The Tavern

(Split from GDD)


Easy way to kill krakens.
Did krakens get removed? I don't remember them my last shoals trip.

I think they're just uncommon.

I'd like some advice on clouds and krakens, please. I tried Pcloud on a kraken on my recent now-dead character, and it chewed me up. I'm guessing I placed it wrong, too far offshore perhaps? In any case, I excluded th kraken and then went on to die to something else.

The only cloud I've used on Krakens before is conjure flame. If you surround yourself with 5 of them the kraken burns itself to death. Your defenses just have to last till then.

Someone else can probably give better advice on the usage of other cloud spells.

You don't pcloud/fcloud/cflame the kraken and then just stand there and let it kill you. You pcloud/fcloud/cflame in general area of the kraken then leave its LOS while it dies; it can't leave water and the tentacles cannot attack if the head is not in LOS. Dying to a kraken is like dying to a melee statue.

You'll have a hard time dealing real damage to the kraken with cflame if it can't hurt you, right? Obviously you want to be where you can run away easily, but I'm not sure how you'd cflame the kraken and run away. It's not like the kraken will just stand in the flame when it's out of LOS will it? I've been using cflame on where the tentacles will go.

Use cflame where the tentacles will go and keep the kraken on the edge of LOS. When the tentacles get close enough to potentially attack, move away, putting the kraken out of LOS and making the tentacles retract. Continue weaving in and out until the kraken dies. Works with any ranged damage in the game, not just clouds (poisoned needles are the most popular). Water monsters are dumb.

And just in case this isn't clear to MJ, hurting the tentacles is hurting the kraken, so attack the tentacles with any ranged attack to speed up the process.

What happens to the tentacles if I Confuse the head? I managed to confuse a Kraken in my last game before it had spawned any tentacles and stabbed it to death without learning this.

Yes, I knew that. Looking back, the error I'd made in my previous encounter was that I PClouded the kraken when it was at edge of LOS, but I also was on a peninsula among plants. It had more freedom of movement than I, and so I had to reset the encounter before I ever got to the part about bouncing the kraken in and out of LOS. I had about half of the right idea, but chose poor terrain to do it on.

Now, I know that if you hit the tentacles you hurt the kraken, but are the tentacle *segments* able to be hurt as well?

Yes.

I think Krakens should start to show up in small areas of water as you get deeper into Depths. Kind of like that thing in Fellowship of the Ring. Seems a shame to limit a cool monster like that to sometimes loading Shoals.

More specifically, this is why something like an area cloud spell (fcloud) is strong against a kraken, because the damage seems to act additive for each segment that gets damaged per turn. No idea how poisoning/pcloud works with kraken -- if it stacks multiple levels on the whole creature, this would be good, but you would walk away or something after casting. Static discharge is also really really effective if you happen to be standing next to tentacles because it jumps to segments (possibly not a duvessa-optimal maneuver).

To find them there's often one in a structure on shoals end, but it's not guaranteed. There's also usually one or two in deep water somewhere on one of the shoals levels, but if you're a land creature by random chance you likely won't encounter them because they are usually not in los of much shore. And there's not a lot of incentive to fight them in these circumstances unless they're near a stairway or something.

I feel like I've seen a vault with a kraken in depths. Remember seeing a zombie one in Coc.

This is dumb as hell and needs to change. Make Krakens great again!

I mean if you change it, they still can't leave water, so they're still pathetic

give them Summon Water Nymphs

Put packs of 1-2 krakens + 4-5 water nymphs in depths.

Make a unique kraken monster with a siren on top of it.

I think we should just remove krakens. As duvessa pointed out, they suffer from the same problems that other water/turret monsters suffer from--i.e. you never have to fight them under undesirable circumstances, so they are basically free xp. Not that all turrets should be removed--there are maybe a few tricky eel/oklob vaults (maybe being key here; these enemies are never great) that are worth keeping. But krakens have a bunch of mechanical convolutions, too. The tentacles don't attack unless the head is in sight, and derived undead krakens have normal tentacles--meaning that kraken simulacrums look funny and don't actually deal cold damage. The only thing they are good for (as far as I can tell) is shoals flavor.

Did a little !lg research and discovered that krakens are apparently useful for killing XL1 characters ill-advisedly diving to Abyss:2 as an AK: http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/BigBluFrog/ ... 152746.txt.

On a side note, if you ever find yourself in such a situation, it's probably a better idea to Depart the Abyss than to try hitting the kraken.

What is often so drastically flawed about this line of reasoning -- and especially so in this case -- is that the argument imagines only an ultra-simplified scenario with only one super-experienced nearly-perfect player, no other monsters around, and accommodating terrain. Sure, in those circumstances, a kraken is "free xp." If you're good enough at crawl, every monster is "free xp." A freaking vault warden is "free xp." All it can do is lock doors. Psht! After he locks the doors you just kill him. Free xp!

Arguments like these ignore a multitude of scenarios where reasonable but less-than-perfect play puts the player in real danger. I've gone into a shoals vault searching for a rune (neatly designed so you have to get inside to put the center tile in LOS), only to find a kraken had floated up toward the entrance when I tried to leave. I've been on some god-forsaken mini-island with fauns and merfolk swarming after hitting an alarm or teleport trap and run into a kraken while trying to cover my escape.

The danger in crawl rarely comes from one individual, isolated threat. When it does, as in the form of an ultra-powered unique, that's often among the least interesting challenges the game has to offer. A high-powered unique often just feels like a slugfest. A hp-off that can be thwarted Zynga-style by blowing through some consumables. Interesting, exciting challenges come through emergent combinations of elements: Traps, shafts, monsters with varying abilities, varying terrains, positioning, etc. Krakens are a great example of the kind of monster that fits into that kind of system. Of course, by itself, in ideal circumstances, with ideal resources, ideal knowledge of the game, and ideal tactics, it's not a threat. That's not remotely the point.

Of course you don't have to believe me, there's also empirical fact: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/killers.html . Krakens have logged more player kills than Tiamat, ancient champions, shard shrikes, etc. Don't feel like those are comparable ? How about Ilsuiw? She only beats krakens with 203 kills to krakens' 162. Not exactly a blowout.

41 kills is a 25% increase which kind of is a blowout. Ilsuiw is also frequently indirectly responsible for many deaths that she herself did not pull the trigger on.

I hope nobody actually needs to address why the other examples are useless and why "empirical evidence" like this is pretty misleading

Tiamat, ancient champions, and shard shrikes can meaningfully move, krakens can't. If you die to a kraken it's because you don't know how it works.