zackoid wrote:I would argue that the problem is not that 'melee' is too strong, but that heavy armour is too good. And given the cuts to spells over the last few versions, there is very little incentive to wear anything but heavy armour unless you're training a ton of conjurations. The only reason to not wear heavy armour, if you haven't already decided to focus on conjurations, is if you can't because your species + background has tiny strength, or it is unavailable.
Heavy armour is a no-brainer these days. Most of the good non-direct-damage spells are level 3 or less so you can have your spell-cake and spell-eat it too.
This pretty much explains why melee is OP imo, or rather, obviously more powerful than other choices in most cases.
All the best spells in the game are level 3 or less and don't check spell power much. Direct-damage spells require significant Int to be effective, as well as sacrifices in armor weight, as does the stealth-stabber playstyle. This is less true of summoning, but you still need to be able to cast the spells... and some gods can generate allies for you if you want to play that way, with miscast protection too. Hybridization away from melee tends to make your character weaker, whereas hybridization away from conjuration is overwhelmingly recommended by good players and is at worse power-neutral once you've reached your level 6-7 spell, due to the enormous XP gap between Bolt of X and your level 9. I think this is an obvious indictment of spell-based playstyles. If anything characters using no spells are more adaptable, since they can use any armor that drops, and a good body armor can be an enormous swing in power in a way that a book will almost never be.
You also need significant XP investment. In contrast you can get a lot of AC without much XP investment, and if you go for a large shield, you can get a delay penalty of about 0.05 at 16 skill or so, while investing almost all stat-ups in strength and having roughly as much damage output as you would have otherwise with a 2-handed weapon and stat-ups in dex. This does leave you more vulnerable to elemental bolts but that's what resistances are for. SH still blocks LCS/OOD. I used to think this strategy was crap then I watched dynast win NaWn's 19 times in a row with it, so I concluded it was actually good.
At least in older versions you could shore up your defenses a bit with charms. But those are being purged for being Tedious. With that said, Crawl's miscast-percentage based system combined with a moral opposition to buff spells, short durations, and large number of fights make charms unwieldy. In my view there is nothing wrong with buff spells, but it would be better if they didn't run out, which sort of clashes with the miscast-percent system (which I think was a mistake, I think it would be better to just have a skill breakpoint based on strength and armor weight, but there has generally been a moral opposition to breakpoints in crawl)