Grimrock

Highest DPS from the Party overall, not just 1 character.

Bombs are great "added" DPS because they have no cooldown, but the DPS of the group overall is what shines here. Meteor takes some time but when you have the ability to constantly "freeze" enemies with Frost Bombs and your Mage Farmer, casting time/difficulty becomes a non-issue.

That's not what DPS means. You might not be getting hit during Meteor if you throw a frost bomb, but that Frost Bomb has less DPS than a fire/lightning/poison bomb most of the time. And if you do intend to throw bombs during cooldowns, the time you spend drawing the runes for Meteor Storm will always reduce DPS, since you could just do fast click-attacks with bulk damage weapons and have time to throw more bombs. I do not see how your build results in the highest DPS when in my mind hitting with 4 heavy weapons then throwing bombs during weapon cooldown would result in significantly higher damage output than taking the time to line up Meteor Storm even once.

Survivability comes from the benefits of dual Alchemists (tons of Skill Potions, Heals pots, Energy pots).

But the question one has to ask here is: do I gain maximum survivability from 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 alchemists? Every time you pick Alchemist instead of Barbarian, you lose HP, i.e. survivability. Everytime you pick it instead of Battlemage, you lose out on +10 protection. And another question one must ask is whether maximum survivability comes from picking Lizardman (+res), Insect (+prot) or Minotaur (+HP).

The only difference between 1 and 2 alchemists is time. Is it not a contradiction for you to act like grinding doesn't matter and then pick two alchemists? Just walk double the distance. And frankly I think even with zero alchemists you have enough HP and revival potions. The need for alchemists comes exclusively from the need for Energy Potions for a mage and more bombs. From a bomb perspective... yeah, if you're going to throw bombs every time your weapons go on cooldown, you're going to need an alchemist. I don't think a mage is optimal unless you specifically foresee needing invisibility or the like, but as you said the point here is to be strong enough for getting hit to not matter, so avoiding enemies with invisibility doesn't bring anything to the table.

The idea is at the "party level" not just 1 individual character. You could easily replace the Mino Alchemist with an Insect Alchemist to get Chitin Armor for added survivability at the cost of high attack (but I wouldn't do that since survivability comes from virtually endless heal potions via dual Alchemists). An Insect Battlemage does have higher survivability individually, but again that is just 1 character whereas the idea is to plan for the whole group. Running 2 Alchemists gives constant Heal Potions rendering the need for an Insect Battlemage a bit useless.

That's not what "highest survivability" means. By your own admission you could in this specific example, increase survivability at the cost of attack. When your front party takes 1 dmg from melee attacks, that increases the survivability of your entire party. If you think further survivability is useless past the point where you can survive, why minmax for survivability in the first place? Why claim to have highest survivability, instead of merely high or high-enough survivability?

The game itself can be beaten with any group, even a solo Farmer. This isn't about beating the game but taking full advantage of the new features while working towards that "god mode" many gamers tend to love. As for grinding... it's an RPG.

If you do not view grinding as having even slightly negative utility, even a microscopically small negative value, then it is logically inconsistent for you to play games in any other way than spending an infinity of time in zero-risk starting areas grinding until you are at max stats. You don't do that, because it would be insane.
My point is that spending several hours to get far more potions and levels than you'll ever need even to easily beat the game is in fact not a very attractive idea unless you somehow enjoy the aspect of grinding more than anything else in the game.

The key here is that while working towards "never getting hit" you also end up so strong that, "who cares if you get hit."

An admirable goal, and I'm arguing with you because I'm genuinely curious if you know something that I don't, because it seems to me that this is not the party set-up with maximum survivability.

As far as your thoughts on effort, I never claimed that this was "effortless" so not sure why you made that a point. Everything requires effort, even buying and installing the game. I began by making it clear that to love "Grimrock is to love Walking." In your case you can avoid most effort altogether and beat the game even faster by downloading a Trainer Program if you like.

The minmaxers dream is maximum efficiency at minimal expenditure of resources and time. The optimum way of spending your time is to maximize the amount of utility you get per unit of resource (e.g. effort) and time (which is just another resource). Installing a game that I can enjoy for several tens of hours? Great fun.

And look, the effort thing was a joke. At first I thought you were serious, and as a fellow minmaxer offered you my view on some DPS/survivability considerations. Then I re-read your post and thought for sure that with all the references to walking you had to be joking, you know, in the "here's how you can utterly break the game by spending an infinite amount of time walking" sense. But now you seem to be serious and even to some extent personally offended that my minmax calculations haven't brought me to the same endpoint as your own calculations. You know just as well as I do that there's a difference between a necessary 5-10 minute installation and 1-3 hours of optional grinding. Don't do this intellectually dishonest thing where you claim that I might as well just cheat to win if I'm not willing to do that.

To each their own.

This is honestly like the "I'm not racist, but..." line of reasoning. If you genuinely embraced "To each their own" as a life-philosophy, you would not get so mad at my way of analyzing party builds from an efficiency-time perspective as to insult me by painting this picture of me as subhuman scum that can't make an effort like all the good people.

You know it's perfectly fine to claim that your build offers the best of the best in hyperbole and jest, it is not OK to get defensive when your calculations are off and I make mention of it.
It is perfectly fine to share and utilize and recommend a grind-heavy strategy, but when I call into question whether one could not achieve 99% of the same utility for 30% of the effort, you don't get to dismiss that by calling me lazy.

You can keep telling yourself that there is no group DPS in a game that has cool-down timers, I won't try to change your mind. I disagree 100% the first few sentences in your reply so I stopped reading. You can win the Internets lol

Azel and GJIG are obviously both very knowledgeable. However I'm not sure why GJIG is so angry. Its just a videogame.

mvdeckard wrote:Azel and GJIG are obviously both very knowledgeable. However I'm not sure why GJIG is so angry. Its just a videogame.

I assume it's the forum trolling stuff that has been around since the Internets. I've been involved in plenty of epic battles since the first Diablo (Odgen's Tavern forum). From there, gosh... VN Boards anyone? Anywho, I will admit that even I am surprised at the level of anger for a SINGLE PLAYER game lol. I think every forum war I've witness (or participated in) was 100% multiplayer. I attributed the anger to the competitiveness that is inherent with Muli-Player games. But single player anger? That's just "special."

Maybe GJIG thinks there is a prize for posting the best "character build" for Grimrock, and he's here to make sure I don't get first place lol. Good times.

You can keep telling yourself that there is no group DPS in a game that has cool-down timers

How about you try to change your own mind. You will never perform even close to optimally if you dogmatically stick to whatever first comes to your mind. It's a very simple fact that it takes time to draw the runes for Meteor Storm. The longer it takes for you to actually execute an attack the lower your DPS, especially if you intend to throw bombs from your inventory every chance you get (i.e. when all of your characters are on cooldown). This means your highest total DPS will come from weapons that deal bulk damage in a fast, single click. Meaning you need to optimize for the highest damage per unit of micro, that's what will actually give you the highest damage per second. Micro is the real limiting factor of almost every encounter in Grimrock 2, anything that significantly increases micro without massive gains, will never increase your real DPS that will actually occur when playing the game.

I won't try to change your mind.

Then don't say anything. Don't try to have your cake and eat it too. You don't get to first claim that I'm wrong and then turn around and say that you won't try to change my mind. Either you make the effort to actually argue a point, or you don't make the point. Anything else is dishonest and disrespectful. Anything else is just playing the audience with cheap tricks.

I'm angry because there was no reason whatsoever for you to make this personal. I asked you to clarify some of your statements and made my own calculations against them. A reasonable person who cared about the truth would have considered it and made a non-inflammatory response. But for some reason it personally offended you that I didn't consider your build the best of the best, and you had to go down this route where every other sentence you imply that I'm lazy or a troll. The fact that you got offended by it is your own fault. It would have been so easy for you to keep this productive, for you to not interpret everything in the worst way possible, but you started jumping at shadows, someone making an argument against you must obviously mean this is a fight and you need to start slinging as much mud as possible. If you have this flippant attitude everywhere you go, it does not surprise me that you've been a part of countless forum wars. There's a point where you need to realize that the common denominator is you.

Let me tell you something. You don't win against reality by smearing your opponent. That's a tribal attitude which is designed for nothing else than making yourself look better than the opponent. No one cares on the internet. You get nothing from making yourself look better than me by implying that I have the moral low ground. No one reading this is going to write you a paycheck for it. All that happens is you lose. You lose to reality, you lose to the truth. Because you don't have the rigor and absolute dedication required to actually optimize. There's no way you could have, if your first response is to argue against the person, instead of the arguing against the argument. Instead of actually thinking about the meaning of what is being said and re-doing your own calculations.

Maybe GJIG thinks there is a prize for posting the best "character build" for Grimrock, and he's here to make sure I don't get first place lol. Good times.

Here's the real problem, I think. You could have chosen to not interpret my post in the worst possible way. You could have seen it as an opportunity for us to discuss what are the actual best party set-ups. But instead you do this. Don't be this insecure. In what world do you live where commenting on the effectiveness of the build you posted makes me a try-hard douchebag? All I did was discuss some specific points of your build. You chose to interpret this in a paranoid manner where I'm trying to silence you from expressing your opinion, and now I'm lazy and a troll and "special".
Do you think this is a good outcome? Is this where you wanted this topic to go?

I am certainly going beyond whatever first comes to mind, which is why the assertions in my original post can be validated by plenty of other gamers discussing DPS, survivability, and "best" group creation. The only change one could make to my Walking Dead party to make it stronger is to drop the Farmer and add another Alchemist. Others are going full fledge 4-Alchemist group to only further engage in the assertions in my post.

Whereas you, in contrast, are trying to argue theoretics that have little foundation in reality. It's almost as if you are dressing up like a Battlemage at home, wielding your Wal-Mart bought sword, and swinging it around your basement while bumping in to walls in order to gain your understanding of survivability and DPS.

At this point I doubt you have even played Grimrock. The few "facts" you manage to stumble upon are clearly borrowed ideas from things you read from other players; made clear by the fact that the conclusions you draw are so far off base you forgot to play the game yourself to test your stolen theorycraft. You don't understand DPS nor this game in general, you just know how to quote hump and forum troll. You can keep typing up long-winded diatribes, I will keep reading only 2 or 3 of the dribble you wish to pass off as sentences before dismissing you.

Azel wrote:The only change one could make to my Walking Dead party to make it stronger is to drop the Farmer and add another Alchemist.

I'm not so sure about that. Replacing one of the two minotaurs with another lizardman (for the massive racial resist boost) or in the case of the HW user, even a ratling (for the additional stat boost due to mutation and the ability to get a lot more easy stat-ups from cheese) would probably make it stronger still. Yes, a ratling starts with lower strength and a slightly lower overall stat total, but it will quickly surpass the minotaur in stat values (and has at least one other useful immunity into the bargain). As for the lizardman, you're getting a bit of stat-help from turtle eggs (+2 over the course of the game, IIRC), but the biggest factor there is that having multiple characters with massive resistances by default means a lot less need to focus on defensive stats (and defensive maneuvering), so more attention can be paid to offensive stats on gear and/or just sucking up the damage that the big guys tend to throw at you as you pound away without interruption. (It's actually very likely that a 4-lizard party would be the strongest possible simply because they could laugh as they take little to no damage from the most dangerous enemies, and can therefore spend 100% of their time on the attack. Drinking potions still takes time that you can't always afford and it will certainly come at the expense of swinging at the enemy.)

Double-minotaur is generally inefficient regardless due to the fact that the Headhunter benefit can't be duplicated across all of them (only split between them).

Bear in mind that no matter how many stat-up elixirs you create due to having alchemists, those apply equally regardless of the baseline stats, so "I'll just make up for the difference with elixirs" isn't really a valid counterpoint; the alternative base-characters would be getting just as much benefit from them.

Yeah that's super tempting. I did swap out my Human Farmer for a Ratling Farmer and very happy with the result. I did consider swapping out that 2nd Minotaur for either another Lizardman (for the reasons you mentioned) or an Insectoid (for Quick and Bug Armor). However, I'm a sucker for those Mino's when it comes to frontline damage (probably cause of too many years playing WarCraft 3). But I would agree, a 4-man Lizard or Ratling group would be intense, especially if they are all Alchemists

--Math removed, due to plague.--

Nice work, Dematto! The Throwing Barb is quite the powerhouse (until a future patch changes things), especially when downing Stat Potions from at least 2 Alchemists.