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James Fung
United States
Berkeley
California
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Fail Whale
In interest of full disclosure, I want to share failed runs as well as successful runs. By and large, this was a successful run. I killed 7 monsters that were 2 level above me over the course of the run. However, a goblin boss is pretty tough for a rogue, given first strike, relatively high health, and 20% physical resistance. The above image was taken after using 4 health potions, and I would still need 2 more attacks to finish him off. What could have been done differently? Well, maybe instead of following Taurog and converting the fireball glyph early on, fireball plus 4 mana potions could have bought us a bit more damage. Enough to finish him off? Maybe if I had done a level-up trick too. The morale of the story is...
Rogue Squadron
As a melee class, our usual options are Human or Dwarf. A Dwarf Rogue? Actually, yes. The Rogue's strongest class ability is a permanent first strike combined with +50% damage, which makes them extremely deadly. Therefore the bane of Rogues are monsters with first strike, especially given their low health. While I usually recommend a race that reinforces the class' strengths, in this case I recommend a race that addresses the Rogue's weakness.
We get very lucky early in the run, finding the Spoon (+1 base damage, 1 gold), Fine sword (+5 base damage, 25 gold), and fireball glyph. Together, these allow us to kill a level 3 goat at level 1.
Here we are a little later, about to beat finish off a level 4 meat man and level up. What can we do with our spare MP? Fireball this goo blob. Goo blobs will be annoying to many classes because of their very high physical resistance, so our fireballs will go further when used against them. Effectively, what we're doing is using the level up trick to get more MP to use against the goo blob.
Here are a couple more examples of how HP and MP may be treated as separate resources to be carefully husbanded: Some gods give lots of Piety when you cast certain glyphs, such as ENDISWAL (destroy walls) or WEYTWUT (teleport self). In such case, we can reserve MP for casting those glyphs unless we really need to divert it to combat. Another instance is in the Factory (one of the unlockable special dungeons) with its animated armor. Animated armor have only 1 HP but death protection equal to its level, i.e. a level 9 animated armor needs to be attacked 10 times. If we melee and it still has death protection left, it survives the killing blow and hits us back. For a level 9 animated armor, that's about 100 HP. On the other hand, fireball will remove one layer of its death protection without fear of retribution. It's an extreme example, but would you rather spare 100 HP or 6 MP? On the other extreme, a level 1 animated would be 3 HP or the same 6 MP.
The Artful Dodger
I would like touch upon one trick that is pretty specific to Rogues, which I dub the artful dodger. Look at the above position, but ignore the fact that we could pull the level up trick. Ordinarily this goo blob above our level will pose a problem. However, Rogues start with a 20% chance to dodge an attack, and in this game we also found Tikki Tooki (yes, this game was extremely kind to us), who granted us the Dodging boon for +10% more. There's also a high level item, Elven boots, that increases dodge. Right now our HP / MP are full, so exploring would be a waste. What we can do is attack the goo blob: if we dodge, we're still at full health while it's at 79 HP, and a fireball + attack + first strike will finish it off. If it hits, well we can explore the dungeon a bit before trying again. The artful dodger is a combination of not letting exploration HP / MP going to waste and technique for killing high-level monsters that would otherwise be out of reach. The reason why I say this is specific to Rogues is that it's pretty hard for other classes to get a decent dodge likelihood.
Endgame
Finally, we return to why I suggest using a Dwarf Rogue: in addition to monsters with first strike, some bosses are quite tough if we can't take any hits. We have just fireballed Aequitas twice then leveled up. We've converted 2 glyphs and bought the Bloody Sigil just to get our HP this high, and we still can't take any hits. But what we can do here is fireball 4 times (using 3 mana potions) then convert the fireball glyph. This gives us 118 HP, just enough to take one hit so our first strike can finish him. Then we ask Tikki Tooki to give us some gold since we've served him well.
That's it for the Rogue. If there was any class built for Tikki Tooki, this is it. The artful dodger is one more arrow in our quiver. While my preferred race for Rogues is the Dwarf, feel free to play around with Human.
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