I went one on one with him, and I used all the health potions on my belt except one, I was getting a tad bit worried that he’d get me before I got him. But no, he went down to the Butcher’s Cleaver.

So now I’m on Level 4 and feeling a little bit unstoppable as long as I don’t get surrounded. I did die a couple of times when I got surrounded because if things can attack you from multiple sides, you get into a constant cycle of interruptions, and die pretty quickly. So yeah, the Rogue looked like the strongest character early on, but the Warrior has climbed back up the ranks to the top again.

I think we all know how this game of Linear Warriors and Quadratic Wizards ends though, haha. Great to hear that your Warrior is back to making progress downwards again, long may it last.

How have I never heard this before, that’s great.

I came across it in the RPG world, where it’s been an issue basically as long as there have been pen-and-paper RPGs. That classic OD&D/AD&D feel of being a Magic User/Wizard with 2HP while the fighter’s strutting around with 6, king of the world. Until, you know, a leveling curve later, you’re reshaping reality to your whims, and he, uh, hits stuff slightly easier.

Oh yeah I’m well aware of the concept, that’s just a great and pithy way to describe it.

@ArmandoPenblade is often pithy. ;)

IIRC, my friends and I never got far with warriors because:

  1. They could not run. Ranged mobs would just walk away from you at the same speed while others shot you.

  2. Your repair bills were outrageous. All your gold mostly went to repairs and health potions. Getting “of the ages” armor (didn’t need repair) was a god-send for warriors.

Update: All 3 of my characters are now on Level 5 (Catacombs?). The Warrior is the only one to have beaten the Butcher and Leoric (or was it Lazarus?) the Skeleton King. I did try to go back as the Wizard to beat The Butcher, since I had a staff of Fire Wall and I was feeling cocky.

Nope. Not even close. The Butcher comes in and walks all over the fire walls I set for him and kills me. I guess Fire Wall only works if I can somehow keep him in it, but away from me at the same time. I guess eventually I’ll find something down there that will help me beat him.

I haven’t really tried the Butcher again as a Rogue, but man, the game is so easy as a Rogue in comparison with the other two characters. I also have the most money. The Warrior and Wizard spend most of their winnings on repairs/recharging and potions. Especially the Wizard. The Recharging staff skill is interesting, as is the Warrior’s repair skill. You can save some money, but every time you use them, your maximum charges/durability go down. So if I keep using those skills, eventually the item becomes unusable. For a staff, that happens pretty fast. If you’re going to recharge your staff using that skill, you’d better be confident that you have another staff ready to go once that one is useless.

At least with the warrior, even if you get down on Durability, as long as you don’t get hit too much you can avoid stuff breaking. But with the Wizard, if your staff can only fire charged bolt 9 times before it runs out, it’s pretty f—ing useless.

Meanwhile, the Rogue has a useless disable trap skill. And the Rogue does need to constantly repair her bow, because using your bow as a machine gun basically makes its durability go down fairly quickly, but still, every run to town you can repair your bow and not worry about it too much. The Rogue also almost never needs to use potions, so I’m constantly selling potions all the time, which is an interesting contrast to the other two who are always buying more potions on their town runs.

I am making Decard Cain very rich.

Here’s a puzzle. There’s a room in Level 5 where you open a door to a relatively small room with only one door. The Warrior opens the door. There’s skeleton archers lined up so that 3 or 4 of them can shoot at the door. If you step inside to try to take them fast, you see that there are more seletons all along the left wall and the right wall. There’s also a bookshelf here. Ooooooh! My precious book shelf! I must have it!

But wait, how the heck to survive? If you approach any one of the skeletons around the room, you can maybe kill one before they kill you. I wonder if the only way is to just go in with all 8 full health potions in my belt and drink them all as I kill enough skeletons? It seemed like I was dying too fast even for that.

Of course, I am a Warrior. What the heck am I going to find in a bookshelf that’s all that useful anyway? This is a trap for Wizards, and ironically, not a very good trap for Wizards. But it’s a great trap for Warriors.

I’ll just have to let this room be.

Stone curse can be a warrior’s best friend, but you do end up chugging a lot of mana pots when you need to use it. Still, with the ‘runaway vixens and archers’, sometime’s that’s your only good option.

What’s the magic requirement on that?

It’s no joke at 51, but you can reach that with items that give +magic, so you don’t have to spend too much on base stats…

Good god. 51?!?

I guess I should be wearing all +magic equipment instead of +strength equipment eventually.

Last night I did take that room btw, I couldn’t resist it. I took a whole row of health potions and drank them one by one while I was in the room taking down skeleton archers.

My reward? 3 useless Books of Telekinesis. Totally worthless.

You only need to wear it to learn the spell, then you can take it off.

I had my Rogue catch up to the Warrior, both at level 9/10 in the dungeon now.

Since the Rogue hadn’t beaten the Butcher yet, and I finally found a new bow I can use for the first time since the early game, I went back to level 2. I fired at the Butcher repeatedly. He was caught in an endless cycle of getting hit for 4 shots in a row, and he died without reaching me. Wow, that was easy.

Meanwhile level 10 in the dungeon is pretty tough now because I’m getting hit with acid damage at range and fire damage at range. I haven’t run across much equipment that gives me resists yet.

Single player can be really hard, since the shop items don’t change often. If I remember right, in multiplayer LAN, which you can play solo, you get new items loaded when you go to the dungeon, and the dungeon levels repopulate, so you can grind money and exp if you need it. That can really open up possibilities to get important resists and other items. Single player is sometimes just unwinnable, as a roguelike ought to be, but is often not what players actually want to play, as seen in diablo 2 and 3.