Is it normal...

[diviton]

To see a Tentacled Monstrosity on Swamp:5?

I've never seen one down here before, but I went down the stairs and the very first thing I see is a sleeping Tentacled Monstrosity.

[sgrunt]

Rare, but possible (they're on the Swamp spawn table and one of the rune vaults places one sometimes).

[Patashu]

Tmons don't seem to be as dangerous as I remember them being in 0.10 anyway (where constriction was just a constant stream of pain)

[Knight9910]

I'm not entirely sure, but I think they reduced the damage on Constrict because it made octopodes too good.

[tasonir]

It was more that they suddenly made nagas not suck, which was too radical a proposal, and they didn't want people to actually enjoy the slow challenge race.

Think I'm kidding? Don't believe me?

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/tourney12a/sp ... asses.html

Nagas were the second most won race in the .10 tournament, only after minotaurs. They are currently 13th in the .14 tournament, although that may shift slightly, they aren't about to suddenly become #2 now.

[Sar]

I don't think what made Nagas not suck was constriction formula, but rather getting constriction on turn 0.

[and into]

^ Yes. Also whenever a new species is added or a new feature is added to a species, people will play that species a lot. I expect you will see a lot more summoners than usual in 0.14, for instance, because the book (and thus background) was substantially changed.

[tasonir]

^ Yes. Also whenever a new species is added or a new feature is added to a species, people will play that species a lot. I expect you will see a lot more summoners than usual in 0.14, for instance, because the book (and thus background) was substantially changed.

This is not correct: summoners are unpopular in .14 tournament. It is tied for 24th, with the only less popular (in terms of won games) being Ar.

In .13 it was only more popular than VM, tied with Ne and Wr.
In .12 it was more popular than Ar, Sk, Wr.
In .11 it was considerably more popular with being tied for 13th place, with 8 total backgrounds in all being tied for 13th...
in .10 it was 9th most popular, the only tournament where it was in the upper half!

So what you see is that tournament games tend to follow a races/backgrounds percieved power, not recent changes. Summoning has been changed a lot, but with the addition of caps and monsters not fighting outside of LOS, it is percieved to be weaker, and thus it is very rarely played/won compared to .10 and .11. Most people are just trying to get wins, the top 10 or 25 players don't have as much of an impact as hundreds of fairly good players, and fairly good players pick powerful combos.

The change with nagas in .10 wasn't simply a change, but a change which made the race powerful, and thus they were played a lot and won a lot.

I don't think what made Nagas not suck was constriction formula, but rather getting constriction on turn 0.

This is correct, I didn't bother to specify which change in my above post - I think nagas should still get constriction from turn 1, and the lowered damage formula is fine (it's still good, it's just very late now and so the early game is tough).

[crate]

So what you see is that tournament games tend to follow a races/backgrounds percieved power

you mean its popularity, which is loosely connected to but not perfectly correlated with power

(example: do you really believe that ghoul is the worst race in the game? do you really think people believe that? until ghvm was chosen as a nem choice, it was the least-played race in the tournament. now it's second-least-played behind only another definitely-not-the-worst race in demigod.
Similarly healer is the least-played background and no one sane thinks healer is the weakest background in the game.)

anyway 0.10 nagas were boring imo, they're more fun now anyway

[WalkerBoh]

Nice thread hijack. Now if we can get someone in here complaining about how a summoner died to a tmons in swamp we'll have come full circle.