Post Saturday, 13th June 2020, 15:44

[YAVP] FeEE of Kiku, greater polytheist done

Morgue:
https://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/P ... 124117.txt

Game went pretty smooth overall despite three deaths (mostly a mix of bad rolls and bad decisions) and multiple near-death situations, which interestingly enough are not as scary with felids as with other species. Between good jewelry, decent books (including early statue form) and EE being quite a strong start I'm not sure I even needed such a strong god as Kiku.

Highlights include 12 (twelve!) orbs of fire, thankfully dragon formed cat rips them apart in no time at all and takes almost zero damage in the process, provided you don't forget to put on your rF+ ring (with only rF++ situation becomes very touch-and-go). Also for this character orb guardians were much scarier than anything else in Zot, which was an unusual experience.

Some greater polytheist (win with all species, backgrounds and gods) notes in no particular order:
Scoring page: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/paperrat.html

I wanted to do the challenge in as few games as possible, that means at least 27 wins (one for each species) was needed, with the ability to repeat background twice (I did double Gl and EE) and god once (double Kiku). Felid was saved for last, cause I anticipated it being the hardest species to win and so wanted flexibility with god/background.

Overall I went with mostly synergistic and not flavour breaking combos and an additional conduct of choosing your god beforehand, which honestly didn't feel more difficult than just playing the game normally. The one combo that felt somewhat weird to me was VSSu of Yred, but that was near the end of the challenge and options were getting limited.

The only time I switched gods was with OpIE of Jiyva (switched from Ely after doing Vaults to 4, I think), otherwise all combos were played straight. All gods seemed decently powerful, I especially liked new Sif (chain shattering Vestibule with no relevant training in Earth) and Fedhas (oklobing/sporing V:5 to death), while Nemelex, Gozag, Yred and Beogh felt the strongest (to the point of being downright unfair :)).

Jiyva and Xom being two "mutation/chaos gods" remove mutations way too frequently for my taste, both times they started out great by heavily mutating my chars, but after some time almost everything of note was removed, which was somewhat disappointing. Especially Jiyva specific stuff should, I think, be semi-permanent (not removable by Jiyva itself), it's good flavour and not game-breakingly powerful at the time you can reliably get it anyway.

Removal of Dmsl made frail, EV-based caster mid-game (S-branches, Vaults, Depths) way harder than it needs to be, in my opinion. It was a stark contrast playing DE, Te and Sp with Dmsl, and Op, VS and Fe without them. Dmsl was somewhat of a milestone to reach when your robe wearing caster became way more safe as long as you stayed out of melee. After removal it feels like you really need statue form or lots of summons for defenses on frail casters, cause yaktaur packs, stone giants and elves and such can chunk you for half your health as soon as they enter LoS and that just doesn't feel good on characters who already have a harder time surviving early game and various "oh shit" type situations (like being shafted or tele-trapped). I know there's a plan of sorts to move the effect to some type of item, but that won't really solve the problem, since, in my experience, specific items are harder to find than specific spells, and also there are some harsh item restrictions (and thus heavier slot competition) on species, who benefited from Dmsl the most.

Speaking of tele traps, I think, there's no place for them in Z:5 specifically (they are fine in rest of the game, IMO). Reason being, that after you get teleported on Z:5, you need to make a bunch of "dice-rolls" before you can even act (due to the sheer number of floor traps present): don't get paralyzed, don't get your MP drained, don't get netted etc., this all on top of high density of extremely dangerous enemies, and to get out of it you, most of the time, need to additionally win a random teleport lottery. While doing this challenge two of my characters (DE and Mu) got teleported straight into the orb chamber, DE got instantly double marked and chunked for 20% hp, Mu got netted (though I did an extra move on Mu, since force_more wasn't set up properly) and surrounded by orb guardians, both then got dispersed into upper lungs with some extra death roulette occurring there. Even though I managed to win both games (despite some suspect play), neither situation felt good. Both times it felt like I lucked out into surviving, which IMO is not a good thing to have as part of the game's final challenge (which is hard enough as it is).

Absolute Zero seriously warps caster gameplay more so than Firestorm or Ignition even, you can generally stop worrying about anything once it becomes castable, which kinda takes all the challenge away, unless resting to full MP before exploring is challenging. Maybe it's fine that way though.

Finally I wanted to say a big thanks to the dev team, I've been playing on and off since at least 0.8 and the current version is by far my favourite, between all the QoL/UI improvements, new mechanics and varied content it's the most fun I had, not only with DCSS, but with any rogue-like ever. Thanks!

PS. Does anyone know of an rc file option to make Shoals and Swamp lag less on web-tiles (I assume shifting tides and swamp vapours are the culprits)?

For this message the author bt has received thanks: 2
shping, Shtopit