Stats

[stillcen]

Greetings; 'Pollard' my Centaur Hunter of CLEANliness, who follows The Trinity of Good gods; had a plan to get all 15 runes. Seeing how the skill modifiers were not so much in his favor; he leved up Bow aLOT and a pole arms to stick and scoot to survive.(maxed out now) My end game plan was to be a high end caster for big ranged damage and have a HVY sheild and my Holy +9 Trishula for meele. I have spent a good bit of time in the Abyss maxing out skills.

STR:18
INT: 13 where i put some level up stat bounuses
DEX 17 where i put most of my level up stat bounuses

With my INT that not of a caster my damage out put from spells is handicaped. I have some items that give some pluses to my INT, with the ArchMage Robe, staff of conjuration, and the spell school at 25-27 I still not doing the Damage output i want to.

The Question: If i can find two decks of Shuffling, is it worth it to try to get my Strength stat and INT switched?


stillcen

[Sandman25]

Shuffling is removed in trunk (and probably in 0.15 too, I don't remember). The only way to change stats is to worship Jiyva.

[duvessa]

Focus card still exists (I have no idea why) so you can change stats by using it, but on this character it will only decrease int of course.

[stillcen]

I am still playing 14.1 so i think the shuffle card is still there.

stillcen

[Sandman25]

It depends on your body armour so the answer is yes for robe/leather/ring and no for plate. Not sure about middle armour. You can do wizard mode tests to find spell success chance and EV.

You are in robe so yes.

[Lasty]

Sounds like a lot of work for 5 int, but if you're grinding the abyss to max skills, I suppose it's really more an aesthetic thing at this point.

[and into]

To clarify, it is damage, not success, that is the problem?

Some spells can do good damage without high spell power (though this is difficult to tell). Freezing cloud is the major common example but there are others. For most direct damage spells, though, low int will hurt your damage output pretty badly.

If you have a good longbow you already have excellent damage at range. Particularly on a centaur (fast speed) the lack of "AoE" should not be a problem.

But, since you seem to have your heart set on this, I'd say that, for the sake of your sanity, just worship Zin. Train up a bunch of invocations. Vitalization is cheap (piety wise), you seem to already be in the portion of the game where you are killing evil all day (so you can keep vitalization up any time you are casting spells), and it gives a boost to all stats based on invocations skill. That, plus some +int jewelry and a spellpower enhancer (staff of conjuration, robe of archmagi, etc.) would be enough to give your spells a decent punch.

[tasonir]

If you're at the point where you're scumming the abyss to train up magic skills on a centaur, then you should have high spell power on your spells even with low int, because you have level 20 or even 27 spell schools. That will give you good spellpower even with low int on any reasonable level 5-7 spells. What it won't do is help you successfully cast level 8/9 spells easily. But I'd reckon a character with 13 int, 27 fire, 27 conjurations could cast a pretty strong fireball/bolt of fire.

Either worship Chei or just cast level 5-6 spells is my suggestion

[stillcen]

-Lastly, it is not so much aesthetics, but getting "it" just right. Going for my first 15 rune victory, and want to maximize chance of Victory.
My only other victory was with a High Elf Air Elementalist, whose INT was 'very respectable', and Pollards is pitifull. My experience is with with Stone Soup version 12 (I think). I up graded to version 14.1 for this run, did i mention that i am resistant to change.(will someday post rant about where the hockey Sticks is my Mt. Dwarf)

Any way, if memory serves(from version 12) Higher Int's really impact spell damage, where higher strength only raises meele damage a little bit.


-And into- oh yes the vitality thing is very very niffty, but the game is cruel. The moment that i use a tiny bit of Piety there is that 1% chance that a Mutation will get thorugh Zin's protection, and it does so about 75% of the time. Zin really really really takes the bite out of the Abyss and the Hells.


enjoy

stillcen

[Sar]

Completely changing the kind of character you are playing in the midgame does not maximize your change of victory. It does the opposite, actually.

Ranged is stupidly powerful and a good bow will get you 15 runes. I also did a Zig on my CeHu^TSO when I played it just by shooting things.

[Lasty]

-Lastly, it is not so much aesthetics, but getting "it" just right. Going for my first 15 rune victory, and want to maximize chance of Victory.
My only other victory was with a High Elf Air Elementalist, whose INT was 'very respectable', and Pollards is pitifull. My experience is with with Stone Soup version 12 (I think). I up graded to version 14.1 for this run, did i mention that i am resistant to change.(will someday post rant about where the hockey Sticks is my Mt. Dwarf)

The reason I mentioned aesthetics is that +5 Int isn't a particularly large change in spellpower, but it takes a lot of effort to get in this case, and because grinding the Abyss is generally not something that overall enhances the survival of a character; if you can grind the abyss safely, you can also win safely.

Also, what Sar said. A longbow is way, way more than good enough to win a 15-rune game safely. As for the impact of strength on damage, Kramin and elliptic recently were doing some tests and found that the impact of 10 str on a great mace at 20 Fighting and 20 M&F skill is about the same as 8 slaying. Bows don't have the exact same base damage or strength weighting as a great mace, but it sounds like your bow and fighting skills are probably far higher than 20 by now, so your 5 str are probably providing the equivalent of about +3-4 slaying, which is quite a lot.

[Sar]

Also, he's playing 0.14, I think it's the version with oldranged where Str was more significant for bow damage?

[mps]

Seconding what these guys are saying. If you have a decent holy wrath weapon and good longbow with appropriate weapon skills and you're worshipping TSO or Zin, you should be able to win a 15 rune game no problem. Getting spells other than some basic staples, like haste, for instance, and the standard low level "good spells" is probably not worth it from the perspective of risk management. There's much more potential for things to go wrong farming the abyss for 20,000 turns or whatever than getting pan/hell runes with TSO or Zin and a heavily armed archery character.