Howdy Folks,

I'm new to the game, in fact I hadn't heard of it until reading an article on it late last month. I've been a devoted Diablo fanatic since the days of Diablo 1, and from there my love for hack and slash crawlers has only grown.

I've played a number of characters through the first town and have decided that I enjoy playing a survivor who acts as a warrior. Pretty much a cutthroat mercenary of sorts. Ideally I would like to play a highly defensive style, crouching around silently and placing traps to slowly thin out numbers before revealing myself to go full on melee combat.

I'm curious if there is some sort of guide which speaks to this sort of play style or if someone could guide me along the path with their experience.

There is one flaw with my ideal style as a survivor, I dislike daggers. I'm much more of a Mace person - I also enjoy elemental damage.

Thanks

There has not been much in the way of guides for survivor builds. The topic sorta new, got a quick question contains some information on playing one.
Just after the original release of the game there was a survivor's archer guide, but the old forum is no longer available (much of that topic's content was repeated in Archery as a warrior - my thoughts, though).


In the disk and Steam versions of the game scorpion traps are quite over-powered (so level 1 of Deadly Gift would be fine); in the GOG version they were fixed (and I expect they'll be fixed in the Steam version, as well).
You can cast Aura of Guarding, SpellShield and Restoration on scorpion traps or summoned / resurrected creatures to protect or heal them, and Aura of Command if you want them to follow you.

Free skills, and spell books you can buy


The game is fairly biased towards swords, especially with pre-placed items that are always in the game (though even these have random stats). There are a couple unique mace class weapons in the game; I used a sword or bow, and didn't pay attention to how often maces show up in random loot or merchant inventories.

If you put one skill point in Sword Expertise and Augment Damage (the starting skills for a male warrior), save the game and then reload, you will have level 2 of those skills.

I found Stun quite helpful for a melee character.

The survivor's Curse skill can be repeatedly cast quickly on a target, so even level 1 is very effective to greatly reduce an opponent's resistances. It can be followed with elemental or poison damage from a weapon or spell, or the Polymorph spell, etc.


Welcome to the forum.