Popular, but stupid notions


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Post Sunday, 25th February 2018, 18:55

Popular, but stupid notions

The list of popular, but stupid notions:

You should use all your enchant weapon and armour scrolls right away:
No, you shouldn't. Wait until you get a weapon type you are satisfied with. Treasure troves are also a thing in the meanwhile. There are cases where it may make sense to use them sooner than later, such as a tough portal dungeon, but these are exceptions rather than the rule.

Stealth is good, especially when it is cheap:
No, it isn't. More solid builds have AC. It's difficult to have AC when you dump points into DEX. Many tactics require beings surrounded by some popcorn. You'll have to spend a lot less time chasing stuff down for XP. Training it wastes XP. Daggers won't pierce heavy armour very well. Get a mace and/or axe fool.

Dex is good:
No, actually it mostly sucks. You want as little dex as you can possibly get away with. As time goes on, accuracy of your weapons will get enhanced a lot by skills.

Evasion is good:
No, it's pretty bad in fact because, see above: Dex sucks. Relying too heavily on evasion probably will result in one of the following outcomes: you misjudge incoming damage and die to a damage spike, you get paralyzed and killed, you get blasted by one of many sources of damage which cannot be evaded and die. That being said, it's worth putting at least a moderate amount of XP into simply because the value of defenses overall is quite high.

You should use two-handed weapons:
By the time you have them trained high enough to take full advantage of them you could have pratically already won a 15 rune game. If you dump all your XP into your weapon and nothing else to reach the highest levels of usage, you're a moron. Their additional base damage is offset by their lower accuracy for a lot of cases. There are cases where it may make sense to use a two-handed weapon, but these are exceptions rather than the baseline.

You shouldn't use shields:
See above ^^. Defenses are key to delivering damage because it's much harder to deal it if you can't receive it. Adding a third method of mitigating damage besides AC and EV considerably increases your survivability and resets the XP cost of increasing defenses back to zero again when shields are being brought up from 0 skill. A buckler is extremely easy to train to skill of 4 to simply remove it's penalties.

Longblades are great:
See above ^^. Shield blocks thwart parry. I've heard in response that "parry doesn't really factor in when choosing to use longblades." To that, I say "cleaving shouldn't really factor in when choosing to use axes." Dum, dum dum dum, dumb! I won't go so far as to say they suck, use them if you find something awesome otherwise go with maces since they cross-train with axes, or just axes.

Losing XP using summons makes no difference:
This has to be one of the most boneheaded arguments I've ever heard. Particularly now with levels which don't respawn enemies, XP is most certainly a limited resource with a few exceptions (abyss & pan which come with heavy considerations.) Furthermore, as the game progresses, enemies continue becoming more difficult. The notion that receiving less XP is fine because it "saved you", allowed you to get that XP in the first place just means that your character sucked to begin with because there are certainly characters that don't need summons and/or allies in order to kill everything. Last tournament, summoners was the least won profession, it's not even very good compared with hitting something on the head much harder. Once upon a time in crawl, it was overpowered, so now today it blows in the other direction.

Faith amulets are soo awesome:
Not. I'm not going to bother to explain, just believe!

I've posted 7,000 times so I know everything better than you:
No, it could just mean that you have had less time playing and more time dramatizing.

My online stats are better so I must be a more knowledgeable player:
Unless, another person just doesn't care and likes to fool around with the game. Another shocking fact is that there are people who play offline, potentially much sooner than ever playing online and potentially currently more than online even if they do currently play online.


...to be continued...

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Post Sunday, 25th February 2018, 19:21

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

* grabs popcorn *
make food great again

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Post Sunday, 25th February 2018, 19:38

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

thats a very nice list of opinions you have there op

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Post Sunday, 25th February 2018, 19:40

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Being a moron, I enjoy playing moronically.

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Post Sunday, 25th February 2018, 19:46

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

I guess this is some comedy thread (because it's in CYC), but I don't see the joke.

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Post Sunday, 25th February 2018, 21:06

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

If online stats don't matter then how come your argument that summoners are weak is that it was the least won background in the tournament? Checkmate, atheists.

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Post Sunday, 25th February 2018, 23:21

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

You should *usually* use your enchant armour scrolls up as you get them, because you *usually* have enough aux armour to soak as many as you find, until you've gotten a decent enough body armour to enchant up. If that's not the case (because you haven't gotten aux armour to drop, or it was already enchanted, or you don't have the slots) then you shouldn't use your enchant scrolls on body armour until you have a non-crappy body armour.
Similarly, by the time you have an indentified enchant weapon scroll sitting around, you will *usually* have a decent-enough weapon, if you don't (and you're using a crappy one) then enchanting a crappy weapon to like +2/3 helps a lot (crappy weapons get more benefit from enchantment than good ones do) in terms of helping you kill things and survive until you get one, but if you're far enough into the game that you are worried about buring a bunch of enchant scrolls on a crappy weapon, you're in a pretty rough shape regardless of whether you spend them or not.

I agree that dex isn't very good (why on earth would you put points into dex to get a moderate amount of stealth, or evasion? dex's effect on stealth is pretty minimal, putting a small amount of XP into stealth has nothing to do with spending your stat increases on dex)

Evasion *itself* doesn't suck, it's good, but you shouldn't be getting evasion *at the expense of* getting decent AC nor should you be taking dex on level ups to get better evasion (the only reason to not have particularly good AC is to be able to cast spells with a smaller XP investment, earlier, which isn't a very good reason, but is an Ok reason) But there is no earthy reason to associate getting better EV with taking Dex over strength or int, for one thing, dex's impact on your evasion isn't all that amazing to start with, and if you're wearing heavyish body armour strength will actually give you more EV than Dex will, saying "EV sucks because Dex sucks" implies a relationship that isn't there.

You're off the mark about the XP cost of two-handed weapons, you can certainly get an end-game worthy two handed weapon online and useful inside a 3 rune game, particularly if you have the aptitude for it. Yes, the triplesword/bardiche/exec axe level weapons are stupidly expensive, but there's some very very good two handed weapons that you can get online, to do more damage more cheaply than you can a one handed weapon, for example a dire flail is *awesome* damage for the XP invested, it's super cheap, two handed and you can get it to min delay sometime early in the lair, and it's common enough that you can have one available with some degree of certainty by that point. Great maces, great swords, battleaxes are all totally fine to get online in a 3 rune game, and cost less XP than the slightly-less-damaging one handed equivalents once you add in the cost of a (regular) shield. Bucklers are cheap, but are also very very limited in the amount of damage mitigation they provide, they aren't worth the exchange of being able to use two-handed weapons (notably ranged two handed weapons) by themselves.

Longblades aren't great, they are slightly less powerful than polearms, axes and maces (because riposte isn't very good) axes and maces and polearms are pretty close in power level, cleave isn't really superior to the slightly higher base damage that maces get, but it isn't really inferior either (Unless you play intentionally badly, cleave is better the worse you are at using positioning)

Losing XP for summons doesn't make any difference *in what the optimal way to play summoners is* it doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't be using summons on trivial fights, because you don't want to spend MP that you don't need to, that's true of any spell, you want to use it when you need to, and you want to conserve your MP when you don't need the spells. It does change your *overall amount of spent XP* certainly, but since summons are more powerful per XP spent than other spells, you get to approximately the same power level for less XP, and have correspondingly less XP overall. So it does make a difference, but not inside of the game where you're using summons, only in how expect your XP to be spent relative to other characters that don't use summons, in short it only makes a difference in the "meta" game, not in a given game.

Faith amulets are good, for some gods, if you are good at using those gods abilities, for other gods they are useless or inferior to other amulets, maybe you just don't like playing gods for whom faith is a significant upgrade.
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Post Monday, 26th February 2018, 08:28

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

It's weird to see OP likes shields and dislikes evasion, they do the same thing except evasion does it much better.

Also I have impression OP thinks that all characters with stealth use daggers and robes, maybe it is time to try Mf of Dith.

My approach to using enchant armour is "save them unless you need them". I mean if I am playing a powerful character who already has easy time why should I waste the scrolls on +0 cloak?
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Post Monday, 26th February 2018, 08:34

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Siegurt wrote:Losing XP for summons doesn't make any difference *in what the optimal way to play summoners is* it doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't be using summons on trivial fights, because you don't want to spend MP that you don't need to, that's true of any spell, you want to use it when you need to, and you want to conserve your MP when you don't need the spells.


It takes ages to kill popcorn with lots of running and kiting as FeSu, it would be so much more enjoyable to just cast a few summons but unfortunately wasting XP is not a good thing :(
Basically summons ARE safer even in trivial fights as HuSu because you never know if Erolcha or Orc Sorcerer will come into view and then you might have a shield from banishment/paralysis if you were not trying to save XP :(
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Post Monday, 26th February 2018, 08:42

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

VeryAngryFelid wrote:It's weird to see OP likes shields and dislikes evasion, they do the same thing except evasion does it much better.

Also I have impression OP thinks that all characters with stealth use daggers and robes, maybe it is time to try Mf of Dith.

My approach to using enchant armour is "save them unless you need them". I mean if I am playing a powerful character who already has easy time why should I waste the scrolls on +0 cloak?



For me, at least, I have found that good pre-enchanted aux armor is rare enough that I'm fine using my enchant armours on my gloves/helmet/boots/cloak. Yeah, I could end up finding a +2 gloves or boots of running, but it's not really a big deal for me-- I'd rather have the AC in the early game, and often those +2'd generic whatevers will stay with me until vaults or later. I will agree that enchant weapons should be saved if at all possible, though. Slings and venom/elec daggers are often just straight up better than whatever you're using anyways, and I've never really found a dire need to have my flail upgraded right now.

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Post Monday, 26th February 2018, 08:54

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

charlatan wrote:For me, at least, I have found that good pre-enchanted aux armor is rare enough that I'm fine using my enchant armours on my gloves/helmet/boots/cloak. Yeah, I could end up finding a +2 gloves or boots of running, but it's not really a big deal for me-- I'd rather have the AC in the early game, and often those +2'd generic whatevers will stay with me until vaults or later. I will agree that enchant weapons should be saved if at all possible, though. Slings and venom/elec daggers are often just straight up better than whatever you're using anyways, and I've never really found a dire need to have my flail upgraded right now.


Maybe I wasn't clear enough.
If I found a +5 plain plate armour before Lair, I will keep the scrolls, I am already above average AC at this point and am highly unlikely to die to direct damage but I am likely to need those scrolls to enchant dragon scales or branded plate armour later.
If I found a nice randart plate armour which is good enough for 3 rune game, I instantly enchant all aux armour pieces (going from +0 plain cloak to +2 plain cloak, for instance) because I am likely to find scrolls later to enchant that +0 cloak of MR which is not found yet.
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Post Monday, 26th February 2018, 16:47

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
Siegurt wrote:Losing XP for summons doesn't make any difference *in what the optimal way to play summoners is* it doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't be using summons on trivial fights, because you don't want to spend MP that you don't need to, that's true of any spell, you want to use it when you need to, and you want to conserve your MP when you don't need the spells.


It takes ages to kill popcorn with lots of running and kiting as FeSu, it would be so much more enjoyable to just cast a few summons but unfortunately wasting XP is not a good thing :(
Basically summons ARE safer even in trivial fights as HuSu because you never know if Erolcha or Orc Sorcerer will come into view and then you might have a shield from banishment/paralysis if you were not trying to save XP :(

But it's just as likely that something nasty will walk around the corner right after your summons expire and you have less MP to deal with it (in fact probably very slightly more likely, since things that walk into view probably did so in response to the combat noise you just made) I suppose you could walk around with a cloud of protective summons all the time, but even if you have such a cloud, it will likely be of the cheap variety (So you have the MP for high level summons available when you need it), so it will be relatively very low level, and not prone to doing much, if any damage, so it wouldn't be stealing any of your XP in trivial fights. (Optimally, you'd probably walk around with summon butterflies cast every so often, which would give you cover, but not steal any XP)

Summoning "extra" things during trivial fights isn't any better than summoning "extra" things when you're just walking around, in fact it's slightly worse, since the extra things you summon during trivial fights might die, and their expiration is that much closer than ones you summon afterwards, and if what you're looking for is the marginal protection provided by having a summon always on hand as a hex shield, a low MP, insignificant-damage-causing one is the most efficient one to use for that purpose, which steals a correspondingly insignificant percentage of XP from the trivial amount of XP gained from trivial fights.
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Post Monday, 26th February 2018, 23:16

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

svendre wrote:Losing XP using summons makes no difference:
This has to be one of the most boneheaded arguments I've ever heard. Particularly now with levels which don't respawn enemies, XP is most certainly a limited resource with a few exceptions (abyss & pan which come with heavy considerations.) Furthermore, as the game progresses, enemies continue becoming more difficult. The notion that receiving less XP is fine because it "saved you", allowed you to get that XP in the first place just means that your character sucked to begin with because there are certainly characters that don't need summons and/or allies in order to kill everything. Last tournament, summoners was the least won profession, it's not even very good compared with hitting something on the head much harder. Once upon a time in crawl, it was overpowered, so now today it blows in the other direction.

So while I don't really agree with most of the points, I wanted to address this one in particular. Crawl experience tends to inflate rapidly; this is often done in rpg's to keep players at roughly the intended level for the area no matter how much or how little they farmed the past areas. A simple example:

Area 1 monsters give 1 exp.
Area 2 monsters give 10 exp.
Area 3 monsters give 100 exp.

If a player farms 250 area one monsters because they love grinding and want to be safe, then go and kill 10 monsters in area 2 and 3, they net 1350 experience. If a normal 'fast' player wants to just move forward, after killing 10 monsters in each area, they gain 1110 exp. The difference between the hardcore grinder and the normal playthrough is an extra 21% exp for the grinder, despite having killed exactly nine times the monsters overall.

Likewise, if you killed all of a previous area's monsters with "summons" you only killed half the monsters there in terms of exp...but once you move on to the next area with more exp, those previous areas really stop mattering much at all. It does still matter somewhat that you're getting less experience in the current, high exp area, but once you've gotten a 2-4 kills of high exp monsters you're in line with the expected experience of a player who got the first 1-2 kills there, which should be "high enough level to safely handle the area".

You can feel this during very aggressive turn count speedruns where you dive down several floors, are horribly underleveled, and then manage to take out a two headed ogre and suddenly gain 2-3 levels and several skill levels, which catches you up to the floor you're actually on and makes the previous monsters above you largely meaningless.

Finally, some example monster exp values in case you think the above example of 1/10/100 isn't accuarate:

D1: Goblin: 1 exp. Hobgoblin: 2 exp.
A few floors down: Bullfrog: 90 exp. Orc warrior: 132 exp.
Enter the lair: Spiny Frog: 409 exp. Black Mamba: 456 exp. Hydra: 976 exp.

Granted, it does start to flatten out somewhat in the mid game; you aren't going to be getting 10,000 from vault monsters (vault warden: 1699). A lot of vaults, elf, and even zot monsters are still in the 1000-2000 range. Zot:5 goes up a decent amount though; orb guardians are 2770 and orbs of fire are 8569. Cerebov himself is only 15000, although if you really need more experience after killing cerebov, I'm not sure what to tell you.

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Post Monday, 26th February 2018, 23:37

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

As further information, look at the XP requirements to level up:

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Experience

If you kill EVERYTHING with summons and don't do any direct damage yourself (and why would you do that, grab a spear and poke from behind your summons if nothing else!) then you'll be about 1 level behind.

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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 06:21

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Siegurt wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:
Siegurt wrote:Losing XP for summons doesn't make any difference *in what the optimal way to play summoners is* it doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't be using summons on trivial fights, because you don't want to spend MP that you don't need to, that's true of any spell, you want to use it when you need to, and you want to conserve your MP when you don't need the spells.


It takes ages to kill popcorn with lots of running and kiting as FeSu, it would be so much more enjoyable to just cast a few summons but unfortunately wasting XP is not a good thing :(
Basically summons ARE safer even in trivial fights as HuSu because you never know if Erolcha or Orc Sorcerer will come into view and then you might have a shield from banishment/paralysis if you were not trying to save XP :(

But it's just as likely that something nasty will walk around the corner right after your summons expire and you have less MP to deal with it (in fact probably very slightly more likely, since things that walk into view probably did so in response to the combat noise you just made) I suppose you could walk around with a cloud of protective summons all the time, but even if you have such a cloud, it will likely be of the cheap variety (So you have the MP for high level summons available when you need it), so it will be relatively very low level, and not prone to doing much, if any damage, so it wouldn't be stealing any of your XP in trivial fights. (Optimally, you'd probably walk around with summon butterflies cast every so often, which would give you cover, but not steal any XP)

Summoning "extra" things during trivial fights isn't any better than summoning "extra" things when you're just walking around, in fact it's slightly worse, since the extra things you summon during trivial fights might die, and their expiration is that much closer than ones you summon afterwards, and if what you're looking for is the marginal protection provided by having a summon always on hand as a hex shield, a low MP, insignificant-damage-causing one is the most efficient one to use for that purpose, which steals a correspondingly insignificant percentage of XP from the trivial amount of XP gained from trivial fights.
Not really. Cost of ice beasts is neglectable even before Lair.
Edir. And I hate casting summons just for walking around. Lots of unfun key presses.
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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 06:25

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Patashu wrote:As further information, look at the XP requirements to level up:

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Experience

If you kill EVERYTHING with summons and don't do any direct damage yourself (and why would you do that, grab a spear and poke from behind your summons if nothing else!) then you'll be about 1 level behind.
You mean level 18 instead of 21 and 22 instead of 27, don't you?
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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 07:43

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
Patashu wrote:As further information, look at the XP requirements to level up:

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Experience

If you kill EVERYTHING with summons and don't do any direct damage yourself (and why would you do that, grab a spear and poke from behind your summons if nothing else!) then you'll be about 1 level behind.
You mean level 18 instead of 21 and 22 instead of 27, don't you?

If you're in Zot and you're still dealing 0 direct damage except for summons and everything is dying, then it hardly matters what your XL is. (But yes, it does get worse later on.)

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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 08:08

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Patashu wrote:If you're in Zot and you're still dealing 0 direct damage except for summons and everything is dying, then it hardly matters what your XL is. (But yes, it does get worse later on.)


I did play summons in the past, even FeSu, and I really felt how underleveled I was so it is not just theorizing on my part. It's unpleasant choice between playing unfun game of earning experience and actually playing a summoner.
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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 08:13

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 08:17

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

To make my point clear:

XL 19 after clearing 3 runes (Lair branches, Vaults:5, Depths, Crypt and Elf), death in Slime.

Vanquished Creatures
74 creatures vanquished.
Vanquished Creatures (collateral kills)
2952 creatures vanquished.
Vanquished Creatures (others)
2247 creatures vanquished.

Without XP penalty it might be about XL 23-24, more HP/MP, more skill points. Felids do lose XL when dying so it can be more complicated.
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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 08:52

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

I concede the point. I haven't played FeSu; it sounds awful.

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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 09:09

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

It's not about Fe also. As it turns out I have played MuSu online. XL 24 win while all my other 3 rune mummies (10 winners) had XL 27. Always the same path with silver rune, Crypt and Elf.
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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 10:43

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Hellmonk wrote:If online stats don't matter then how come your argument that summoners are weak is that it was the least won background in the tournament? Checkmate, atheists.


To clarify, I said: "stats are better so I must be a more knowledgeable player:" which means I am refuting the argument that stats guarantee the quality of knowledge of the player. That is not the same as saying that statistics do not matter at all.

The quality of the assessment goes up with more data. I would still make note of a larger sampling of data from a single player. In the case where I discuss the abysmal statistics of summoners in the tournament, I am referring to a much larger sampling of data than a single player. While this greatly increases the probability that the data was meaningful, I still merely presented it as evidence.

Your move.

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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 10:55

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

I suspect Su was the least won background (it actually wasn't, CK was won less times) just because it takes too much real time to win one and the tournament encourages playing fast games to win more games. Can some stats guru provide data on average duration of winners for every background?
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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 12:42

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Su also lends itself to a really painfully boring playstyle that could put people off playing then.

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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 17:42

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Ok since you took the time to respond to my shitpost here's my response to some of the juicy nuggets in the OP.

svendre wrote:Longblades are great:
See above ^^. Shield blocks thwart parry. I've heard in response that "parry doesn't really factor in when choosing to use longblades." To that, I say "cleaving shouldn't really factor in when choosing to use axes." Dum, dum dum dum, dumb! I won't go so far as to say they suck, use them if you find something awesome otherwise go with maces since they cross-train with axes, or just axes.

"Riposte is unimportant." "Oh yeah? What if I said [completely unrelated mechanic] was unimportant? Bet you feel like an idiot now, huh?" This is a complete non-sequitur. Riposte is a garbage mechanic that shouldn't exist and its interaction with SH is dumb, but riposte chance legitimately should not affect your skill and equipment decisions 99.9+% of the time. It "scales" too badly for that to matter.

svendre wrote:Losing XP using summons makes no difference:
This has to be one of the most boneheaded arguments I've ever heard. Particularly now with levels which don't respawn enemies, XP is most certainly a limited resource with a few exceptions (abyss & pan which come with heavy considerations.) Furthermore, as the game progresses, enemies continue becoming more difficult. The notion that receiving less XP is fine because it "saved you", allowed you to get that XP in the first place just means that your character sucked to begin with because there are certainly characters that don't need summons and/or allies in order to kill everything. Last tournament, summoners was the least won profession, it's not even very good compared with hitting something on the head much harder. Once upon a time in crawl, it was overpowered, so now today it blows in the other direction.

So the context lost xp usually comes up in is something like this. New player comes into irc and has a question about eg. Brothers in Arms. They read on the wiki that they'll only get half exp from their ally kills. Is this a trap ability? The correct response in this case is to tell them it doesn't matter, that they should use BiA when the alternative is dying, etc. But your argument taken on the whole is completely wrong anyway. The only reason you need experience is to make your character stronger; if my character is strong enough to clear zot easily at xl 22 (ie is a "pure summoner") then evidently the experience loss wasn't important! Summoners sure sound a lot stronger than a playstyle that needs to maximize every source of experience to win the game, as your characters presumably do. Could exp loss conceivably matter? Sure, if crawl generated far less experience than it does now. Until then, allies will continue to be overpowered because they provide a ton of utility (and most of them also do way too much damage).

Now let's address summoners being unpopular. My hypothesis is essentially the same as Leafsnail's; summon play is boring, tedious, has a bad interface, and most people don't like it. However, the summoner tournament wins argument doesn't prove your point even if tournament play is a good measure of playstyle strength because summoner starts aren't the only characters that use allies. You would at minimum have to include IE, Ne, and every game that went Fedhas, Beogh, or Yred, though I suspect that still wouldn't capture every character that made extensive use of allies (you'd also probably want to filter by some criterion of player skill, however you choose to define that).

svendre wrote:Faith amulets are soo awesome:
Not. I'm not going to bother to explain, just believe!

Same except for regen amulet, the most overrated amulet in the game.

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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 18:36

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

It is amazing that everyone treats the opening post as a serious one and not as a joke. How is that possible? Just take a look:

svendre wrote:Stealth is good, especially when it is cheap:
No, it isn't. More solid builds have AC. It's difficult to have AC when you dump points into DEX. Many tactics require beings surrounded by some popcorn. You'll have to spend a lot less time chasing stuff down for XP. Training it wastes XP. Daggers won't pierce heavy armour very well. Get a mace and/or axe fool.


These sentences are completely unrelated, jumping from the topic of stealth to Dex then to daggers vs heavy armour. The Dex one is especially out of place (maybe is crept in from the next paragraph? who knows). This could be Cerekov post.

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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 19:30

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Hellmonk wrote:Same except for regen amulet, the most overrated amulet in the game.

As far as this one goes, that's easy to explain: the amulet of regeneration is the best amulet in the game for o and tab. I suppose it probably isn't the best amulet if you're actually being tactically optimal, but for accumulating high AC/EV/SH so that you can tab everything, the best amulet to pair that with IS regeneration. Without those assumptions maybe there's better amulets out there, but when you're high on tabbing through life, wear regeneration.

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Post Tuesday, 27th February 2018, 23:32

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

regen amulet isn't even good "for o and tab", whatever that's suppose to actually mean. It's just a relatively weak amulet that's easily outclassed by gspirit or a moderately enchanted reflect amulet, neither of which require you to use the ability screen. It's also not difficult to pay enough attention to use your god's invocable abilities when those do a lot of extra damage or give you a big safety increase, and if you can pay that amount of attention you'll find that faith is a very strong amulet.

Making an "o-tabber" doesn't require you to pretend that god abilities hardly exist or to pretend that 0.4 H P per turn is better than effectively 20+MHP or 5 SH. Just using god abilities more frequently can raise your win rate dramatically, and outside of challenge runs, experienced players prefer to actually win games more than 4% of the time, especially when they play simpler characters.

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Post Wednesday, 28th February 2018, 02:42

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

qw is a literal bot and specifically values amulets of reflection and guardian spirit higher than it values amulets of regeneration

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Post Wednesday, 28th February 2018, 08:28

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Hellmonk wrote:So the context lost xp usually comes up in is something like this. New player comes into irc and has a question about eg. Brothers in Arms. They read on the wiki that they'll only get half exp from their ally kills. Is this a trap ability? The correct response in this case is to tell them it doesn't matter, that they should use BiA when the alternative is dying, etc.


I agree with this.
But your argument taken on the whole is completely wrong anyway. The only reason you need experience is to make your character stronger; if my character is strong enough to clear zot easily at xl 22 (ie is a "pure summoner") then evidently the experience loss wasn't important! Summoners sure sound a lot stronger than a playstyle that needs to maximize every source of experience to win the game, as your characters presumably do. Could exp loss conceivably matter? Sure, if crawl generated far less experience than it does now. Until then, allies will continue to be overpowered because they provide a ton of utility (and most of them also do way too much damage).


But not with this. You seem to miss what we are discussing here. Would you suggest to use Brothers in Arms in every fight because piety cost and XP penalty don't matter? I hope not. There is a link to a dead "pure summoner" character earlier in this thread, I suspect it might be alive if it was trying to maximize XP instead of playing in a convenient way. Evidently a character with higher HP always has higher chance to win and thus summoner is encouraged to avoid using summons unless really needed like Trog's worshiper is encouraged to avoid using BiA unless really needed. A character with XP penalty (pure summoner is the absolute example) always has a higher chance to die because no character starts at XL 27.
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Post Thursday, 1st March 2018, 17:52

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Pure summoning isn't that great because you waste a lot of turns not directly damaging enemies or waiting for your summons to kill things. If you train another skill to kill things, then summons really shine. (Pure anything isn't great anyway.... this argument hardly applies to summons).

Pure melee: bad. You should be training evocations or invocations or throwing...
Pure conjurations: bad. You should train a weapon a little bit at least for the popcorn so you don't get ambushed with no mp.
Pure longbow: good, because it's OP. maybe thwack some popcorn to preserve ammo, but you don't need to train it.

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Post Friday, 2nd March 2018, 00:33

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

gammafunk wrote: experienced players prefer to actually win games more than 4% of the time, especially when they play simpler characters.

I'd respond to the rest of your post but I'm afraid I'm going to have to wait until I get out of the hospital first after I received this SICK BURN.

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Post Friday, 2nd March 2018, 01:20

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Why are people posting in this thread?

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Post Friday, 2nd March 2018, 01:54

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

I mostly post because it's better than working. When I'm funemployed, I post a lot less. Exceptions are made for tournaments.
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Post Friday, 2nd March 2018, 02:07

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

unironically mostly agree, except stealth can be ok in the early floors if you are playing a weak race, or a naga. i used to think shields were terrible too but then I tried actually using them more and the most memed of all combinations, axes + shields, is actually pretty decent. the tricky bit is of course actually finding a broad axe...
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Post Friday, 2nd March 2018, 14:34

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

tabstorm wrote:unironically mostly agree, except stealth can be ok in the early floors if you are playing a weak race, or a naga


Well, if a weak race can put some skill points into stealth and still be fine, why can't a stronger race do the same? I mean a Mf of Oka or HO of Makhleb can be happy to avoid Erolcha or Rupert. I think it is mostly limited by body armour, not by race. Or to put it other way, you are strong if you are wearing heavy armour. Though then you don't care about stealth anyway because it does almost nothing in heavy armour
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Post Friday, 2nd March 2018, 17:38

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
tabstorm wrote:unironically mostly agree, except stealth can be ok in the early floors if you are playing a weak race, or a naga


Well, if a weak race can put some skill points into stealth and still be fine, why can't a stronger race do the same? I mean a Mf of Oka or HO of Makhleb can be happy to avoid Erolcha or Rupert. I think it is mostly limited by body armour, not by race. Or to put it other way, you are strong if you are wearing heavy armour. Though then you don't care about stealth anyway because it does almost nothing in heavy armour

I guess that's a difference between the stealth *skill* and stealth the attribute, if you can get some decent stealth while using heavy body armour, it's certainly not a bad thing at all (shadow dragon armour is actually pretty good) It's like AC vs Armour, more AC is always good, the Armour skill might or might not be worth the investment.

Maybe we should rename the skill "sneaking" or something so there's not two different things with the same name.
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Post Friday, 2nd March 2018, 23:33

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

gammafunk wrote:...to pretend that 0.4 H P per turn is better than effectively 20+MHP or 5 SH.

To respond to this more seriously - except that sometimes .4hp/turn is better than 20 hp. For one it's a disingenious comparison because while it is often the case that losing the 20 mana is fine, there are cases where you really want to have that 20 mana. You're exchanging mana for health; the regeneration amulet is creating health out of nothing, there is no trade off. And then the other half of the argument is just that after 25 turns, the .4hp/turn is larger than 20 Mana-as-health. This argument isn't entirely complete though as your future mana regeneration does generate more "health", so you'd really want to take the .4 - Mana regeneration rate to compare how much regeneration you're gaining. I do think that the .4 is higher than typical mana regen rates in most cases. For example a character with 218 health and 36 mana and no regeneration sources is currently reporting .46hp regen and .25 mana regen, so the regen amulet only adds .15 more regen than using your mana regen as hp does.

In short:
Theoretical mid game character:
Regen amulet: .4 hp turn
Guardian spirit: +20 max health, +.15 mana (health regen), if you take extensive damage, may disable mana dependent abilities.
Theoretical end game character:
Regen amulet: .4 hp turn
Guardian spirit: +40 max health, +.25 mana (health regen), if you take extensive damage, may disable mana dependent abilities.

If you really have no use for the mana I'd say guardian spirit is great, but some god abilities are stupidly expensive. For example, Cheibriados' step from time is 10 mana...Why? It's more expensive than firestorm. In Hellcrawl it costs 5 mana. So I often prefer to keep my mana and generate health directly. I will concede that when using the late game character, .4 regen - .25 mana regen means that effectively .15 regen/turn is going to take a very long time to beat out +40 hp (from mana) (~266 turns). However at that point in the late game I'm either winning or I'm doing extended, and I'd rather not have 1-3 torments immediately remove my mana pool.

That being said I find it funny that we're basically arguing over two forms of adding regeneration to your character. Yes guardian spirit does also front load some extra health pool, but they're both basically "Wear this and you'll have more hp".

There are some very clear cases where spirit is vastly better - the most famous being FeBe.

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Post Saturday, 3rd March 2018, 02:19

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

tasonir wrote:And then the other half of the argument is just that after 25 turns, the .4hp/turn is larger than 20 Mana-as-health.
And here I was thinking that 0.4 * 25 wasn't bigger than 20.

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Post Saturday, 3rd March 2018, 04:39

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

duvessa wrote:qw is a literal bot and specifically values amulets of reflection and guardian spirit higher than it values amulets of regeneration


Because that's what the bot writer wanted. qw is not the product of a machine learning algorithm

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Post Saturday, 3rd March 2018, 06:19

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

I agree with Op, crawl is all about building layered defences and shooting for your lategame solution as directly as possible. With some weak backgrounds it may be favourable to take a detour in stealth, conj, evocations or summons at early levels to increase odds of surviving until you have your defensive kit (troll leather armor + ozocubus armor + shield + dodge, OR heavy armor + shield OR statue form + shield + dodge, but from that point onwards it is best to forgo diversity and specialise in one source of damage, usually your melee attack. At this point the game starts to devolve into a boring o-tab fest. The game suffers from the fact that there is little incentive for diversifying offence . Some might say a character with 15 levels in a ranged attack and 15 in melee is stronger than one with 20 in only either one. I disagree, due to the way damage is calculated in crawl, having a single strong attack is much better than multiple mediocre ones with different niches. Different attacks will always compete in opportunity cost for the scarcest resource in the game: time units of the player character. Summons are of course an exception since they dont share that opportunity cost, which makes them a viable late game alternative to boosting a single attack. But as others said they are tedious and slow to use.
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Post Saturday, 3rd March 2018, 13:17

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

Stealth with strong meleers has a weird effect in which you are used to the enemies charging at you, but, instead, now they will keep moving around while you are trying to chop their head off with an ax, and you have to run after them and do a few attempts.
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Post Saturday, 3rd March 2018, 17:28

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

That being said I find it funny that we're basically arguing over two forms of adding regeneration to your character. Yes guardian spirit does also front load some extra health pool, but they're both basically "Wear this and you'll have more hp".


An AC+8 ring and an AC+4 ring are both "wear this and you'll have more AC", that doesn't make them equivalent. You'll just have significant effective HP boost if you wear gspirit that's a great deal higher than the effective HP you get from regen amulet.

There are some very clear cases where spirit is vastly better - the most famous being FeBe.


There are just tons of cases where gspirit is a lot better. Gspirit is good on any character with lots of MP, which is any character that trains significant levels of spellcasting, invocations, or evocations. Arguments about how chei's abilities cost a lot of MP aren't very compelling, since chei is a god that makes you weaker the turn you worship it in the first place. If you lose a ton of MP by taking massive damage you can first be grateful that you're not dead or that you have a much lower chance of dying on the next turn, since you have more HP remaining, and secondly you either have enough MP to use one of your escape abilities/spells or have another consumable that can get you to the safety you need.

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Post Saturday, 3rd March 2018, 19:53

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

I have very little experience to add to this discussion, but it has made me reconsider my reluctance to use GSpirit on character who use MP for their primary killdudes, that is, which use MP to kill thought opponents. My fear is always, if I take more damage than I thought I would, then I'm very low on MP. Obviously better threat assessment would mitigate this. Does that mean that Spirit is best for casters IFF the player has sufficient experience?
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Post Saturday, 3rd March 2018, 23:03

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
tabstorm wrote:unironically mostly agree, except stealth can be ok in the early floors if you are playing a weak race, or a naga


Well, if a weak race can put some skill points into stealth and still be fine, why can't a stronger race do the same? I mean a Mf of Oka or HO of Makhleb can be happy to avoid Erolcha or Rupert. I think it is mostly limited by body armour, not by race. Or to put it other way, you are strong if you are wearing heavy armour. Though then you don't care about stealth anyway because it does almost nothing in heavy armour

because getting noticed by one enemy may be the difference between living and dying for a weak race and especially a naga. Not so for strong races. It probably won't make much of a difference on "strong" races since they often like to wear heavy armor and forgo stealth anyway. You can go ahead and train stealth on a stronger race, you just probably won't notice the benefits.
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Post Sunday, 4th March 2018, 07:27

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

tabstorm wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:
tabstorm wrote:unironically mostly agree, except stealth can be ok in the early floors if you are playing a weak race, or a naga


Well, if a weak race can put some skill points into stealth and still be fine, why can't a stronger race do the same? I mean a Mf of Oka or HO of Makhleb can be happy to avoid Erolcha or Rupert. I think it is mostly limited by body armour, not by race. Or to put it other way, you are strong if you are wearing heavy armour. Though then you don't care about stealth anyway because it does almost nothing in heavy armour

because getting noticed by one enemy may be the difference between living and dying for a weak race and especially a naga. Not so for strong races. It probably won't make much of a difference on "strong" races since they often like to wear heavy armor and forgo stealth anyway. You can go ahead and train stealth on a stronger race, you just probably won't notice the benefits.
The same is true for strong races. With powerful character I am likely to wear MR+ ring instead of slaying and never switch, for example. Similarly I can train stealth instead of getting yet another AC or HP.
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Post Monday, 5th March 2018, 22:57

Re: Popular, but stupid notions

duvessa wrote:
tasonir wrote:And then the other half of the argument is just that after 25 turns, the .4hp/turn is larger than 20 Mana-as-health.
And here I was thinking that 0.4 * 25 wasn't bigger than 20.

Whoops. That'll be 50 turns for the regen to match the initial 20 mana-as-hp buffer, then. I think the post generally still stands though; the premise was never that regeneration catches up to guardian spirit quickly - it's always going to take a long time to catch up to all that "front-loaded" mana. Especially in the last example I mentioned it was at 266 turns to pass guardian spirit, which is basically forever in terms of crawl combat. You'd have to have a very long string of additional monsters trickling in, or just not rest to full between fights, in order to regenerate for that long without hitting 100%.

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