Snake Sneak
Posts: 124
Joined: Monday, 14th March 2011, 11:14
Triple defense hypothesis
It took me a bunch of years to realize this because Crawl used not to display skill costs so well. But it appears that if you want to use your xp efficiently, it's best not to focus on a single defensive skill (Dodging/Armour/Shields). For the purpose of this thread we'll assume the goal is to maximize AC+EV+SH (the sum).
If you focus on, say, AC and Armour skill, your AC increases slower and slower because the skill gets more and more expensive to train. If all you care about is the sum, it's better to use at least 1 more defensive skill. Then you get to benefit from a fast skill growth once more. Your defensive skills get more expensive two times slower. If you add a third skill, they start getting more expensive 50% slower (relative to 2 skills) or 3x slower (relative to a single defensive skill).
I used to focus on a single defensive skill and to dismiss hybrids as jack of all trades and not particularly good at anything. Now I started to believe that the main benefit of multi-skill defense is not the access to multiple types of defense, really, but that you can get more points before it slows down to a crawl.
A bigger issue with shields is that they limit what you can wield and can't be swapped quickly.
A problem with armour/dodging hybrid is determining the exact point and Strength requirement where you can still dodge reasonably. This gets doubly more important with Cheibriados or when you play a Demigod, because they come with significant sacrifices.
The only way to opt out of multi-skill defense is to use some magic.
The only good reason to focus on a skill if it's the only way to punch through monster AC or deal a bunch of damage in a single turn. So missile skills. Conjurations and pals. With melee you want to train until weapon min delay and then switch to Fighting.