Constant inconsistency (mostly melee)

[battosai30]

Too much random, too many times I am left without any option other than taking a deep breath and clicking the enemy one more time and hope for the best. This game is like endurance gambling. Been playing it for years and it always managed to aggravate me more than anything else ever did. Want examples? I'm sure any of us have millions of them.

High elf skald, D:2, wearing a sweet +3 leather armor I found on D:1. I climb downstrairs and I'm surrounded by a pack of gnolls AND a pack of jackals, climbing back up is not a good idea so I take 3 steps to a safer location and pop my buffs then managed to kill all of them by some miracle, still 80% hp left, Song of slaying at +8 now, then here comes the last enemy of this battle, a single unarmed hobgoblin that punched me to death in 3 turns. Starting a Skald is pretty hard, because there's no possible way to gauge if that giant rat is gonna deal massive damage to me or just die like the pack of orcs I just brutally flawlessed.

I find a mottled dragon armor on D:2, enchant it to +3 and a +4 long sword of electrocution, incredible start! Nothing could stand in my way but still I remained extra careful. Then at D:10, here comes a single ogre with a normal basic club, and he killed me in 2 consecutive attacks, the second while I was carefully backing off. I've been killing hill giants and cyclops for a while at this point then get smashed in 2 rounds by the lesser possible enemy of this type. Why just why...

Sometimes I could just get naked and punch grinder to death at XL3 or get instantly paralysed as he sees me then spammed to death by agony at XL 9.
These are just some annoying early game examples but what about every late game senseless deaths?

Here I am, just tabbing my way effortlessly through waves after waves of death yaks then get absolutely wrecked by.... a black mamba.

Holding a bunch of runes, cleared the depths, leveled in the abyss, meh, might as well pay the elves a visit just for lols. How could I have known that last elf conjurer would spam that pink fireball thingy 3 times in a row followed by a bolt of acid while I cleared the whole elven halls without even breaking a sweat?

The gap between absolute rampage and outright death without a chance is basically non existent. I only wish I could feel like I learn something when I die, or see what my mistake was, but lately all I have to say after every deaths is just a massive "WTF" everytimes. Well maybe I should just stop playing Skalds for a while...

I miss the brutal deaths that actually made sense, and were kind of hilarious, like when I insta-killed the royal jelly with a sneaky stab without having a clue it would absolutely fill the screen with baddies, then I died trying to take off that damn -tele pair of gloves that was also my only source of Rcorr xD

That is amongst the things that makes me love how brutal this game is, I'd rather any at time be punished for ignorance or hubris than because of incredibly inconsistent dice rolls.

P.S. Maybe this is in the wrong section, but my point is, is there any way to make especially melee combat more um... predictable? instead of taking 5-10 damage making you think you're in the safe zone then the same guy with the same attack smashes you for like 60 (no brand)

Mod edit: moved from GDD

[BabyRage]

I'd rather any at time be punished for ignorance

Well, you ARE punished for ignorance. Ogres can hit hard and random energy exists. Your fault for not taking that into account. I don't see a problem here.

[goodcoolguy]

It amazes me how wild and woolly games are for some people.

[dpeg]

Too much random, too many times I am left without any option other than taking a deep breath and clicking the enemy one more time and hope for the best.

Crawl is known for its "long tail". This means that damage distributions tend to have very high damage, although with very low change. You can think of this as a very high ceiling.[/quote]You seem to have enough experience to know that almost all of these deaths are avoidable. I think it's important to stress that you can actually avoid them in real play without resorting to very bizarre gameplay. Basic stuff like skipping enemies, or even a level, not-tabbing at the right moment.

I miss the brutal deaths that actually made sense, and were kind of hilarious, like when I insta-killed the royal jelly with a sneaky stab without having a clue it would absolutely fill the screen with baddies, then I died trying to take off that damn -tele pair of gloves that was also my only source of Rcorr xD

In my games, there are plenty of those.

P.S. Maybe this is in the wrong section, but my point is, is there any way to make especially melee combat more um... predictable? instead of taking 5-10 damage making you think you're in the safe zone then the same guy with the same attack smashes you for like 60 (no brand)

Not really, I am afraid. The closest approximation might be a heavy armour Gargoyle of Makhleb? (HP from kills helps to smooth out incoming damage.)

I am sure that other roguelike games are more rational in how they dish out damage. Personally, I think it'd be much better if winnability wasn't 99% but only 80% or even less (yes, that many unavoidable deaths).

[Sar]

HESk is a terrible combo, if you want an easier win I would recommend something else.

[Rast]

is there any way to make especially melee combat more um... predictable?

1. High AC with a high GDR type. Gargoyle get a boost on both of these, but you can do this with any race.
2. Deep dwarf damage shaving.
3. More max hp -- choose races with good HP apt, good fighting apt, and train fighting hard.
4. Vamp, heal-on-kill, and regen items. These obviously aren't going to help you in the most extreme cases, like archlich casting crystal spear on consecutive turns and rolling near max damage both times, but in general they will keep your health high so that a few hard hits are more more likely to leave you at mid-low HP instead of instantly dead.

Notice that I didn't mention EV, that's useless against damage spikes. Hilariously, the devs mostly gave the low-HP races high EV and poor AC.

[Implojin]

HESk is a terrible combo, if you want an easier win I would recommend something else.

I disagree with the part of this calling HESk terrible. +2 LBL, +1 Dodging, +2 Charms, with LBL/riposte/spectral weapon turns them into absolute juggernauts by the time they've survived to XL:3 or so, and casting infusion for every fight on D:1 and D:2 will reliably get them there.

They're finicky to build if you're unfamiliar with the underlying systems: You have to know to that spectral weapon is borderline broken, you have to position to be able to use it, and you have to remember that it's important to get Fighting, but if you do those things HESk is really quite strong outside of their HP aptitude.

[goodcoolguy]

It's below average, not terrible.

[tasonir]

Best way to smooth out damage is high HP + high regen. Add in high AC to help, although this can still fail in spikes - hp/regen can not fail against anything. This is why I play statue form characters with the regen spell. They are literally the most resilient to spike damage you can get. If you want to go all in on this strategy you have to do it on a troll, which makes casting statue form a bit harder, but it's certainly very strong once you do. It becomes very tabby after you have enough experience to have statue form and do some catching up on all the physical skills that fell behind due to training magic.

Two recent examples: http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/tasonir/mor ... 072945.txt
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Tason ... 231010.txt

To the more optimal players out there - yes this is pretty much the definition of a "win more" build, since by the time you've gotten this far you really don't need the power...but I'm a sucker for end game power

And on a side note I've been calling for smaller damage ranges for years now, but they seem to be pretty firmly entrenched in crawl. I'd rather have an 11-20 damage range than a 1-30, but crawl goes for 1-30 every time.

[Siegurt]

And on a side note I've been calling for smaller damage ranges for years now, but they seem to be pretty firmly entrenched in crawl. I'd rather have an 11-20 damage range than a 1-30, but crawl goes for 1-30 every time.

To the point where melee doesn't even have a smaller damage range as an option, it would require a whole new set of data which there isn't even a slot for, plus the code to make it happen for there to be the option for melee to be "less extreme"

You can sort of fake it, by diving the damage up into multiple attacks, although that doesn't change the extremes, it just makes them less common.

There just currently isn't a provision for a "damage floor" for monster attacks.

It is a little inconsistent that there is such a provision for spells. But allowing for such a thing at this point is kind of annoying, coding-wise.

[Sar]

I'm speaking from a perspective of a bad/terrible player. For me, HESk is garbage. I suspect for a newer player "unfamiliar with the underlying systems" they would be such as well. You have a truckload of skills to manage and your HP sucks. Ouch, that really hurt!

[BabyRage]

I'd say Sk is okay background, just HE sucks in general.

[tasonir]

And on a side note I've been calling for smaller damage ranges for years now, but they seem to be pretty firmly entrenched in crawl. I'd rather have an 11-20 damage range than a 1-30, but crawl goes for 1-30 every time.

To the point where melee doesn't even have a smaller damage range as an option, it would require a whole new set of data which there isn't even a slot for, plus the code to make it happen for there to be the option for melee to be "less extreme"

You can sort of fake it, by diving the damage up into multiple attacks, although that doesn't change the extremes, it just makes them less common.

There just currently isn't a provision for a "damage floor" for monster attacks.

It is a little inconsistent that there is such a provision for spells. But allowing for such a thing at this point is kind of annoying, coding-wise.

Granted there isn't an easy and elegant way to do this, but I wonder if you could fake it by running the calculation as it is now, and if it's within 20% of either extreme end, then repeat the calculation until it isn't. This is a horrible hack, and could theoretically get pretty slow if it had to redo the the calculation thousands of times, but practically speaking that shouldn't happen. I'm a horrible and lazy programmer, so those are the kinds of solutions I usually come up with The "20%" value is just arbitrary, it'd probably have to be more complex than that since damage curves in crawl aren't symmetrical, so you want to discard say the bottom 15% but also discard the top 30%, but since the top 30% was so rare, you actually haven't moved the average. Figuring out that exact math sounds like too much work, though. Someone call berder

[Sar]

I'd say Sk is okay background, just HE sucks in general.

HEIE/HEFE is probably okay or as good as HE can be, maybe HEBe.

[tabstorm]

I think at some point "HESk is worse than you'd think" evolved into "HESk is terrible"

[tasonir]

Skalds in general suffer from the Transmuter problem - too many skills to train early on that are all interdependent on each other. It isn't so bad if you can survive down to lair or so and now you have some of your magic online as well as enough physical skills to actually fight, but the first 4-5 floors are pretty rough. They are both really cool backgrounds, just slightly below average in terms of raw power on D:1. You can try to pry transmuters from my cold dead hands, though

[battosai30]

Well the pain began when I realised I turn every casters and assassins that make it far into a skald as soon as I find suitable buffs and spent way too long trying to start as one, and damn, these high elves sure have amazing aptitudes for this!

I admit as the first comments said that I have two major flaws for this kind of character, I am compelled to clear everything on every floors and am very stingy with ressources usage, which is a deadly, horrible combination for such a squishy character. Time to move on I guess, thanks for all the replies, that was very liberating

[Sprucery]

Notice that I didn't mention EV, that's useless against damage spikes. Hilariously, the devs mostly gave the low-HP races high EV and poor AC.

Do you think that the game would be better if the low-HP races had mostly high AC and poor EV?

[WingedEspeon]

The game would be better if high elves had a +1 HP apt so you could play an elf that is also a badass.

[tasonir]

Also the high elf -10% hp is misleading - it's worse than it sounds because they're also a -1 exp aptitude race, so they level up slower than 2/3 of the races, and only demigods level slower than them. So you're a level or two behind, and also getting -10% hp per level you do have.

Both HE and Sk are choices that are weak at the start and get better over time, so combining them makes for a really rough start. It's good eventually, but in this case (imho) eventually doesn't really kick in until around level 15-20.

[Reptisaurus]

Does Spectral Weapon work differently for me than everybody else? In my games it's only level 3 and it kills pretty much everything (that doesn't fireball you) fast.

[duvessa]

Sk isn't Cr so people have this idea that it must be terrible, even though it isn't