CIP - Looking for tips on equipment choices

[tasonir]

So I'm fairly new to DCSS, although I have some (limited) nethack experience, and have been doing fairly well in early dungeon levels. My current level 10 Kobold Berserker is on dungeon 9 and is making his first stash as I am finally getting a large amount of (possibly) useful items, and I'm not sure what equipment I should be wearing anymore.

I typically want high evasion armor, but I have a +6 ring mail "haed" with rElec and +3 int, so I've been using that instead. My armor skill is currently 3, and is on normal training. I have a troll hide, not yet turned into regen armor, and also a +2 robe as alternatives. As an aside, the kobold berserker guide recommends getting int to 8, and this does it for "free" for me - how big of a problem is having 5 int? Is 8 very important?

The second artifact I have is fairly newbie confusing; lots of resists and yet -5 enchanted: The cursed -5 cloak of Purpose! Grants +Blink, resist fire+, resist negative energy+, and stealth++. I can't enchant it up but I can remove the curse? Should I be wearing this full time, keeping it just to blink away with in some cases (is this a controlled blink or not?), or stashing it? The two resists seem great but I have an obviously good +1 cloak with rCorrosion+ and Conservation which lets me keep my armor quite high for this level (AC 12, EV 15, level 10).

My current weapon is a +1/+1 short sword of speed - how good is this overall? Basically I'm wondering if it's worth it to enchant this a few times or if Trog's going to be gifting me much better soon. He's already gifted me a sling, but no melee weapons yet. (5/6's max piety)

[Serne]

Speed on a short sword is not the best thing you could get, in fact it is probably one of the WORST brandings for that kind of weapon as it decreases damage done on each strike while increasing the speed of an already quite fast weapon. Electric branding would be the best damage wise, and a poison brand would be highly useful this early.

About the Int question: if at ANY time your Int hit's 0 or below you could forget to breath and WILL die, unless you can quaff a restore abilites pot or eat a Royal Jelly before you do. Hitting the negatives on any stat can result in very quick stat death.

The blink from the cloak will be uncontrolled, BUT if you have a c. tele ring it could be great for filling resists & escaping once you feel you are ok on ac&ev. Personally I would go with the non artifact cloak at this point. The stealth++ on your artifact COULD keep you alive by making the odd OoD mob not notice you, but if that monster did notice you it might be hard surviving without summoning some brothers, depending on what the OoD is. Once you find an enchant armor scroll that troll hide COULD become great for you.

Trog's weapon gifts are weighted on your skills loosely. If you have 8 in a ranged skill he will additionally give you ammo as well as launchers for that skill. Most of his gifts are branded or artifacts, with a fairly large number of them being Anti-Magic, with good +damage and a lesser amount of +accuracy. If you are going to be focusing short blades he will eventually give you a quickblade which is THE fastest weapon in the game and if electric branded can do impressive damage with high enchantment.

[rchandra]

You can remove the curse from your cloak with scroll of remove curse, no problem. The blink will be a random blink, like the spell. I'd probably keep the cloak as an alternate when you need it. Not just for blinks, there are places where the resistances will be worth the -6 or so AC.
Trog will eventually give you something more useful, I'm sure - like an antimagic quick blade - but a lot of his better gifts will have a lot of damage and/or be artefacts, so you won't be able to use enchant weapon effectively. Consider enchanting bullets if you use that sling.

[mikee]

That ring mail might actually be good to wear for now. It is hard for me to tell unless you post a dump or at least mention which version you are playing. Don't wear the crappy randart cloak. Many randarts are actually bad (they just randomly have some properties, and you have to assess them altogether). In the long run it would not be good to enchant the short sword of speed, but if you think you may have trouble surviving it would be worth it to enchant it as much as +4.

Um, one last "don't" for now: try not to use the wiki as your main source of information about the game. It is horribly outdated/horribly misinforming (I am familiar with the kobe guide and I can tell you it is both). A more reliable source would be: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots

Good luck!

[Ashery]

Troll hide armor is absolutely fantastic and I'd suggest enchanting it up to the +4 cap as soon as possible. With that being said, however, I'd still carry around that ring mail as rElec can be a bit difficult to acquire and you might find yourself in a situation where you need it.

The cloak is situational as well. As a Trog worshiper, it'll be the only castable type of blink (It's the random blink ala the level two translocation spell. Semi-controlled if you have cTele) that you'll have access to, so keep that in mind. However, you probably currently lack the evocation skill to use it, so stick with the cloak that'll actually contribute to your AC.

The short sword is pretty much trash. It's decent for the time being, but you should ditch it the moment you find any short blade with poison (Early/mid game primarily) or electrocution. Flame and frost aren't bad, either, but the former two contribute damage that is independent of the short blade's damage. Poison also helps with the massive amount of fleeing mobs you'll encounter in the Lair.

[tasonir]

Um, one last "don't" for now: try not to use the wiki as your main source of information about the game. It is horribly outdated/horribly misinforming (I am familiar with the kobe guide and I can tell you it is both). A more reliable source would be: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/bots

The bots don't really present enough information per entry to make them useful. Most of the information given is joking/brief and seems designed for other people who already beat the game, not people learning it. Some of the pages on the wiki are marked as outdated, sure; but most are up to date or had little changed. I really can't see anything on the KoBe guide which looks wrong to me, unless it's his advice on later branches, which I haven't gotten far enough to test yet. Everything else seems right, I reread it just now.

[Serne]

To be completely honest some of the advice presented in the guide is still quite valid, though some parts might steer a new person wrong.

As for the bots they provide quite a bit of extremely specific info in a condensed form. The wiki contains a number of extrapolations and other things from the game data, that while sometimes outdated is of GREAT utility to near any player of the game.

[mikee]

Learndb is certainly far from perfect, but it has more constant peer-review and is less subjective than the typical wiki article. Most of the wiki's strategy guides, for example, are from the experiences of one guy who beat the game once with a combo and who is generalizing what he did for everyone. There is almost no way he is not going to be interpreting some things incorrectly.

I also reviewed the kobe guide just now. It looks like ionfrigate has done a good job cleaning it up back in september, but there is still some nonsense, particularly in the walkthrough. It also still expresses something of an obsession with venom weapons.

Crawl is a hard game that the majority of its players have not won, and it's only natural that people will want to voice their opinions about strategy anyway - this leads to a lot of guessing expressed as fact. So I recommend looking for quality of information rather than quantity.