Ridonculous Builds

So I finally finished the game with the dwarf, and it was pretty good. The crafting still was rather tedious however, I think I made in the region of 600 paralysis grenades (100 before BMC, 200 mid Wheel Clan, 150 at Caladon, 150 for Vendigroth and end game) as I wanted to spam them in most combat (I could first make them even before the BMC) and that crafting obviously takes time. However, you could probably save a lot of time by going for a mix of paralysis and stun grenades, stun grenades just last significantly shorter. I will say that paralysis grenades make the final boss a piece of cake, as he's not immune to them like he is the Stasis spell by dint of 20 WP (at least I recall he's immune to Stasis, it's been a while since I've played a mage). In terms of how to craft efficiently, here's my dork's guide to the thief crafting process:

Spoiler

To do is most effictively, you’ll want to empty all your inventory apart from money and all of your quick slots. Then purchase 16 Monroe’s Cleaner, 16 Varham’s Aqua Vitae, 12 Saltpeter, 12 Stearic Acid, 2 Spirit of Camphor, 2 Famous Blood Pills, 2 Tincture of Arnica, 2 Rheumatism Cure, 1 Migraine Cure, 1 Doolittle’s Glyceride – putting the largest items in your quick slots. You’ll also need to covert 1 Monroe’s Cleaner and Varham’s Aqua Vitae into Strong Poison, then you can also put Strong Poison in a quick slot too, as it’s the only way all of this’ll fit.

In terms of where to get this all from, just use the general store in Tarant for the Cleaner, Aqua Vitae, Saltpeter and Therapeutics ingredients – then get the Stearic Acid from the inventor. Hightail it back to Black Root on the train, convert your remaining Cleaner and Aqua Vitae into Strong Poison and transfer them into the bin outside Annabelle’s Galley (don’t worry, you’re coming back for them). The final 3 crafted will drop on the floor, so transfer three to the bin before this happens.

Then go to your chest in the Drop Yer Anchor inn room, make your Therapeutics and Stun Grenades, store your Therapeutics and grab your 4 Chemistry Manuals. Go back to your binned Strong Poison, convert them all into Paralysis Grenades with the Stun Grenades, and store the Manuals and however many grenades you want back in your chest.

All of this should only take about 20 minutes-ish, and this gives:

=> 48 Paralysis Grenades
=> 6 Elixir of Physical Prowess
=> 6 Tonic of Increased Reflexes
=> 3 Liquid of Awareness

When you don't need the therapeutics late game, you can swap them for Ginka Roots and Kadura Stems as per below. Also, if you buy a Scroll of Exiting, you can use it immediately when you get off the train at Blackroot to warp straight to the inn. The scrolls are also sold by the general store in Tarant.

In terms of how the build can be changed, honestly getting an Auto Skeleton Key and any Disarm Traps, while good for flavour, is pretty pointless (I didn't get the Auto Skeleton Key until level 48, and by then I'd done all the relevant thieving related lock-picking to be had in the game). As mentioned, you can also use strength spell to shave further character points off. Where you'd want to put these is up to you, but the character only needs two points to also master Firearms, so that's not exactly a bad idea.

For the other Therapeutics and crap I crafted, I made 16 Muscle Makers, 16 Brain Builders (representing going up and down to max INT 4 times if necessary), 15 Energizers, 14 Mind Marvels, 50 Plastique, 10 Time Bombs and 10 spare Dynamite. This was almost all assuredly overkill, I think I used 4 each of the Muscle Makers and Brain Builders and probably 6 or less of the other Therapeutics and Plastique.

For hitting masteries, a Mind Marvel, a Liquid of Awareness, Halcyon's Blessing mid-game and Eye Gear from the BMC will let get the necessary PE to do the Disarm Traps and Prowling masteries at Caladon after a -2 Muscle Maker drop, then the earned Trapmaker's Spectacles with x2 Charged Rings, Tonic of Increased Reflexes and an Energizer will let you level all your DE skills and do relevant masteries (e.g. Throwing) when you want to. You can use the blessings you get in the middle of the game to get certain masteries (e.g. Bolo for Pick Locks) then put points in these later when you lose the blessing and gain Velorien's. All the blessings do make levelling the build a bit confusing at times, so that's something to watch out for.

Here's how the build looked at the end of the game (going the Energizer/Mind Marvel/Liquid of Awarness/Tonic of Increased Reflexes route for the special occasion):



And here's the inventory, armed for bear (the cursor was on the Aerial Decapitator, but I cropped it like an idiot and have since deleted the original, and I'm just too lazy to screen shot again):



So that's finally the build I posted up over a year ago, I got there in the end. I post up the Escaped Lunatic build tomorrow most likely when I have the time. As a side note, here's a final weird thing I noticed.

Spoiler

Apparently the map in Arcanum isn't drawn so accurately:



I thought it was worth a mention, but probably not it's own thread.

 

Now that I finished the dwarf tech thief, and to make sure I’ve done a build for each race, here is…

The Mad Meatshield

Idea behind build: I always a fan of builds with a good rate healing over time, it produces a really nice self-sufficiency I like in characters and you never have to rely on healing items. With this in mind, I also wanted to make the character have huge health as my second priority and great resistances as my third priority. As I hadn't done a human build yet, and humans have a great damage resistant background in Escaped Lunatic, that was a natural fit. I came up with a character who could master Melee and Dodge, buff Strength and Dex to 20 without much effort, had over 400 points of health, had that coveted healing over time, and hit the 95 cap in the most important defences - AC, DR and MR. Details of the process below for those interested:

Spoiler

In terms of healing over time effects, Arcanum is quite limited - it's either Regeneration from the Nature college or the Healing Jacket. Quite possibly Accelerate Healing also heals over time from the Herbology discipline - but using an item to activate your heal over time misses the point of refraining (at least mid to end game) from use of healing items, so I never tested it.

Of the two, the Healing Jacket heals 4 health every 6 seconds or so and Regeneration 2 health every 6 seconds. When you consider to be able to hit 5 in a magick college you need 18 Willpower, whereas you can just get a Healing Jacket for free from Sebastien (either take him as a follower, kill him, or steal it, etc.), and Regeneration places a huge drain on your fatigue (5 per 10 seconds) the Healing Jacket seemed like a no brainer. Though it takes charges, it consumes 1 per heal activation. With total health being just over 400 for this character, you only need 100 for a max health more or less, and it's not hard to carry around 1000 charges.

My second and third priorities were huge health (which can only be achieved through investing character points straight into it) and achieving max resistances - which is now more difficult given the Healing Jacket isn't great resistance-wise (+8 AC, +14 DR). Though Escaped Lunatic helps with resistances, particularly DR +25, there was still a long way to go - something which I solved with using a low-end spell.

Shield of Protection from the Force college is extremely neat. What I found through testing is, regardless of aptitude, it always gives 20 AC (pretty massive for considering the fatigue cost doesn't really effect a tech character at all) and also the DR, FR and ER resistances it provides take a while to completely drop off with high tech aptitude (for example it gives +20 to each at neutral aptitude and +14 to each at my chosen aptitude of 45 tech). Therefore, taking Shield of Protection was a given.

The limiting resistance here was MR. Velorien's Blessing gives you +30, Pelojian/Cassie's Amulet gives you +40, and a Flow Disruptor (create-able entirely through manuals or, again, Sebastien has one) can be used for +30 at full tech aptitude. As I wanted to be saving character points, I didn't really want to be hitting 100 tech aptitude, and through testing found that 45 aptitude hits +27 MR with the shield (any less I think and you don’t hit the 95 MR cap) so that is what I wanted to aim for.

In terms of maxing DR, MR and AC, the break-down is therefore as follows:

AC = 20 (Shield of Protection) + 15 (Vendigrothian War Gauntlets) + 8 (Healing Jacket) + 30 (Flow Disruptor) + 10 (Dexterity bonus) + 5 (Enchanted War Boots) + 10 (Pig Face Basset) = 98, capped at 95

DR = 30 (Velorien's Blessing) + 25 (Escaped Lunatic background) + 14 (45 Tech Aptitude Shield of Protection) + 14 (Healing Jacket) + 6 (Enchanted War Boots) + 12 (Pig Face Basset) = 101, capped at 95

MR = 30 (Velorien's Blessing) + 40 (Pelojian/Cassie's Necklace) + 27 (45 Tech Aptitude Flow Disruptor) = 97, capped at 95

Next I wanted to skimp as much as possible on character point expenditure, so I could invest more into HP. As most people know, the elemental colleges are a great way of boosting attributes by +4 points. However, as one spell slot was already taken up with Shield of Force, taking more than one of these spells does not provide a return as you'd need an Intelligence of 12 to keep three spells active. Of the options, Strength of Earth is the best as Dexterity tends to be much easier to boost than Strength for both magick or tech characters. As an additional point, even the base Heal Rate of 3 at Constitution 8 recovers more fatigue than having both Shield of Protection and Strength of Earth costs - something else a bit nifty, let alone CN hit end game – so fatigue drain isn’t a concern here.

Knowing that the build is now taking two spells (10 magickal aptitude) it now needs 10 tech investment at 5.5 tech aptitude apiece to hit that desired 45 tech aptitude, and within the confines of Intelligence 8 which only allows us to learn up to the second level of tech disciplines. As such, how can this tech investment be used to save character points? Therapeutics 2 allows for production of Elixirs of Physical Prowess, which give a +2 ST boost and as discussed in other builds are very easy to produce. Elixirs of Physical Process also allow for the production of Muscle Makers alongside tech manuals which lower mental attributes by 1 while increasing physical attributes 1. As there's one mental attribute we care about (Intelligence, but only for the purposes of keeping at 8 minimum) and two physical attributes we care about (Strength and Dex) the trade-off for using Muscle Makers is on our favour. Lastly, there's the old favourite Charged Rings, costing 2 points to access but providing 4 points of Dex. With this, we can max ST and DX as follows:

ST = 8 (base) + 1 (Vivifier) + 2 (character point investment) + 4 (Strength of Earth) + 2 (Elixir of Physical Prowess) + 3 (Muscle Maker) = 20

DX = 8 (base) + 1 (Vivifier) + 4 (Charged Rings) + 4 (Velorien's Blessing) + 3 (Muscle Maker) = 20

As per usual shenanigans, Velorien's Blessing gives 3 character points worth of Melee and Dodge, you only need to spend two of these to max them – with the added health acting as a nice means to make up for your shoddy accuracy. With the blessing, you now only need to spend 6 more points in tech, 2 in Intelligence (to offset to Muscle Maker drops) and you can invest the rest (44 character points!) in health. This gives:

Health = 128 (8 ST base at level 50) - 2 (6 Willpower from Muscle Maker drops) + 24 (20 ST) + 176 (4 x 44 from character point investment in health) + 100 Velorien's Blessing = 426

So there you have it, the entire boring number crunching breakdown for this build in all its glory as well as the testing process. What a treat.

Race: Human

Background: Escaped Lunatic

Backstory: You remember it clearly, even though you were only five years old, “Mum, Dad, when I grow up I want to unite both magick and technology to make everyone in the world happy.” Your parents thought it was adorable, your dad called you the “cutest little idiot” he’d ever seen.

When you eight, at one of your parents’ high society soirées, “Magick and technology do not have to be at cross purposes, one can use small amounts of each to produce a warrior with strengths greater than the individual strengths of either field.” The other guests were aghast, your father said you’d brought shame upon the family name. Your parents never looked at you the same again.

At 14, in a heated exchange with your dad, you exclaimed, “I’ll show you, I’ll show everyone! I’ll use both the force college and the corresponding electrical discipline to make myself both better protected and faster than any man alive. We’ll see who has the last laugh, you’ll rue the day you ever talked down to me, father!”

At 16, they disowned you and put you in the nut house. They said your desire to combine two extremely contrary ideas was indicator of rampant mental instability, and that they could no longer tolerate the embarrassment to their noble lineage. They adopted your weak-chinned, simple-minded Cousin Cecil as their new heir who had been orphaned at a young age; despite his many and obvious deficiencies, he was considerably more pliable and worthy of the family estate than you.

The regimen of electrical and chemical therapies they exposed your body to left you hardened to physical pain, yet they also knocked something loose in your mind. Try as you might you couldn’t help but unsettle and disturb people with your bulging eyes that pin-wheeled around in their orbits, or the slight leak of saliva that was produced constantly at the corners of your mouth.

Naturally you escaped incarceration, one of your brilliance could never be confined in such a place for too long. Fearing recapture by agents of your father and mother, you stowed away on the Zephyr bound for Tarant, desperate to explore, feel fresh air on your face and lead the life of adventure you’d so far been denied.

Initial stats from background:

ST 8 IN 8
CN 8 WP 8
DX 8 PE 8
BE 8 CH 8

Required Stat, Skill and Aptitude Boosts: Velorien's Blessing (+4 DX, +12 melee/dodge/pickpocket), Vivifier (+1 all), Muscle Maker (+3 ST/DX, -3 IN/PE), Elixir of Physical Prowess (+2 ST), two Charged Rings (+4 DX), Strength of Stone (+4 ST).

Necessary Character Point Allocation: 2 ST, 2 IN, 8 (2) Melee, 8 (2) Dodge, Force 1, Earth 1, Herbology 1, Therapeutics 2, Electrical 2, Chemistry 2, other tech (e.g. Pick Locks) 3, 44 HP.

Final boosted stats:

ST 20 IN 8
CN 12 WP 6
DX 20 PE 5
BE 12 CH 6

Equipment: Healing Jacket, Pig Face Basset, Enchanted War Boots, Vendigrothian War Gauntlets, Flow Disruptor, two Charged Rings, Cassie/Pelojian’s Amulet, weapon of choice.

The post had over 10000 characters, meaning I couldn't post it in one, so it's continued below...

 

Notes: I guess the main thing to note about this build is it’s a little boring, all your necessary character point allocation is completed by level 15, giving you 35 levels where you're just putting points into health. However, you do rapidly notice the health mounting up (I did get to the Wheel Clan with this build, I think I’ll start again with it) which with the sturdy resistances is pretty cool.

Something else I noticed is that while the health pool is huge, Healing Salves which you will need to use before you acquire the Healing Jacket still only heal about 30ish health and by level 25 I was rocking about 200. The resistances do help to ensure you don’t take much damage, but even so it somewhat reduces the benefit you feel from the high health early game.

Depending on how you feel about stacking Strength of Stone spells, it’s very easy for this build to hit ST 20 early with the 2 character point investment, the Elixir of Physical Prowess and applying Strength of Stone twice. This means you have two modes you can more or less run around in, one with much higher damage and the other (with Shield of Protection and Strength of Stone active) which much better defenses. On the whole I found the defensive mode was actually better on the whole, but both have their charms.

Alternative builds: At the cost of 2 more IN, you can make Repair your Tech skill of choice and take it to Expert. When you lower your IN back down to 10, you should still have access to the advantages of Expert training. This allows you to repair the Healing Jacket yourself while still giving you 400+ HP, which is useful as you only have the one set and means that you don't have to be so cautious with using it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

There we have it anyway, other builds I’m considering are a Shrink on Halfling character ytzk mentioned (where your negative ST modifier actually adds damage) who runs around with an army of Vorpal Bunnies from the Nature college, but as the build doesn’t seem to offer any distinct mechanical challenges I’ve been too lazy to work anything out for it just yet. As per usual, hope you enjoyed!

 

Can anyone here suggest a technomage build?

I was thinking probably half elf with sold your soul. Elf is too crippled

 

Also I was thinking of creating a Grenadier/Sapper/Bomber build.

Probably a Halfling with Beat With a Stick or Troll Offspring or Run away with the Circus or even Arsonist.

I need INT, STR, DEX, and optionally PER

DEX= throwing
STR= throwing distance
INT = ability to build Molotov cocktails + other useful tech branches

Probably a cool one would be a Halfling with chemistry tech + dodge + thieving skills.

Might be really hard but probably super fun to play with.

 

I just started the most ridonculous build ever

Idiot Savant Half Ogre named "Nice"

I got 10 INT but I get really low intelligence dialogue. Is actually pretty funny. I think I'm gonna stick with it.

I m thinking of building him full melee technologist although any form of tech guy would be nice too like gunsmith chemist/grenadier or even sapper/trapper . I'll figure it out.

Tech INT + melee STR/DEX is actually an incredibly strong combo.

 

There is a grenadier build in this topic... a dwarf thief. Plus in the first page you will find an elvish techno-mage; I am testing both personally and I like them.

 

Something cool I did a while back but didn't write up here was to do an elf magick character who could build all of the weird schematic tech grenades. Tech grenades are oddly a weapon that doesn't get any sort of penalty regardless of your aptitude. I think what I was going for was an anarchist character who wanted to master all forms of destruction, both tech and magickal, in order to bring about change (some men just want to watch the world burn).

It was good fun, I think if you take most of the principles in one of my other magick/tech elf builds and look here on Codex at the schematics it wouldn't be too tricky to work out what was needed.

 

What's his strength like? You could probably just punch everything to death.

 

I get 11 Strength and about 7 Dexterity and about 5 Constitution . He actually is incredibly strong and can beat the shit out of a lot of early monsters.

What's fun is that he can get all the high tech stuff but keeps all dialogues very basic making the game quite easy much more fighting oriented than talk oriented while still having the benefits of having high intelligence outside dialogue.

I think I wanna focus on the smithing branch all the way to machined plate mail that should make him a god.

 

Something I was always curious about was whether low INT dialogues had been prepared for mastery talks/quests for Gambling, Repair and Healing skills (INT based) that only Idiot Savants or Frankenstein backgrounds could have access to. Maybe I'll have a look into it soon.

EDIT: I tried the combo, you can train to expert but not to master in any of the disciplines (which should itself be technically impossible, but the dialogue is just the same a stupid character says to any expert training). Seems a bit of a wasted opportunity, especially seeing as Idiot Savant gives you a Gambling bonus.

 

I found another ridonculous build

Elf - Throwing Expert Magick User with Arachnid and Explosive tech
Sheltered Childhood -6 STR +2 Int +2 Wis +1 PER (this one is not so good)
Increase Throwing skill to max (2 levels)

In merchant menu buy Boomerang as starting item

Increase STR by 1 point so you don't get encumbered so quickly.
Get 2 points in Coveyance so you can get mage lock or you can get 3 points in Mechanics to get Auto Skeleton Key later

The build path will be
Temporal MAX
Conveyance MAX (for teleport)
Morph to Shrink only

Mechanical Max to Arachnid
Electric 2 points to Charged ring for ez dex
Explosives to Stun grenade only

You start as 1 STR elf but it makes little difference because Throwing skill is based on DEX but I think STR controls range which is irrelevant as most thrown explosives do not affect party members i always throw them at point blank range

Sheltered Childhood is the best because it reduces your STR only which is a dump stat for a throwing expert. It does not affect CON and DEX which are important for magick and throwing .

Late game is super op due to magick caster ability and explosive ability which are overpowered. Early game boomerang hits really god damn well I was pleasantly surprised. At only 2 levels I hit 60% of the time.

I was thinking elf would make most sense because he gets bonus magick to offset the little bit of tech you get so you still as OP in magick as a human say.

Hobbit might make even more sense for straight up throwing but I guess the high DEX falls off later because explosives become less about DEX or STR and simply op in general.

Another skill to invest in is Dodge. Having high dodge helps you in melee combat to avoid being hit while dishing out shit ton of damage yourself.


I actually hit harder than a tech Half-Ogre as weird as that sounds. Is because with boomerang and starting 9 DEX for elf you get about 4 hits as often as a balanced sword later but right from the get go. In fact with extra dex I can get even more hits. Is nuts! But also you hit more often with boomerang with 2 levels of throwing than with a sword with 2 levels of melee. So is worth all the way bby!!

 

Boomerang throwing builds are BROKEN. While you deal less damage than melee you actually hit a lot more time making it somewhat on par with an average melee fighter. A Half Ogre melee with 20 STR is still stronger. The advantage of boomerang is you can hit anyone on the map anywhere within a range of 20 and you hit a lot of times and throwing ignores Strength modifiers and pretty much deals straight up damage based on Dexterity only.

Get some magical chakram later and you will hit everything on the map before it even comes close.

I think they really fucked up on the throwing made it quite broken.

While throwing grenades and Molotov accuracy/range depends on Strength , boomerang depends on nothing really only change to hit on Dex. Says it needs a min STR of 6 but has no effect if your Str is 1. I think the effect is your range is reduced to something like 20 - (if < max str then max str - curr str). I have a feeling range is reduced based on missing strength. In real actual practice all thrown weapons have a range of 20.

I think is more broken than firearms and bows because you shoot 2x more.

So HIGHLY recommended build are Halfling or Elf with maxed out DEX + throwing + boomerang starting item. Get Explosives tech branch and max out spells you need esp Agility of Fire for extra dex. That way you become a throwing expert. IS RIDICULOUS BUILD! MOST BROKEN IN THE GAME.

 

You should try the Aerial Decapitator with throwing (you get it from the Old Blind Master unmarked map location). While I don't think it has quite the range of Boomerangs, it does pretty crazy damage and is pretty fast. I'd say it's the best Throwing weapon in the game if you play in real time, though the speed of Azram's Star is probably better for turn based.

Bows are still pretty decent because I think with Expert training they fire two arrows not one, which makes things like the Pyrotechnic Bow pretty potent. I think the main advantage of guns is a few of them fire extremely fast, but they do gobble bullets rather ridiculously. I think the extra design effort they put into guns makes them a bit of a cooler weapon too, I don't think the devs tried quite so hard with any other type of weapons in terms of variety and the art for them.

 

Anyone got some suggestions for Discworld builds? I was thinking of trying to build Detritus, Vimes, and Granny Wetherwax. Maybe Susan too.

 

Rincewind you could probably approximate by playing tech and having enough magick so your tech always has a good chance of dramatic failure (I know, Rincewind is a mage, but it's probably the best way of representing his issues in game). I'm not versed enough on Discworld to delve much further in I'm afraid.

 

The problem with any Rincewind build for most any game is that the tried and true combat style of 'Run away...just away never mind the too' is usually unavailable. Also there is the Luggage and the incredibly humiliating good luck he has would be hard to play...

 

That is true, I guess it's probably tricky to readily conceptualise most characters in a game like Arcanum which already has a rather unusual setting and mechanistic system in the first place.

 

Yep. But it was one of the 8 most powerfull spells on the Disk.