This game reminds me of Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale, where half the fun was optimizing your spell loadouts and party composition to kick maximum amount of ass.

Hey Ninth, I just wanted to say that my first win in RW 1 was with chain lightning+cascade+redeals and it was bro - ken! Nice vid ;)

@NinthSettler

3 күн бұрын

@@tompuce84 yes, rw1 redeals are absurd

Another key to that build (at the end) was the fire frenzy mask. That thing had 232 charges at the end, so even immolate could do 700+ damage per turn. It was clearly gaining charges from all the auto-casted blazerip spells (229 casts in just 13 turns against M). Also I will say that I made heavy use of the chaos familiar early on. He was casting immolate for me all the time and when I took enchanters boon he was casting searing seal as well. I had ironize so I could make him practically invincible (with the infinite duration upgrade). Also when your ally copies the ironize spell it applies the buff to you, so I had permanent 100% physical resist on any floor that I wanted it

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

Yes, that item is very busted for builds that cast fire spells a bunch of times per turn, like rain of fire

I like Rift Wizard 2's music. It gives the game a good sense of etherealness, which feels appropriate for all of the weird magic

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

Me too, but it's not the kind of soundtrack to hear for hundreds of hours at the moment. RW1's was better for that.

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

i also have to say i liked mordred's theme better in 1. I like tense music for tense moments. Recently on stream i said i'd love it if rift wizard 2 got some songs that were at least as tense as the start of In the Presence of Enemies by Dream Theater. When i think about great songs for an epic fight, that's the first that comes to mind.

I think where Moasseman is coming from is that he's trying to apply a bit of the Crawl philosophy to Rift Wizard. Basically saying that if something is obviously powerful and trivializes a part of the game then it shouldn't be in the game. At one time I might have agreed with that but I think now I am post-Crawl-philosophy as a roguelike player. I think it is way too limiting of a philosophy and this leads to games like Crawl which treat the player like an unwelcome guest. There is plenty of room within the roguelike design space for games that try to achieve other goals. Rift Wizard, having a philosophy around giving the player the tools to achieve some really creative and funny builds, even though they are totally busted, turns out to make the game incredibly enjoyable. This is an area of creativity-based game design we haven't seen in roguelikes much before, and is much more commonly seen in physics-based puzzle games (such as one my childhood favourites, The Incredible Machine series -- all about building Rube-Goldberg machines). I think it's an incredibly amazing development that should be encouraged, though it's understandable that it would be judged harshly by many in the traditional roguelike community

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

I completely agree. The crawl philosophy has good things and bad things, and it advanced the genre from the caveman era of nethackisms everywhere to something resembling modern gaming. However, it's time to take what was good from the crawl design philosophy and toss away what sucks about it.

1:49:47 167 casts of fireball :D That's why searing heat, melting armour, and disintegrator are doing so much damage. In my last run it was blazerip that was getting cast 200+ times per level automatically (I love the blazeloom!) I dunno why some people can't seem to appreciate how funny this stuff is! It's very addictive. It's a Rube-Goldberg machine in roguelike form!

1:34:01 R15 that situation is one of the reasons I love dispersal. You could drop in the upper left corner and disperse the gold skulls away from you, then throw your CL stuff! Dispersal in RW is so much better than it is in Crawl!

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

I have gotten some use of it in future runs that will make it to the channel

@chongli297

3 ай бұрын

@@NinthSettler I have been watching some runs of k.hoops and he seems to take dispersal almost every time! In a lot of his recent ally builds he'll just summon a TON of allies nearby and then disperse them throughout the level. It's really effective because normally allies can have a hard time reaching the enemy to do damage before they die

I think one big QoL upgrade to the user inter face would be if you could click on the titles for the status page (Spells, Items, Equipment, Skills) to hide/show them. In general the game needs a bunch of small fixes to give you easier access to all of the information that you're supposed to have access to!

The cascade range for CL provided by thunder lord is far bigger than the +2 number attached to it. One of the reasons the spell seems kinda lame a lot of the time is because it can randomly cascade into a "dead end" enemy on the edge of a group and not be able to reach its way back to the next enemy. Going from 5 cascade range to 7 cascade range only seems like 40% improvement in the number but it's close to DOUBLE the number of tiles inside the radius. That doubling of tiles on average doubles the number of enemies that are in range of a bounce and so the spell is much more likely to be able to hit everything!

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

Yeah, the exponential potential increase in cascade and radius upgrades does not elude me

"Did I leave the experience behind?" This is why I trained myself to automatically press "a" when I hear the victory tone. I have Pavloved myself to do it. I have left XP behind too many times.

Okay this should be pretty cool! (After quite a few deaths) I just had a win using enchantment spells only (but I allowed myself to take any skills). It turns out that the blazeloom staff is insane with this build! Mercurize and immolate were the keys to surviving the brutal early game. Immolate conflagration upgrade is so strong for killing groups of enemies. Later on it's all about prince of ruin, searing seal, pyrostatic curse, serpents of chaos... In the final battle against Mordred the blazeloom cast the blazerip spell for me (a spell I never learned) 229 times! I would say the average turn length for realms 15-20 was around 5-7 turns. I took extra time against Mordred and Ophan casting siphon shields and darkness for extra safety. What a run though! Started off very difficult but finished insanely strong. I never even got close to using a mana potion against Mordred! I think at one point I killed him twice in one turn!

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

I think I'll wait until the inevitable nerf of the early game to try that

@chongli297

3 ай бұрын

@@NinthSettler I think it would be a lot easier now that I figured it out. I wasted a lot of time trying things that just don't work. Immolate is really good though!

I think heaven's wrath might be a good support spell for this build. With the culling upgrade it could be very effective at cleaning up a lot of the leftover enemies, especially if they're out of reach of further CLs

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

Yes, heaven's wrath is an excellent spell for all lightning builds to clean up

The ice modifier is scary (due to the iceball) it really should come with a downside of -50% fire res for the monster!

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

modifiers need rebalancing hard

For some reason youtube decided to remove my comment about the redeal rework from the beta patch. Summary: the holy redeal skills are getting doubled to 100%. Starfire redeal is going to hit 4 adjacent targets with arcane damage. There's a guy in the RW Discord who won a game using only fireball (no upgrades, no other spells, only skills and items) and only casting 8 fireballs in the entire Mordred fight!

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

Yeah Starfire is an absolute nuke skill now, great change imo

Yeah there's a ton of RNG in the early levels now. You can get an easy one like displacer beasts, fire lizards, and fire bombers or you can get totally ruined by treants, orcs, and green mushbooms. Early treants pretty much make a level 2 fire spell into a must-have

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

Annihilate oneshots everything that is not a rock worm, fireball into annihilate is a great start combo. Lightning spire is very strong too

I like psychic seedling (it's one of those snowball ally spells that appeal to me) but it's really bad right now. The biggest problem with it is that all of the minion hp and minion damage buffs apply only to the seedlings you summon directly with the spell. They don't apply to the trees after they mature nor to any new seedlings that spawn from existing ones. This means you are forever stuck with the garbage 3 arcane damage attacks so you have to find other ways to get them to do damage. Since they are not undead they definitely qualify for mass calcification but there are much easier ways of getting that going, as you demonstrated in your worm eater build. If moonspeaker was reworked to trigger off arcane allies (not just holy ones) then that would definitely be a possibility

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

I promise you I will never play psychic seedlings

@shanewilliams4614

3 ай бұрын

Annihilate blade with the aoe option might be a way to go. Upgrade all of them in a group with your annihilate spell, but on melee

@chongli297

3 ай бұрын

@@shanewilliams4614 Oh yeah that could definitely work!

That's a fun build! Question: did you do any 'specialist' runs for RW1 - and by that i mean challenge runs where you limit yourself to only one school of magic, such as arcane, metallic, enchantment, ice etc.. And if not, do you plan on doing any such runs in the future? Personally, i'd like to see how the game goes when you restrict yourself to being a stereotypical fire/ice/enchantment/arcane/dragon/chaos mage - it might force you to employ some unique gameplay tactics you wouldn't have thought of otherwise!

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

I did melt only if that counts

I think this build might've been missing Melt. I think Melt with the White Flame upgrade would have triggered on every Fireball cast by the CL, no? That would've added a nice boost to the damage

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

At some point it's time to stop, I was already oneshotting everything that had to be oneshot with chain fireball

One weird thing about those dancing blades: they have a leap attack but no melee attack. Once they get next to you they can't do anything! Seems like a bug to me! The burning ones can still damage you with fire aura of course, but the regular ones literally just float there doing nothing!

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

seriously?

@chongli297

3 ай бұрын

@@NinthSettler Yep! I had a situation in a game recently where all the tiles next to me were occupied by dancing blades which protected me from other enemies! It turned an otherwise scary situation into a totally safe one

Just did wolf only win it was hillarious you should try it sometime

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

yeah i might do it later today

Isn't there a spell that absolutely shreds terrain? That would be useful with rain of fire.

@NinthSettler

3 ай бұрын

Wallcano