More Dungeons of Dredmor. Let's talk about Perception.


The biggest problem with Perception is that it doesn't work. Buffs to your vision range don't actually increase your vision range. This is probably a bug, and hopefully it'll get fixed at some point, but it's obviously pretty unfortunate.

Having noted that, Perception is underpowered. Even if the sight radius buffs had any effect...well, sight radius doesn't do much. I mean, it extends the range of your magic and thrown weapons slightly, I guess, but that's a corner case. Mostly all it does is make you better against darkness curses, and if you're worried about that, you might as well just take Emomancy for curse removal and get some good spells.

Sight radius being underpowered kind of ruins the appeal of this skill, since that's basically the only thing it's good for. It gives you a little bit of anti-trap, but if you need an anti-trap skill, Perception is basically just flat-out worse than Burglary, Archaeology, or Tinkering, which are just as good or better at anti-trappery but have a variety of utility thingies to go with them. Whereas Perception has...not much of anything, really.

It gives you some small boosts to dodge and enemy dodge reduction, but neither of those are especially useful or exciting. It gives some small boosts against traps, but as I said, Burglary and Archaeology and Tinkering are much better for that. And you get Eye Lasers, but it's a single-target spell with a long cooldown and it's really not that good. If you took Tinkering instead, you'd have infinite crossbow bolts and you'd never even need a single-target damage spell, and you'd get more trap affinity and extra Savvy to make your spells cheaper.

You get a Second Sight buff, but it's really annoying to keep reactivating it, and the bonuses it gives aren't particularly great. The accuracy is substantial, but accuracy in general is not very important. And then there's Third Sight, which I swear does stone nothing. It's supposed to reveal traps and invisible enemies but a. you already have +5 trap detection just from the previous levels, how much do you need? And b. you have to manually activate it, so it's pointless unless you already know there's a trap in which case don't walk on it, durr.

So where does that leave Perception? It's just a worse version of some other rogue skills, basically. I don't think it's very good. If you're interested in the skill, I recommend installing Essence's Core Skill Rebalance mod, which gives it some much-needed buffs to make it viable, raising its stat boosts and adding a loot drop passive bonus.