YAVP: First Martial Artist win (VSMA^WJC - 15 runes)

[artagas]

https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/ar ... 214546.txt - the first place is all mine friends.
Martial artist are explained at: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=26794 or https://github.com/b-crawl/bcrawl (along with other bcrawl shenenigans you might wish to know)

Vine stalkers also happen to be different in the branch: they evolve into one of 3 kinds (Mana Stalker, Twilight Stalker, or Jungle Stalker - cool, huh) and get different abilities. My run ended up as a mana stalker which is closes to its vanilla brothers, the main difference is that it does not receive innate spirit but is given a nice bonus to MR instead. WJC is slightly reworked as well in the branch see the link above for details.

I ended up dropping CT early this run in favour of shield+short blades (sorry Bhauth, i hope you forgive me). I posted about this on petercordia's dump already, CT is nice for the start of the game (I am still running it on my current DSMA in lair), but just not nice enough to give up shields. The other issue is that unarmed is not actually good on a wjc char unless you are a troll or a felid. Heavenly gives you insane +slay making fast weapons desirable. While it is possible to eventually get low delay on unarmed, you are doing yourself a favour by investing that exp into defensive skills instead and settling for a quickblade or a demon weapon.

This run started off insanely lucky since i got an early spirit artifact amulet and evolved into Mana Stalker. This basically ends up being the same deal as a vanilla vs^wjc which is super-strong once you are past the very early parts of the game. Mana bites triggering with +80 slay and whirlwind aoe is a sight to behold. Hell and Pan lords all fell easily in 1v1 as did Mennas, Tiamat and Dissolution. Note that pan was done xl23-25 since in the branch it closes its doors once you hit xl27. Even at those levels it posed closed to no threat to this character, the only near-death spot being the result of me missing the patch notes that granted Balrugs a truck-like melee hit (also ignoring the screams in spectator chat from my fellow patch note reading players). Even tomb was a breeze due to the aoe blocking awesomeness of heavenly storm. WJC seems to be in a very good place now in the branch, as an offensive-minded melee god, which is a decent alternative to other popular choices. Finding a chaos qblade around 10 runes in was the icing on the cake, it is both powerful and entertaining with the amount of attacks this guy can dish out in a turn.

All in all was an insanely fun run, 5/5 - would ruin developer's gameplan for new background again.

[petercordia]

Congrats on the first win, especially with 15 runes!

I'm curious, what would you think of CT requiring the user to have at least 1 hand free, either the main hand or the off-hand?

[artagas]

Depends on whether this spell will be available outside of MA start i guess.

For MA: I feel like at some point you just spam storm, and your damage during it is so high that a short chance-on-hit confuse is not super relevant anymore.
for early game right now CT gives a legit reason to go with both hands empty (like a "true" martial artist"). It is still not a clearly optimal choice, my VSMA went sblade+buckler early and never regretted it. But it is a valid choice which is nice. With your suggested change i guess one will always try to go quick-weapon+empty-hand (and graduate to quick-weapon+shield) or unarmed+shield. Whether or not this is a change we want im not sure. I guess i kinda dig the idea of 2xempty having some upside to it.