Avernum: Escape From the Pit Melee Dexterity Build

[MaximB]

I read some time ago a post about this in Steam forum:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/208400/discussions/0/2569816224938350902/

 

Basically Sir Jace wrote that he became OP by using Str+Dex build:

The full post:

 

 Over-powered on Torment
I'm at level 20 now on Torment on my first play of the game. I didn't read any guides for building characters and I just took two soldiers, a priest, and a hedge wizard based on my experiences in other games. I like being invincible. I seriously don't think it's going to change. I sort of accidentally stumbled into the party I have, I guess. It comes down to one simple fact, and something I'm going to exploit completely in the sequels, which is dexterity is over-powered. Strength gives accuracy and damage at the same rate as the others, but strength is very weak. It gives only carrying capacity. Thus, for my soldiers, I found myself gradually dumping 1 point per level into melee. The goal is 31+2 points in melee for the 33 damage dice and accuracy. That's basically what I'd have gotten from strength. Then, because I know that evasion is over-powered (from experience) -- barely anything can even hit my soldiers -- I want split dexterity. Mostly we cannot trade any more strength away without losing ability to hit while wearing armor and shield. The end result is my soldiers hit very, very hard for this difficulty. They actually have more damage from specialization than the weapon itself. This also scales with blademaster. In fact, blademaster only becomes more important for damage once the damage dice are 34+, which happens early. Anyway, to add insult to injury, not only does dexterity give 5% evasion per point, which is insanely powerful, but it also gives +1 initiative. I can position my soldiers up in the enemy's face and draw them exactly where I want with challenger. Then, I use disciplines, which I had extremely early, like bladeshield (riposting 50% and 30% more damage reduction) or adrenaline rush to do 3-4 attacks each and execute fragile enemies like spiders and mages. Basically, I just wanted to share what I accidentally discovered. Enjoy!

 

L30 Soldier
Attribute Ratio

14 Strength : 14 Dexterity : 4 Endurance (early)
Skills
31+2 Melee +33 dice+accuracy
2 Pole
8+2 Hardiness
8+2 Blademaster +10 accuracy
2 Bow
2 Gymnastics +4 evasion
+2 Resilience
+2 Cave Lore
10 [Free]
Traits

Improved Strength 5, Improved Dexterity 5, Good+Robust+Perfect Health, Improved Endurance 1, Challenger 1, Sure Hand

 

What are your thoughts about this?

 

[Randomizer]

Evasion is insanely overpowered and in older games it was even worse. Jeff countered by making it less effective against area effect attacks and mental attacks.

 

Enjoy running amuck!

[Mea Tulpa]

What Jace has discovered is basically that Torment isn't actually that tormenting, in AEFTP.  He picked up on some key OP abilities, notably Adrenaline Rush.  And that's enough to carry him.  However, there are a lot of inaccurate statements in his description.  It just doesn't work the way he says, and his choices aren't as optimal as he paints them as:

 

> The goal is 31+2 points in melee for the 33 damage dice and accuracy. That's basically what I'd have gotten from strength.

Melee Weapons gives +1% accuracy per level.  Strength gives +5%.  These are not the same thing.

 

> Then, because I know that evasion is over-powered (from experience) -- barely anything can even hit my soldiers -- I want split dexterity.

I don't know how far he is in the game but there is no way that 14 Dexterity is enough to consistently evade things on Torment.  (Dexterity also doesn't help you evade cold, acid, or poison attacks.)  This has been discussed a lot recently on the discord -- evasion isn't bad, but you really do need to pump Dex to make it work.

 

> This also scales with blademaster. In fact, blademaster only becomes more important for damage once the damage dice are 34+, which happens early.

This sounds like he has recognized that you get diminishing returns from damage dice (which is true!) but he seems to think he only gets damage dice from Melee Weapons.  This is incorrect -- they also come from Strength, and they also come from the weapon's base bonus level.  (EDIT: And from half of PC level, I forgot that bit.)  So he's actually hitting 34 damage dice much, much earlier than he thinks he is.  This is the real reason that maxing out Melee Weapons is not actually the way to max out damage.

[MaximB]

Interesting,

So what is the optimal build for melee? (1 tank and 1 damage dealer that can also survive well as he also is in the front)

Currently I have 2 melee (early game):

tank: 6 str, 3 dex, 3 int, 8 endurance ; 5 melee weapons, 5 hardiness, 2 blade master, 1 quick action ;  1 mighty blows, 1 good health

fighter: 9 str, 3 dex, 3 int, 4 endurance ; 5 melee weapons, 5 blade master, 1 hardiness, 1 quick action, 1 dual wielding ; 1 good health, 1 mighty blows, 1 improved str

The tank misses like 50% of the time,

The fighter also sometimes misses but not that often.

 

How should I allocate the points and what skills to get?

[Mea Tulpa]

Endurance makes increasingly little difference as your level gets higher.  So as long as you can get through the early levels, the optimal build for melee is probably all stat points into Strength.  That said, it won't kill you to put a few points into Endurance if you really want to.

 

On the other hand, Hardiness and Resistance both reduce damage by a huge amount.  Hardiness is a top priority for pretty much any character.  Parry is also really good for a front-liner.

 

For DPS output, dual wielding is just massively better than sword and shield in AEFTP.  The higher tier melee skills aren't super amazing but they do provide more DPS improvement than Melee Weapons does.

 

Here's a sample build I put together way back when:

 

All points into Strength

 

8+2 Melee Weapons
+1 Pole Weapons
+2 Bows
+1 Thrown Weapons (Warrior Cloak for the last 2 points to AR & BS)
10+2 Hardiness
10+2 Parry
10+2 Blademaster
7+2 Quick Action
9+2 Lethal Blow
8+2 Dual Wielding
+2 Resistance

 

Health Traits x3, Parry Mastery x2, Mighty Blows x3, DW Traits x2, Improved Strength x5

[MaximB]

Thank you,

Any good builds for priest and sorcerer?

[TriRodent]

15 hours ago, MaximB said:

Thank you,

Any good builds for priest and sorcerer?

No build handy offhand, but some general advice that worked for me.

 

Both priest & sorcerer had skill points invested into each other's skills at least for the first few levels of spells (actually 'everyone' in my party had that - the front line guys at a minimum could each heal/cure poison & cast a firebolt/summon a minor creature). 

 

Sorcerers would generally be trained up to Mass Healing/Curing & later to Fireblast (L10-11?).  Getting them there would also allow them to use the priest's early Summon Shade (? the one around L5) as that was generally stronger/hardier than any mage summon for quite a while.  

 

Priests would be trained at a minimum to Ice Spray & later up to Lightning Spray as those were better AOE spells before getting high enough for Fireblast.

 

Skill points aren't 'so' tight that everything has to follow an exact path to survive.  Giving everyone some of everything makes tactics quite flexible. Eventually I try to get the front line guys up to Ice Spray & Summon Shade (so tenish points into Mage & Priest skills) as that gives you the ability to have four summoned creatures running around distracting the bad guys & doing their own damage.  Four AOE spells in one turn early on will dramatically thin out the ranks of those coming to inflict mayhem upon you...  But even without them that high, it can be useful for one of those guys to rebuff the party if the fight goes on a while, allowing the main spell casters to keep throwing out their big spells.

 

Attribute points primarily into intelligence, the rotating automatic points will bump up the others enough for the most part.

 

Trait points need to include Swordmage (I don't have the game open to check, the one that lets you wear heavier armor), at least a couple of levels of it.  By doing that you can wear/use heavier armor/shields ... and by doing 'that' you don't have to put a bunch of skill points into resistance (freeing them up for use elsewhere).  Make sure your front line guys get this trait too otherwise they won't be able to use those mage spells they learned.

[Mea Tulpa]

> "Giving everyone some of everything makes tactics quite flexible."

 

The 4-stat system kind of makes this not work so well for most offensive skills, especially because of accuracy.  You can mix Priest and Mage spells just fine (though both have perfectly good attack spells on their own, so if you're mixing those it's probably to get more healing).  But there isn't much point to having a mage who has a weak melee attack instead of a completely pointless one, if it's going to make him worse at the main thing he does.  Similarly, there's not much reason to have a melee fighter learn a few mage spells -- they'll never do great damage, they'll miss a lot unless you invest a lot into Intelligence, and his melee attack will be weaker and less accurate.

 

> "By doing that you can wear/use heavier armor/shields ... and by doing 'that' you don't have to put a bunch of skill points into resistance"

 

Resistance and Hardiness are arguably the two strongest skills in the game.  Swordmage does not in any way replace them.  (It also isn't actually required to equip good armor, since you can wear 10% encumbrance and still cast if you equip a longbow for the +5%, and there are a number of great magical heavy armors with low to zero encumbrance.)

 

Resistance is actually so good that it's not a completely crazy choice to have a warrior invest in it, though it's obviously not cheap for a warrior and comes at the cost of some DPS.  But for a spellcaster it's a no-brainer.

[Jawaj]

On 6/23/2024 at 8:57 AM, TriRodent said:

Skill points aren't 'so' tight that everything has to follow an exact path to survive.  Giving everyone some of everything makes tactics quite flexible. Eventually I try to get the front line guys up to Ice Spray & Summon Shade (so tenish points into Mage & Priest skills) as that gives you the ability to have four summoned creatures running around distracting the bad guys & doing their own damage.  Four AOE spells in one turn early on will dramatically thin out the ranks of those coming to inflict mayhem upon you...  But even without them that high, it can be useful for one of those guys to rebuff the party if the fight goes on a while, allowing the main spell casters to keep throwing out their big spells.

Summons can be useful for distraction and taking hits (at least on Hard), but the low-level ones really drop off. Summon Shade is nice for awhile but by midgame everything will kill your shade in 1-2 shots. For late game only Divine Host and Arcane Summon are worth using. Throwing AoE spells from your fighters will have major accuracy issues unfortunately, at least above Normal.

 

Giving some priest spells to a fighter can be useful for extra healing, basic buffs, and an extra Unshackle Mind if you go to 6. Even Mass Healing isn't out of the question at 8, though I didn't do it myself. A few levels of Mage spells on a fighter has some utility for an extra Haste/Slower (whether it's really worth the investment is debatable though), but not for damage with the way accuracy works.

Edited June 24 by Jawaj

[Randomizer]

Summon Shade is great because shades can't be affected b mental attacks. Get the shade near the foe and almost all mental attacks get wasted on them sparing your party.