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I don't think the problem is one of power level so much as differentiation. Buffing an aspect of a monster (or giving it a weakness) encourages the player to treat that monster differently from all the other monsters. edit: i get that the op focused on power creep, but i feel that [power creep] and ...

Spider and emperor scorpions is basically the same situation as Lair and dire elephants The problem w/ nagarajas is that they feel too much like other nagas. They are a mage/warrior hybrid w/o any striking features. In that sense, they are like dire elephants relative to the rest of lair (imo dire ...

If you pass a lot of time the monsters will wander, causing the situation to (most likely) diffuse. There still may be dangerous monsters by the stairs, but it will be easier to stairdance.

This is pretty niche advice, but TLH dies more-or-less automatically to a phantom mirror. If one has spawned in my game, I'll always bring it to S:4. In a similar vein to the ghost issue you really have no reason (other than the obvious one: convenience) to touch either lair branch end vault until y...

A lot of my stupidest deaths have been in portals i was ill-equipped for where i recognized pressing on was dangerous and pressed on anyways. You always end up w/ more loot and xp than you need. (this is where the old dont-do-elf meme comes from) (i always do elf tho lol)

Lure ghost to stairs. Go down another set of stairs. Clear orc. If he shows up again, repeat. If your stair situation is not conducive to this, tank him w/consumables on stairs (if you arent willing to wait a couple levels for orc loot) Rule of thumb: if you never die you will eventually win. So its...

This would be a significant autopickup convenience and wouldn't impact tactics in basically any way.

Crawl/anything sucks when you are just doing it to pass the time and aren't really paying attention. Crawl is really fun when you are engaged. If you feel burned out playing crawl and are just playing because you can play no matter how shitty you feel maybe do something that you are less familiar wi...

hm. when i ?/M tiamat it doesn't mention silver vulnerability, but maybe silver vulnerability is always done on a case-by-case basis (b/c silver vulnerability also comes from being mutated? idk) so you can only tell when you xv a specific monster? if so, neat.

is that list comprehensive? afaik there is no way to tell what is chaotic

Is there a way to check whether a monster is vulnerable to silver in game? Failing that, which enemies are vulnerable to silver? I know oofs/shapeshifters/ugly things are, but beyond that i don't want to make assumptions... edit: to add to the intrigue, ugly things don't have descriptions when you s...

Call the ring of Shaolin "Ring of Phasing" and borrow the description from phase shift. Calling it the ring of wu jian doesn't solve anything. Call Shnarga the "Bow of Eternity" or something. +1 names should be easily spellable, but also you should be able to browse a list of all...

Precise casting is dumb. Not only do i not understand how it works based on your blurb, but it seems like it would be a drawback a lot of the time and would encourage weird optimal skilling.

What do you do when an orb spider comes into view?

PowerOfKaishin wrote: If I turn a corner and see an ogre, stone giant, or juggernaut, and they get a hit, I've suddenly lost most of my ability to retaliate.

lol that's not when you retaliate, that's when you gtfo

I hope this is a feature, TBH, and that allies in general don't have to worry about hydra mechanics. It seems like a total pain to check derived undead/orcs/yred slaves for weapon types whenever a hydra appears, and getting the allies you want to fight the hydra to fight the hydra while getting the ...

I feel like net positive tradeoff mutations like spirit shield are cool so long as they don't encourage particular tedious strats in order to mitigate their downside. Maybe you change your character's direction a little in order to get better value out of it. The god conflict is more annoying imo bu...

yeah, lol, that would be easier, so long as the differences between (edit. The ways player/monster/ambiant clouds behave) cloud types are specified as well. In a similar vein, there should be a way for players to figure out the owners of summons.

I don't think that player clouds and monster clouds should follow different rules because cloud ownership is unintuitive and there is often no way to distinguish cloud owners w/o taking an action. Relatively recently player clouds were changed to vanish when the player breaks LOS w/ them to (I assum...

I feel like large vaults would be more replayable if they had more varied monster placement. So rather than knowing there is a caustic shrike pack (or some similar dangerous pack--I know the monsters are sometimes selected from a small list) around corner X, and therefore you ought to camp corner Y ...

Its funny that you named 3 of the most annoying monsters in the game...

W/ the Wu Jian council, how does attack delay factor into the # of attacks you get when you move around enemies? Do you get 1 attack/move? If so, is it probably better (in terms of raw damage output) just to attack enemies normally, assuming you have lower attack delay than movement delay?

Huzzah, another meme reform! Throughout most of the game, curses are literally just an inventory management/wear-iding inconvenience. The only time curses matter is in the very early game when you can get randomly screwed over if you decide to use the shit you find on the floor without having a cert...

Deep water and lava are terribly annoying in their current incarnations. They force the player to play in a convoluted manner so as to avoid item/corpse drops on inaccessible tiles. Even swimming races must avoid killing enemies on deep water if they have any intention of using necromancy. Semi-trav...

The issue is the targeter though. Arguably im just lazy--i dont like animating every skeleton individually either.

Spears are especially miserable is you move fast, but then again dcss in general is miserable if you move fast.

I rarely use polearms just because i hate hitting v and entering target mode when i could just be using a mace and the numpad. Balance/design aside i dislike polearms because they fall into the category of 'powerful w/ tediousness as a downside'

Halflings should get perfect rMut imo, so you at least have the option of doing extended w/o playing the mutation minigame (bar zin)

Thanks bel--that is very useful analysis. It seems that in many circumstances where food felt critically low I still had a substantial cushion of sustenance. I guess the 'thesis' of my op would be "food matters in a miniscule portion of games, but it affects a slightly larger portion of games i...

Food tilt: it may be irrational, but it's a real thing. it's like the dcss equivalent of a character getting hangry

current char: http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue/bazoo/bazoo.txt http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue//bazoo/morgue-bazoo-20161209-015640.txt -- in this game I remember feeling pressed by food during the midgame http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue//amaril/morgue-amaril-20160511-215323.txt -...

note that I don't think food is good overall for the game, however Food affects the way that I play in a reasonably high % of games. I play a lot of magic starts (on non-magic starts it often feels correct to basically just play a melee/ranged weapon character w/ heavy armor & strength whereas t...

It's a good idea to learn meph cloud on otherwise weak, seafaring races like op & br:

drown your enemies without fear
of losing all that food and gear

packs of crimson imps... wtf dude Seriously, crimson imps only exist because the call imp spell exists. They do a worse job teaching players about enemy blinking than orc wizards and phantoms (which are basically just as annoying as crimson imps except that they can maybe actually kill you if you ig...

This might break your 'melee' conduct, but bows (or javelins, if you get lucky/choose oka or trog) are one of the strongest defensive options in the game. Even though you don't get to use a shield, you kill most things before they can hit you and it makes splitting packs/fighting in safe terrain way...

By contrast, grey gives you the most uniformly useful ability (5ac) whereas black gives you a bunch of niche stuff that is never necessary and is rarely useful at all. I imagine most players know about the breath (it's the species gimmick) but remembering to occasionally use fire breath and fire clo...

protip: shields are still good if you have less than 4/15/25 skill.

Not finding aux armor hurts light-armor characters far more than heavy-armor characters.

Haven't you heard? The tavern meme meta has shifted. Shields are good now.

Why would the game be better if the player was guatanteed full aux slots by lair? Does the player need such a buff?

floors that you can farm w/ minimal risk are terrible. this includes dungeon floors, where I am pretty sure that optimal play for mu/anyone with surplus food involves clearing explored maps and reexploring them, but it is absolutely awful in pan/abyss. "it is its own punishment" is the wor...

One problem w/ always-on charms: if you normally wear heavy armor, you are encouraged to remove armor in order to cast your charms. This is currently the case w/ rmsl, and it is particularly bad there because rmsl times out so fast at low spellpower that in order to play optimally you have to remove...

When i was a newer player i definitely overvalued having low fail rates, to the point that i wouldn't use evokable rage/invis unless i had already trained a lot of evo. Likewise, i never casted spells with yellow miscast rates and wouldnt have deemed a 30% fail support spell viable. Granted, this wa...

@Nekoatl: I have minimal experience swapping gods (except for a couple Oka/Trog-->TSO swaps for extended), so I was unsure how powerful this god needed to be to be at least a tempting option. +6 to all defenses and to slaying would be quite powerful, but an issue w/ @'s design is that you can't make...

The purpose of this god (gonna call it @ for now) is to encourage players to experience god wrath, and to give the player a unique set of single-use powers. To some degree, TSO/Zin accomplish the god-wrath thing, but they aren't worth switching to in a 3-5 rune game (and 15 rune games aren't particu...

Identifying wands in the early/midgame is often better than identifying potions or scrolls. If you have a mid-tier wand (iceblast, acid, confuse, paralyze, enslavement, disintegration, digging, lightningish, slowish), you get a decent-sized stack of a known consumable out of your scroll. When you id...

Well, the xl3 hu from my last post has 2/12 defenses in robe and 12% sts vs. 5/11 defenses and 28% sts so i would wear the ring mail but that might just be a player preference thing.

An xl 2 hu tm in a ring mail that has only been training uc has 43% failure on sts. Which is usable and powerful, just difficult to quickly flood los with. A lv3 hu in ring mail w/ 11 13 13 stats and 3.2 tm has 28% failure on sts. Idk if it's worth getting it to lower % for awhile; low-powered sts i...

The fighter/mage distinction is overrated too, even in the early game. A spell like Animate Skeleton or Sticks to Snakes is easily castable in a ring mail or whatever, and gives you a serious boost to survivability. Not saying TM is an easier start than GL (it isn't, mainly because of the disparity ...

Your skilling seems decent for the character you built. It seems like your character would struggle fighting large groups of enemies but wreck basically everything 1v1, so shoring up that weakness (w/ some evo for evocables, imo, or maybe some summoning or cloud spells) might have been more valuable...

If you believe you've won once you've reached lair, the best spellcasting classes are (*race dependent) the best starts in the game, bar berserker. If you lose after reaching lair, str-based characters become more appealing because they have more mid-game fault tolerance.

Have you never tried to reach D:15 as Sp without killing anything? No. But that's not a particularly applicable scenario. You avoid getting surrounded by picking off individual monsters near the upstairs, and only venturing farther when you are pretty sure you have a clear line of retreat. Ofc mons...

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