The Tavern

Hey everyone,

Anyone remeber the previous best/worst tier poll by Duvessa? Time for a new one!

Here I give you a poll to place spells into top and bottom tier, Split for pure casters/mages(that mainly use damage spells to kill monsters and have training in the damage spell schools) and everyone else, since some spells can be very different usefulness based on that.

Here is the poll: https://forms.gle/o4uWxufDiZpDKzyG7

It's a bit lengthy(7-15min), but I think some nice data can be collected this way.

You can choose up to 3 top and bottom tier spells for the average character and the caster per level. No need to fill in all 3 if you can't think of any spells, and you can just skip the tiers you don't know at all.

matching reddit thread, with some more discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/ ... tier_poll/

I don't find this poll meaningful at all: what's the reason to divide between "direct spell damage dealing mages" and "every one else"?
For the first group the trained X-level school damage spell will be always the best. For the latter, the best X-level "utility" spell will be always the best - except with "assume no significant training in any spell schools" they won't cast anything past 1\2 level.

I can't see a way to compare anything with a poll structured in this way.

I guess my intention wasn't clear. It's meant to ask what spell from each tier you would most likely train for, meaning that the spell would provide the most power/utility to the character. On damage spells always being the best, wouldn't you say that even though you haven't trained for blink its still one of the best spells you can get on tier 2, even if you do direct damage which spells and have the element schools trained? another example could be summon lightning spire, very useful even for blaster casters.

I think by "assume no significant training" they mean no existing training. So they ask which spell would you train for. The requirement just tries to abstract aways from the fact that the best spell to train for depends on existing training. It is not meant to be a realistic scenario, just an attempt to compare spells from different schools across a variety of characters.

it feels weird to divide it like this and also include summoning spells(and animate dead) because if you start training summoning spells as a blasty caster it will pretty quickly become a major part, if not the biggest part, of how you do damage instead of direct damage spells

e: am I really the only person who thinks infusion is a great spell for an "average" character?

so i know i'm bumpin up an ol post from back in the ancient days of may, three centuries ago at this point, but let me just say, something that i found interesting was how completely undifferent the spells that are best for "dedicated murder mages" and "every other kind of person" are