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Good call guys. I was able to tab through the end vault with just heroism and snakebite. Guess it's time to pick a demon whip and enchant/brand it; the high attack speed really works well with this much slaying.

I recently came back to crawl after a years-long hiatus. I'm running a DsGl, which seems to be going pretty well. One rune so far (Shoals), and some decent loot. Unfortunately, the other Lair branch is Snake, and my only sources of rPois are: [*] A +0 plate mail [*] A +2 scale mail [*] Snakebite (a ...

That's a really interesting approach. I'll keep it in mind. I don't really enjoy guardian spirit on non-pure-melee characters, so I'll probably keep acrobat. I think that it tends to kick in in more desperate situations, which is how I would tend to weight my defense analysis. OTOH, guardian spirit...

That's a really interesting approach. I'll keep it in mind. I don't really enjoy guardian spirit on non-pure-melee characters, so I'll probably keep acrobat. I think that it tends to kick in in more desperate situations, which is how I would tend to weight my defense analysis. OTOH, guardian spirit ...

Hey, I'm picking up crawl again after long hiatus. Running a pretty standard SpEn of Gozag to get my mind back in the game. I found an amulet of the acrobat early (D:3, I think), and I've been enjoying it for quite a while. I'm in Lair now, and I have a Gozag shop with most of the other base amulet ...

Well, if you accept that food is a good design component, having foodless branches is probably good design as well. It provides some additional food pressure in a small area and increases the feel-diversity of the branches. Personally, the only positive experience I've ever had with food is as a spr...

Good to know. I must have just dodged them outside of swamp endings till now.

I haven't played crawl in about a year, but finally drifted back to it. First game's going fine, a DsWz of Ru that's doing a nice hybrid between a hand axe of elec and throw icicle. But in Swamp 2 I spotted a tentacled monstrosity. Last time I played, these were a constrict-tank that was mostly only...

Interesting. I hadn't realized there was much value in that beyond convenience. Though I haven't played much since it became a perma-buff.

No, it's giving me +9 at the moment, +7 from protection brand. That's off by one from when I tested (13->30); dunno if it's rounding, or if I goofed somehow. I should get a few levels in charms; it is quite cheap. I just can already cast Repel missile fine so I hadn't bothered yet.

My AC is artificially low here; with ozcubas in melee with the protection brand I have 30 AC/17 EV. That's been good enough for meleeing most things so far. Does that change your analysis? Yeah, I should drop training ice and conj. Good point. Also, the harm amulet is not something I'll be wearing l...

I just came back to crawl after 6 months of not playing, and figured I'd start with a combo that ought to be easy, but I've never ascended either half of (VSIE). So far so good, I'm post Lair/Orc, using icicle spam, protection dagger tabbing and Ozo refrigeration to handle pretty much everything. I ...

Basically, I only ever cared about this on spriggan stabbers, and it almost never was a factor in decision making even there. It does affect optimal pull distance somewhat, but I usually only pull half a screen or so anyhow. While my action may wake someone, I've guaranteed that they're all on one s...

Fair enough. Though roguelikes have a tradition of looking down their noses at start-scumming, the main point of playing is to have fun. I still stand by it being a bad risk from a character-survival perspective, but it's not like that's the only legitimate grounds to make a decision on.

We have 4 gods with the 'Downside, mitigated by bigger powers' design. If you look at their interactions with Silence: Trog The downside is entirely eliminated by silence. The powers are also entirely eliminated if not pre-cast. Qazlal The downside is entirely eliminated by silence. Most of the offe...

I would go for the cubic. it's already a noticible balance change to the early game. It's certainly better than the current system. (And damn that old version was terrible... I'm surprised it took till 0.9 to kill that with fire.)

It's actually a bad risk in a roguelike. Generally, any action which is entirely non-forced and has a 5% chance of maiming your character should never be taken. Mechanically (assuming perfect play) you have a 80%+ chance of winning. Making a single choice that lowers your best-case chance of winning...

Teaching people to kite slow things with spears instead of tabbing everything is also good you know... ;) I think worms and imps are fine, and teach different lessons. Worms teach you how to deal with monsters that are quite dangerous in melee; a lot of the same lessons apply to hydras later (if you...

I think the line between intentional troll god and non-troll gods is a pretty clear one. ;) Xom isn't intended to be a viable god choice. I don't see any reason he should be treated the same as those who are. I agree that the 'suboptimal' non-troll gods lead to interesting situations. TSO on VM, Tro...

Also, note that spellcasting is 75% as effective at bringing a 3-school spell online (I'm looking at you Mephitic Cloud). That makes training some of it usually optimal on wizards and VMs, at least if one of your early game goals is 'Mephitic Cloud online ASAP'. Which I would argue it should be. Sam...

Well... I'd like to just let someone else handle it, but I really prefer my format to his for a couple reasons: ⋅ Power-level rating ⋅ Single poll per thread The second particularly focuses the conversation a lot, and lets us actually talk about the choice. It's hard to have a go...

The only change I'd like to see is removing Xom from the roll list. He's unique in that he's (by design) worse than atheist for most characters. That means that rolling Xom is close to just having a 1/23 chance to auto-lose. Like, even rolling Trog on a FE gives you a reasonable chance to adapt to h...

I disagree... VM is a really strong early start, so if you have to abandon TSO and wait for a non-evil god it's not that big a deal. My top 2 VM gods are Vehumet and Okawaru; I don't particularly want an evil god.

I'm a lot more worried about randoming Xom...

Humbug. Granulating aptitudes to a certain coarseness, whether on a log or linear scale, is useful for regulating developer modifications to certain values. Yes, you could make a development rule that all aptitudes need to be 50, 75, 100, 125 or 150. Or you could simply make the code store -2->2, an...

I checked with bcadren, and he was OK with me hijacking his tournament this way... so here's the start of a proper bracketed single-elimination god tournament (idea courtesy of tasonir). Bracket Seeding is by games won in 0.17 tournament, and all opinions should be based on the 0.17 version of these...

I actually have a bracket made up if we want to do this properly...
http://challonge.com/CrawlGods

I suppose I should make this happen.

When I'm playing some random hybrid combo (say fooVM) and know I can pretty much swing whatever way the god pushes me, I go for it. As those are my favorite king of characters, and gambling is fun besides, I probably take it 1/3 games it spawns.

Good to know about throwing. I'll put that in my bag of tricks then.

It's not so much that the other gifts are bad, as that they're relatively rare, so you don't have as good of a chance to get a good enchantment on a good, relatively rare basetype.

So far as comparing abilites goes... Unable to use spells -> Massive Negative Power on most strong characters. It's only a "Massive Negative Power" if you compare current Trog to a version of Trog that had the same abilities but didn't restrict magic. It's not much of a negation compared ...

For swamp, the only obvious effect is preventing submerging... It's small, avoids an annoyance, and adds negligible power.

I'm not sure this would be significant, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be. I'd definitely be interested in the experiment.

Your analysis omits the strongest Trog ability and instead you are comparing Trog's first power with Oka's final one... Fair enough. Given my choice, I'd rather have effectively unlimited access to Trog's Hand than to Berserk. MR is great, and the regen really helps in some sticky situations. So fa...

The hunger costs do limit channeling in branches with limited corpses. I would like to see them go, but it isn't really true to say they have no gameplay effect.

Eliminating hunger costs on channeling would be a sizable Hell buff for some builds.

Sounds like a lot of fun, but these should probably not apply to Zigs (as mentioned previously). I think each of the proposed effects essentially removes some of the frustration of exploring the branch at low cost. I don't know how hard this would be to code, but it seems like a splendid idea.

I really don't understand how you would use the information that "Training Axes from 0 to 10 costs 70% of training Long Blades from 0 to 10 on a hill orc." What decision would this be helpful for that, where "Axes are two notches easier to train, and currently require 3 times the inve...

^^^^^^^ Please do this. I'm actually quite interested in the outcome. Edit: Oh, and Okawaru wins, hands down. Trog is stronger pre-Lair, but the game doesn't end at the entrance to lair. Heroism is a great strategic ability (5 fewer XP levels for both your melee and ranged weapon, plus bonus defense...

For those who feel the amulet is too weak, how would it have to be changed before you would consider wearing it on at least 1/4th of your characters? For me, it would have to be swappable with no detriment. That's really not a good idea. If this amulet was swappable, optimal use would be absurdly t...

Couldn't we just use patrol instead? Having a vault designed around exploiting a bug in our AI sounds like a problem, since improving our pathing AI could potentially break the vault. Also vaults that are best dealt with using exclusions, with no loot to compensate for the risk they add, is probably...

Currently, the ID minigame mostly denies you access to items you have in your inventory. Of course, you can still use them, but it's like using a wand of random effects, and you're rolling the dice when you do so (unless you've read up on the spoilers and know things like "the biggest stack of...

Consider that characters strong enough to win sometimes aren't strong enough to do extended. I could definitely see abyss scumming being nominally optimal on some characters that are determined to go for 15-runes. Of course, going for 15-runes is 'suboptimal', but abyss scumming might up your chance...

It doesn't really work that way; the number of projectiles is randomized and dependant on spell-power.

I concur that this would be an interesting addition to draconian packs. I like that idea.

Unless I'm mistaken, death channel spectral things don't have spells or abilities...

Wait. You want necromancers to do this when they AREN'T in LOS? I'm opposed simply because it's a break with one of crawl's rules: monsters don't cast out of sight. I don't support making exceptions to that unless we're ready to do away with it all. You also said it would be like Torpor snails... wh...

This is probably only dangerous in the Lair vaults that place them, but still.

I don't think torment would be unreasonable, but I have to admit I prefer the current 'No regen till full" mechanic.

The EV averaging might get out of hand without the EV stepdowns. A HEGl (possibly^Chei) with 70-80 EV would almost never get hit. That said I have been wanting to make a DCSS fork to try out just removing EV stepdowns (including the dex-EV stepdowns). And if you have 80 AC, you'll almost never take...

This is how you should already be training spellcasting in the current game-for spell schools when you need them. Once in a while for extra MP, but never for hunger. *Except on spriggans, where hunger manages to sometimes be an impactful mechanic. In retrospect, I disagree with VAFelid's proposal. ...

I agree; gameplay-wise this would play differently from lost souls. OTOH, we have an issue that zombies are usually non-threatening, and we have the issue that this is gamable by manipulating LOS. I'd suggest making it a buff spell instead, so if the necromancer casts it you still have to deal with ...

Purely theoretically, a game that expects me to calculate (trunc(skill/(22/n))+1)*22/n should either be advertised as an educational game, or is doing something wrong. Not all wrong things are high priorities to fix of course. But having to calculate a nasty formula to optimize skilling, with non-sp...

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