Today I played Dungeons of Dredmor. I ran with a random skillset on the highest difficulty with permadeath on. And I made it to floor 11 before getting killed by a boss monster in a Monster Zoo.

I had Berserker Rage, Artful Dodger, Viking Wizardry, Fungal Arts, Wand Lore, Squirtle, and Magikarp. It was...not that great. Berserker Rage, Magikarp, and Squirtle made my melee pretty decent, although Squirtle felt a little underpowered; I think I need to tweak the numbers on it. I feel like Blastoise should learn Mirror Coat. Wand Lore actually turned out to be pretty good because I found out there is a bug with it--if you make your own wands, they can stack together in your inventory, and splitting the stack resets the charges. So basically, infinite wand charges. I got to abuse coral wands for infinite food. It was nice. Probably a bug, but Wand Lore is so painfully bad otherwise that I'm not about to complain. Gyarados wasn't the worst--good stat boosts and Hyper Beam did some work. Changing it to scale better helped a lot. Hyper Beam's blasting damage now scales with the Crit stat, and the conflagratory damage scales with the Haywire stat, and it's 1:1 for both of them.

If I hadn't had it on the 15-floor version, I could have killed Dredmor on floor 10 instead of dying on floor 11. Not only would I have gotten the coveted "Left for Dread" achievement for beating GRPD, but I would have gotten "I Can't Believe That Worked" for doing it with a random skillset. I guess it wasn't to be. Not today.

I did really well, though. The latest patch made the lower floors a lot easier on melee characters. I was terrified to go hand-to-hand with Muscle Diggles because they used to hit constant unblockable, uncounterable, undodgeable crits for like 40 damage. But under the new game mechanics, critical hits don't automatically override all your defenses, so you can still block or counter them.

So it was an encouraging run, if ultimately unsuccessful, and I expect I'll try again in the near future.