The Tavern

Because ogres are totally bland now.

Don't you prefer a very high HP Deep Elf more than a Troll with different melee?

They are nowhere close to high HP DE and were not have been close to Tr with maces.

As High-HP casters, we already have Draconians, a much more interesting species, so Ogres have no reason to exist now.

Humans have about the same HP too and basically have the same spell apts with a Draconian so should they be scrapped too?

Human is the most boring species in this game.
But I don't think they should be axed, because they are "flat standard" of the game.

#SavetheOgres2016

Well, humans can wear armor while ogres can wear dragon scales just to hammer down even more how similar to draconians they are.

always hitting things with giant clubs is so exciting

Ogres were-
before the change : boring species with at least capability of using GSCs
after the change : boring species with nothing special


they had been boring as well, but the change made them even worse.

They were also good at throwing stuff, which is now the best thing they can do.

Pretty sure big shield + big rock has always been the optimal Ogre build unless you're worshiping trog. Eveningstar/Morningstar is already overkill off ogre str. -3 spells apts did not even remotely impede ogre's from picking up utility spellsets with light int invest and conjurations are pretty worthless when you have the dual school spell "throw big rock".

Ogre spellcaster starts/Warrior mage starts were actually a pretty fun hybrid on par with demigod.

The flavor fuckery of Ogres specializing in polearms is just disgusting.

Spiked apts are more fun to play with.

why not just revert the mace apt change? when you selected ogre at the start screen before you did so because you wanted to use a gsc. i don't get why seemingly no one but the developers and a few others buy into this "weapon choice is a meaningful and interesting decision" meme. honestly ask yourself "how often do I change weapon classes from my starting weapon class?" I bet it's not that often.

Weapon choice is meaningful in the sense of, one hander+shield+throwing vs 2 hander + launcher, and fast vs slow but that's already self contained in every weapon branch but polearms and UAC. From what I can tell it's mostly in-game as a way to give different races different feels in combat along with somewhat varied skilling choices without resorting to obnoxious gimmics like fucksforsaken hop.

Edit: Isn't the large caster race Naga. I mean they play more as borderline-indestructible suspiciously sneaky turrets than the traditional kitey mage, but they're still a thing. They're also... an actual large race?

if anything the function of the weapon skill system is to restrict choice rather than encourage "interesting" decisions, imo. It basically makes 90% of the weapons that spawn on the ground floor trash, since one generally doesn't want to use a new weapon class unless something remarkably good spawned and you have cross training. But even this is rare. Since weapons are not especially differentiated in use, I can only conclude that either it was desirable to not have players picking up and using the "best" weapon they found on the floor (where is the decision in that), or the skill system was ported from Nethack without much thought. Given that many bad features of crawl are there because they were originally ported from Nethack without much thought, I'm going to guess it was the latter. nethack truly was a mistake...

Anyway, I don't think this idea that "We must force a decision on weapon class!" is really one of value. Really, how much can you differentiate bumping into enemies, especially in Crawl where you have big numbers, base damage, enchantment and brand dominate, and the marginal value of stat points to damage dealt is low?

I don't think Nethack even had skills at the time Linley created the Crawl skill system.

e: Well, Nethack 3.2.0 was released in 1996 and it had weapon proficiencies... so I don't know.

e2: But in any case Nethack's skill system was quite different from that of Crawl.

just make it +1 or 0 at least

Why not back to +3? Did anyone except duvessa think Ogres were overpowered (who would probably argue mummies are overpowered because crawl is so trivial) before this change? If anything, since ogres are often stuck in robes for much of the game, having the old maces apt back could open up a melee/conj playstyle that is bad for other races because of armor constraints (armor good, spells not good enough), that seems to be considered desirable judging by the emphasis on versatile races in recent additions.

This actually worked on old ogre. If you stayed full spells it played a lot like demigod... except actually fun and without the midgame agony.

Big rock just exists so there was no real reason to go heavily into conj, even OgFE caps out around the Cflame/IFlame/Sflame combo.

if you dont want weapon class choice then you should remove weapon classes, not give lopsided weapon apts to an arbitrary number of species

turns out devs want weapon class choice! imagine that! i never could have guessed that the years of work trying to balance and differentiate weapon classes might mean that devs want weapon classes to be interesting!

this is actually a good idea

To be clear, we need to distinguish between choices in weapon class function and choices in resource allocation.

Do characters make in-game (as opposed to pregame) choices based on the function of a weapon class? Not very often. I can only think of summoners using polearms to reach to attack behind summons. Players don't often change to Long Blades because it has riposte, for example. Why? Because, once the player has found a decent (not floor trash) weapon, typically in the starting class (but not always for a non-weapon start) the power of a given weapon mostly comes from investment, in the form of both experience and enchant scrolls, not the ability the weapon has, so the value of the secondary ability at the margin is small compared to the XP/enchant investment previously used.

Assuming for the sake of argument you are a Mage background and trying to pick a weapon class, not being previously hamstrung to a starting weapon type, are you going to pick a weapon class based on what its function is? No, you are picking whatever has the fucking elec brand on it and has a decent amount base damage. Overall, I think we can conclude that few meaningful choices are made in-game with regards to the function of weapon classes. Pre-game is another matter, since players who want to use cleaving, or riposte, or a gsc or whatever might pick their race accordingly.

Do players make choices in-game based on experience allocation in weapons? Yes, the decision is most often "don't change weapon classes", though there are exceptions, usually involving cross training and that damn elec brand again... I actually did change weapon classes in my last game, because I had cross-training from axes (which I always use out of laziness and liking of button mashing) and found a demon trident... of elec, and had no other decent axes.
This is what I was saying earlier, where in practice the function of the weapon skill system is to restrict choice in weapons, since the power of a given weapon comes from enchant, brand, base type, and XP investment. So the actual decision that has to be made is: Should I start investing experience/enchant scrolls in a new weapon class for no returns for some amount of time? Usually the answer is "no", but occasionally it is "yes."

So the weapon skill system mostly creates decisions in XP investment and resource allocation. But the actual function of different classes leads to few decisions of any real import, as players who want a different special-weapon-trick will often pick accordingly at the start screen. Aside from reaching, the different weapon class abilities don't change melee tactics in a substantial way.

I personally could care less about whether there are weapon apts or not. Assuming they continue to exist, their function is in practice a form of power level.

It's an ascii/tiles based game and either way you're still bumping against things until they die or you die, it literally does not fucking matter if your beatstick of choice is called a 'giant club' or 'spear' or 'dagger'.

Man, playing an ogre with polearms is so much more **differentiated** than playing one with maces, however will I thank the devs?

It literally makes the game because imagining my @ smashing stuff with an enormous log is so much more satisfying.

The dark maul is the only weapon in the game with sound.

I pick long blades for most of my conjurer-types, because it might hit do damage to (adjacent) critters when I blast them with spells, as opposed to all other types of weapons which don't. (This is one of the reasons why I liked HE)

But I don't invest on weapon skills at all. It's clearly unoptimal if you're going to waste exp on a skill that is only used if you made a mistake of running out of MP/not killing every threat in LoS before you run out of MP and forced to melee'ing with poor AC; that's two situations that any player can comfortably manage to avoid. Only staves can bypass this because of elemental enhancer staves but it's still a no-brainer to not invest anything in it if you don't find one.

Given this is a single player game, I wouldn't mind seeing Ogres as "easy/strong" race that sacrifices armor for a good mix of aptitudes.
So why not just having the increase mace without losing anything? (or maybe reducing XP affinity slightly)

i want to know why ogres were given 9 base int

this is higher than humans which is confusing given they're still apparently "mostly seen as brutes" and are almost entirely martial enemies in the wild

like i disagree with everything else about the changes strongly but this is just insane to me? at this point rename them to basajaun or something since they're clearly not the giant club-wielding punks roaming the dungeon

I've been affectionately calling the Ogre Mage (OM) for a while.

FR: rename Ogre to Ogre-Mage

Call it Orgrasm. Short for Ogres Are Smart.

I do not contest changing their playstyle from SMOrc SMOrc SMOrc to "maybe get a weapon in between giant club and mace".

I would sincerely like to see weapon skills changed to just "one handed weapons" and "2 handed weapons", which crosstrain

I'm late to this party, but with troll claws and ogre M&F -1, why have giant clubs and GSC in the game at all? Give early dungeon ogres polearms and staves, and ettins et. al. can keep their great maces (by the time you meet them great mace is no longer an Early Good Item).

♪ Let Formicids wield giant weapons if they leave the shield ♫

They'd be better at using them than Ogres, that's for sure.