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Fighter Reasons:

Pros:

Only background to start with a Shield and Shields skill.
Only background to start with scale mail and good Armour skill.
STR and DEX attribute adjustments are tailored for melee (though Gl and Be also have this).

Cons:

The good weapon drops in the upper dungeon are mostly two-handed: gnolls dropping halberds, orc warriors dropping dire flails, ogres dropping GSC. The shield-equipped brawler needs to hope for branded SBl or whips, and only the latter results in useful XP expenditure for later-game weapon choices.
The initial Shields skill does not compensate for the size of shield given, leaving the player with three bad choices:
1. Use the shield without training it further and accept an EV penalty.
2. Train the shield, risking wasted early-game XP if RNG gives a good two-handed weapon (likely).
3. Not use the shield to avoid the EV penalty and retain weapon flexibility, wasting background XP instead.

There's a difference between, "Fighters suck!" and, "I can't see how Fighters don't suck." Please help me find it. All I'm seeing right now is that the shield is more of a handicap than a benefit and I ought always go Gl.

Fighter weapons: (rapier, flail, war axe, trident, longsword)
Gladiator weapons: (rapier, flail, war axe, trident, longsword or quarterstaff)

Quarterstaff is a good weapon, but otherwise it's the same.

Berserker: (short sword, mace, hand axe, falchion, or spear)

Much worse.

Skills, Fighter/Gladiator:

Code:: Fighting: 3/2 Chosen Weapon's Skill: 2/3 Armour: 3/0 Dodging: 0/3 Shields: 3/0 Throwing: 0/2

So if you're running for a heavy armour build, you're probably better off starting fighter and dropping the shield whenever it's convenient.

For starting items you have potion of might vs throwing nets. It's hard to really say one is better than the other. The shield provides more early-game survivability than it removes. The scale mail is better early than the leather for most races.

It's pretty even.

I tend to prefere gladiator over fighter because the quarterstaff is amazing and because I tend to ditch the shield pretty soon anyway. Gladiators also start with a helmet. If you take even a single point in dex as a fighter you could have had the same stats by starting as a gladiator ( the reverse is true if you take even a single point in str as a gladiator). The armour issue isn't normally that big because ring mail will generally be better than scale early as scale has about twice the actual encumbrance for one more point of AC than ring mail, and ring mail is very common.

byrel wrote:Fighter weapons: (rapier, flail, war axe, trident, longsword)
Gladiator weapons: (rapier, flail, war axe, trident, longsword or quarterstaff)

Quarterstaff is a good weapon, but otherwise it's the same.

Berserker: (short sword, mace, hand axe, falchion, or spear)

Much worse.

thanks for catching that, I'll edit the OP.

Note that even without further training, at the beginning on the game the shield bonus is larger than the ev penalty in terms of prevention of damage, and plenty of flails, morningstars, long swords and scimitars drop, admittedly scimitars and morningstars are not quite as common as halberds, but I would personally never play a one handed polearm user (since there is no one handed upgrade to a trident other than a demon weapon)

I do agree that it is unfortunate that regular sized fighters have to invest a whole lot of xp before removing the penalty for a regular shield (personally, I would just move that penalty elimination point down by 50% or so across the board on shields, you are already giving up a second hand, why make things more horrible while you are training it up)

Fighters are mostly good for lengthening a streak of won games without having to resort to a difficult background. This is only relevant for long streaks, since there are plenty of redundant backgrounds with or without using fighter. They are mostly indistinguishable from gladiator; the starting skill differences are mostly just trace amounts of noise even on D1 and D2.

You should not worry about eliminating the shield penalty early, regardless of whether you plan to use shields for the long term.

Troll fighters in particular are pretty good because you almost certainly want to end up with a shield, and starting with one is nice. Probably not as useful as a berserker kit, but assuming you aren't interested in trog, it's a solid choice.

The main penalty for having an underskilled shield (especially one larger than a buckler) is bad spellcasting. That doesn't matter to a d:1 fighter. The -EV and -Accuracy are not a huge issue, take care of them later on when you have the time.

Should this be in Dungeon Crawling Advice?

Sounds good to me, wheals.

Thanks guys this has been helpful.

Shield penalty includes attack speed

Gladiators
-are statwise identical to Fighters essentially
-dont push you into shields from the start
-have a better initial skill distribution. tho this isnt important in the end, it does help on D1 (dodging instead of shields, throwing)
-can easily survive until they find some heavier armour which often happens in the first three floors
-START WITH A HELMET
-START WITH SOME NETS

I wouldn't pick Fi over Gl unless I was playing a species where I was absolutely sure I would be using a shield, and even then... shields are pretty common.

Berserkers
-START WITH TROG

daggaz wrote:Gladiators
-are statwise identical to Fighters essentially
-dont push you into shields from the start
-have a better initial skill distribution. tho this isnt important in the end, it does help on D1 (dodging instead of shields, throwing)
-can easily survive until they find some heavier armour which often happens in the first three floors
-START WITH A HELMET
-START WITH SOME NETS

I wouldn't pick Fi over Gl unless I was playing a species where I was absolutely sure I would be using a shield, and even then... shields are pretty common.

Berserkers
-START WITH TROG

The advantage of Fi over Gl is that Fi start with a potion of might. IMO Fi vs Gl comes down to would you like a pre IDed might pot or some nets, and would you like to start with a staff.

lol i completely forgot about the might potion, which is true it is nice to have, but i would hardly base my build around it. I would also never base my build on the starting weapon... staff is superior? Ok, are you going to go staves the whole game? Longswords might be slightly crappier than a quarterstaff but you are going to find a greatsword pretty quickly usually, same goes for any weapon class really. And if I am not going to be committing skill points to that weapon, I don't want to pick it for my start. You get a few points put into the weapon you pick, after all. I would way rather have those invested in whatever I am going to go for min-delay in.

One advantage of the Staves skill is that it doesn't require much XP to get its best weapon to min-delay, and that with only two weapon types you are likely to get that lajatang with your first weapon acquirement. So if your build is XP hungry it seems an efficient way to get end-game melee online.

Longsword is also a pretty strong starting wep.

3 nets and some throwing skill are infinetly better than a potion of might

fighter reasons: you haven't won one yet

duvessa wrote:fighter reasons: you haven't won all of them yet

FTFY

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