I am an old school rouge-like player. I have probably logged more hours into Nethack than any other game I own. For those that do not know, Nethack tracks certain game conducts. What you eat, whether or not you used a weapon, whether you killed a monster, etc.
Going through Grim Dawn recently and discovering that you can acquire experience from reading lore about the world got me thinking about a unique play challenge. Is it possible to get the through Grim Dawn without personally killing a mob?
Before anyone dismisses this out of hand, my thought is, you would need to get your first level by finding books for lore experience, rescue Faldis, etc. From there, you would need to go Occultist or Shaman for the pets. Your devotions would need to be those that give you pets, and you might need a poor weapon too proc them, or pick up Arcanist for a low level PRM to proc them.
So essentially, you could try for what would be considered a weapon less or a pacifist win. You could also go food less and ignore all food drops, it that would be tough as I accidentally pick them up by walking past them.
Any how, for the experienced hands, would it be possible? Even if it is insanely difficult, which is the point.
You start the game. No skills. No pets. To get that first level you could grab the note inside the prison (stand by the bridge close to the prison and click on it and your character will grab it even tho it’s physically distant). This will get you most of the way to level 2. Next go to Francis’ body and get his note. Now you should be level 2 and the most expedient thing to do would be to spec Occultist and grab Raven. Your early levels will be filled with drudgery as you stand around waiting for your Raven to kill everything.
Pacifist Challenge has now essentially been won without actually needing to do anything else as I’m pretty sure Pet builds can beat the game without you hitting anything except breakables/hidden walls etc.
The food thing would be doable with extreme care I suppose but would be extremely tedious to keep worrying about it over the long haul (carefully repositioning yourself all the time to grab desirable items without accidentally getting the food).
I may try and do it with a future character. In Nethack, you have less control over pets, but you have less chance of being caught in a bad spot if you play carefully. Here, you can have your character ruined by one set of RNG rolls with regard to crit. I think that is a fair trade off.
Give all enemies (probably via balancingadjustment_difficulty_enemies.dbr) a massive amount of innate reflection, so that if you just tap them, you explode.
Then give all pets (probably manually) 100% reflected damage reduction, so that they’re allowed to hit enemies.
Pet builds are viable, and among the best builds, if that’s what you’re asking.
Enforcing a conduct by punishing conduct-breakers with death kind of takes the fun out of the conduct. Though a lot of conduct players I’ve seen actually opt to suicide their character and start anew if they break conduct anyway, so idk.
Pacifist conduct play under a mod that makes it so you’re instagibbed when you break conduct makes the conduct trivial on Softcore (you effectively CAN’T kill anything yourself, it’s no longer a matter of restraint and control) and makes the conduct ridiculously strictly enforced in HC.
I then offered a counterpoint (mostly to the latter issue):
Most conduct players I’ve watched will actually simply opt to suicide their character if conduct gets broken anyway.
