Slightly off-topic, but this is just another reason that forks are good for the overall health of the game.
They give devs/players a chance to try new and potentially radical changes without pissing off the majority of the playerbase, and we can gather some fairly valuable information even from the failures.
I think Firestorm being pure Fire, Glaciate pure Ice, etc is an excellent idea.
I kinda like the concept of the stamina system, at least on paper, but (and I haven't played it, so take this with a grain of salt) I think I would find that system would be very tedious in actual execution.
Shard1697 wrote:Having stuff like dex affecting spellcasting speed makes me want to throw myself off a cliff
This pretty much sums up my feelings here completely, too.
Directly to the topic at hand:
My only webtiles recorded 15-Rune win was with a DsWr.
Despite the book background, and the spells I "learned", I only cast 1 spell the entire game: Blink
And I cast it a grand total of
2 times. (My endgame weapon was actually a randart morningstar with -Cast...)
I would call that character an absolutely pure melee duder, and argue that while utility spells are nice to have, they are not a necessity at all.
Also, on my first 6 out of 7 webtiles recorded winning characters, I have a
grand total of 19 spells cast, split between like 5 spells. (Blink/Regen being the main ones, followed by a few casts of Fireball, meph cloud, and sting?)
By my anecdotal evidence, I have to disagree with the paragraph written by the DCSS fork dev.
Strong fighters don't need significant magic investment, they can instead rely on Evo/Invo if they need to shore up any weaknesses in the character.
I will say though: I'm convinced that an End Game caster's power level is
much higher than an End Game melee character.
And given the plethora of XP available in extended, and the variation and range of threats, its almost dumb
not to pick up some spells. (With maxed out everything, why not?)
Realistically speaking, with "infinite" XP, the skills/aptitudes difference between any two characters played by the same person will approach zero barring some sort of self-imposed conduct. A person is going to gravitate towards the skills/spells/abilities that are the most effective, fun, and to a lesser extent what they're familiar with.
So I can see where they're coming from, I just think that maybe they're being a
tad disingenuous, if we're using your average player as the basis for the analysis.