Playing a Caster?

[snow]

I've gotten pretty far with melee characters but can't seem to get very far with a caster. Has anyone ever won with one? Can you give me some advice? I know what I'm asking is vague but I've seriously haven't gotten far at all with them at all. From hunger issues, running out of MP, to spamming an enemy with a thousand harmless spells before giving up and hitting it with my short sword... I just can't figure them out.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Casters can be a little tricky to get the hang of, but they're quite good once you know how to use them. For learning a straight up caster, I'd recommend a Venom Mage to start with, perhaps Kobold, Spriggan, or Deep Elf. Poison magic isn't the strongest past the mid-game, but it rocks in the early game, especially if you use and abuse Mephitic Cloud. Venom Mages will most likely branch out into other magic schools later (Air seems a natural direction), but Poison Arrow spammers are quite effective, I hear. Other backgrounds can do quite well at the start, especially those with a good utility spell in their starting book, but my Venom Mages are the ones who seem to consistently make Lair more often than my other casters.

You may also want to try a hybrid. Transmuters, particularly Sludge Elves and Merfolk, make for great hybrids as they can toss spells around while transforming themselves and wrecking stuff in melee using unarmed combat. They also get Evaporate, which lets them throw potions with different effects. Potions of Confusion and Potions of Poison are very effective early on.

For more general advice, you want to try to get your spells to Excellent. Although those you don't use regularly can perhaps be fine at Great and maybe Very Good, but Excellent is strongly preferable. You can do this by boosting the school the spell uses and by boosting Spellcasting. Spellcasting is very important since it makes your magic easier to cast, cost less food, grants you spell slots, and gives you more mana. Intelligence is also important for reduced spell hunger and helping with spell success.

For gods, Sif Muna and Vehumet are your most straight-forward caster gods. The former just wants you to train spells and throws books at you in return, eventually giving you access to everything, as well as giving to Selective Amnesia and mana channeling. Vehumet gives you specific conjuration and summoning books, likes it when you kill stuff, boosts conjuration range, and gives you mana when you kill stuff. Kiku is a less magic-specific god, but Kiku does gift necromancy books, so it's great if you want that route. Kiku also does torment protection, corpse delivery, and will let you torment stuff, even if undead. Other gods provide various amounts of utility that can benefit spellcasters, though you'll want to avoid Trog completely and, if you want to do any summoning, don't follow any god who doesn't like allies getting killed, such as Okawarau or The Shining One.

[hxy]

It's a bit about play style as well. You need to be careful to not end up in a crowd, need to rest often to recover MP, and generally a little more cautious than melee players.

[Sprinter]

Guess its just a matter of playstyle some people prefer pure caster over melee. Personaly im not too cautious so prefer chars with 100+ hp which most of casters tend not to have. My best caster got to dungeon lvl 27 but that was when divinations schools existed detect monsters spell is what i miss for pure casters.

[Tiber]

It might help a bit more to tell us what type of caster you've been using, as well as what spells.

[joellercoaster]

Right.

Crawl being Crawl, there are a variety of ways to play casters... generally though, if you're playing a pure caster and not a hybrid, working out how to manage spell hunger and MP takes a little bit of practice. Broadly, you can't just blast everything you meet with your biggest cannon, and you might want to spend some time working on Spellcasting (giving you more MP and less spell hunger) rather than just skilling up your specialty from the get-go.

Generally casters are harder to get off the ground (there are exceptions).

Like Tiber said though, let people know what you're trying and struggling with, no doubt there will be someone on here who's won that combo and can give you the low-down

[Dustbin]

I struggle horribley with most pure casters too, but only after the earlygame, always end up getting near one-shot and dying in rune branches by a big uniques spell , yaktaur zinger in the face or I will miscast at some important moment and doom myself. Only spellcaster I've ascended was a transmuter, who really only did enough spellcasting to cast bladehands and buffs then hit things till they stopped moving!

If you're having trouble early on with MP and hunger it might be because you're casting offensive spells that are too high level, before Lair I usually try to just stick to my level 1 spell which is pretty adequite for at least 50% of the enemies you'll meet before lair on most casters I think, a level 2 throwX spell if my class has it and meph or evap if I have it for groups. Anything other than that I usually only cast on uniques or things that I need dead really quick.

[snow]

I just cleared the mines with a caster.

Thanks for all the help. Once you figure them out they're not that bad.