GrBe Walkthrough: Upgrading Your Weapon (edited)

[MainiacJoe]

I am working on a project, a newbie walkthrough that won’t suck. I’m choosing GrBe of maces. Here is the introduction, to set the tone and describe my goal.

The “I Want to Stop Dying All the Time” GrBe Walkthrough Guide
The purpose of this guide is to get you through to the end of the Lair of Beasts. The target audience are players who keep dying and dying without feeling like they are making any progress. The presentation will be in broad strokes, trying to avoid the minutiae of optimal play for a specific character build. My goal is that you'll enjoy greater success in the game than ever before, which is fun in itself, and also learn good habits that will translate to better results with nearly every character you try.

The first section I’ve completed is the one on choosing your weapon. I’ve come up with a tier system that I expect will give suboptimal advice occasionally, but is intended to be easy to use and to give outright bad advice rarely. Please let me know whether you think it meets that goal and the goal for the walkthrough overall, keeping the target audience in mind. I'm particularly interested in whether the advice to wield-ID runed weapons is too risky.

Upgrading Your Weapon
Your starting mace isn't going to be effective for long. You want to replace it with a better weapon that uses the Maces and Flails skill as soon as you can. Here are the tiers of vanilla M&F weapons. I’ve added an adjective that will help you evaluate them below if they have a brand.

• -3: Any weapon that isn’t Maces and Flails
• -2: Club (garbage)
• 0: Whip (fast)
• 1: Mace (plain)
• 2: Flail (plain)
• 3: Morningstar (heavy)
• 4: Dire Flail (heavy and fast)
• 5: Demon Whip (fast)
• 6: Eveningstar (heavy)
• 7: Great Mace (heavy)

Do not replace your weapon with any weapon that isn’t a Maces & Flails weapon

• This is broad strokes; in several cases switching weapon skill is the “best” decision, but you don’t have the experience to make that call yet. Sticking with the weapon school you’re training is not bad and gets better the longer the game goes. So for the sake of simplicity, let’s leave it at that.
• See below if you find a very exciting artifact weapon that isn’t M&F.

Occasionally you’ll find a weapon that is glowing, enchanted, runed, etc. This means that it has some slaying and/or a brand applied. Or it might be cursed…

• To see which brand and how much slaying a weapon has, wield it.
• Slaying: Slaying gives a bonus to accuracy and damage. For each plus of slaying, add 2/3 tier for fast, 1/2 tier for heavy, and 1/3 tier for plain.
• “Enchanted” means that it has only slaying and no brand. These tend to be cursed often enough to be annoying. Other labels mean that it has a brand.
• If the brand is explicitly identified before you pick it up, it will almost certainly not be cursed, but you still need to wield it to find the slaying amount. It might be zero, with the brand being the only thing special about the weapon.
• Freezing, flaming, crushing, slashing, holy wrath, vampiric and draining add two tiers for heavy and one tier otherwise.
• Venom and anti-magic add two tiers for fast and one tier otherwise.
• Electrocution adds three tiers for fast and two tiers otherwise.
• Avoid chaos, pain and distortion
• Runed items are risky: you do not know whether it is cursed or not. A cursed weapon will stick to your hand and is likely to have negative slaying. This risk can be mitigated by waiting until you have a remove curse scroll. If the weapon’s base type is at least a two-tier upgrade, try it anyway even if you don’t have the scroll; even with negative slaying it will likely be an improvement, and you’ll be able to uncurse it soon enough since those scrolls are common.
• Another risk is that the weapon is a distortion weapon. When you unwield a distortion weapon, you have a 1/4 chance of being sent to the Abyss, which is exceedingly dangerous at your skill level and character XL. Even though this is scary, IMO this risk is rare enough that it isn’t worth spending an ID scroll on every runed weapon. Distortion isn’t an intrinsically bad brand, it ranks with venom and anti-magic as favoring fast weapons. If you get stuck with distortion, you may get lucky and find a scroll of brand weapon that you can use to overwrite the brand.

Rarely you will find a weapon with a white description. This is an artifact! It might even be useful!!!

• The most important criterion for evaluating an artifact is the base type. An artifact club is pretty much guaranteed to be worse than even a vanilla eveningstar. You are a melee character—you kill monsters with the damage of your weapon, not its rF+++. Don’t let the novelty of an artifact blind you to the tier structure.
• Artifact weapons can have very large slaying bonuses. Evaluate these tier-wise just as you would for branded weapons, according to base type.
• Artifacts will have extra properties. Use your best judgment. MR+, Str+, Dex+ and SInv are good and worth a tier. Elemental resistances aren’t as important in the early game as they will be later. Bad properties will be worth negative tiers; *Tele and -Tele are particularly to be avoided.
• You will eventually in one of your games find an incredibly awesome weapon that isn’t Maces & Flails. I ought to say that you should use the tier system and start at -3, but I recognize the sheer fun of wielding a badder weapon than you’ve ever had before. Go ahead: have fun! You should probably not train its skill though unless it’s a weapon with high base damage and you found it fairly early. Be ready to go back to M&F when a high-tier weapon comes along. Trog will start giving you weapons about when you enter Lair and he bases his gifts on your skills, so this will happen eventually.

[duvessa]

anti-magic add two tiers for fast and one tier otherwise.

Distortion isn’t an intrinsically bad brand, it ranks with venom and anti-magic as favoring fast weapons.

If you're going to rank the strength of weapon brands without bothering to learn what those brands do, your guide sucks already, sorry. That is not remotely close to how anti-magic works. (This old post is still accurate, except for the part about monster powered by pain which was removed)

Artifacts will have extra properties. Use your best judgment. MR+, Str+, Dex+ and SInv are good and worth a tier. Elemental resistances aren’t as important in the early game as they will be later. Bad properties will be worth negative tiers; *Tele and -Tele are particularly to be avoided.

There's no way MR+/SInv/resistances/-Tele should ever affect your main weapon choice. Weapons are the fastest items to swap in the game, at 5 aut; resistances on a weapon are completely irrelevant for choosing your primary weapon, because you can just swap to the resistance weapon when something appears that checks that resistance.


Anyway if you can't guess how good a weapon is you should just use fsim instead of looking at a guide, that's like, you have a hospital next to your house with the best doctors in the world, and they exclusively serve you, for free, with no waiting time, but when you wake up with a sore throat you get in your car and drive downtown then wander around alleys until you find a meth addict and then you ask them for medical advice, yes it's possible to get the correct advice but you have a much better option available

[jwoodward48ss]

Duvessa makes the best metaphors.

And yeah, antimagic scales with damage. Works well with heavy weapons.

[MainiacJoe]

Point taken re antimagic and of course you're correct. Thank you, I had somehow gathered the wrong impression about antimagic.

I see your point about artifact properties of weapons and accept that, too.

No time to edit the OP now but I will later today.

The hospital analogy is entertaining and I personally use fsim quite frequently, but I decided that suggesting it to the target audience was overkill. It seems to me to be exactly the minutiae of optimal play that I'm trying to avoid, so I tried to come up with a rule of thumb that would serve to give adequately sumilar advice most of the time. Perhaps I am wrong, and fsim is precisely the thing I ought to be teaching newbies to use to help them gain success in Crawl. In my own development though tactics were more important, and I'll be focusing on that in other sections I write later.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

this seems needlessly complicated and imprecise
why not just use base damage instead of your ranks?
multiply by some factor corresponding to your strength and skill (doesn't have to be exact)
add enchantment, modify by brand (add or multiply), divide by speed, and you get average damage
doesn't take accuracy into account, though

[MainiacJoe]

After thinking more on duvessa's analogy, I think that I was wrong and that teaching to use fsim isn't really that difficult, and will help the target audience more in the long run than sloppy chart like I tried to make. So I'll update the OP sometime soon.

[MainiacJoe]

Here is an edited version, tossing the tier system and adding reference to fsim, and fixing the errors duvessa pointed out with artifact properties and antimagic brand.

Upgrading Your Weapon
Your starting mace isn't going to be effective for long. You want to replace it with a better weapon that uses the Maces and Flails skill as soon as you can. Here are the M&F weapons with their damage, speed and handedness. In general you want to use the highest base damage weapon you can find.

• Club base damage 5 / base speed 13 / one-handed
• Whip 6 / 11 / one-handed
• Mace 8 / 14 / one-handed
• Flail 10 / 14 / one-handed
• Demon Whip 11 / 11 / one-handed
• Morningstar 13 / 15 / one-handed
• Dire Flail 13 / 13 / two-handed
• Eveningstar 15 / 15 / one-handed
• Great Mace 17 / 17 / two-handed

Do not replace your weapon with any weapon that isn’t a Maces & Flails weapon.

• This is broad strokes; in several cases switching weapon skill is the “best” decision, but you don’t have the experience to make that call yet. Sticking with the weapon school you’re training is not bad and gets better the longer the game goes. So for the sake of simplicity, let’s leave it at that.
• See below if you find a very, very good artifact weapon that isn’t M&F.

Occasionally you’ll find a weapon that is glowing, enchanted, runed, etc. This means that it has some slaying and/or a brand applied. Or it might be cursed…

• To see which brand and how much slaying a weapon has, wield it.
• Slaying: Slaying gives a bonus to accuracy and damage. For each plus of slaying, add 2/3 base damage for one-handed weapons and 1/2 base damage for two-handed weapons.
• “Enchanted” means that it has only slaying and no brand. These tend to be cursed often enough to be annoying. Other descriptive adjectives mean that it has a brand.
• If the brand is explicitly identified before you pick it up, it will almost certainly not be cursed, but you still need to wield it to find the slaying amount. It might be zero, with the brand being the only thing special about the weapon.
• Most brands perform better on heavy weapons: freezing, flaming, crushing, slashing, holy wrath, vampiric, draining and anti-magic.
• Venom and especially electrocution perform better on fast weapons.
• Avoid chaos, pain and distortion.

Rarely you will find a weapon with a white description. This is an artifact! It might even be useful!!!

• Artifact weapons can have very large slaying bonuses. Evaluate these just as you did above, based on the handedness of the weapon.
• Artifacts will have extra properties. These might be good or bad, but typically do not affect the value of the artifact as a weapon. The most important criterion for evaluating an artifact is the base type. An artifact club is pretty much guaranteed to be worse than even a vanilla eveningstar. You are a melee character—you kill monsters with the damage of your weapon, not its rF+++. Don’t let the novelty of an artifact blind you to the tier structure.
• You will eventually in one of your games find an incredibly awesome weapon that isn’t Maces & Flails. I ought to say that you should stick with M&F, but I recognize the sheer fun of wielding a badder weapon than you’ve ever had before. Go ahead: have fun! You should probably not train its skill though unless it’s a two-handed weapon and you found it fairly early. Be ready to go back to M&F when a better weapon of that school comes along. Trog will start giving you weapons about when you enter Lair and he bases his gifts on your skills, so this will happen eventually.

The quickest and surest way to compare say a +5 mace of electrocution with a +1 dire flail of freezing is to use fsim, a melee simulator that comes with Crawl.

• Fsim is not available online. I you’re playing online, do this to get fsim
  
  1. Download Crawl from crawl.develz.org
  2. Open your online character, and export a character dump with the ‘#’ command.
  3. Save the text file into the ‘morgue’ subfolder of the offline Crawl installation.
• In offline Crawl, start a new character, the name doesn’t matter.
• Press ‘&’ and then type ‘yes’ to enter wizard mode.
• Press ‘#’ to load your character dump. Type in ‘[yourCharacter’sName].txt’. This will load up your current attributes, skill levels, and any artifacts that are in your real character’s inventory will be on the ground for you to pick up.
• If you are testing a runed weapon and not an artifact, you may need to make it.
  
  1. Press ‘&o’, then ‘)’, then type the name and brand of the weapon.
  2. It will be made at +0. If you need to add slaying, press ‘&t’, select the weapon, then adjust the ‘a’ field with the number of the slaying.
  3. If you do need to make an artifact, you can probably get away with just making the base type, brand and slaying.
• Now it’s time to test the weapon. Press ‘&f’ and then the name of a monster. The result you are after is “Attacking > AvgEffDam”. The bigger this is, the better.
• Which monster should you test against? Just pick the toughest fight you’ve had lately, until you get more familiar with upcoming monsters based on your dungeon level, then test those.

Runed weapons involve a measure of risk

• You do not know whether it is cursed or not. A cursed weapon will stick to your hand and is likely to have negative slaying. This risk can be mitigated by waiting until you have a remove curse scroll. If the weapon’s base type is a big upgrade, you can try it anyway even if you don’t have the scroll; even with negative slaying it will likely be an improvement.
• Another risk is that the weapon is a distortion weapon. When you unwield a distortion weapon, you have a 1/4 chance of being sent to the Abyss, which is essentially a death sentence at your skill level. Even though this is scary, IMO this risk is rare enough that it isn’t worth spending an ID scroll on every runed weapon. Distortion isn’t an intrinsically bad brand, I’d rank it with venom and electrocution as favoring fast weapons. If you get stuck with distortion, you may get lucky and find a scroll of brand weapon that you can use to overwrite the brand.

[njvack]

I've harped on this before and I'll probably do it again, but: Any mainly-melee guide with a main premise of "I want to stop dying all the time" should spend very limited space on weapon choice (say, "Pick a weapon type you have decent aptitudes on, except short blades. Pick the highest base damage weapon. Brands are good; distortion can be annoying and chaos can be dangerous and pain is only worthwhile if you're training necromancy. But don't agonize over choosing a weapon too much.")

While weapon choice makes a difference, it is far far far from the most important consideration in the game. With good tactics, you can win the game swinging a morningstar. With bad tactics, you'll splat over and over even if you're swinging a +9 great mace of freezing at mindelay.