The Tavern

I'm playing Minotaur of Nemelex Xobeh right now in 0.13. I have enough strength for my preferred armor right now, and I'm using a unique mace that's a lot more about stacking drain than doing damage (rpois, +9/-1, Drain, and rF or something else on it too).

I'm wondering whether my wands and decks of destruction refer to my Int stat, because if so it seems like I should level int.

Spellcasting skill only gives max MP, max number of spells known, and reduced spell hunger right? Decks seem to skip all those things, so I don't see point in that. But does specific knowledge of the school of magic matching a card affect damage at all? The learning rate sucks somewhat for Minotaur but I could learn like 2 levels in each other them to make my draw 4 nukes bigger.

No, you don't need to train spell schools or raise Int for card damage. That mace sounds like a bad weapon, by the way.

Decks use evocation and nemlex piety for power, nothing else.

What's bad about the mace? Is it really worse than a +2/+0 mace of protection? That's the best other branded mace I've found.

No morningstars or great maces?

oh, i had a great mace of protection too but i prayed it because it didn't have as much enchant on it. I didn't know they were better. The attack speed/damage/accuracy tradeoffs generally look like a wash to me.

I'm just about to fullclear orc 4 so i should be able to upgrade

"higher is better" - Bill Gates

A little lesson about weapons in crawl:

Let's take a +0 +0 great mace vs a +0 +0 mace,

Stats (by examining them):
Great mace: Accuracy -4, Damage 17, Delay: 1.7, Min delay 0.7
Mace: Accuracy +3, Damage: 8, Delay: 1.4, Min delay 0.7

If you *just* take the damage per delay (That is to say the damage done per unit time) you can already see the great mace is way ahead.

You can also see that the "Min delay" is the same, so ultimately with enough training, they will swing equally fast, with the great mace doing more than twice the damage in the same unit time.

Now you might say "But my mace is +9 accuracy" Well, here's a little secret, Typically your accuracy is around 80-95% each point of accuracy improves that by something like an additional 1%, so you can take +9 accuracy and estimate that it will let you hit a little less than 10% more often, 8 damage plus 10% is 8.8 damage, still *WAY* worse than the great mace.

A similar (but less extreme) example applies to bonuses to damage, as a very rough approximation, you can say each point of damage enchantment on a weapon is about half as valuable as a point of base damage, therefore in order to have a mace approxmate the amount of damage of a great mace, you'd need approximately +18 damage enchantment (Which can't occur normally)

Brands are another thing to consider, there are some pretty good brands out there, some are a percentage of the damage done (flame/frost/crushing/holy/dragon slaying) and those do between 25% and 75% damage on top of the base damage, for a mace that's the equivalent of +2 to +6 base damage (again as a rough approximation) there are some brands who don't rely on the damage done, and simply do a flat amount of damage done (electricity, distortion, pain) which are pretty good, electricity and distortion are roughly equal to +5 base damage (elec is slightly better), pain is roughly half your necromancy skill. And finally there's draining, which it's roughly equal to +1 and +12.5% (So in the case of your mace about +2) base damage

So yes, a +0 great mace of nothing is still way better than that mace.

This is all simplified a lot (There's a host of different ways that skill and stats interact, but for a rough approximation you can ignore those), but it's close enough to work with and relatively easy to remember

Well if you're holding that mace for the resistances and spamming decks of destruction i guess it doesn't matter

But yah pick something off the next ogre you kill.

Mace is great for use against stalkers.

the rF i remember turned out to be a -, but the mace is my only source of rPois for now so it's getting me through snake pits.

I was told that you can only reduce a weapon to 50% of the base delay. How does it actually work? Am I just supposed to know the minimums for each of fists, short sword, long sword, axe, mace, staff, bow, crossbow, sling, blowgun, polearm?

Examining a weapon will show you it's base delay, and if you're playing on trunk it shows the min delay as well. If you're playing 0.13, here's a quick guide to min delay based on the weapon's base delay.

0.7 > 0.3
1.1 > 0.5
1.2-1.3 > 0.6
1.4+ > 0.7

The only exception are cutlasses (sabres in 0.13), which have min delay 0.5 despite being 1.2 base delay.

do not use a weapon with rF-. that shit is dangerous as hell.

The rule for melee weapons is "min delay is 50% of default delay rounded down, unless that would be greater than 0.7, in which case it is 0.7. Also, sabres/cutlasses are special-cased to 0.5 mindelay."

Unarmed combat is 1.0 delay - 0.1 for each 5.4 levels of UC skill you have, plus a random amount based on your armour evasion penalty.

Ranged combat delays are a bit weirder and involve your str and dex. Look them up if you care.

That mace is barely good enough for a DEWz to limply carry around for the rPois, and even then only as a swap. Pick up any old -1/+1 orcish flail you see lying around; it'll work a lot better.

Edit: Didn't read most of the thread; ignore me and listen to Siegurt.

I killed a swamp drake, and skinned it and made armor out of it's body so I can be rid of the mace. I'm probably going to pray it away sometime when my piety is low since i expect uniques are worth a lot of piety.

I have no see-invis, is a +9 draining mace worthwhile against invisible monsters at all? I expect not since to-hit rolls aren't normalized, so it's better to make some wild fat hits and hope a couple connect then to spam weak ones.

You can just assume monster invis doesn't exist in most cases if you know how monsters move (which, in most cases, is obvious). Unseen horrors are annoying but not threatening. By the way, the mace is so much worse than a decent great mace that I would question using it even in Snake (though maybe approaching monsters wielding it and then swapping would be a good idea, if you can put up with how tedious that is).

Unseen horrors can actually be relatively threatening if you encounter them early, they can hit up to 3 times a round and do 12 damage, which a level 8-12 character might find fairly nasty (Which is about as early as I encounter them. A pre-lair unseen horror while uncommon can really ruin my day if I'm caught in the wrong part of the level, at very worst I'll probably end up TPing away) But I agree, generally sInv isn't especially useful, more convenient than important.

unseen horrors are terrifying if you are an octopode (turns out 12 damage vs 1 ac is a lot), but they're pretty tame otherwise imo

anyway a good general rule for weapons: the one you are wielding should always be for damage first, and for other things second ... there are a few situations where this is wrong but I find they are very rare and having the option to do something noticeable by hitting enemies is a good option