The Tavern

Apparently developers hate stabbers with passion. Every second version nerfs them directly or indirectly. 0.21 generates awake monsters. What is next? Perhaps stealth and stabbing need some love?

It's not really that much of a nerf - wandering monsters generated awake, too. Stealth and stabbing was never a reliable plan as your only way to kill stuff.

That said, stealth gets a bad rap. Even if you never stab anything, it's very, very useful. It can turn pillar dancing into a free escape when they forget you're around a corner. It lets you effectively position such that you only fight one thing at a time. It lets you engage dangerous enemies on your terms, not theirs. It's on the same level as poison magic or evocations, in my mind. It can't be your only skill to deal with enemies, but it's a solid option for lots of characters to deal with lots of threats.

Also, DCSS isn't really a "stealth game." Buffing stealth directly to the point where it WAS viable to kill everything in the game would likely make the game either boring or needlessly complex. The current "on or off" stealth system isn't very strategically complex - getting next to a sleeping monster means it's dead. Now, if there's a system (new god? New species? New spells?) that can give you tactical bonuses to stealth without making it "lol, everything's asleep," I'd be happy to hear it, but just buffing stealth directly seems like a bad idea.

I'm having trouble thinking of any stabber nerfs in recent versions, aside from reducing the availability of invisibility. Is that all, or was there something else you were thinking of?

Also there was a recent shadow step upgrade (not a big deal in terms of stabbing, but a slight improvement)

#StabbersWereNeverGreat

they were never good, you probably just played spriggan. having a movespeed bonus makes a stealth-based playstyle seem a lot better than it is for normal races.

Spell augmented stabbing is pretty good imo, at least in the short game.

Ensorcelled Hibernation can work wonderfully in Depths, and somewhat in Zot. I dunno about extended.

Mephitic Cloud and Confuse or Confusing Touch are also quite strong if you have the aptitude/books to learn them early enough.

Later on, you might want more regular weapons or bigger spells/blades to supplement. But by then, you can probably find or afford some, and get xp to train them.

(PS Not complaining!)

I vaguely recall back when hilldwarves existed stabbers were good. Passwall onto sleeping enemy worked even in extended. There were less impassible walls. Less noise. More invisibility. After you leave the floor for long time monsters could go back to sleep. With no separation between depths and dungeon you could dive deep to hunt sleeping monsters, now you must manfight your way to depths.

Hill Dwarves were removed in 0.3, apparently. You really want to go back that far?

It works now too. It's true that there are more impassable walls now but I'm not convinced that makes a difference.
This is definitely not true. The impact of noise was greatly reduced in 0.8 when walls started reducing noise, in pretty much all practical situations - as the commit says, noises are now louder on extremely open levels but very few levels are that open (and stealth was awful on those levels in the first place anyway).
I suppose Lair, Zot, and Snake have gotten more open though - not open enough that the impact of noise is higher than it was in <0.8 versions, but open enough to make stealth itself worse.
Crypt and Tomb are the exceptions of course, since noise is effectively way louder there now, but that's two branches, one of which doesn't get visited in normal games.
Oh yeah, forgot this was removed. Fair point.
I'm not seeing how the separation matters here. Just the fact that there's a single staircase instead of 3? (Also, this wouldn't have been a good strategy even in 0.3.)

I wonder if these changes affect certain sprints more heavily than one would expect. So there is the one with the invisibility cloak, I wonder how it was meant to be played.

Everything sucks in crawl except for heavy armor brutes. Preferably with shields so that EV is unnecessary. Luckily at least 70% of starts can be played this way.

No it doesn't. But it's offtopic here. Then again, this is CYC.

Stabbers to me always seem pretty easy early on, but then stabbing stops working well enough to cover large swarms of mid/late game monsters, and you've got all this experience stuck in skills that aren't good enough alone anymore. You try to transition to something else, but something else is horribly under leveled and then you die.

I realize this is more of a personal experience (although probably shared by some/many) than a universal truth, and it certainly can work...but I never really felt the urge to go too heavy on stabbers. I consider Yermak to be superhuman

I have noticed that pivoting with stabbers can be difficult. One thing I've found to help me is to take advantage of cross training with long blades- which are the better weapon for longer fights. Stabbers tend to be more EV focused since heavy armor hurts stealth score, which coincidentally pairs well with long blade's riposte for free attacks. Long blade's higher base damage also helps when you need to fight something head on and get damage through mid game. The trick is to train small blades part of the way, maybe level 8 or so, then pivot to long blades, and the x training will get short blades to min delay with your long blades at a useable level by the time you need them mid game.

The other thing that tends to plague me with stabbers is that I often forget to take advantage of all my options. Its easy to get into a rut where you go from stab stab stab to a prolonged fight relying on your short blade + dodging- which doesn't work great vs really fast accurate enemies or those with excessive amounts of AC. Remembering to dive into your toolbox with evocables, blowguns, etc can make a huge difference in fighting effectively against mid game mobs.

How late are we talking about pivoting here, I find that hexes are good enough tool through at least vaults, here's what my skills/actions looked like in a recent OpEn game through vaults:4:


For reference here's the spells and equipment I was using at the time:


I used Wu Jian and pretty much chewed through everything in sight, mostly with a +1 venom dagger.

As you can see I've just started to pivot towards long blades, and I've gotten enough points to get fireball working, but it's not something I need to rely on yet.