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Well OP is a flimsy race so you play slower and rest more. If you're casting spells on top of that you're going to run into food issues. Yes, Gozag is not fun because it punishes optimal play and unlike Chei it is not guaranteed to make you any stronger. Ignore the shops and it IS guaranteed though...

Shtopit wrote:Have the Hall of Blade alternate with the Hall of Pussy.

*Applause*

Counterpoint - Depths are hard enough as is.

But I wouldn't mind something like this in Zot. Zot 1-4 strike me as a tad easy.

Give warpers a bow to go along with blink and portal projectile. Dump all the arcane marksman spells into hypothetical challenge wizard class (or just get rid of them altogether.)

I always find kobold way easier than halfling, (first win was kobold berserker.) Good fighting attributes help with negative hit points, yer magic skills are vastly better, and gourmand makes the game far less annoying (if only slightly easier.)

Curious if this applies to anyone else, but i hardly ever use the "strong" hex wands like para or enslave. Confusion does basically the same thing and holds more charges. It has a slightly better success rate too, if im remembering right. You sure? I really thought confusion/para/enslavem...

Yeah, I know how to do use knowledge bot, thanks. Note please that this doesn't answer any of my questions. It mostly does. Does a spectral weapon swing with a speed based on your weapon skill, or is its speed independent of your weapon skill? Is strikes the enemy when you do. Therefore it is influ...

Hah, when I said Gozag is pretty good, I wasn't thinking OP, I gotta say. The better your character already is, the better gozag is for you. If your character is strong enough to move through the game at a pace that keeps food coming in faster than you need it, gozag's just a bunch of free shops, b...

If I remember right Arcane Marksman has the highest % of wins of any starting background online. I believe this is because (A) newbie players don't play AM because they are a poorly designed class that nobody talks about as being fun or interesting*, and (B) starting with a launcher is insanely good...

doesn't this just make you want to find some weak enemy and grind up to max piety whenever you enter a level I did a Uskayaw thread and one of the devs told me that weak enemies add next-to-no-piety. This could be lowered even more. I did make it into zot with a stabber of Uskayaw. Still felt very,...

Well, yeah, agreed. But you want to use spectral weapon all the time because it's only got a 34% failure rate, and killing everything makes up for not wearing chain mail.

Or spend it. Tone down the very top tier effects. Love, love, love the basic concept of Usky, but don't like the implementation. Basically it doesn't feel like you have much control over your piety gain. You get a bonus for being trapped in long fights, but you still don't actually want to be trappe...

Skalds start with leather and, really, you don't want to wear heavier armor for a while because it makes it harder to cast spectral weapon.

If I remember right, a human skald that memorizes spectral weapon at level 3 starts with a 34% failure rate. This doesn't strike me as "far too high."

Some vaults leave corpses!

...

I guess.

The more I think about it, I'd be all in favor of a "challenge" caster background that starts with relatively-difficult-to-pull-off spells like inner flame. But I'd like to see (hypothetical challenge caster background) defined as obviously a challenge background, and not start with a bow.

Yeah, that is probably your best strategy.

(Merge Warper + Arcane Marksman, pls.

Do it. Dooooo Iiiiiiiiitttttttt.)

But you're spending a whole lot of XP on not-killdudes to get slow and cause fear working at a good percentage on actually dangerous monsters. Monsters that would probably be less dangerous if you just trained your killdudes instead. It's not like EN, where your hexes skill directly translates into...

Yeah, I can see how it would be cool when you pull if off, but if anything goes wrong - several miscasts of attack spells in a row, powerful fast monster coming up behind you - it can kill you really easily.

My favorite Inner Flame strategy is to cast it on the first orc in the pack and then the frickin' spriggan baker wanders up and blocks the corridor and kills you.

Yeah, Dischord destroys Draconian packs and Silence makes ancient liches trivial.

So, in a three runer, never.

Leda's Liquidification: Oh, I JUST figured this one out from looking at the wiki. It's supposed to combo with flying! lmao no it's not, flight and leda's never worked together Ok, I don't get it then. Second Point: OH MY GOD Arcane Marksman sucks sooooo much and I hate it. You should probably just ...

duvessa wrote:
Sprucery wrote:Partial solution: make swinging a weapon at an empty square always take only a short time.
This was actually how Crawl worked for a long time. It caused more problems than it prevented.

Yeah, I do that all the time to figure out my attack speed without doing math.

Corona: Less useful that throwing a stone, but does get you see invisible that doesn't work against the only REALLY nasty invisible threat because you can't tell where they are. Slow. I never memorize it on wizards, but it's really not to bad if you got nothing else and are willing to sink some spel...

I only take Ash if I have a buttload of remove curse scrolls.

Said it before, but Earth Elementalist of Ash is one of the most fun combos in the game. Kill things while they're still around the corner!

I tend not to brand my Very Best Weapon because distortion is such a pain in the ass. I'll try to carry something with decent min-delay (quick blade is optimal) for getting critters out of melee range.

I'm not sure a lot of people have realized this, but the poison magic school is built around learning ignite poison. Olgreb's + ignite poison is damn close to a level 9 spell. And poison arrow does really heavy posison damage, so another 250% of that in fire damage is quite nice. Poison Arrow by its...

Deep Elf isn't that great, though.

There are lots of easier conjurer options.

What? No! Of course not!

Not sure. If you're GSC-ing it you're playing an ogre 99% of the time, so you'll have a + 3 maces. I'd roughly guess you'd hit min-delay on giant spiked club around the end of the dungeon/beginning of the lair branches.

CypherZel wrote:Artificer?

Is straight up the best background for the first few levels - you basically don't have to take any damage from any monster you can see coming.

And this combos well with Pakellas, who gives you infinite charges in your wand of heal wounds.

Mummies at least have decent Spell points. PLUS I have the lowest magic points of any species, tied with minotaurs and trolls. one extra magic point a level -1 magic a level and they have the lowest magic points along with trolls and minotaurs. It's literally only -1 mana point at level 1. Early on...

Oh, okay. Good.

(Or bad, because UC isn't super great until you're level 22.)

A great sling has the same base damage (10) as a javelin with stones, and hits min-delay at level 14 instead of level 16. A regular hunting sling + bullets does 9 damage, and bullets are far more common than javelins, with lower mindelay. Plus slings can be enchanted and branded. (And, hey, small ch...

Use Giant club as soon as you get it.

Giant spiked club is, actually, not any better than giant club until you hit skill level 23 or something ridiculous.

Use giant club, or eveningstar and shield.

Intelligence stat matters for casting, and ghouls suffer in that department. Eventually you can get decent to good int, but it takes a while. You can do fine with book starts on ghouls, but playing them as a ~~caster~~ from the start is a bit rough in my opinion. Intelligence, and they have the low...

I won, but only because of great luck with items early on. Also I ate all my food. That has never happened before. Probably shoulda laid off Crystal Spear towards the end there. :) I didn't think it would be that bad because Ghouls have decent magic aptitudes (including a + 1 in earth) but I'm think...

You want a two hander and a shield eventually, because why the hell not. I kinda dig (Ha!) abyssal knights because you can blink.

But my only win was fighter of gozag.

Depends on the character, but I find the Depths monsters at the very bottom of D can be a little too much sometimes. If I run into one of them I go do the S branches first. Yeah me too, but I always at least try to finish the dungeon first. It seems like there's a better chance of shops in the dung...

Yeah, but I've won with all of them without much trouble and I'm not a good player. Formicids especially seem far better than given credit for. I grant you that ghouls might be decent fighter because of all their hit points and good fighting skill, but that -1 magic a level means I'm carrying around...

(Got an unidentified acquirement scroll If you still have it, try to get a weapon that does not suck. Found another one... Glowing hunting sling. Although so far my sword-of-being-good-at-spellcasting seems to be working. Still don't see how ghoul casters are good, compared to... say... mummies or ...

Yes. Passwall, Petrify, Alistair, Ignite poison, Yara. And earth elemetalists start with petrify, so I thought it might be worth it to get a reasonable %. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup version 0.18.1 (tiles) character file. GiggleTrain the Eclecticist (GhEE) Turns: 89430, Time: 04:46:53 HP: 159/178 (181...

That's helpful. I just tabbed myself to death with a torpor snail, surrounded by summons and skeletons.

Huh. The wiki said dex affects unarmed damage... somehow. Anyway, practically, I agree with you guys that unarmed is not worth it on this character.

And is probably never worth it on characters that aren't (A) trolls, (B) transmuters, or (C) potential transmuters.

Or just clear everything up to the orb chamber after you get 3-4 runes.

As I see it if you get 15 runes you deserve a little break.

It's not really dex that is the issue, it's that UC requires big skill investment to be good. A focused melee ghoul will be good, but a caster using unarmed as backup is dubious I thought unarmed combat is dex heavy? Anyway, yeah, it seems way worse than any branded weapon. If I could transumte (Wh...

Okay so, from this morgue it appears that you completely ignored all the advice you got, which is probably a big part of why EE seems to be bad. You're still wearing awful armour that you can't cast in Ring mail is too heavy? I didn't find anything else. yet, and you've spread your skills even thin...

I pretty much do lair as soon as I find it. Except for the frog swamp lair:8 generally feels easier to me that D:11.

GhEE is strong. I'd suggest taking a good god like kiku instead of a mediocre god like ash though. Should be pretty easy if you stop spreading your skills super thin (why did you have transmutations skill and two weapon skills) and stop wearing bad armour that prevents you from using your spells. I...

I'm playing alphabetically. So you start with species (A) and background (A). Human fighter. Than move to species B and background B. High Elf Gladiator. And then I splatted.... what am I up to now? 179 deep elf monks. THEN I got bored so I'm jumping around. I even had a little win streak (of two!) ...

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