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Ask fellow adventurers how to stay alive in the deep, dark, dangerous dungeon below, or share your own accumulated wisdom.
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Wahaha wrote:Scimitar is better if you're fighting something that 1. Does fire or ice damage, and maybe whatever rm+ protects against. and 2. Is not affected by pain. You can easily swap weapons when needed.
Another case where the scimitar is most likely better is if you're fighting something that does fire or ice damage and you have 0 resistance of that type.
Also note that if you mostly use spells, you might end up having the scimitar wielded most of the time in the endgame, for convenience because a lot of enemies do fire or ice damage and if you're using spells you might as well have extra resistances. And only swap to the demon blade when you want to hit something. This last advice depends on your playstyle so it's not necessarily the best way to play.
ydeve wrote:You need to decide if your weapon slot is a weapon or auxiliary armor that happens to kill popcorn.
If it's a weapon, go for the demon blade.
If it's armor, go for the scimitar.
It sounds like your weapon is conjurations, not a melee weapon, right? That scimitar looks great for popcorn killing to me. Sar and Wahaha's suggestion of using both is good as well.
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ydeve wrote:edgefigaro, can you explain how it's bad advice to use the scimitar as a resistance stick until you actually get within melee range of monsters, then swap to the demon blade?
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Hurkyl wrote:The demon blade does absolutely nothing for the character when it is blasting things with conjurations. Or when reading scrolls, quaffing potions, retreating on foot, and a myriad of other things. The scimitar does, against a number of different dangers.
The demon blade is only good when you're meleeing things. If you're not meleeing things, it's worthless. If you're only meleeing things for which being even better at melee is unimportant, then 'upgrading' to the demon blade is unimportant.
Finding the demon blade is only a 'boon' if the character is engaging in melee at times where doing good melee damage matters, or is considering transitioning to such a character, and it may well be worthwhile to consider making such a transition. However, it is a mistake to become be blinded by a shiny weapon and forget about all other concerns.
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Siegurt wrote:I think the expectation is that if you are playing a character with some necromancy and some long blades at least reasonably proficiently, you will be meleeing most things most of the time, certainly more often than the resistances will come into play.
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Hurkyl wrote:Right; and I probably wouldn't have said anything if it weren't for the fact the OP's description that the character makes 'heavy use of conjurations' which makes me think it isn't a character resembling your description.
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KoboldLord wrote:When one of the best possible equipment options for the specific character that you are currently running happens to spawn on the floor in front of you, you should go pick up that best possible equipment option and modify your plans to start using it. This isn't really an ambiguous scenario.
the good general rule of thumb that more damage is better.
The scimitar's resists are nice but nothing special, and pretending this is a serious choice only fogs up what should be a really obvious choice.
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edgefigaro wrote:Wahaha wrote:Scimitar is better if you're fighting something that 1. Does fire or ice damage, and maybe whatever rm+ protects against. and 2. Is not affected by pain. You can easily swap weapons when needed.
Another case where the scimitar is most likely better is if you're fighting something that does fire or ice damage and you have 0 resistance of that type.
Also note that if you mostly use spells, you might end up having the scimitar wielded most of the time in the endgame, for convenience because a lot of enemies do fire or ice damage and if you're using spells you might as well have extra resistances. And only swap to the demon blade when you want to hit something. This last advice depends on your playstyle so it's not necessarily the best way to play.
This is all bad advice. See duvessa's post for details.
A demon blade of pain on a char with necro trained is amazing unless you are in extended. Stop clouding the issue with talk of how that scimitar could be the rational choice.
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KoboldLord wrote:You might as well carry around the scimitar for the time being as a swap in case you get an Ice Cavern spawn or something, but eventually your inventory is going to fill up with things that are more likely to be useful.
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Utis wrote:KoboldLord wrote:You might as well carry around the scimitar for the time being as a swap in case you get an Ice Cavern spawn or something, but eventually your inventory is going to fill up with things that are more likely to be useful.
Yeah. Though, the only resistance on that scimitar that I find interesting is the +rMagic -- in case the char has low rM as a situational swap.
What's this thing with "pure blaster builds", again and again? Is this a D&D inheritance? For unrelated reasons I have been reading on build optimisation in 3.5 d20. I understand the idea of "fullfilling one's role in the party" there. But in crawl?
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Utis wrote:What's this thing with "pure blaster builds", again and again?
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edgefigaro wrote:This is DCA, the question is about weapon choice, you could have told him a staff of conjurations is a better weapon than either long blade. Instead, you are spending paragraphs defending a placeholder +rF +rC +MR weapon.
edgefigaro wrote:I daresay it is bad form to recommend building one-dimensional characters in DCA. I'm not saying it doesn't work, and you can't win crawl doing it. You are just giving poor advice to justify a playstyle which is entirely outside of the spirit of DCA.
edgefigaro wrote:If you build a one dimensional character, then blatantly non-optimal decisions become may become more attractive.
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Hurkyl wrote:Utis wrote:What's this thing with "pure blaster builds", again and again?
It's a local optimum.
Training up your ability to blast increases your pool of burst damage, and is a way to improve your ability to win short fights against dangerous enemies.
If you can train your blasting ability enough, most significant fights are over before your reservoir of burst damage has emptied.
Your ability to do sustained damage -- i.e. melee -- only comes into play in prolonged encounters, and the ability to reliably withdraw from battle becomes comparatively much more important. And you get a vicious cycle where the diminished value of melee means you buff up melee less, letting you devote more of your build towards blasting and escaping, which further diminishes the value of melee....
And in some edge cases -- e.g. efficient blasts with a strong source of channeling or things like battlesphere+magic dart over moderate timescales -- your blasting might already do more sustained damage than you could do in melee, meaning that buffing up your melee is completely worthless unless you devote a lot of resources towards getting your sustained melee damage above your sustained blasting damage.
Similarly, but not as dramatically, you get a vicious cycle with defenses.
The importance of the purity in this regard is that you have to keep ahead of the threats -- once encounters start outlasting your burst damage, sustained damage and defenses suddenly become important again. Thus, you either have to focus on staying ahead of the curve, or make a transition to a more balanced type of character.
Things are exacerbated by the way magic training works -- your blasting/escaping strength tends to come in several large jumps around when you get new spells online. In terms of training, this means you should tend to either focus training exclusively on magic to get to the next jump, or you should ignore magic training entirely while you shore up other aspects of your character.
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Utis wrote:
The problem with maximizing burst damage at the cost of foregoing significant melee options rests in the fact that this strategy strongly depends on being able to treat encounters in isolation. While a player can do a lot to this end, it is never completely reliable. After depleting one's mana resources, the next engagement might come too early. Or an encounter that on initiation was deemed safe enough might be prolonged by new opponents unexpectedly arriving on the battlefield. Or, simply, unlocky rolls might mean that the mana bar is emptied before the encounter is resolved in favour of the player. The 'pure blaster' strategy relies on the characters ability to disengage and/or avoid. A player has to disengage or avoid more often than with a mixed strategy and each time bears a small risk of something unforeseeable going wrong. Like edgefigaro said, it can be done and you can win with this. (In fact, two of my first three wins followed a strategy like this.) But it's a strategy that is deceptively simple and, when done right, appears to be quite strong most of the time, while it is actually quite risky.
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crate wrote:training some melee makes you less powerful in theory if you play perfectly but (if you use it properly) it helps prevents mistakes
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Hurkyl wrote:crate wrote:training some melee makes you less powerful in theory if you play perfectly but (if you use it properly) it helps prevents mistakes
I'm not sure I actually believe that -- trying to power through a mistake often just makes things worse when you should be looking for a way out or using your panic buttons. (unless you're secretly saying something like "train up a melee weapon so you can use might potions more effectively", which I don't think you are)
Furthermore, without a significant level of melee ability, the line between "I can handle this with magic" and "I can't handle this with magic and melee together" is very narrow, and arguably could have been covered by just being better at blasting anyways.
I have tried to follow the "use melee as a backup" advice a number of times on my blaster-oriented characters, just to see if I'm missing something. And every single time it has felt like a complete waste of skill points -- that there was essentially never a situation where I meleed something nontrivial and afterwards felt like it was a wise decision. Well, prior to late game anyways when you can get something relatively cheap -- particularly the corresponding enhancer staff -- and even then I usually feel like I've done so prematurely.
I could believe your comment if you really mean "become a hybrid character" rather than "use melee as a backup plan for your blaster-oriented character". Although I will add that even there, I usually feel like hybrids are less powerful than being either more melee/ranged-oriented or blaster-oriented -- at least through the part of the game I've played them; I tend to get bored quickly with such characters.
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crate wrote:You use melee to keep your mp high instead of using mp on killing harmless things, which reduces the chance of you getting caught with low mp. Now, if you are actually patient enough to always go restore mp on upstairs, this use of melee isn't particularly valuable. However, almost no one is that patient.
The xp investment involved in doing this is tiny (you don't even need 10 weapon skill for most characters, and through lair you can do it with like 5 in fighting and no weapon skill), so the rewards do not have to be large for it to be worthwhile.
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ydeve wrote:It doesn't take patience when you use autotravel
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ydeve wrote:I do what you're advising. But what you're advising still uses a weapon for convenience as a popcorn killer, not for dealing real damage.
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MainiacJoe wrote:Please tell me whether I've gleaned the correct things from this thread:
- A character's weapon choice depends on whether melee or magic is the method of choice for the toughest threats.
- If melee is how the toughest threats are addressed:
- Pick the weapon that deals the highest damage
- Don't be tempted by good artifact properties to use a less damaging weapon, even for swapping
- Very bad artifact properties such as -Tele or -Cast may disqualify a weapon or may be worth tolerating.
- If magic is how the toughest threats are addressed:
- The weapon becomes a mechanism whereby MP is conserved during combat in case a strong threat reveals itself after combat has been going on for a while. NB: most conjurations are loud.
- Don't be tempted by good artifact properties to use a weapon not adequate to this task.
- There's no reason to abide very bad artifact properties because adequate weapons are not rare.
- Because adequate weapons are not rare, you may have opportunity to take advantage of good artifact properties when choosing among several adequate weapons.
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nago wrote: Anyway, in most situation, most resistances doesn't matter really, so carrying or wielding a resistance stick is most often useless, albeit not directly detrimental, if you melee things with the good weapon and not that resistance stick.
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crate wrote:training some melee makes you less powerful in theory if you play perfectly but (if you use it properly) it helps prevents mistakes
crawl is almost entirely about preventing mistakes, because basically every single encounter is easy (this is a simple mathematical truth), so lowering the theoretical power of your character doesn't end up mattering much
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Utis wrote:Also, to put this "waste of xp" into perspective: If you put 10 in a weapon skill, your Bolt of Fire might need (very rough, very quick calculation) on average 2.9 castings to kill your toughest foe rather than 2.8 if you had put all that xp into your magic skills.
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Hurkyl wrote:Utis wrote:Also, to put this "waste of xp" into perspective: If you put 10 in a weapon skill, your Bolt of Fire might need (very rough, very quick calculation) on average 2.9 castings to kill your toughest foe rather than 2.8 if you had put all that xp into your magic skills.
Or, it might mean you're casting fireballs because you still have a high miscast rate on bolt of fire. Or it might mean you don't have mephitic cloud reliable enough to help with escapes. Or you have a few less max HP than you otherwise would have had.
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