Now that boundless tesseracts have been added, how does that change how people approach Z:5? The idea seems to be to force one to charge in, but I’ve now lost two characters to that. Should I really have been playing the same as before?
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You don’t really need to charge in or rush new Z:5, you can reset once or twice without very bad stuff happening. Tesseracts need to be dealt with, but the time frame is pretty generous, unless you try to lure every single monster to the stairs, or like take a lot of damage in every single encounter and rest without regen on (which is a sign of either a weak build or wrong tactical approach).
Tesseracts activate after you kill your first orb guardian, and those are always present in the antechamber. So you always know when the will clock start.
Things that help:
- Pre-buffing. Chug your haste, brill, might, enlighten, resist, etc. preemptively. You want to overkill the first enemies you encounter on the way through the lung, so you have resources to spare for going deeper. You want to not take too much damage from trivial stuff like the orb guardian trio in the antechamber either.
- Being willing to spend your piety freely. Same reasoning as above, there’s no need for saving anything at this point, it’s the last battle, and some gods can solve it by themselves.
- Having regen for tabbers or MPregen for casters. Helps a lot to not get bogged down. Also chugging ambrosia in the moments of calm to get back to killing sooner.
- Reading revelation and choosing the lung with the better terrain. You need to be especially aware of alarm and dispersal traps.
It also helps if you are comfortable with using your kit. Killing enemies efficiently is a big part of making good progress in the lungs, so you should really think about how to do the most damage, while taking the least. This stuff is very context sensitive of course.
I often see that people have their “tab-button of choice” (spell/melee w/e) and they just spam it regardless of what the situation is until their HP get low-ish, only then The Thinking begins. And, to be fair, this approach makes sense, cause most encounters don’t punish you for resting a lot. Current Z:5 kinda asks you to be slightly (just slightly) more efficient than that.
Read fog to limit damage from ranged enemies, read fear to scare away draconians and moths, read summoning to surround stuff or butterflies to not get surrounded yourself etc. etc., sometimes something as small as taking one step to the left can mean that only one monster has line of fire on you instead of like four, which means you’ve just reduced potential damage by 75%.
Ideally you want enemies to come at you one at a time and get promptly stomped in the ground, like on a gruesome conveyor belt.
Finally, if you need to run, then you run, reset, go again buffs and all. There’s no point in killing the tesseract, if you die in the process.
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So luring to the extent needed to fight one at a time is fine? My last Z:5 death was from fighting 3 orbs of winter at a time; had it not been for tesseracts I’d have tried to pull them one at a time to the antechamber.
Yeah, it’s fine, you just need to methodically kill stuff to make progress and not rest for hundreds of turns at a time and you’ll be fine. Maybe the rest of the floor will be more densely populated after you kill the tesseract, it wasn’t really an issue for me in any of my runs.
Fighting OoW one at a time would probably be faster anyway, since you would take less damage and have to rest less as a result. I don’t think tesseracts are a fast enough clock to be worth considering for this type of short term decision.
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Thanks for putting this down on paper. It will be extremely helpful for me when I get back to playing the game. I was a bit worried about the tesseracts making the game less fun but this seems very doable.
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No problem, I like blabbering about the game :), helps with structuring my thoughts as well. And yeah, tesseracts sound worse than they are in practice, it’s a nice twist on a final encounter IMO, though they can make it much more stressful as well.
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Yeah, Z5 was always sort of a relaxing affair unless you got unluckily TPed into the lungs. But I think what I learned from your post is I need to treat it like I do V5, which is also very manageable, but different than I normally play.
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