tasonir wrote:I still really like hybrids, but a compact character like TrBe or MiBe are definitely much easier to recommend to a new player trying to get a first win.
I suppose it's all kind of relative, but I've always felt mixed about this. While most of my wins are still in the melee realm, I've always 1) enjoyed picking up different skills for more options, and 2) felt that tactically you often get a large benefit from them (Blink, Repel Missiles and Evocations are probably the obvious ones but item brand/ego drops or the immediate trainability of spells come into play a lot too).
It's certainly possible to overdo it, but I feel like much of the game is just learning how much less or more of various things you can get away with. In other words, the problem is also learning how much of a given skill is enough to be satisfied under various conditions. The "tracks" will sometimes get people by if nothing particularly challenging happens in a shorter game, but how often is that true for new players either?
It's really partly up to player style and interest, though. I'm a pretty hopeless packrat, so I like to experiment with using more of the odd stuff lying around rather often. "Sure I
could just sit in the ambush hole another three turns and wait for that centaur some more, but I wanna toss this javelin and see if I can hit already dog-gone it!" It's not really always that sub-optimal, but that's the general idea.
I also suspect I would have taken up conjurers more seriously earlier if I didn't keep constantly hearing how much more "simple" or "easy" melee was. While it's probably safer, I'm not sure it's really that much tactically "simpler" of late. If you can run an archer, at least, you can probably figure out a basic conjurer with a bit more patience. Perhaps I'm just blind because now I've seen most of the monsters before and I know about what to expect from them and which ones will rush (usually!)... But early on I couldn't seem to figure out which spells to trust when and I find running a Deep Elf (enough times) starts to shrug that problem off. Maybe melee is somewhat simpler to learn training Skills generally, but I think I also spent a lot of time learning how to maneuver in combat and which weapons I was more comfortable with - and about just when to train those in bursts and when to worry about armor/defense, too.