How good is Majangs Caster walk through?

[CypherZel]

I'm new to playing this game to win and I'm just wondering if I should follow this guide fully or are there problems


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[Sar]

It's bad. Most wiki guides are bad. Play the game and ask for advices on the forums!

[goodcoolguy]

Wow, that guide is hilariously bad. Unfortunately, tavern advice tends to be confused and argumentative. I suggest you find a public crawl server near you that has a reasonable number of spectators so you can talk to people in a responsive, relatively private setting about the game and watch some people with more experience play. If you're willing to listen and learn, there's really no substitute. Make learndb your go to source of information and wiki an occasional supplement for numerical information, understanding that it is often out of date.

[Arrhythmia]

An unidentified specimen could be an amulet of faith, and you don’t want to have those.

Once you have learned a fire-spell, start training fire magic right away. [context: this is a guide for GrEE]

Don’t ever teleport on [Zot:5]

This guide is terrible, wow.

[CypherZel]

;_; already on dungeon 9 and I followed the XP and spell guidelines. I feel like I have the gist of the game but I'm just confused of how long I should be specialising for, and what skills I should be going into when not specialising, the wiki doesn't help with this at all


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[hopelessDelvder]

Majang's walkthrough for casters is highly specific, a GrEE who worships Vehumet and sticks to Fire and Earth spells. In that context, you do want to train Fire Magic right away and stick with it, because you are selling out to getting Firestorm or Shatter castable. It's debatable as to whether you want to put on an amulet of faith after you pick up Vehumet, you really can't do a lot of amulet switching if you do it.

That walkthrough helped me by giving practical advice on when to broaden out and start training defensive skills. It's a straight up blaster gargoyle guide and it tells you to avoid numerous very useful spells -- but most of that is to reserve space for Vehumet's gifts. I think goodplayers will laugh at most guides, but it's sort of like how a native speaker of a language would laugh at a 1st year textbook for someone learning it as a second language. The idea is really to keep you focused and on track with skills and spells to start getting to branches and on-track with the ability to do enough damage to survive there.

[MainiacJoe]

FWIW the GrEE in my signature was my second win from following this guide. I had both Fire Storm and Shatter for a 3-rune game and was using a staff of earth for melee, but I won!!!

[Hellmonk]

Majang's walkthrough for casters is highly specific, a GrEE who worships Vehumet and sticks to Fire and Earth spells. In that context, you do want to train Fire Magic right away and stick with it, because you are selling out to getting Firestorm or Shatter castable. It's debatable as to whether you want to put on an amulet of faith after you pick up Vehumet, you really can't do a lot of amulet switching if you do it.

The thing is, most of its strategic advice is questionable or flat out wrong even in the context of playing a 3 rune shatter/firestorm gargoyle of vehumet. It recommends training something like 8 skills at once in the midgame, which I'm fairly certain is worse than automatic skilling, among other things. It also gives very bad tactical advice as others have pointed out.

[stickyfingers]

GrEE is easy, that's why you can win with bad strategy. Aiming for fire storm on Gr in 3-rune game is nuts. Even shatter is questionable, even under Vehumet. And giving up useful spells to reserve space for Veh gifts is terrible.

[Rast]

Gr is one of the easiest species, even if played sub optimally.

Crawl is strategically very forgiving past Lair.

[hopelessDelvder]

And giving up useful spells to reserve space for Veh gifts is terrible.

It's not terrible if you don't know how to properly use those other spells. It's not terrible if you are playing through a strategy specifically designed to capitalize on Veh's gifts. It's a tactic that would be "terrible" in the general use case, but we aren't talking about a guide for the comprehensive mastery of all DCSS use cases.

Unlike most other guides, there are numerous examples available online of Majang's guide fostering better outcomes and wins for many Crawl players. I suppose that might be an accident because a pure Gr blaster is OP or whatever, but the specific advice about when to branch out your skills (even if you don't train dodging, fighting, 1H ,evoc at the same time) is something I haven't really gotten specific advice on, and vexed me for years. Because, this guide is so focused on a narow range of spells, the advice as to when to broaden out 'when Sandblast reaches ####'

I don't know why I'm bothering defending the wiki. Oh, wait, yes I do. Piecemeal critiques of isolated sentences from actors who are not part of the use case the guide is intended for is a bit silly. We know what outcome a guide is supposed to produce; go use it and see if you don't get the desired outcome. If you do, I suggest it is a usable and effective guide.

[and into]

It's like over 20,000 words. Not going to read it thoroughly and do a point-by-point analysis, but from a quick skim, it is a mix of some good and quite a lot of bad advice, both of which are mixed up together and buried under a deluge of information that is not really necessary, with some misleading or just flat out incorrect stuff thrown in.

More information is not necessarily better, especially if it means the really important things get drowned out. E.g., Majang recommends training defensive skills like dodging (good), but when the word "dodging" appears 5 times in 20,000+ words, is that lesson actually going to stick?

A much shorter guide with some recommended EV/AC totals for different parts of the game is going to be hell of a lot more useful to new players than thousands of words devoted to handholding players about when to cut on or off skills, etc., which may sound scientific and exact, but simply reflects how the author of the guide just happened to play the game. Notices about dangerous enemies in each branch is helpful for new players, but most sections of this guide have a pretty bad signal-to-noise ratio. The fact that some people do OK despite having read the guide doesn't mean it is a good guide.

[stickyfingers]

It's not terrible if you don't know how to properly use those other spells.

It would be better to learn that than to throw dozens of playthroughs at the bad strategy in search for a lucky one.

It's not terrible if you are playing through a strategy specifically designed to capitalize on Veh's gifts.

It's terrible if you're playing through a strategy specifically designed to be terrible

Spoiler: show

Sorry, couldn't resist.

I don't know why I'm bothering defending the wiki.

I thought we're talking about this particular guide, not the wiki as a whole. Not all of the guides there are as bad.

[robbcorp]

I've glanced at the guide.

Didn't really care for it. Guides are annoying for this game because nothing fits into the mold. It's like spending the whole time pushing a square peg into a round hole. Even worse is people bring up the guide as justification for actions when there are CLEARLY better ones within the game.

[ydeve]

Any guide that recommends players to pursue lvl 9 spells (in different schools???) in a 3-rune game is pretty terrible. That's not capitalizing on a playstyle, it's just plain giving bad advice. That xp is better spent on defenses. A caster playing as a blaster mage will have greater success with solid defense than they will with lvl 9 spells.

[Arrhythmia]

"Don't Teleport on Z:5" is like, literally the opposite of good advice. That's the best way to do Z:5.

[ydeve]

Ninjaing the orb is likely to be hard for a newbie.

[Magipi]

"Don't Teleport on Z:5" is like, literally the opposite of good advice. That's the best way to do Z:5.

Okay, I've just checked, and this is not CYC. So this comment is pretty hard to expain.

Ninjaing the orb is certainly entertaining for the spectators, but that is because you have an overwhelming chance to get into deep shit.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

A number of good players seem to think tele-ninja is safer than clearing a path to the orb. They are better than me so I don't want to argue against it.

I guess I'll settle for: I don't see how randomly teleporting on Z:5 is better than careful pulling / 1v1 fighting close to stairs. By all means tele if something bad happens until the situation improves. Can someone explain?

[BabyRage]

I never risk teleporting in zot 5, neither before nor after picking the orb.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I don't think that's good. There are clearly situations where teleporting is good. Imagine you've cleared Z:5, picked up the orb and a very fast panlord with glaciate showed up. Tele is a good answer to that.

[stickyfingers]

It depends. If you're strong enough to repeatedly melee orbs of fire and ancient liches, then the probability of getting into shit deep enough to kill you is very slim (and is faster, which is attractive characteristic when you've "already finished the game"). Characters that are weak, with particularly limited haste or slow ones will have much better success rates when just teleporting and not fighting what they can't handle safely in controlled conditions.

Oh, and regarding the fact that the good players often prefer it, it's just that they more often are less prepared for Zot than the newer players, because they know how to handle stuff there and don't bother with Elf/Crypt/Slime etc., thus falling into that second category.

[BabyRage]

I don't think that's good. There are clearly situations where teleporting is good. Imagine you've cleared Z:5, picked up the orb and a very fast panlord with glaciate showed up. Tele is a good answer to that.

In that case — of course. But I usually clear only 1 half of the "orb room" and don't bother with another one.

[arandomperson12]

In all of my (few) wins, I have cleared all of Zot 5, including with a SpEn.

[Shard1697]

Once you realize you really don't have to it just makes things easier.

[Hands]

I think slow, methodical killdudzing is the safest strategy for most characters for most of the 3-rune game. At any rate I don't see how it's possible for any other approach to be strictly safer.

[Shard1697]

FWIW I do still mean slow, methodical killdudzing, I just mean you truly can just... not go into one of the lungs, and it's totally fine, and saves you consumables and hassle.

[dowan]

Usually I try to clear one lung, and if at any time during zot 5 either stuff gets ugly and I teleport near the orb, or stuff gets ugly when I'm already fairly near the orb, I use scrolls of blinking to get myself to the orb, read tele, if I land somewhere decent walk out of Z5, if not, try again.

Sometimes you just don't want to or think you can't fight the stuff in the lungs, and lots of teleporting, especially if you have some blink scrolls to back it up, really can make things a lot easier. But I would certainly not recommend it as the best way to do Zot 5!