now crossbows are garbage

[radinms]

who choose crossbows seriously
now penetration ego are gone

[dynast]

This is first time i 100% agree with radinms. Who even uses slings now? You the choice of the most common, better damage output/attack delay weapon, or rare and rarer bullets if you dont get shoals slings, or rare until you reach vaults crossbows. Given the circumstances you might end up using slings or crossbow but given the choice you always go for bows.

[Sandman25]

Well, I never choose crossbows for penetration. If you are something like Ko (+2 crossbows, -1 bows) or DD (+1 crossbows, -3 bows), obviously crossbows can be useful.

[dynast]

OBVIOUSLY they can be useful for THOSE TWO RACES, and maybe spriggan.

[Tressol]

Bolts have higher base damage than arrows.

Crossbows are very accurate as a weapon class. They are also highly damaging.

Hand Crossbows are an excellent early game weapon with minimal investment and allow use of a shield. All this with far superior damage to a short bow, nearly as much as a long bow in fact, if you include the ammunition damage difference.

Triple Crossbows are insane, if you can invest enough in the skill (otherwise they are incredibly slow).

The above suggests that Crossbows are an excellent secondary weapon for a melee character or late-game specialist. Crossbow accuracy means that you can sink stat points into STR (for damage and armor) or INT (for spells!) without missing much - after all, if you're a ranged specialist, you (hopefully) won't need to dodge much. The main problem with Crossbows is the lack of a reliable early source of ammunition, imo. Well, that and high min delay, but that's offset by the good to huge base damage (which also makes them superior against high AC).

[Sandman25]

OBVIOUSLY they can be useful for THOSE TWO RACES, and maybe spriggan.

Right, and this is how I used them before the removal of penetration too. Longbows always were superior, nothing changed IMHO.

[Tressol]

Also, Slings crosstrain with throwing, which is significant because throwing is very strong. So, if you're a slings specialist, you can take out popcorn with Stones, moderate threats with bullets, and serious problems with Needles. You also get use of a shield. Of course, slings do fairly crummy damage in Crawl, but that's the tradeoff.

[dowan]

Well... if you are training crap ass slings so you can have access to the throwing crosstraining, you could also just train throwing!

Slings are pretty great early on though, they just fall off so hard later. So I use slings a lot, I just don't train them.

[Tressol]

Sure, just train Throwing. But Slings still get a slight boost when you train throwing, since you are then crosstraining slings, making them slightly less bad.

But yea, slings are pretty darn weak, especially later on.

[dowan]

Ah, I see what you're saying, I read it backward I guess. Yes, you might as well use slings early on where they are quite good with no investment, and if you're training throwing anyway, all the better. After all, those plain rocks aren't likely to run out anytime soon.

[Tressol]

Well, the way I said it originally was basically train slings and also you can throw. Both ways are fine, I guess, as long as you aren't training Slings beyond a reasonable level - train Throwing for stronger emergency range, train Slings if uhh... You need to kill popcorn very efficiently, I guess.

Why are slings so weak late game, anyway? It's like the Short Blades of ranged, without Stabbing.

[duvessa]

don't worry, slings are bad early game too

[Siegurt]

don't worry, slings are bad early game too

Untrained hunting slings are pretty good compared to untrained stone throwing, short bows or hand crossbows, of course winning a competition among those options isn't exactly impressive.

[dowan]

Trained slings are absolutely ridiculous early game, have you tried them recently Duvessa? But even a 0 skill +0 hunting sling with stones will kill the majority of enemies in early D quite easily. With sling bullets, they're even more awesome. They fall off quickly once things start having HP and armor, of course. They fill much the same niche as magic missile, except they can miss and have more ammo available tactically.

I assume slings get bad late game because halflings are good at slings, and we wouldn't want halflings using good weapons

[duvessa]

i meant compared to other ranged stuff, of course they are still better than melee

[dowan]

I think at least 75% of tavern discussions could be held by bots programmed with the user's typical replies, and an outside observer wouldn't notice the difference. Hell, I was replaced with a bot YEARS ago, and nobody seems to have noticed yet.

[Sandman25]

I think at least 75% of tavern discussions could be held by bots programmed with the user's typical replies, and an outside observer wouldn't notice the difference. Hell, I was replaced with a bot YEARS ago, and nobody seems to have noticed yet.

That's because bots here are not programmed to recognize bots. At least I am not. Maybe Sandman26 will.

[Shtopit]

I think at least 75% of tavern discussions could be held by bots programmed with the user's typical replies, and an outside observer wouldn't notice the difference. Hell, I was replaced with a bot YEARS ago, and nobody seems to have noticed yet.

That's because bots here are not programmed to recognize bots. At least I am not. Maybe Sandman26 will.

Wait until bots can travel in time. Then we can have Terminators built to kill older bots and stop them before they can post.

[Sandman25]

I believe time travel will never be possible.

[dowan]

That's exactly what a time traveling robot would want us to think!

[Siegurt]

I believe time travel will never be possible.

Well depending on how you interpret "time travel" all travel is "time travel" in that subjective time passes more slowly the faster you move relative to the thing you are moving faster than, so you effectively move a very tiny amount into the future (relative to things that didn't move) every time you travel.

[Arrhythmia]

I believe time travel will never be possible.

Well depending on how you interpret "time travel" all travel is "time travel" in that subjective time passes more slowly the faster you move relative to the thing you are moving faster than, so you effectively move a very tiny amount into the future (relative to things that didn't move) every time you travel.

Theoretically you could have someone move around at relativistic speeds and then bring them back to earth, putting them {arbitrary number of years in the future} for 1 hour of their time.

[Sandman25]

Well depending on how you interpret "time travel" all travel is "time travel" in that subjective time passes more slowly the faster you move relative to the thing you are moving faster than, so you effectively move a very tiny amount into the future (relative to things that didn't move) every time you travel.

I was talking about traveling back into the past of course. Time axis is unidirectional.

[stoneychips]

It's still possible to get a Penetration weapon, yes? Or no?

Although I do rather miss the ammo. Needles were just reduced in frequency; I'm a little surprised the same couldn't happen for at least some of the crossbow ammo brands.

[nago]

Yes, randart Xbow can still get the penet brand. For bow I think the only chance is the fixedart longbow I don't remember the name

[PleasingFungus]

Piercer.

[amalloy]

Piercer.

Please keep your comments in this thread topical. I don't see what Piercer has to do with time travel.

[dynast]

If you worship oka you normally end up with a pen xbow, you also might end up with a xbow of each brand. If you dont go oka you will be lucky to even find a normal triple xbow.

[Sar]

If you worship oka you normally end up with a pen xbow

Spoiler: show

Thanks, Oka!