How to get SpEn (or stabbers) to Lair

The Tavern Dungeon Crawling Advice
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Hi there.
A little introduction: stopped playing around 0.21, getting back into it. Played a bit in trunk and considering new attack of opportunities thing the only species I want to play now are spriggans since they can actually run away from things. Running and stabbing or running and casting, stabbing is more cool though.
However my previous experience does not account for spriggans at all: all I was playing were o-tab melee dudes =/

  1. So how does one start skilling their Sp/stabbers? I’ve been trying to mix stealth and hexes/ice magic to get Ensorcelled Hibernation online then switching to defenses, defenses being stealth again and dodging
  2. How does Sp/stabbers deal with enemies that can’t be put to sleep easily? Spriggan aptitudes for example are a bit weird and have negative -1 or -2 at most magic schools except few (not even looking at melee options unless…?)
  3. How to recognize threats better? Spriggans have lowest HP aptitude and many many monsters are much more dangerous for them, for example in my best SpEn run I died to frost giant casting bolt of cold twice in a row and I did not have any rC+ , which resulted in sad splat
1 Thank
2

I have a lot of experience with stabbers, but not spriggans in particular. Getting to Lair is actually the easy part, in the late game there are a lot of enemies that are hard to kill.

  1. I would usually go
    12% fighting
    25% short-blades (skill target at 10/12/14 depending on weapon)
    12% dodging
    12% stealth
    12% spell-casting
    25% hexes
    And briefly train Ice, with a spell target of 3 or 4 or so
    (This is not optimal per se, but it’s good enough for a lot of the game, and you should notice naturally when you need to adjust it.)

  2. Run away. Leave them alive. This is why I don’t play Spriggans much really, prefering Naga instead.
    An optimal spriggan run should leave a lot of enemies alive. You can safely&cheaply kill enemies you can sleep-stab, enemies with low Will, and (later in the game) using Discord. Even if you kill only half the enemies, you can still have enough skill/xp.
    If there’s something you really really need to kill there are evocables, darts, god abilities, etc.
    If you want to you can come back later and noob-stomp those annoying Death yaks
    You can also cross-train into alchemy if you get the right books.

  3. Another reason playing Spriggans can be annoying. Yes you need to be aware of the maximum amount of damage most monsters can deal in a single turn. I can’t consistently do this either.

One small thing I noticed: you write as if you exclusively use Ensorcelled Hibernation. The other starting spells are very good too. One of the fun things about hexers is that it’s always worth keeping all your spells in mind. Cause Fear is incredible if you can get it.

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Howdy! Last I won with a Spriggen stabber was in 2021. But I played a SpEE. It was a great combo. Dith was the god. I don’t know if it would be as good now, because I think passwall has been nerfed.

But the key to this build is that petrify works for setting up stabs throughout the whole game. You can kite most enemies while trying to petrify them. Once they are asleep you go in for the kill. With Dith, they sometimes replicate your action, meaning that if you sometimes instantly petrify an enemy because 2 successes instantly put the enemy to sleep. This won’t work with all enemies but it works with enough to make it a very good tactic.

If you encounter asleep enemies you can passwall on them. The GREAT thing about passwall is that when you pop out there is zero time for the enemy to wake up. Meaning you get guaranteed stabs. I was able to stab kill orbs of fire (again, I think the range of high powered passwall has been nerfed though :frowning: ).

Here is the morgue for how I skilled it. As you see I used petrify through the whole run to get stabs, and the same with passwall.

Oh and to actually answer the question, in the early game with this build it looks like I attempted to get passwall stabs, then transitioned to sandblast while kiting things when I couldn’t get those stabs. Stone arrow was used for heavy armoured things. And Petrify was useful by lvl 7 or so.

https://cbro.berotato.org/morgue/Sobieck/morgue-Sobieck-20210716-160332.txt