Grimrock

I beat the game already with a 4/4 party on normal and loved it a lot. I wanted to go back and try to complete the game with (or close to) 100% with a full walk-through of everything I missed, however this time I wanted to try to do it with just 1 character. So, I decided that since I came across a ton of food in my first play though that the farmer would be an ideal choice.

The race i chose was a lizardman of course because of the racials. Metabolism for double the potion effectiveness and regen rate and nature resists were a no-brainer due to the endgame. I knew I would be melee so I went 5 str 5 vit. (kinda wish I went dex instead of vit, but we'll see)

First 6 levels came really fast, however I was still struggling in combat on normal difficulty. I suppose that I could have played the boring strafing around, attacking, and strafing back game, but the fights ended up becoming so long and dreadful that I tried fighting head-on. Fighting face-to-face was a challenge later on due to taking too much damage which eventually would end up resorting to strafing tactics again and running out of potions if I got pinned down. And with that, I remade the game and changed the difficulty to easy since I really just wanted to see how far I could take 1 guy and what kind of powerhouse I could turn him into.

RIght now I would say I'm already half way through the game, and I'm noticing that it's gonna be almost impossible to fully max out a character. I'm level 15 working towards 16 and the food just barely moves the experience bar these days.

Here are some problems that I've noticed so far.

- Food is limited in the game except fish which do respawn after a certain point. Mobs do respawn as well and farming mobs with any other class would probably make the high levels easier to obtain than playing a farmer that looks for fish, but this leads me to my next issue.

- The experience necklace doesn't seem to work for farmers. I haven't thoroughly tested it with various different food items, but from I've noticed is you gain the same experience regardless if you wear the +experience necklace or not. Look into this?

- I hated having to put 1 point into concentration to get the balance shrine. I don't like any of the special attack moves from weapons, so concentration isn't important to my playstyle. I kinda wish there was a basic wand/orb that allowed you to cast without concentration or at least add an alternative way to open up the shrine. Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but its a waste of a skill point.

- The rock dudes suck to kill if you didn't spec heavy weapons. With my farmer I chose dual-wield with crit damage, 1 alchemy point, heavy armor, and I may go accuracy but light weapons already give good accuracy. Anyway, I'm not speced for heavy weapons, so the heavy weapons that don't require skill points in order to use is my only alternative unless there's another method to defeating them that I'm not aware of.

Oh well, those are just some of my issues so far with rolling a solo farmer. If anyone else is trying the same thing let me know how things are going for ya.

Also, are there enough lockpicks in the game to unlock all chests that require them? I know gold keys are limited so you need to choose wisely, but not sure about lockpicks.

I haven't done a huge testing of it, but I'm more or less sure that a Spirit Mirror does affect the farmer xp gain - I've done two parties, one with the spirit mirror rush, another without it, and the spirit mirror rush farmer got about 2 levels more from the initial chunk of food.

For the rock dudes, there is the light pick - it's kinda bad weapon, but against golems it is rather ok (and another boon of rushing to the spirit mirror amulet early on).

Sounds logical enough, I'll have to try the pick then.

As for the experience necklace, if that's the case, then I wasted a lot of food without wearing it.

You won't be able to max out your character unfortunately without cheating excessively.

The XP level is linear until reaching about LV 17 or 18 (can't remember which) in which each level then needs 1,000,000 experience to go up a level. I really don't know why they bothered to do this, as it makes a solo campaign impossible to do, and it makes reusing a party for later adventures pointless.

Palandus wrote: The XP level is linear until reaching about LV 17 or 18 (can't remember which) in which each level then needs 1,000,000 experience to go up a level.

My farmer is lvl 18 and she needs just 100k experience for the next level, not million. It may occur later, of course, but not that early (I've heard about people reaching lvl 24 - probably by herding the mushrooms - so if there are millions, they're probably far). Another thing is that, for the human farmer with the +25% xp amulet, that's just 20 foodstuffs - that's a lot but, if the fishes do respawn, the lvl 20-22 should be easily reachable in the singleton run. Without grinding the shrooms, obviously.

Pope Amole wrote:

Palandus wrote: The XP level is linear until reaching about LV 17 or 18 (can't remember which) in which each level then needs 1,000,000 experience to go up a level.

My farmer is lvl 18 and she needs just 100k experience for the next level, not million. It may occur later, of course, but not that early (I've heard about people reaching lvl 24 - probably by herding the mushrooms - so if there are millions, they're probably far). Another thing is that, for the human farmer with the +25% xp amulet, that's just 20 foodstuffs - that's a lot but, if the fishes do respawn, the lvl 20-22 should be easily reachable in the singleton run. Without grinding the shrooms, obviously.

Are you talking about farming Herder's Den boss fight mobs?

Of course. It's not like there's anything else to grind there.

19 to 20 is a Million I believe and thereafter.

The mirror pendant does work for food as does the racial and the trait for humans.

There simply is no maxxing in this game without hacking or some absurd amount of time.
I left the herders den to last and still it was a very lengthy time to gain experience and sooner or later you run out of pots because even with only one spawner alive the shroom people come pretty fast. And with a chance of that poison gas one you can not simply sit at the spawner and kill them one by one.

Link to Food experience tests:
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7554&p=79096&hilit=farmer#p79096

I hope we can (sooner rather than later) have access to the experience tables and the the formulas surrounding it.
The problem remains that we have a very minimalist set of skills to give experience too.
Even with all skills at max (excluding the magick that give resists) we do not become extraordinarily powerful.

Feels like they wanted to move away from much combat and focus mainly on puzzles.

I attempted a solo farmer on hard, old school, ironman, and single use crystals, and the thing that dissuaded me the most was how boring fighting quickly became. Since one character, obviously, deals less damage than four, I could defeat everything in Shipwreck Beach without too many issues, but it would take a loooong time to grind turtle after turtle and so forth.

This playthrough came to an end when I died against Viper Roots for being overconfident (refusing to use potions and not saving before the boss ).


Regarding your question about lockpicks, I finished the game while lacking several secrets, but I did open every chest I could find and still had 8 spare lockpicks. /shrug

Anyways, good luck to you and your farmer! ^^

There are more lockpicks in the game than locked chests, even if you don't open the thief's cache.