The Tavern

If I train a lot of evo with Pak, it’s really hard to squeeze out charges. Even using while at 15 MP, Quick Charge tends to give 2-4 charges on the good wands. It becomes a good idea to use it at 1-2 MP to guarantee a 1:1 ratio of MP:charges.

But if I keep evo at 0 I get a large multiplier of MP->charges; 8 iceblast charges from 2 MP is typical.

Maybe at some point late in the game, it makes sense to train some evo with Pak. People seem to stop using Quick Charge anyway, and stockpile magic potions. But for much if not all of the game, it is better to keep evo low, to get lots more charges. Wands are plenty good without skill; being able to spam them is more beneficial than having higher power.

I suspected that maybe it’s because Quick Charge scales negatively with max MP, and evo skill gives you MP, but now I think the stepdown does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do with respect to evo:

as Rast points out, getting more charges is not actually useful because you already have more than you can possibly use

what about the part where evo makes everything the wands actually do much better when you train it

I think this is really weird and should be fixed. I found a great artefact with MP+9 and the property is bad because of Pakellas.

I wasn't referring to OP's suggestion.

It does nothing at all for the 4 best wands: HW, Hasting, Tele, and Digging.

But i think this isn't really intended to be actual good advice. It's just pointing out a weird inconsistency with how the game works.

enslavement is better than tele

Ha! Funny!

(Although you still want to train invo if you have a decent rod. Acid clouds and summoned stone giants are worth a couple charges on your wand of iceblast.)

It's not a joke. There's already tons of ?tele. How are you putting yourself in so many bad situations that /tele is better than /enslavement?

It seems like, to me, people still think that wands of tele are valuable, because it used to be that scrolls could be destroyed by any fire attack and of course the wand couldn't. So a lot of people treated it as "if I want to reasonably have Tele uses in extended, I need tele wand", and haven't re-examined that value judgement since item destruction was removed. If they did, they would probably realize that they are usually useless since you usually don't run out of tele scrolls!

Also enslavement is legitimately really really good, it's part of the reason why Artificer should be guaranteed to survive earlygame with smart play.

/tele is good insurance against an early Mennas encounter, or an exceptionally unfortunate abyss run, but these are very rare events so yeah it's not really top tier.

This may be a way of saying Pakellas is overpowered anyway so you may as well just have fun. But this trick is quite good - I just used it to get the 3rd fastest gossamer rune grab and the fastest win with 4+ runes (morgue). I hit zero-star piety in The Vaults, and hovered around 1* for the rest of the game. Pakellas is the new Old Elyvilon. Best part shown below (bye-bye, orb guardian...)


this is supposed to have been fixed, here:
http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... ad678e4057

This has been occupying my mind lately as I've been playing a DD Artificer of Pak. I have 3 main weapons I use, one axe with +9 MP, an iron rod, and an antimagic axe so my max-MP changes constantly and I'm not sure I'm optimizing well. However, Pak is also pretty powerful so I haven't had to think about it all that much. I do spend the majority of my quick charges of Heal Wounds though.