The Tavern

Seriously. Even the ever-popular mummy wizard has a better winrate.

DEWz is both a very obvious combo for somebody new at Crawl (Deep Elfs are good at magic! Wizards are good at magic!) and a completely terrible one.

Yeah. I guess that's the problem. Still, I'd have thought a mummy wizard would have beaten it out...

I'd have thought that the process goes like this: "lets try a mummy- might be fun. Oh, mummies are so unfun that I cannot even leave the starting staircase"- so most newbs try mummies only once or twice.

That process is missing the 'read mummy wizard guide on wiki' step. I did that one myself a decent amount

I wouldn't call DEWz a bad combo since it's still a Wz which is a really strong background, but yes

It's bad for new players imho. Generalists aren't easy to learn how to play.

"Wizard" is just the wrong name for the background, imo. You start with very wizard-ish equipment, but the book is not very good for characters who want to do most of their damage with spells.

"Magician"?

Warrior-mage.

"Magician" is arguably better than "wizard," whereas "warrior-mage" doesn't quite fit given that Wz doesn't start with a weapon.

Other ideas: "Novice," "Initiate," "Magus," "Postulant," "Neophyte," "Lector," "Cantor," etc.

Wz is bad, and lots of bad players play DEWz because they think Deep Elves are good at spellcasting, and Wizards are good at spellcasting. Deep Elves are good at spellcasting, but Wizards are not meant to be played as conjurers or summoners in the long term without specific god choices. It should really be moved to warrior-mage.

Yeah but that's more about "wizard" being a misleading name than about background strength, because it is strong (personally I really dislike it but I cannot say it's bad)

If you are playing Wz remotely optimally then it does do most of its damage with spells for at least until around the end of lair...unless it's trwz or something I guess.

For me remotely optimally is to grab is to grab a stick and avoid to lose my mental sanity with clouds, fucking blinking imps etcetera, but I see your point, you can certainly only rely on those spells easily for long time

Apologies for being dim, duvessa, but what do you mean by "do most of its damage with spells"? Is it optimal for a Wz to do most of their damage with imps and mdarts, helped by blocking/confusing enemies with meph cloud and cflame? Does it count as "doing damage with spells" if you stab confused enemies you've meph'd or beat on an enemy standing in a cflame?

To put that another way, what does optimal Wz play look like? I tend to think it looks like picking the background as a melee-oriented species to get guaranteed support spells, like one does with Sk or Wr, and ignoring it altogether with magic-oriented species as a second or third-best choice compared to the other mage backgrounds. The "optimal Wz," in my mind, either turns on UC on the first turn or picks up the first convenient weapon type, because hoping that you'll find a better damage spell than mdart and call imps in any reasonable amount of time seems kind of suboptimal.

Naturally, as I wrote this, nago said it quicker and better.

Optimal wizard play??

Obviously worship Chei and destroy everything.

Optimal wizard play involves massive amounts of flame clouds and magic darts, lots of polearm tabs, some imps and mephitic clouds.

As far as I'm concerned, optimal wizard it is the safest demigod start since it also has blink and repel missiles (so it has multiple ways to survive and escape dangerous situations), and allows easy clearing of early dungeon lair and orc. It is also very very slow and very boring. I would estimate that clearing early dungeon+lair+orc with just the wizard book takes around twice the turns and 3 times the real time as a heavy armored tabber.

Examples:
- vs wights: bring to corridor, put up conjure flame, tab them over it with polearm (remember that your clouds expire on your turn not theirs, so you can always renew it safely)
- vs orc warriors: bring to corridor, conjure flame between, if it won't step in it on it's own force it with mephitic cloud
- vs orc priests: if priest is solo and unarmored magic dart, else imps and mephetic cloud
- vs hydra, elephant: get it in cardinal direction, put down flame clouds while stepping back, you normally need to eat 0-2 hits while it burns to death (if multiples need to split them before fighting them)
- vs uniques: depend on which ones, but generally imps and mephitic cloud through imps (run from grinder!)
- vs player ghosts: they step in flame clouds, so if ghost is low hp race bring to corridor and let them burn themselves, if high hp race dont take chance, just run and come back later
- if need to run, cast some imps and switch places with them to create space, or use blink
- vs yaks birds undeads: bring to corridor and put flame cloud between, they will step in and kill selves, if no corridor available surround self with flame clouds
- vs centaurs: with repel missiles precast, just magic dart, one is no threat
- vs invisible weaklings: bring to corridor, force cast magic dart in their direction with control+arrow
- vs almost everything else: magic dart if enemy unarmored, imps (white and black) if armored

If I remember right spellcasting at 5, conjurations at 10, summoning and translocations at 3 makes all the spells at <5% fail if all level up points are in int.

XL1: cast magic dart to kill things, avoid things you can't kill with magic dart
XL2: start spamming imps too
XL3: start casting conjure flame in front of things too
once you can also memorize meph: start casting meph when needed
probably never: stop spamming imps

If you want to damage something faster than imps and magic dart, then putting it on a flame cloud is almost certainly better than giving up positioning by meleeing it. If you memorize meph then you can put almost anything on a flame cloud. (You might melee it while it is in the flame cloud, or while it is being killed by imps, but the flame clouds and imps will definitely be most of your damage, which is what I said).

Of course when I say optimal play I do not mean the way most people (including me) play, nor do I mean to imply that it is the most fun way to play. Most people (including me) play in some way they find more fun, and die more often in exchange.

That's nuts. You start with two better damage spells than mdart, they are call imp and conjure flame. Conjure flame is probably the best damage spell in the entire game that isn't level 1 or sticks to snakes. It kills everything in lair easily except fire drakes and fire crabs...which meph kills anyway.
It is sometimes optimal to train melee skills eventually, sure, which is why I said "do most of its damage with spells for at least until around the end of lair" instead of "hurr durr you should never train skills other than spellcasting and you should use magic dart to kill orbs of fire".

I guess my cflame fu isn't good enough, since I never seem to have much luck doing tons of damage with it unless I'm also taking a fair bit of damage in melee? Otherwise, good points, fair enough, etc.

I guess this is something you might not know: if a monster is in a mephitic cloud, and doesn't have rPois, it will happily walk into a flame cloud regardless of its hp. You don't actually need to confuse it.

Conjure Flame is really underrated. It does huge damage for 3 mana, and as enemies get tougher it gets easier and easier to use. Early in the game you can use it as fake walls and sometimes lure monsters into it, but later they'll happily park themselves in the fire.

One of my easiest Shoals games involved using CF; things like impalers will happily stand in the fire and burn to death in 2-4 turns. Even batty monsters like harpies will have to pass through flames to get to you. It's definitely good to supplement CF with solid defenses, but that's true of every form of offense.

Huh. I have yet to find a way to use CF that is not outrageously tedious. Maybe I'm doing it wrong?

I suppose it depends on what strikes you as outrageously tedious, but my recommendation is to place it somewhere that your foe will need to walk through, and then once they've stepped into it, make sure you're positioned such that they stay in it.

So I may be a bit late to the thread, but I'd like to point out that DEWz also has the most wins of any other Wz race It's just played a ton, and probably by more newbie characters. It is of course, still a terrible combo, but hey, I thought it deserves -some- defense. The main problem being Wz doesn't get a second higher conjuration, so nothing really spellpower dependant for large damage is in their book, which is something a DE would actually be good at. <3 DECj

I think if you go Veh, DEWz wouldn't be that weak.

Well, if Veh altar generated on D:2 every time...

...or just cast it again on the next square they'll move to.

I've managed to catch one minmay game on the servers to watch. I was amazed at how much he was casting CF but man it really worked. When I saw him he was in Lair. Hydras walked through five of them to get to him. In the open he'd make a semi-circle around himself and use it to either dodge the monster or dance around it making the monster stay in flames. He'd use it in a bottleneck to run away from fire-fearing monsters. Before I saw that game I thought of it as a cast-once-or-twice kind of spell, but he spammed the hell out of it and it was very instructive to watch.

So if DEWz isn't a good race for Wz for beginners, what is? HE?

good races; it's pretty rare for background choice to actually change the order of how good races are (only exception I can think of offhand is that GhBe is probably the second or third worst Be, which isn't the case for any other background)

arguably you should restrict it to good races that accurately represent the experience of playing races that aren't broken (i.e. no DD, Ce, Sp, Fe, Tr)

As some may know, I have been playing Wz almost exclusively since I started playing the game, and DE was my first choice and first win. It was not easy, but I followed through after the first win of 5 runes with another DEWz for 15 runes. The starting wizard spellbook is indeed extremely powerful. The only spell I do not use in it is Slow. Everything else is memorized as available.

The tactics of using Conjure Flame are very much what duvessa explained, as would be evident to anyone who dedicated oneself to mastering the use of those few spells. Yes, that is how you kill hydras as Wz, as well as many other things. I usually keep CF memorized far into the game, even in extended, but its use is limited after certain levels. For illustration, I've extracted the cast data of the Wz starting spellbook from my winning morgues so you can see the frequency of their use, and they appear in the order of the wins (and in the order of my learning curve).

I could probably have used imps more, but I've never been a fan of summons, preferring to use them as a last resort, except in certain cases (white imps are excellent red imp killers, for instance).

DEWz of Vehument - 5 runes

DEWz of Vehument - 15 runes

OpWz of Vehumet - 15 runes

FeWz of Vehumet - 4 runes

FoWz of Vehumet - 15 runes

OgWz of Vehumet - 15 runes


Edit: I've omitted Repel Missiles from the lists, although that is also memorized 100% of the time, but is the last to be so. Nonetheless, it is a cast-and-forget spell, so the number of casts does not at all reflect its usefulness, hence its being omitted.

I think it'd be a good idea to stick Wz into warrior-mage. I've greatroled Wz, and the only wins that were heavy magic was w/ a DE and Sp.

NaWz is pretty good, I greatly enjoyed my mfwz game. I love playing DsWz.

It 's my favorite background , though I never use call imp.

I don't think I've ever spammed imps as a Wz o.O It's just so tedious, I view it as a stepping stone to mephitic cloud and a way to kill things I can't meph and then faceroll with weapon/dart.

They're tactically relevant early on. I'm also not a fan of luring, so when I encounter a larger number than can be handled solo, I make sure to pop some. Also, worms, adders, and the usual dangerous stuff in the starting dungeon are handled pretty easily with them. They're excellent support early on, especially white imps, but their use has all but expired by mid-game. It's the first spell of the starting book that I forget, invariably.

As someone that's attempting to Great Role Monk...and just did a really magic-heavy TROLL MONK. How you start has little bearing on how you end up playing. [Troll Monk of Sif with Statue Form, Haste and Controlled Blink.] That said...until you find another book (It will happen but you may have to clear Elf to do it if you don't pick a magic god); I'm going to agree that Meph Cloud + Short Blades is probably optimal for --Wz in early game. Duvessa can argue positioning or whatever, but...killing things fast without using up all your mana often trumps positioning, since being out of mana can be fatal. (I'm saying hiding behind a cloud and spamming Imps can leave you with low defenses because of being out of mana).

Does Deep Elf have the worst win-rate of every other class, too? If DeFi has a 50% win-rate, than Wizard's sucking so much is interesting. But it's not statistically significant if they just die all the time no matter what their starting background is.

I assume that Deep Dwarves are going to be the best in damn near every category. I am a terrible player and I have about a 10% win-rate with them, no matter what class I start with. They just seem to give a lot more room for error than any other race.

Odd to see Spirggans so low. I assume that they are forsure stronger with other backgrounds.

Yes, deep elves have a horrendous winrate. But that's significantly because of how many people play them; they're probably the least user-friendly of the classic newbie combos.

The winrate gets better if you exclude sebi's games.

If DE are so bad why not buff them by giving them more innate MP? They only have as much as spriggans, but they could have more and be bags of mana, which would be more interesting than most other buffs you could think of.

they might be bad but that's fine

Come on, tell us more. This is exciting enough, 106k games without a win, 93k with DE. Is it some bot?

No, just a startscummer.

Startscums for what? To lose more games?

It doesn't change much: