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I also think some conjurations are useful even for a summoner, for example if a monster reaches melee range with you and you need to kill him quickly. You are on an EXP budget in this game. By putting EXP into conjurations, you are not putting EXP into more important skills. Your answer to "a ...

I think everyone is allowed to express their opinion in this forum part, no? And I'm also part of the community even if I don't write a lot on this forum or contribute code. Yes, you're allowed to express your opinion. You are free to continue expressing it, but I got the impression you weren't her...

In my opinion Your opinion does not match the community's and you are not convincing anyone. DCSS not moving in the direction you want? Then grab the code, look at the git commits which shortened the branches, do "git revert" on those commits, build your own brew of DCSS and have your bra...

OoD and Poison Arrow means you're great at killing single targets. Not sure what you've got now for AoE, but patient peeling tactics should ensure you're not swarmed.

Poison Arrow is the lategame version of 'magic dart' - the go-to "I can kill anything with this as it does physical damage" conjuration. Bolt of Fire/Cold are also strong 'bread & butter' spells you can lean on, though with some restrictions due to elemental immunities. Don't be tempte...

Not on this character. Unless you're deep into postgame when EXP is a non-issue. CBoE is a huge EXP investment and, without 30 pets to hide behind, is still a large risk for when it botches. I prefer Sub.Blood + Regen instead of CBoE but again, without 30 pets to hide behind, that's got its risks. S...

Yes but this game I got "lucky" and the altar appeared in the Slime entrance vault in Lair:5. I should probably actually escape with the orb once before trying these "challenge" runs. You had a good death, now you have something to look forward to when you get another character ...

Time for Depths. Crypt too if you want to pad yourself more. During that time, learn how chain lightning works and experiment (in safety) how much damage you take if it hits you without rElec. If you're scared to do that with this character, make a new character and enter Wizmode to test it out. The...

Usually, a switch to Jiyva happens lategame rather than as you're going through Lair. Mostly because the Jiyva altar doesn't show up except at the bottom of Slime (and you really don't want to go in there prematurely).

Sprucery wrote:Why is ooze so high?

That was my thought too. Giant gecko et al I can understand, ooze I can't when rat is on a separate tier.

The first six floors of any Hell realm are basically irrelevant for any extended-capable characters, and also uninteresting: the player just ends up running through them, often utterly ignoring everything on the screen (except for a handful of torment-capable threats like Ice Fiends in Coc). Lazy c...

You only need a +0 unbranded demon blade to make a +9 branded demon blade, given enough time. Quite a lot of time. I have no idea how many scrolls of enchant weapon I had lying around, but I'm guessing it wasn't 9 - and I don't know that I had a scroll of brand weapon, either. Besides, I'd cleaned ...

What I meant by that is that while a +9 branded demon blade would be better than a +11 branded scimitar, I didn't _have_ a +9 branded demon blade - at all, let alone one with a set of useful intrinsics into the bargain. You have to work with what you've actually got... You only need a +0 unbranded ...

I am partial to the spell gifting You have a good point with the meta-game issue I focus on just this to arrive at a counter-proposal: You do not memorise Vehumet's spell gift. From the current spell gift framework, whatever Vehumet is 'offering' you is castable as if it was a single-school Conjura...

ITT: people who need to learn to use fsim Sure, what is fsim? A fight simulator in wizmode, accessible with &f and &F. See {!source fight_simulator.txt} for the fsim help. In other words, "stop hand-wavy theorycrafting and just do the number crunching in crawl itself to see who is righ...

I don't think it's wrong to have both specialist gods and generalist gods to choose from, but that's just my opinion. It is an opinion that runs contrary to the developers' policy. The crux of the issue: why do you want to indirectly buff Summoning with a new god? If it's for the mechanical feel of...

When you have 30 pets doing all your work for you so there is no possibility of you ever taking damage from enemies. Requires recognition of what monsters to stop this routine for, e.g. smite targetters. Casting Regen is a big plus.

Chicken wrote:I'm amazed to hear animate skeleton dismissed

You are mis-interpreting. Nobody here is dismissing it outright. All the comments refer to specific comparisons or situations.

Bottom line: yes Animate Dead is great with Kiku. But you don't NEED it from him. If he doesn't give it to you, adapt.

We need to see your skill allocations (among other things) to advise. Char dump please.

In the old days, when you could pick up corpses, you tele-threw it (Portal Projectile) then cast Corpse Rot. Now you'd use it with Kiku Orbital Corpses. Or alternatively, in a corridor to a bee room littered with the aftermath of Bolt of Draining spam (have an undead meatshield in front and Sub.Bloo...

PowerOfKaishin wrote:Gozag and Trog are out (lack the money and lol trog).

That exclusion list should include Zin too. Well, since you want novelty how about Jiyva or Uskayaw?

Malevolent wrote:Is this supposed to be an experimental status for the Desolation that would eventually become a rune branch

New content is easier to start out as a portal vault before being turned into a branch. Spider used to be a portal vault.

It boils down to "you know how to make good decisions by thinking, but you haven't made them so often that they become reflex." Nothing wrong with playing the game while your brain's in thinking mode and not reflex mode.

I died... Quite disappointed[/code] You'll get over the disappointment. It's a good death: you learnt who Mara is. You'll get another MiBe to similar progress soon enough. The -6 accuracy dissuaded me from using the bardiche. Shouldn't it? By the time you can swing the Bardiche at or close to min. ...

I've had ammo problems when I focus Bows too early, and then I've not trained anything to back up the now useless bow. It's a little counter-intuitive, but until you have ridiculous amounts of ammo, you train Bows to not use them unless it's against a threat. 0 skill melee weapons (or a sling) work...

the range of the overflow altars (currently D:3-9) could be changed in either direction. Sometimes this is brought up but I don't think anything will happen there. Personally, I wouldn't mind extending the range to D:3-11. Allowing access to all temple gods is mandatory to me, but but I can see mak...

lethediver wrote:not all that common for me to have an army of summons in advance because undead are no longer permanent

You're not clearing the floor fast enough then. A Kiku Necromancer who rests to reload HP/MP is too slow or encountered an unusual challenge.

Having to cast onto an enemy prevents you from positioning behind your summons like normal. You should already be behind your army when you're casting it. Be it because you walked back after seeing something or because you told your army to 'retreat' ahead. Then you don't care of the time taken to ...

simply trying out spells from many different schools That's good fun and a phase to go through at some point in your crawl career to learn about spells. It lowers survival chances as you skill sub-optimally but that's part of the learning experience. Once you have an understanding of the spells, th...

Haunt is disgustingly powerful for a full-on Kiku Necromancer. The smite targeting is very relevant when you're always surrounded by 30 pets from animate dead + death channel. The mana cost is irrelevant when things are going well, given Sub.Blood + Regeneration - if they're not going well, you shou...

Sar wrote:High-invo oklobs are surprisingly tanky.

Translation: stare in disbelief as OoFs fail to kill your oklob farm.

Does high invoc make them better? With high Invocations skill, they will fire pretty rapidly. You have not experienced the Fedhas Oklob farm until you've read a scroll of loudness in Zot:5 and watched the farm machine-gun down everything that comes to check out the loud invitation. Yes, 'everything...

Imps are a starter book summon, having blink there makes them deliberately unreliable for e.g. blocking off a corridor. Blink frogs are fine as a characteristic threat of Lair though their description could mention their interaction with distortion.

Phantoms I can't make a tenable defence for.

The thing with casters is that it's easy to mis-spend your EXP 'teching' the wrong skill (or the right skill to the wrong level). You'll splat quite a few characters while you figure this out. Unlike with melee styles where you're reasonably assured you'll get good-enough weapons to 'tech to', being...

sometimes potentially choice Hmm, perhaps there's something deeper here than just "drop it". Consumables (including wands) and 'specialist equipment' are a part of the character just like god choice, spell repertoire and skill strategy. But the cost to 're-configure' the "ready state...

Why am I so attached to junk items? Hoarding instincts. Other games tap into this to make you measure progress (read: make you feel good for playing the game) via item collections. If you're doing it in crawl, it's because you like it on some deep down level (or you wanted a break anyway). If you'r...

I don't like AM as a starter background, but some of those spells are great for creativity. My preferred use of Inner Flame is with animate skeleton (thank Kiku for corpses): dumb undead don't turn hostile when marked by Inner Flame. Another alternative is to mark them and then zap /enslavement to s...

Too many words, needs to be more concise. To Lameador2: as you point out, there's nothing wrong with the 'flavour' of the shapeshifting playstyle. That's not what everyone is discussing. The mechanical number-crunching issue that is the problem doesn't affect you - whatever solution we come out with...

dpeg wrote:Minor obstacle: what to do with the fifth rune? (Each extended branch should have the same number of runes.)

Cut the demonic rune, extended is now 11 runes. Or if we have some special attachment to "12 runes", make a one-floor branch and put it in there.

It's my go-to "anti-bees in earlygame" solution. For extra hilarity (read: don't do this without thinking it through), also quaff !berserk and laugh at the absurdity of an angry tree.

...but but but Welcome to crawl's secret way of killing off intermediate characters: EXP temptations. The game constantly bombards you with "look at this Cool Thing you could add to your character! You only need to pay enough EXP to raise this skill to X!" As such, you die from bad strate...

But since no money is involved, we can afford to keep all the stuff we consider fun. This will lose potential players, but it'll also mean that the "design identity" (for lack of a better term) is more pronounced, which has good effects in itself. When you are small and free, better to cr...

ignoring totally spell book and not being able to read them, you have a very fuzzy idea of what spells can or can not do. And this is kinda frustrating. Two things: 1) being able to use spell books as "conjure flame" consumables is a useful ability on rare occasion. In fact, it's more use...

What newbies like about Trog will not be the same as what veterans like about Trog. We will just have to disagree on whether it's good to give beginners an I WIN button for the early floors - they've got plenty to learn (starting with the UI), giving them some easy good-feels helps them stick around...

Add an "edible corpse autosearch" function to make the mechanic less annoying while keeping it meaningful from a food availability perspective, with a countdown to automatically exclude already rotten corpses? That wouldn't solve the problem: "this is annoying to play around". T...

Maybe flavor is actually bad. Dangerously too few words. I suspect you mean "the flavour justifying this annoying constraint for Zin worship is bad" and not "all flavour ever in crawl is bad". Anyway, this conduct has no actual strategic effect so it all boils down to flavour im...

See the link in my sig.

mopl wrote:
nago wrote:I still hope it's another small step toward curse removal
But Ash ?

Can adapt.

In ancient versions, EXP assignment was done with 'victory dancing' instead of the nice "send all EXP into this skill" UI. Back then, if you weren't a book starter, you had to read scrolls (with skill points in the pool) to reach Spellcasting Lv 1 before you could memorise spells. These sc...

Congratulations on your first win! Not finding a wand of heal wounds in a 3-rune game isn't unusual. You got a vampire battleaxe which arguably is better for most of the game. At Zot:5 you had so much food you could have 'hot-swapped' between your vampire axe and your anti-magic axe to deal with thr...

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