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I always go +9/+9 TSO blessed weapon when I play non-evil characters. I went ghoul because im tired of the Torment spam BS in endgame and I can't use holy wrath. Aside from speed brand which is super rare, what brand should I go for?

basically whatever you'd use in a 3-rune game except not pain/vamp and not draining (but draining isn't really very good in a 3-rune game in the first place)

antimagic is one of the best brands in most of extended, in fact it is better than holy wrath against single targets

That is a really weird question to ask, and in fact one no one can answer with this kind of information since all we know about your character is you're a Gh who is not using his baby Gh claws.
Basically just use whichever weapon (weapon, not brand) you've been using until now I guess, since if it was the best for the regular dungeon it'll also perform greatly in post-end.
Unless it was vamp or pain, obviously.

e: right not draining either

Why does everyone post so fast.

duvessa wrote:basically whatever you'd use in a 3-rune game except not pain/vamp and not draining (but draining isn't really very good in a 3-rune game in the first place)

antimagic is one of the best brands in most of extended, in fact it is better than holy wrath against single targets

How is it better when Holy Wrath can so 175% more damage?

I know extended is negative/poison immunity with vamp/etc.. so if im using brand weapon scrolls that leaves:

Flaming
Freezing
Protection
Vorpal

Ill probably just stick with vorpal since protection is 8% chance, all endgame monsters have varying res

Protection is a pretty terrible brand and electrocution can be obtained from ?brand weapon.

It's better than holy wrath against single targets in the extended game because most of the threatening enemies there use nasty, nasty spells - which antimagic randomly makes them fail at using.

Vorpal is the brand of "Can't find anything better"
Protection is bad outside early game and low AC (read: non-melee) characters.
Flaming is better, but it's also the most common resistance type.

Best bet is one of the following 3:
Freezing is good against many cold-blooded creatures i.e. most of Zot.
Electricity, though only proccing at 1 in 3, guarantees at least an additional 10 - 20ish damage as very little resists electrcity
Anti-magic is best against the major late game threats i.e. OoF, where denying their spells is the best way to not die.

ElderVIII wrote:Vorpal is the brand of "Can't find anything better"
Protection is bad outside early game and low AC (read: non-melee) characters.
Flaming is better, but it's also the most common resistance type.

Best bet is one of the following 3:
Freezing is good against many cold-blooded creatures i.e. most of Zot.
Electricity, though only proccing at 1 in 3, guarantees at least an additional 10 - 20ish damage as very little resists electrcity
Anti-magic is best against the major late game threats i.e. OoF, where denying their spells is the best way to not die.

Mostly talking about Hells/Pandemonium. I see a good bit of enemies have rElect. Protection isn't that bad, there are still melee attacks being dished out when spells aren't being spammed.

AC affects (the majority) of elemental damage you are hit by.
Also what you want from your weapon is to kill things as fast as possible, so it's a pretty bad brand.
Nothing wrong with vorpal however.

If you yourself aren't casting much or otherwise using your MP for much, antimagic is the best brand in all except a few specific branches. In pan/hell/tomb it is amazing because almost everything threatening in those branches are scary due to their spells, which are greatly blocked via antimagic.

Failing that: yes, holy wrath is the next best.

Otherwise speed/electrocution/vorpal/freezing/flaming are all perfectly fine.

Ignoring XP requirements and anti-magic, the best possible weapon you could be wielding as a ghoul is your claws. At high levels, it'll out-damage any other weapon that you can reasonably expect to have generate. Of course, anti-magic is often much better than just extra damage, and XP is not something you should ignore.

I disagree, a good demon whip or dflail or dblade or whatever beats the investment>reward of Gh's baby claws.
Of course that's not to say Gh's claws aren't great (they're still just UC with 2 free extra damage after all), but they aren't incredible to the point they can be considered the absolute best even with their extremely good availability.

Well, I did expressly say ignoring XP. Its simply true that after investing an absurd amount into UC, even no-claws UC beats all other non-artifact weapons (barring, say, holy wrath vs demons and dragon-slaying vs dragons). With claws, the difference gets even larger.

Lasty wrote:Well, I did expressly say ignoring XP. Its simply true that after investing an absurd amount into UC, even no-claws UC beats all other non-artifact weapons (barring, say, holy wrath vs demons and dragon-slaying vs dragons). With claws, the difference gets even larger.

I am curious as to how much larger. I've avoided Ghouls because of the rotting food conduct but maybe I should take a few splats for a spin...

claws 1 is pretty close to 2 free levels of UC skill (and claws 3 (troll) is close to 6)

Hopeless wrote:
Lasty wrote:Well, I did expressly say ignoring XP. Its simply true that after investing an absurd amount into UC, even no-claws UC beats all other non-artifact weapons (barring, say, holy wrath vs demons and dragon-slaying vs dragons). With claws, the difference gets even larger.

I am curious as to how much larger. I've avoided Ghouls because of the rotting food conduct but maybe I should take a few splats for a spin...

The rotting is a non-issue. They can eat any chunk at any hunger level, mutated, poisonous, rotting, degeneration, doesn't matter. It's really easy to keep rotting away, even in crypt there's enough necromancers and necrophages and you can exit into vault where a single stone giant gives enough chunks to get you back to max hp. Extended used to be a bit different but you should have at least 50 of various meat, cheese, sausage, and pizza rations in the dungeon for hells and now pan has Ds so there's actually chunks there.

Another question is what God should I use for my ghoul? I been using okawaru, but my main stats are 27 only leaving finesse useful. I was going to drop him for jiyva to have item protection, but I killed TRJ

Finesse is fine for Gh in extended IMHO, you don't need rMut from Zin/Jiyva/Nemelex, torment protection form Kiku and cannot worship TSO anyway. Not sure why you got main skills to 27, you could train spells Haste/cBlink etc with that XP.

Mak for hp on kills is good so you can keep moving without resting. Nemelex might be helpful also and you'd get full piety extremely tediously but quickly, but decks are a lot more abuseable before extended for a gh.

Sandman25 wrote:Finesse is fine for Gh in extended IMHO, you don't need rMut from Zin/Jiyva/Nemelex, torment protection form Kiku and cannot worship TSO anyway. Not sure why you got main skills to 27, you could train spells Haste/cBlink etc with that XP.

None are available.

Personally, I would go ashenzari for the sake of getting support magic online quicker, since extended is likely to gift you important tools like cBlink(or even just control teleport + regular blink). Support magic is pretty important for extended in my experience.

Tiktacy wrote:Personally, I would go ashenzari for the sake of getting support magic online quicker, since extended is likely to gift you important tools like cBlink(or even just control teleport + regular blink). Support magic is pretty important for extended in my experience.

At the very least, Haste is near-mandatory for extended(provided the dungeon is kind enough to provide it, of course.) Some close runners-up:

cBlink: Goes without saying. Being able to reliably dodge packs of scary monsters or ninja runes makes this invaluable.
cTele: Same as above, but much more likely to actually generate in my experience.
Regeneration: While below Haste in the conventional wisdom, I personally rate this spell on nearly the same level. Seriously, Regeneration will save your ass in extended - the less time you spend in Hell, the better.
Deflect Missiles: Much more distant than the others, but Deflect can also protect you from nasty beam spells - handy if you like being un-roasted/frozen/drained.

Regeneration: While below Haste in the conventional wisdom, I personally rate this spell on nearly the same level. Seriously, Regeneration will save your ass in extended - the less time you spend in Hell, the better.

I've never had much problems with just =regeneration (and Makhleb/TSO and no regeneration source has also been fine. Trog's Hand is also enough).

cerebovssquire wrote:
Regeneration: While below Haste in the conventional wisdom, I personally rate this spell on nearly the same level. Seriously, Regeneration will save your ass in extended - the less time you spend in Hell, the better.

I've never had much problems with just =regeneration (and Makhleb/TSO and no regeneration source has also been fine. Trog's Hand is also enough).

Like with all things, I suppose it depends on what the dungeon ends up giving you. The spell is much more potent than either the ring or Trog's Hand, so I prefer to use it when it does show up, which is frequently enough given it's a fairly common low-level spell.

Regen spell is exactly the same regen amount as Trog's hand.

crate wrote:Regen spell is exactly the same regen amount as Trog's hand.

Oh, it is? Huh, I could have sworn I read that it was more. Learn something new every day, I suppose

https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=7616

My current LoFi has been using a Vampiric Bastardsword +5 since lair. I got 16 LB skill and am using a shield of resistance (I also got the Gong

). I am planning on going extended, but am a bit worried about my weapon. I got a +4 +5 demon blade of venom, that I tried to re-brand twice, first was drain, then venom. I also got +2 +3 demon blade of flaming and a blessed long sword that I got from Mennas. The biggest question is, what should I use my scrolls of enchant weapon on? Should I perhaps save them and wait for a better branded demon blade? I like vampiric but I would like to be able to switch between weapons, since I got the Hellfire in my stash...

Well, most things that can't be vampired can't be venomed, so those two brands are near-equivalent in extended, and demon blades and bastard swords are almost identical (except demon blades need less exp to get to min delay) in terms of damage-per-time (demon blades take slightly more advantage of slaying and bastard swords are slightly less effected by critter's AC, but the difference between the two isn't noticable)

So if you want a weapon to swap out with your crossbow without chewing up some extra food and having to answer 'yes' every time you unwield it, then go ahead and use the venom demon blade, it's not like it's going to be any *worse* than the bastard sword against a demon or undead, of course ghoul's mad chunk eating skills probably make the vampiric hunger cost mostly meaningless for swapping anyway. (So you could just continue on with your vampiric bastard sword and swap when you felt like it, and just eat a some more chunks)

@MrRokkomies:

Don't use Gong. Also when you have shield of resistance, that is the shield you should be using if you are using shields, so basically ("Don't use Gong")^2.

Where are you right now? Because these are the branches in which a good vampiric weapon is incredibly good (the best brand,* in fact):

Dungeon
Lair
Orc
Swamp/Shoals
Snake/Spider
Vaults
Depths
Slime
Elf
Zot

[* Some characters want to switch weapons a lot, but a good vampiric weapon (like a bastard sword) is easily good enough to make me forgo rods and ranged combat, assuming I don't already have a ton of experience invested in evocations or longbows or whatever.]

Use the demon blade of flaming everywhere else and put all further enchant weapon scrolls into that, unless, like, a bastard sword of holy wrath drops.

I only have zot and extended left. I found Autumn katana from slime, so that solved my weapon problem for pan, hells and abyss.

I just noticed that you cant use a shield with a crossbow in trunk anymore, which kinda makes using Hellfire pointless. The Vampiric bastardsword stays with me and Autumn will take care of all others, unless i find an antimagic or holy weapon.

You never should have used a shield and crossbow - as far as I know it's still allowed, but if they disabled it isn't much difference. A shield will slow your rate of fire on the crossbow by 100% (buckler 50%, large shield 150%). It's bad. Shield skill can cut that in half but not remove it and you really don't want to be slowed at all.

Only ranged weapon you can use with shields are slings, and throwing if you count that.

tasonir wrote:You never should have used a shield and crossbow - as far as I know it's still allowed, but if they disabled it isn't much difference. A shield will slow your rate of fire on the crossbow by 100% (buckler 50%, large shield 150%). It's bad. Shield skill can cut that in half but not remove it and you really don't want to be slowed at all.

Only ranged weapon you can use with shields are slings, and throwing if you count that.

I think the idea is that he was wielding Hellfire for the resistances.

I have not used Hellfire at all, since I had Vampiric Bastar sword in use. I was hoping I could use Hellfire in extended for occasional ranged needs. I still could ditch my shield, if I found a good claymore, but for now I will resort to throwing. A Lava Orc in GDA doesn't need Hellfire for resistances.

In trunk, if you try to equip crossbow with shield, it says you can't use that with a shield. I think it is only appropriate that they did it. I just don't like it happening right when I happen to find both a good crossbow and a good shield. They should add a Hand Crossbow that would be single handed...

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