CIP VSMo advice => YASD

[Zhorgal]

I started this char just to kill some time: http://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/zhorgal/zhorgal.txt

My questions are: which god should he use? I have seen several VSMo of Chei but all my experiments with him ended in disaster because I invariably try to run away with a lower speed.
Given that I am a noob, which god should I choose?
Update: I just found a GDA. Should I wear it immediately and concentrate on just training armor for a while?

[Sprucery]

Decent gods for VSMo in alphabetical order (imo of course): Ash, Dith, Fedhas, Gozag, Hep, Kiku, Makhleb, Nemelex, Okawaru, Ru, Trog, Uskayaw, Yred. Pick whatever you find early.

As for armour: wear the +3 leather of rF for now. You generally want to wear the armour that gives the maximum AC+EV. I'm sure it is the +3 leather and rF is a nice bonus.

Identify the potions.

[ddubois]

Whip of electrocution will be better than Unarmed for awhile, won't it? Whip gets to 0.5 at skill 12, Unarmed gets to 0.5 at 27.

[MainiacJoe]

Whip of electrocution will be better than Unarmed for awhile, won't it? Whip gets to 0.5 at skill 12, Unarmed gets to 0.5 at 27.

Yes, if speed were the only criterion. But base damage matters too, and UC is base damage 17 at skill 14 while that whip is still 6, and UC gets the offhand punch. Electrocution processes 1/3 of the time and does 7+1d13, offhand punch processes UC/20 * 2/AEVP of the time and does 5 + UC/3. The bite in both cases happens (STR+DEX)/50 of the time and does 6+XL/3. At skill 14, the whip is speed 5 and the UC is speed 7.4, so the whip gets about half again as many swings as the UC. This is more than offset by the much greater base damage of UC, and there's also that the offhand punch happens about twice as often as the electrocution if you're in light armour at this skill level. Then the kicker is, the UC is only halfway towards its best at skill 14, but that's as good as the whip's gonna get. So I'd not discard the UC purely over its attack speed.

[tasonir]

The standard VSMo build is to rush to statue form as quickly as you can, if you're speedrunning. If you aren't speedrunning, you can take a little bit longer to get there, but you should still get statue form as soon as it's practical. VS with statue removes the only limiting factor of the race, the -30% hp. With nearly normal hp, vs regen, and statue form defenses, it's downright hard to die. 4thArra had it online by level 12, where as my speedrun didn't get it going until around level 14. You could wait a bit longer if you're playing cautiously. But with Chei it doesn't take too much effort to get online, roughly 10 trans/earth will get it to a modest failure rate, then you can train some more physical skills, and then maybe take trans/earth to 12 to get miscast to 1% and gain some spellpower.

GDA is a good choice overall if 1) you have the strength, and 2) you can actually fully enchant it. However, it's going in the opposite direction of statue form, which is a better choice overall. You could try to make the GDA work if you don't think you'll find statue form, but abusing statue + Chei dodging is usually the point of the build

[Sprucery]

I really don't think you can say that statue form has anything to do with standard VSMo builds, because statue form is not guaranteed to appear at all. Also Chei is bad, as the OP has already noticed.

[tasonir]

Chei isn't bad, as I have noticed.

Very few things are guarenteed to spawn, and yes not finding statue form is a risk, however it is fairly common to generate.

[Sprucery]

yes not finding statue form is a risk, however it is fairly common to generate.

What do you mean by fairly common? It's in two books (Transfigurations and Earth).

Also, it is not a good strategy to pump a whole lot of exp in two spellschools to get one level 6 spell online. So you should have some other lower level transfig and earth spells as well. (Neither of the statue form books has them).

Chei and statue form are apparently very good for speedrunning, but recommendations for a newbie are a different matter imo.

[tasonir]

And those two books are usually quite common? I can only think of one game where I was trying to do a statue build and finished a 3 rune game without it:

http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/tasonir/mor ... 193252.txt

So you just put on some medium to heavy armor and play without it. It isn't mandatory, but if you find it and you're VS and unarmed, it's a mistake to not use it. +30% HP on VS removes its one and only weakness, low hp pool. I don't consider 10/12 skill in two skills to be too much investment for statue form, although you're free to disagree.

Chei and statue form are good for speedrunning because they grant you a large increase in power which lets you dive faster and kill harder monsters earlier. It works just as well for non-speed runs, you just don't dive down and you raise up your starting skills (ie, not statue form) a bit higher first, rather than rushing to a level 6 dual school spell.

[bel]

Monks are just fighters who get 2* in piety when they join a religion, instead of a shield.

Therefore, play VSMo as if you are playing VSFi or VSGl or something like that. Choose some weapon you like. You don't need to be choose unarmed if you prefer not to. Unarmed is not that great without Transmutations, though VS is powerful enough to play with anything it likes.

Since you have found gold dragon armour, it's probably best if you concentrate on being a mostly spell less fighter. Any melee-oriented god is fine. Fedhas, Okawaru, Trog (if you want to completely give up on transmutations), Yred and so on.

[Zhorgal]

He died from stupidity. Actually, most of my chars die this way.

http://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/zh ... 171903.txt

[Airwolf]

He died from stupidity. Actually, most of my chars die this way.

http://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/zh ... 171903.txt

Most characters die this way, not just yours.