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YASD, gargoyle in a labyrinth. There were three of them, and I fought them one at a time, and the third had one too many Stone Arrows for my VS.

WingedEspeon wrote:You are guaranteed animate dead from kiku later.

I've gotten both book gifts and Animate Dead wasn't in either one. 0.16. The wiki is confusing, at one point it suggests what you do, at another it says "if animate dead is in your second book."

My latest VS has finally made it past the first few dungeon levels. I'm not quite sure what to do next (aiming for 3 runes). I didn't get Animate Dead, but I've found plenty of Summoning books. Or I could just go for melee, pain-brand a short blade, and back off a lot on the spellcasting. I've found...

Does the OP idea retain any value for those characters who are worshipping exploration gods?

Which of these would you say is most accurate for 3-rune games? ⋅ Slings can be your main ranged option throughout. ⋅ Slings can get you through the mid-game, but their main benefit for the end-game is that they cross-train with Throwing ⋅ Slings are only useful in the ...

The only time I've used Leda's was on a Spriggan, so maybe I was dodging the self-slow. It made kiting Orb Guardians a breeze, they were no threat at all.

Cure Poison is useful for low-level, low HP characters that can be outright killed by a single dose of poison: Sp, Ko, VS.

Suppose you enter a level and it has a Sewer, Ice Cave, etc. but you don't have magic mapping. Is there anything you can do to increase your chances of finding the portal before it times out? Just blundering around I feel like I'm only finding about a third of them.

Pollen_Golem wrote:Is there any reason you want to preserve Nemelex's hallmark of cramming your inventory?

Because no other god does that?

This suggestion is intended to address the un-fun inventory management hassle of Nemelex while retaining the very powerful but mostly random effects and the inventory-hogging nature of the god. The basic idea is that Nemelex gifts token objects, and moves card effects to be direct options on the abi...

The easiest way to hit an orb spider with its own orb is to kill Donald first.

Axes don't have a demon equivalent and polearms don't have a slow-but-strong one-hander (double sword, eveningstar, broad axe). I hadn't noticed this lack in polearms, thank you. Now that both melee-plus categories (cleaving / reaching) also both have a weapon archetype missing (fast one-hander / h...

njvack wrote:
MainiacJoe wrote:So in effect, Nemelex gives powerful abilities but the game-balance sacrifice is, "reduce inventory slots."

Well, except that the stuff you're filling your inventory with is powerful. So it's much more a UI sacrifice than a power sacrifice.

Ah. Put that way, I see the problem.

Demon weapons are one-handed viable fast versions of their skill which are mostly not available early. The god aspect is fairly extraneous to their identity. Thank you for clarifying my question, this is indeed what I have in mind. Bardiche vs. Executioner's Axe suggests that cleaving and reaching ...

So in effect, Nemelex gives powerful abilities but the game-balance sacrifice is, "reduce inventory slots."

Most of the weapon types have a "fast version" weapon, but Axes and Staves do not. Lajatang is kind of hard to improve on, but what about axes? Is the 7 damage of the hand axe already the maximum you'd want to give cleaving at speed 6?

I'd be curious to know the breakpoints for when a multiplicative brand is "better" (YMMV of course) than an additive one. For instance, speed 6 weapons. I'm confident that in general a short sword wants additive and a dire flail wants multiplicative, but what about a quarterstaff? Or a dem...

onget wrote:
MainiacJoe wrote:It speaks only to my inexperience that Vine Stalkers are my worst. Adder venom is my nemesis with them.
I believe VS is one of the most powerful species. If you want to use a melee, it is always powerful.

I know, everyone says that! But I haven't figured them out yet.

I disagree. Batty movement is very predictable (in the important ways) once you know how it works. Since you aren't the first strong player I've seen say that, I'll defer to your experience. But since I myself haven't figured that out yet, I must escape and knowing where the horror is would help me...

It speaks only to my inexperience that Vine Stalkers are my worst. Adder venom is my nemesis with them.

Monster invis is still an interface screw in many ways, probably the most notable form of it that remains in DCSS. But turning invis into a simple defensive buff isn't very good, and invis will probably remain the way it is until someone comes up with a way to fix it up. Unseen horror without SInv ...

Don't forget Nethack's hallucination randomizes your inventory descriptions as well! Wouldn't that be fun in crawl! I have three ascensions and a few almosts under my belt and I never noticed that! Probably because I only quaff-ID'd potions in locked rooms on empty levels, and if I got hallu I just...

Hallucination was a pretty nasty and quite thematic debuff in Nethack. I wonder whether it would even work in Crawl, given the way maps and stashes are remembered.

byrel wrote:Dancing weapons can't see invis. It's not hard to stab them to death if you have invokable or castable invis.

Oh, good to know! My enchanters have had lots of trouble with them. One got Turkima's Studio for WizLab and barely survived!

i don`t just Fuckin get it, excuse the language but I just don`t get it when people have to say 2d4 instead of 2-8. There is more than one way to get 2-8. Is it (1 to 7)+1? (1 to 6)+2? (1 to 3) + (1 to 5)? "2d4" specifies exactly what is going on. And besides, lots of us inherited being c...

I'm curious how you are dying with your melee builds. It seems to me that learning how to win with casters would teach you lots of good Crawl survival skills that would translate well to melee.

+3 whip of holy wrath, +Silence (when wielded, a small zone of silence surrounds the wielder, 9 or 25 tiles) I chose a weak base weapon and a small radius so that it wouldn't be overpowered, since you can easily unwield it if you need to. I think it would be best for skilled throwers, who can wield ...

Wow. I had no idea. I just assumed that Zigs were for characters with at least 10 runes or so. It's nice that they scale up like this.

How feasible is doing a zig in a 3-rune game? Is there a good reason to? I've never dared to go in one.

Shields are mostly not useful because they reduce your melee damage output (since you must use a 1h) and only give you a weakened form of EV in exchange, that some attack types randomly do not respect. Okay, this finally clicked. Characterizing SH as a type of EV was very helpful, since I had been ...

tabstorm wrote:
MainiacJoe wrote: I feel like shields are both rare and useful and that also makes me more reluctant to get rid of them.

I think this is a misguided opinion

Well, being unsure of this was indeed one reason I asked. Is it the rarity, the usefulness, or the reluctance that you find misguided?

I'm trying to decide how valuable Fi's starting shield is. I typically invest in Shields skill fairly early to mitigate the EV penalty, yet the more XP that gets put into it the more reluctant I become to switch to a 2H weapon should a good one come along. I feel like shields are both rare and usefu...

A troll should stomp the early game easily enough that 0 skill hand xbow isn't worth screwing around with, so I'd say forget about xbows. Well seeing how it was your comments in the DCA "Who Like xbows?" thread that was making me consider it, I'll take your comments here as a big fat DON&...

So I splatted so many Vine Stalkers, even after I started trying Assassins instead of Air elementalists, that I got discouraged and chose something that has an easy early game. Now I have an XL:7 TrMo^Makh on DL:6 who just found a +1 hand crossbow and then went back and collected 86 normal bolts and...

Sar wrote:well As is also a different archetype than stabber so you could've picked it as well

Please expand on this. As and En seem to be to both be stealthy characters that stab disabled foes, just one uses Hexes and the other Throwing.

At XL:1 with VSAE I'm biting on (1+ STR=8 + DEX=12 ) > d50 = 40% of attacks. If I focus on melee only initially, then I'm handicapped by my low STR from the caster background. Also, melee characters eventually do find starting books, and apparently melee Vine Stalker is perfectly viable on its own. ...

Okay then, why is it that VS is a recommended race for AE and AE is a recommended background for VS? In fact As is the only other symmetrical recommendation for VS, and since I've done a SpEn I was looking for a different archetype than stabber so AE it was.

Point well taken on double-zapping, thank you. And swiftness is for running away, not kiting?

I am having quite a bit of trouble getting the hang of VS. Starting with a caster background (VSAE is recommended), I find myself in the position that even using up all my MP isn't always enough to kill stuff, and then I'm stuck with no spirit shield and no offense. More than once a monster with a w...

e: I'm surprised javelin damage holds up so well against xbow, since xbow base damage is considerably higher. The point is that xbows fire much more slowly and somehow the extra damage doesn't help get through the AC of OOFs as much relative to javelins as I thought it would. This is why I'd like t...

Considering 0.16 and trunk, in which versions is armor evasion penalty also added as delay? IIRC it was removed for UC in trunk but I'm not sure about throwing. IMO this has been the counterbalance to the greatly increased damage for throwing that comes from (base + skill level).

My fourth win, all three runes. This was also a two-game win streak (I play offline so you'll have to trust me--check out the datestamp, that's because my motherboard's clock battery has died). It was also the first time I got the abyssal rune and now that I know what's involved I will do it more fr...

Fi isn't very good for VS since they rely a lot on mana to survive, and Fi starts with a very low mana pool. Ah. Now this makes sense! If you do go Fighter it would seem that you have to go with an Invocations-heavy god to get more MP. You could do Evo too, but you probably get a quicker return on ...

Sorry. I intended to post this in CYC as I know it's not appropriate here.

You start with all your background attributes in STR and DEX boosts which increases the frequency of your bite attack. But stats have no bearing on attack speed. The Vine Stalker's anti-magic bite is a mutation-based auxilliary attack. My understanding is that whenever you make a melee attack, a (1...

I've noticed that the rods are all offensive in nature. I thought it might be nice to have some rods that do debuffs instead. Given that rods tend to have unique effects no available elsewhere, here are a few hair-brained ideas to get things started. Bristling Rod: Inflicts the Barbs status on all t...

Jeremiah wrote:Earth elementals are meant to be pretty good against OOF as they are immune to fire. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried this myself, just repeating what I've read elsewhere…)

Well the stone itself won't do much since AC's counted thrice against LRD.

VSFi is not a recommended character combination, but I'm not sure why. Here are the advantages I see, given that it's a melee-focused background: ⋅ You start with all your background attributes in STR and DEX boosts which increases the frequency of your bite attack. ⋅ All the qui...

I have all four and an Evocs of 16 but I'm just not using them, mainly because I don't know when and why to use them. Please tell me, what is each evoker good for, and how do you decide in a given encounter whether to use it or save it?

I had a pants-browning episode this morning on the concentric-circles Depths vault. I bailed from one hairy encounter (Titan + Storm Dragon without rElec) with a ?Tele and ended up in the central chamber. I read another ?Tele, and then used a ?Blink to try to gain some space while I waited for the T...

I'm gathering from your suggestion that two pips of elemental resistance always on isn't necessary if you can swap in the second pip on jewelry as needed? How would you feel about +2 storm dragon armor vs.+7 plate. I think 5 AC isn't worth the rElec in the short run, but presumably I'll find more EA...

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