Best way of building plate-casting worshipper of Vehumet

[EnigmaticFellow]

One thing that I've been itching to try lately is a plate-casting caster of Vehumet who mainly uses conjurations when enemies are far away or if they're too dangerous to fight in melee such as Juggernauts or Iron Giants. Seeing as OoD is a single-school spell, getting it online with Vehumet's wizardry shouldn't be too hard to do. In addition, useful spells like Sticky Flame and Fireball are low-level enough to cast without too much difficulty. I've been recently playing HOGl^Vehumet and have been usually making good progress with them; however, I've been wondering if there's a better way to go about this. So far, I've been focusing training on Armour and doing normal training on Fighting, weapon of choice, Conjurations, and Fire. In addition, I've been putting points into Int every third level. My desired spell list for this character is Fireball, Delayed Fireball, and OoD. Sticky Flame and maybe Iron Shot are also spells that would be good for this character. Are there any additional spells I should be thinking of besides the usual support spells? Are there also any considerations I should take when building such a character? Is HO the optimal choice in plate-casting? The only other ones I can think of are either HE or Te, and they both have low health which makes them a bit too fragile for my liking.

[duvessa]

I'd suggest not doing this, since it's really quite bad. Having one strong damage option is better than having two not-as-strong ones, and Vehumet is not a good god in general.

If you are committed to heavy armour conjuring then the strongest character for it is probably DDEE of Makhleb. HO is good too, but a background that starts with a book is much better than one that does not (Gl).

[TonberryJam]

it's a matter of having decent str/int i think. 23 str and atleast 15 int for some low lvl spells

[ololoev]

If you want to cast spells then choose Veh/Ash/Che. But bear in mind that your spellpower will suck without Che if you don't have +Int items since you will definitely invest some points to Str for damage/ev/spell success. And with all of that, your ranged option will be single-target (or 3x3 in case of fball).
If you want some decent single-target ranged option, you should train throwing. If you want to cast real spells - go Che Ibriados and master fstorm/tornado.

[Sar]

Don't start as a Gladiator, start as a mage with the school you want to use. Don't wear the first plate you find, don't hybridise too early. Also, consider a Summoner of not-Vehumet (Ash or Chei, I guess?) because Summons don't seem to care much about Spellpower and generally want one spell school.

HO is a good choice race-wise, though, maybe the best one.

[Tiktacy]

If you want to do plate-casting then just follow Pakellas and use wands.

Or just use wands because following Pakellas is miserable and you can do just fine without him.

[dracos369]

I did a plate-casting HOFE with Zin recently, although, for the most game, I was wearing scale/FDA. Only in extended did I switch to OCPA(best unrand ever!). The point was to vitalise against anything you wanted to cast spells against, and train a lot of Invo for vitalise stat gain. Also, had luck with an early randart Wiz ring.

[nago]

As said of Duvessa plate-casting ins't really the strongest build in town: while being viable and possible, it is quite weaker than other choice because you'll going to have worse offence and also defence for a longer part of the game, and there's really no big difference to cast lv.6 spell while having 20 AC 30+ EV instead of 30+AC 5 EV.

The things you need are:
a) A race with high str, at least decent int and possibly good apts because this is going to be quite exp costly.
b) a god helping you
c) choose a strong spell school whose spell (especially whose higher than 4) are single skill.
c) optionally some +wiz sources.

For the race DD is probably the best, but also HO, Gr and possibly Dg are good. In theory, also Fo but they're terribly weak so don't do that.
For god, from my experience Ash is the best, followed by chei - but cheis is terrible, so i'm not really suggesting him - and then vehu. If you can bear to vitalize very often Zin is going to be better than Vehu too - but that is going to require to invest in another skill for an already exp hungry build, so beware.
For the spell school, the best choices are earth, summoning, necro and possibly pure conjuration magic.

Regarding how develop the char: you train pretty much as the usual squishy mage combo, so you start to focus on your spell school, adding some spellcasting when you need more spell slots\mp, then later a bit of fighing. However, instead of dodging you train armor because that will be your main defence for all the game, and on level up raise str until you have at least 22ish if you wanna plate, then int. The str requirement is a big rule of thumb, so you may stop to raise it around 18-20 and wait the natural bonus point of your race or whatever.
The trick to cast in heavy armour is that you need to overtrain spell school, a lot for lv.6 spells - depending on your god, race and whatever around 18ish.
I'd suggest to stay low and use only lv.4/5 spell until your first rune or so, unless getting a +wiz source and add later lv.6+ ones, in order to train a bit of defence\melee skill and whatever.
Theoretically you should be able to swap to ring > scale mail before Lair and to plate by the end of D \ your first rune.

[crate]

EE is probably better than FE since you don't have the xp to cover elemental resistances very well (definitely start as a book background though). LRD is also single-school so you can get higher spellpower/easier casting (and you never have to worry about hitting yourself since you have lots of AC).

Don't train a weapon past like 5 skill. Fighting skill is ok, and you can obviously just hit harmless things with your 0-skill melee weapon.

Veh is pretty good for this if you don't want chei. I wouldn't bother with heavy armour conjurations with any other god in most situations, it's not worth it (and probably not really worth it with veh or chei but it's a lot less bad in those cases).

Also go back into the past so you can find orcish plate armour if you're playing HO, that's much better than any ego you can get in current crawl on your plate.

[njvack]

One of the reasons folks are saying this isn't a very strong character is -- the alternative is to grab a flaming crossbow and then you can train one skill and pelt enemies from afar with little fireballs and never miscast and do lots of damage and hey here's a freezing crossbow woooo! And the range is better and you can take a god that's not Vehumet.

In other words: you can do something that's pretty mechanically similar to conjurations by picking up a missile weapon, except your character will be stronger as your XP isn't spread so thin.

If you want to build a char to cast L6 conjurations in plate you can do it and this thread has good advice, but you're fundamentally roleplaying in a game that doesn't take roleplaying into account when balancing systems. FWIW I like to pretend Crawl is an RPG too.

[Tiktacy]

Also crossbows don't have mana.

[Reptisaurus]

Gargoyles, deep dwarves, and formicids have the highest starting str + int of any species that can worship a God and wear plate.

With Vehemuts conjuration wizardry this should be doable.

[crate]

btw don't play DD of vehumet, it's not very fun

[tabstorm]

It's garbage, don't do it. If you insist on it for roleplay reasons, play a HOFE. The way you're building your character will make it too weak at magic for it to be useful against nontrivial enemies, and definitely not strong enough to fight iron giants and juggernauts in melee. If you can fight iron giants, you can mash buttons to win.

[TonberryJam]

If you want to heavy melee you need Armour, dodging and shields, or a lot of armour and dodging for two-handers.

If you just want the AC from plate, I don't know. Dodging is better for casting.

You can be casting in heavy armour by the time you get to Zot:5 for level 6ish spells. When i'm done with melee skills, the game has Zot and Tomb left to explore before extended. Talking about 18-20 skill in fighting, weapon of choice, armour, dodging, shields, some invocations.

Can usually get 2 schools around level 18 by the time I hit Zot:5.