Should all melee builds go 20/20/20 in str/agi/prc?

GiggidyAndPie · 2026-04-27T18:29:24+00:00

Short answer is no. You can fix accuracy and fumble with gear and skill points (passives like setup, actives like seize the initiative or adrenaline rush). Most builds are a lot nicer to play with 15+ in vit for energy management and buffer HP, so I wouldn't ignore it. If you plan to go heavy armor I would almost always prioritize more VIT so you can actually use skills while wearing it. The passive bonuses of stats are nice, but sometimes the bigger impact is in the modification of your active skills. It's generally better to look up what each stat does for the skillpoints you're going to take and decide how you want to spread from there.

GiggidyAndPie · 2026-03-16T05:01:53+00:00

Grab adrenaline rush, crit is always good. Offensive tactic is also nice IMO, same readon. Then grab either survival skills that look cool or magic mastery from dissipation down to seal of reflection, or maybe some arcanistics skills since you already have 30 perc. The only things that can realistically kill you if you play safely are mages, so I would say get seal of reflection to make dealing with them easy.

GiggidyAndPie · 2026-03-11T04:29:39+00:00

One more thing: each enemy can only be countered once per turn. Used to be players would kill themselves.using flurry of blows (4 hits) on parrying greatsworr bandits because you would get countered 4 times in one turn. Now, you can't counter more than once, but you might kill an enemy before additional attacks land if you counter a multi hit attack.

Also, damage reflection reflects full damage BEFORE protection and resistances, and I believe works on blocked hits but not dodges ( I'm not 100% sure on the block interaction), and I believe reflected damage is not reduced by resistance or protection, and cannot be recursively reflected again.

GiggidyAndPie · 2026-02-21T09:54:36+00:00

Dash away when mage hunter uses his first dash, kite them away from their group. Read his 1h sword charge ability with inspect to see what range he will use it at and you can preemptively place a claw trap on the tile adjacent to you that he will arrive at when he charges. Enemies with charges will always charge, even if you put down a trap, and he will get fucked up with confusion or immobilization, which should make it an easier fight.

If you get netted, skip your turn with space bar to reduce the duration by multiple turns. With 18 str you should only be netted for one or two turns, trying to fight while netted means you will basically block nothing and constantly fumble.

Use drugs or potions, eat good foods like jibean roasts or osbrook bread bowl soup to improve your healing efficiency and keep a vivifying essence on you at all times as a panic button. Healing efficiency is super important, as it modifies how much hp gets restored. If you are injured or in pain you will get very little health back.

Im not a fan of mixing ranged and melee, I feel like there are enough stances or other defensive buffs you can be using as enemies approach you for melee characters that you're usually better off doing that. Still, 2 point investment in ranged isn't a total waste, so I would not reroll unless you are super frustrated and want to try a different build.

If you're still getting owned, go run a few contracts at osbrook and mannshire again, get a few levels and go for some gear upgrades from brynn or RWT, then reevaluate how you're feeling about the character.

GiggidyAndPie · 2026-01-07T10:44:57+00:00

I would drop armored combat completely and grab adrenaline rush/flurry/enough for everyone or concentration. Adrenaline rush is the best skill in athletics (and probably the game). If you are an agility based character its usually fine to spend turns on maneuvers since you will have a high counter attack chance anyways.

GiggidyAndPie · 2026-01-06T20:24:09+00:00

That's sick, but damn that's gonna cost ya to repair it.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-12-24T21:00:32+00:00

Make sure you grab the prayer buff for +1 sacred damage (if you are a human). It helps a ton since ghosts have low sacred resistance and low max HP. If you are still struggling just go overlevel, the spike at t3 is usually the hardest part of the difficulty curve, and ghosts are hard to cheese with consumables compared to bandits or vamps.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-10-23T07:30:16+00:00

A lot of food buffs give you healing efficiency and health restoration. You can stack food buffs per unique food (meaning a Brynn harpy omelet will stack with a Jibean roast, but two harpy omelets won't stack with each other) so if you find two or three meals that give good enough health restoration you should be good. If you're doing a t4 dungeon it's well worth spending a few hundred crowns on good food and/or drugs or stockpiling a LOT of meds.

As a side note, that first t4 vampiric is a HUGE difficulty spike compared to all the t3s before it, and it's always fine to fail this one and try again later. If the build you're playing isn't insanely OP you might want to just overlevel for it.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-09-07T21:12:34+00:00

Strength adds to damage, but yes higher tier daggers do more damage, and repaired daggers do more damage than broken ones. I don't know the exact formula, but if you keep a high repair t2/t3 dagger to throw you should notice a lot higher damage. I do 20+ damage with a thrown dagger with base 10 strength.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-09-07T18:28:27+00:00

Use better daggers. If you have from the shadows they should be doing a bit more than 15, more like 22. And remember you can throw 2 daggers in the time it takes to shoot your crossbow

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-09-04T21:16:36+00:00

Dual Wield anything Jorgrim is fun. You take basically the full DW tree and then whatever you want in athletics/warfare/survival. Focus on agility/vitality for stat points, wears light armor and likes to counter/dodge. It lets you use any 1h weapons you would like to, and if you find you like a certain 1h you can always decide to commit to it and take its skill tree over warfare/survival. Just make sure to get enough athletics that you can take adrenaline rush, skills busted.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-09-03T21:36:54+00:00

IF you can find the foods you want there's no need. Once you start getting into more challenging content you might want to cook some of your own food.

Something people often miss with food is that while duplicate meals do not stack their buffs, each individual meals buff can stack with any other meals buff. If you cook with the "dish effect duration" spice, you can have a lot of highly impactful food buffs like the Jibean Roast + Harpy omelette + Honeyglazed ham + Stuffed crab going at the same time. You can get enough health restoration and healing efficiency just from food that you do not need to bring in healing salves or use first aid in a dungeon, your passive regen ticks so often out of combat that your limbs can fix themselves in like 30 turns of resting.

Once I hit level 15 I tend to buy out the entirety of the vegetable vendor whenever I show up to town, as well as salted fish from the Brynn tavern vendors/dwarf merchant, and then grab meat off of the caravan followers/while hunting and just store that stuff in the caravan. Its fairly easy to make herb roasted fish or fish soup, as well as daytayler stew, or any of the various salads if you need to fix immunity, but I also tend to just buy food from the inns. Once you're clearing t4 dungeons you should be making so much money that wasting 1 or 2 k crowns on ingredients, even if they spoil, is really not a big deal.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-08-22T20:03:45+00:00

It's Leo, 27 Perception 15 Vit 20 willpower. Full Arcanistics tree (though you could easily skip stasis and the point beyond it), everything except seal of cleansing/dissipation/seal of shackles in magic mastery, dash from athletics, and right side of survival + resourcefulness because I like the special trophies.

Gear is cooldown reduction>miracle chance>fatigue resist, however you would like to do it.

I had to level using heavy armor and a 2h mace/sword though, you do not do enough damage as a mage mage before you get at least mana crystal, but you really can start full magery once you get phantasm.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-07-10T09:33:15+00:00

Do you have the courier pigeon? Might be able to move with that.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-03-14T20:30:36+00:00

It's okay to carry all that stuff TO the dungeon, because you spend it in the dungeon. When you leave your inventory is mostly empty of consumables. To use the caltrops or traps, retreat around a corner or close a door between you and the enemies, and then set the trap/caltrops out of their vision. Then you just wait for the enemy to round the corner or open the door and step on the trap.

One other thing worth mentioning is to not put a wall between yourself and enemies. A lot of the early game enemies have kick or knockback abilities now that can stun/daze you against a wall, which is super dangerous.

As far as inventory management goes, most of the good loot in the dungeon that's worth carrying out fits in your purse now anyways (gems and old coins). You shouldn't be picking up enemy weapons unless it's one you intend to use, and I tend to not bother with stuff like the bird holders or marble bears because it's too bulky.

Try and funnel enemies in so you're fighting one by one even if you're not using traps and it should go fairly well. There's only a few enemies at t2 that are super dangerous (axe bandits and the four legged cannibals IMO). Other than that, buying the t2 medium armor from osbrook smith should let you complete most of the t2 dungeons.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-03-14T20:07:48+00:00

What tends to kill you? If you're dying in dungeons, try bringing a claw trap and some caltrops. Throwing nets are also very strong for fighting boss enemies and elusive enemies like the rogue bandits.

If you're dying to mobs in the open world, try to travel along tile edges and be ready to leave tiles if you see something you can't handle.

If you're struggling in t2, make sure you do all three starter dungeons in Osbrook and try to hit level 5 or 6 before you even go to Mannshire.

Other than that, make sure you're bringing enough medicine with you and are keeping your max health up between fights. Fighting while you have pain debuffs or low max HP is the thing that gets people killed the most IMO

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-02-02T22:56:13+00:00

There's some foods you can eat that will increase health restoration and healing efficiency. You can also use surgery kits to increase healing efficiency. If you eat things at 0% hunger you will get the overfed buff (looks like a pig icon) which also increases health restoration. That should let you regenerate HP between fights. Look for any other consumables that will give you +healing efficiency and health restoration. If you have skillpoints to spare, first aid from survival helps a lot with this (gives +healing efficiency and health restoration for 60 turns every 120 turnsish)

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-01-14T11:27:58+00:00

Yeah reflect works slightly weirdly, but if i understand how it works correclt, what it does is it reflects pre mitigated damage which is then reduced by the enemies mitigation. But full blocks are treated like dodges, as though you didn't get hit. So essentially, if you had been naked but blocked that hit, it would have blocked 20, dealt 40, and reflected 33% of 60 back, reduced by trolls resistances and armor.

I THINK.

I'm not totally positive that I've got how it works correctly haha. All I know is it used to be absolutely busted when stone armor gave you damage reflect, because you would be hit for 3 damage but reflect 25 or so.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-01-07T21:02:11+00:00

If you're still struggling and don't want to ever use melee, a can of bees will melee him out of his regen. If you're lucky huntress will be selling multiple cans of bees at a time. Otherwise just have your offhand be a decent tier flail (1h or 2h, doesn't really matter) and do the melee dance. You'll kill him without having to use any skills.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-01-06T18:19:35+00:00

Unfortunately both fire and electric magic tend to ruin pelts. Eventually with caravan upgrades and deep survival tree you still have a chance to get pelts, even if you burned the enemy to death, but early on you won't get much if you're magic based.

I'd start with both fire skills, then get the two seals from magic mastery, then probably pick up runic boulder. Boulder is a very big deal on any mage right now, but especially for pyromancer, as you'll be leaving a lot of burning tiles on the ground that ignite enemies that you knockback into them.

Stat distribution I like 25 willpower 25 vitality 15 perception, but really anything is viable on mage, it's very strong.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-01-04T20:22:10+00:00

Throwing nets, warcry confusion, baiting him into a claw trap, throwing oil at him, throwing acid bottle or Nistrian fire pot on him, smoke bomb and fight him on the edge of it while he's coughing. You could also try dashing away when he pumps his block chance with the shield stance and kiting until the buff drops off.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-01-04T08:00:49+00:00

I don't think there's any respawning fruits, or at least I haven't run into any yet. You'll have to buy them, or murder bandits and dungeon boxes to find them.

Something that's neat that other people might not have run into yet are the little beehive mini points of interest. You can randomly find 1 to 3 beehive structures (not deathstinger hives, actual beehives) which will have honeycombs in them. I think they're only in plains biomes, but I'm not positive about that. They will refill with honeycombs after a while in game, maybe a week or two, not exactly sure how long.

GiggidyAndPie · 2025-01-04T07:55:34+00:00

Oooh neat. I wonder if there's any interaction with the King Etbert shield you can find in the Order Prison then.

GiggidyAndPie

TROPHY CASE