Defensive Stats

[Mason]

I've been enjoying playing an astral stand-still build. I've been doing pretty ok. But often I very suddenly die despite having no problems up until then. I know one time it was because I tanked my speed. Another because I didn't diversify my damage and came up against an astral damage resistant enemy, but I've learned from those mistakes but still feel like I suddenly die.

Any general guidelines for stat allocation regarding general survivability?

[JackThejil]

Raw health. Just... health, health, and more health. The other defensive stats are nice and all and it's fine to stack them up as much as reasonably or unreasonably possible, but health and only health is guaranteed to be consistent. There's no failure state to just having more HP, you can't miss having a particular resistance, there's no bypassing it. So you want health, health, and more health. Raise up dat vigor.

... just wish there was an easier way to tell how many levels you've put into 4. You can calc it, but it'd be nice if it was tracked closer to the other stats in some way or another...

[Arcvasti]

The other big way to help survivability is to have summons. If you're doing the teleporting part of astral stand stilling then Shimmergang is very helpful, but there are a number of ways to get just a bunch of dudes in front of you.

[Mason]

Originally posted by JackThejil:

Raw health. Just... health, health, and more health. The other defensive stats are nice and all and it's fine to stack them up as much as reasonably or unreasonably possible, but health and only health is guaranteed to be consistent. There's no failure state to just having more HP, you can't miss having a particular resistance, there's no bypassing it. So you want health, health, and more health. Raise up dat vigor.

... just wish there was an easier way to tell how many levels you've put into 4. You can calc it, but it'd be nice if it was tracked closer to the other stats in some way or another...

Thanks for the reply. That makes sense.

I've never actually chosen the vitality option since it kinda seemed a lot weaker than str, dex and will. But is it actually worth choosing on levelling up? I've been putting enough points into str to negate encumbrance then the rest goes into will. Should I divert some points into vitality? Or some into dex for the speed?

[Mason]

Originally posted by Arcvasti:

The other big way to help survivability is to have summons. If you're doing the teleporting part of astral stand stilling then Shimmergang is very helpful, but there are a number of ways to get just a bunch of dudes in front of you.

The times I died I actually had summons around so in my situation they don't seem to be tanking enough. I kinda wonder if my speed is too low or something.

[Draken]

Vitality is definitely worth level ups. In any case.
Even if you have a build that has incredible defenses in all 3 other categories, each of those has a 10% chance to just fail. Meaning 1 in 1000 attack will hit you.

And most builds don't get that. Only 2 good defenses? 1 in 100.
Only 1 good defense? 1 in 10 to get hit.

So you should have at least enough health to survive one hit. Divine Intervention helps a bit with that, but it usually fails if you get hit frequently.

How much health exactly you want depends on you build though.

[JackThejil]

Originally posted by Mason:

I've never actually chosen the vitality option since it kinda seemed a lot weaker than str, dex and will. But is it actually worth choosing on levelling up? I've been putting enough points into str to negate encumbrance then the rest goes into will. Should I divert some points into vitality? Or some into dex for the speed?

Like, in complete honesty, while I also almost never put points into vitality personally, it's very intentional poor/maximizing play and easily the #1 reason, hands down, I die generally multiple times for every win I get through.

Health isn't just as good, it's generally the best option to pick if you actually want to win a round. Maximizing the other stats will get you to hitting seven, eight digit damage numbers but you don't need seven to eight digit damage numbers if you're not balancing on a knife edge and one turn from being instagibbed by any gribbly in range.

Comfortable/relatively safe vitality investment's going to vary by cycle, though I've... mostly forgotten exactly where breakpoints are. 24th cycle, you probably want 8-10k hp by the time you meet the King, I want to say 1st cycle it's more like 1.5-2k, but it's been a while. 12th cycle was like 5-6k, iirc? Fairly substantial health investment is very much the more stable, reliable, and consistent stat allocation, heh. Damage is good, but if you're consistently overkilling things you don't need as much as you're outputting and can (probably should, if you're actually trying to play well instead of making numbers go up for the lulz) get health, instead.

So far as speed investment as a defensive measure goes... you want some. But "some" is like 10-20 as a base line, and while more is good, it has diminishing returns past a point (fairly hard ones past 100; something with 100 speed will move almost as much as something with 5k, from what I've seen) and you can pretty comfortably win most runs with just 20 or so at most.

High cycle in particular, speed through stats falls off because there's just literally nothing you can do through dex investment to match the cycle boosted nonsense you see up there, where enemies with several hundred or multiple thousand speed just kinda' happens, regularly. There are ways to match that kind of speed, but dex isn't one of them.

[Mason]

Originally posted by JackThejil:

Originally posted by Mason:

I've never actually chosen the vitality option since it kinda seemed a lot weaker than str, dex and will. But is it actually worth choosing on levelling up? I've been putting enough points into str to negate encumbrance then the rest goes into will. Should I divert some points into vitality? Or some into dex for the speed?

Like, in complete honesty, while I also almost never put points into vitality personally, it's very intentional poor/maximizing play and easily the #1 reason, hands down, I die generally multiple times for every win I get through.

Health isn't just as good, it's generally the best option to pick if you actually want to win a round. Maximizing the other stats will get you to hitting seven, eight digit damage numbers but you don't need seven to eight digit damage numbers if you're not balancing on a knife edge and one turn from being instagibbed by any gribbly in range.

Comfortable/relatively safe vitality investment's going to vary by cycle, though I've... mostly forgotten exactly where breakpoints are. 24th cycle, you probably want 8-10k hp by the time you meet the King, I want to say 1st cycle it's more like 1.5-2k, but it's been a while. 12th cycle was like 5-6k, iirc? Fairly substantial health investment is very much the more stable, reliable, and consistent stat allocation, heh. Damage is good, but if you're consistently overkilling things you don't need as much as you're outputting and can (probably should, if you're actually trying to play well instead of making numbers go up for the lulz) get health, instead.

So far as speed investment as a defensive measure goes... you want some. But "some" is like 10-20 as a base line, and while more is good, it has diminishing returns past a point (fairly hard ones past 100; something with 100 speed will move almost as much as something with 5k, from what I've seen) and you can pretty comfortably win most runs with just 20 or so at most.

High cycle in particular, speed through stats falls off because there's just literally nothing you can do through dex investment to match the cycle boosted nonsense you see up there, where enemies with several hundred or multiple thousand speed just kinda' happens, regularly. There are ways to match that kind of speed, but dex isn't one of them.

That is super helpful. Thank you so much.