One of the biggest struggles with rogue-like games is figuring out the best way to play. Sometimes it’s about unlocking everything for more options, other times you want to restrict options to only the best and most useful gear. Sword of the Necromancer is a bit different due to the mechanics, though it’s also really simple to get ahead if you know what to do. With this in mind, here are five tips we strongly recommend doing to make your experience better.
Just Die Until You Unlock Game Settings
Losing gear and levels can make this a brutal experience, one where you slowly progress and struggle to get ahead. Thankfully, after about two failures, a new menu is unlocked. This includes difficulty, losing items and/or experience on death and death notifications for enemies. While difficulty is completely up to you, I strongly suggest turning off the loss of items and experience on death. That will make runs stress free and if you want to try a hard mode run, that can either be done with a bunch of resources or on a new save.
Pay Close Attention to Stats
Unlike most games, Sword of the Necromancer has a wide variety of both positive and negative attributes for you to deal with. One nice thing is, things like experience stack, so getting two separate 2x items will give 4x experience, or so the game says, though there are a lot of negative attributes. I would get rid of anything that decreases power and focus entirely on useful accessories or helpful perks.
Experience Is the Most Important Metric
Due to having a mere four slots on your character and an additional 12 for inventory, choosing the right items is extremely important. The easiest way to boost your stats without wasting slots is to power level. This will increase health, damage, your ability to dodge and so much more. Best of all, once you reach the cap, it will only further boost the advantage gear gives.
Use Monsters to Your Advantage
When I first encountered a Dollahan in Sword of the Necromancer, I was surprised by its ability to block attacks. Often times I would get baited into taking a hefty amount of damage and it was not fun. Even if this is far from hard to deal with, I found literally any summoned monster will often overwhelm these enemies. They go from blocking their front to getting attacked from behind by me or my monster and eventually die before they know where the attack is coming from. Other monsters are simply distracted, making for easy kills.
Finally, smart use of skills can make some of the bosses a joke. A Dollahan can actually three or so hit the first boss, bombs left by Champimbomb can do serious damage to the second, anything helps overwhelm the third, Scholoak breaks the AI for the fourth and the final boss has no clue how to deal with a Kaogyps.
Pay Attention to Colors
In addition to giving an indication of what kind of power they have, like red enemies usually use fire, they also generally following a tiering. It isn’t uncommon for one color to have no attributes, whereas a much more powerful enemy having four. Obviously the latter is much better for builds, along with being far safer, so it’s strongly advised to keep track of them during missions.
