Keeping Pace With Vehumet?

[milo]

I end up choosing Vehumet a lot, and especially when finding the altar early, I find I have a hard time keeping enough spell levels free to take advantage of his gifts. I'm really selective, but when piety is pouring in and you're at about *****., you can miss gifts even when soloing Spellcasting, because each one would potentially use another 4 or 5 levels. (?amnesia is a valid option, of course, as long as you have them.)

Even early in the Vehumet game I put way more levels into Spellcasting than I would normally (I'm usually happy with ~4, Conj get's it all just about), just for the spell levels. Vehumet is such an XP dodge that I'm sure it still amounts to huge savings, but I basically don't stop training SC until the final, permanent gifts, when I can breathe a sigh of relief.

Not proposing any changes, or even that this is bad, just wondering if anyone has similar experiences, and whether "Spellcasting > Conjurations" is really the Vehumet game.

Thanks!

EDIT: Grammar.

[e1999]

Why do you feel the need to learn everything he gifts? There are still spell books in the game. You dont need to accept every crappy spell he throws your way.

You say you're selective but I find that hard to believe. I've never had a problem with missing a spell I wanted with vehumet. What I have a problem with is him gifting shitty spells I want nothing to do with.

[milo]

You say you're selective but I find that hard to believe.

Okay. It doesn't make any difference to me whether you can believe I'm selective or not. But really, I am!

Maybe I'm alone in training SC as little as I do; in non-Vehumet games getting spell-levels is also the driving factor for me, but with Vehumet, as I say, I basically end up training SC as much as Conj.

[KoboldLord]

I generally haven't had trouble. I'll only go Vehumet if I have a good starting conjurations spellbook, so I'm looking for something that won't have redundant coverage with it. I don't really need two different AoE spells, or two different point damage spells. The range extension and mp refund is worth the price of admission anyway.

You should consider raising spellcasting more than four levels. A level of a spell skill raises spell power four times as much as a level of spellcasting, but if the spell skill is far enough ahead of spellcasting already it will cost more than four times as much xp to get that level. You don't need loads of spellcasting, but you do want to train it if it your cheapest option for improving your spells.

[Siegurt]

Usually I end up getting one mid level (5-7) spell from Vehumet's gifts, (Rarely two, I remember picking up level 5 bolt spell, because I didn't have a bolt spell available, and then getting spellforged servitor once, but I think I had to amnesia something for that) and that's about it. Typically I already have the low level spell slots taken up with something useful by the time I have access to them.

And then I usually have the final gifts sitting around for a very long time (Since they don't go away, I typically try to have them in the 'I would actually be able to cast that' range before I memorize them.)

I feel like that's about as much as you would want or expect to be able to get from Vehumet's gifts, more than that is probably just cluttering your spell list up with spells you don't need, which duplicate effects you already have.

If you aren't even able to do *that*, I suspect you might be experiencing is that you might dawdle too long on floors, or be religiously clearing every one. Vehumet gives you piety with kills, regardless of how much exp that kill gained you, so if you kill a lot of low-level creatures compared to your level, you'll gain piety faster than XP, if you dive and fight harder stuff, you'll get XP faster than piety.

[milo]

I think I just try to do too much with my characters. And I can certainly be accused of dawdling.

The above lists aren't too far off mine, and I don't do anything silly like duplicate spell-effects, but I do tend to use Veh to branch into melee earlier, while picking up spells from books along the way.

And I do like lots of spells.

[TheDefiniteArticle]

Vehumet gifts a total of around 15 spells IIRC. In a typical game, you should learn about 5 of them total. So yes, if you have any significant problems with Vehumet you are just not being remotely picky enough.

Training Spellcasting more than normal with Vehumet is totally unnecessary, and the only reason I do it is to make sure I have extra spell levels in case one of my personal favorites makes the list.

Vehumet is such an XP dodge

Vehumet is not an XP dodge at all because spellpower is a thing that matters.

[Hurkyl]

Vehumet is not an XP dodge at all because spellpower is a thing that matters.

... but matters less than simply being able to cast the spell in the first place. The point where you aren't getting significant benefits from the miscast rate is a very natural place to stop focusing on conjuration/elemental skills and work on other things for a while. (except, of course, when the "other thing" is getting the next higher level spell castable)

This is especially the case for the higher level blasts, where stepdowns dramatically reduce whatever benefit you'd get from spell power. With 30 int, the difference between getting Iron Shot castable with Vehumet versus without is something like 13% extra damage. But with LCS (which has almost as much dependence on spell power as Iron Shot) it's more like 5.5% extra damage.

[Hurkyl]

A level of a spell skill raises spell power four times as much as a level of spellcasting,

Sort of. True for single-school spells, but it's only 2x for double-school spells, and 1.66x for triple-school spells. It's more accurate to say that four points of spellcasting count as one point in all spell schools. (also, stepdowns, so beyond a certain point, 2 points of skill has less than twice the effect of 1 point of skill)

[headcrab0803]

well as a veh worshipper you need less conjurations since veh already lowers your fail rate quite a lot which means that you can invest couple of extra spellcasting levels without losing too much spell availability