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Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 18:41
by VeryAngryFelid
I spectated an ogre player today and was surprised how effective stealth was depite the player didn't train stealth much.
Now I am playing a DsBe in leather armour with 0 stealth and found this:

  Code:
A killer bee, 2 orcs, an orc priest and an orc wizard come into view


All of them are sleeping. Previously I would have stealth score 35 (Dex 15 * 3 - 2 * (4^2)/3). Monsters with HD 3 (killer bee, orc priest and an orc wizard) have monster awareness 15. That's roughly (15/35)^5 to stay unnoticed by all of them, it's slightly above 1%.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 19:30
by duvessa
no, it still sucks

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 20:40
by tasonir
I think I've intentionally trained stealth on about 3 characters because I explicitly wanted to go stabbing, so that's about <5% of my wins. Imho the problem with it is that making half of fights auto-win doesn't really matter if it doesn't help you at all against the other 50% of fights - you still have to train a solution to the 50% of fights that wake up. And even if auto win goes to 80%, 90%, etc, it doesn't really change anything as long as it's not 100% of fights. Stealth is great if you are going to stab things, otherwise I don't use it. Of course there are a lot of things I don't use that I probably should (like fedhas), so take it for it what it's worth :)

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 20:43
by VeryAngryFelid
Counterpoint. When you stab an orb of fire you save a potion of might and a potion of haste. I would not call it "does not matter".

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 22:26
by Sprucery
I train stealth in most of my games. I guess I like challenge games!

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Tuesday, 14th February 2017, 23:36
by papilio
After noise rework (at 0.19 or somewhere) stealth became the best defensive mechanics in this game

Reducing number of enemies that you face is always good

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Wednesday, 15th February 2017, 05:33
by VeryAngryFelid
Sprucery wrote:I train stealth in most of my games. I guess I like challenge games!


I think you like challenge games because you don't use heavy armour in most of your games.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Wednesday, 15th February 2017, 16:02
by Lasty
Stealth is not very strong offensively, but is pretty strong defensively. If crawl had more genuinely scary monsters, stealth would be one of the better skills.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Wednesday, 15th February 2017, 21:32
by tabstorm
the main reason stealth isn't strong is that it doesn't fucking do anything in the mid to late game because of the high enemy density. it also doesn't help you kill anything. i feel like literally every roguelike that has stealth has this problem except Brogue and Infra Arcana since they have no experience for killing monsters so there's no loss to avoiding everything. once a monster notices you, you are screwed. Crawl in particular has shouting! so that once you wake up one enemy, you are waking up like 8 others, except you need to continually pass 8 stealth checks to stab said monster.

OTOH going too far with the "we want to encourage unkillable monster avoidance" can give you IA syndrome where every character has to orient themselves toward stealth because almost all enemies in the latter third of the game are unkillable or too resource-intensive to kill. But if you can kill said monsters that are too strong for a stealth build by training more melee, why even train the skill at all? In Crawl, there's no shortage of escapes, after all. It seems hard to avoid these two extremes without simply declaring stealth a challenge playstyle.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Wednesday, 15th February 2017, 21:44
by Sprucery
tabstorm wrote:once a monster notices you, you are screwed.

Except that when you are stealthy, you can lose the monster just by walking behind a corner.

Doing the Abyss with a stealthy char vs. a non-stealthy char is enlightening.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Wednesday, 15th February 2017, 22:22
by duvessa
Lasty wrote:Stealth is not very strong offensively, but is pretty strong defensively.
I'd love to see someone explain why they think stealth is strong defensively. I know exactly what stealth does, and it still seems basically useless for anything other than En and Hu.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Wednesday, 15th February 2017, 22:47
by tabstorm
I don't know, I never train stealth except as an En and don't find the abyss to be a challenge. Meanwhile if you just put XP into melee or damage-dealing spells instead, you can just kill whatever monster instead of hoping to lose it around a corner...

Look, you need to have unkillable enemies for stealth to be of any consequence to a decent player. Once you decide to go with this, stealth becomes a dominant playstyle.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Wednesday, 15th February 2017, 22:52
by le_nerd
Stealth is strong defensively because that first centaur/orc priest/cyclops/unique wont wake up after opening a door to them. Close door, exclude, and raid the rest of the dungeon. Of course stealth on +0 aptitude sucks, its only cheap enough over other defensive skills on +4/+5 aptitude.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Wednesday, 15th February 2017, 22:57
by Rast
duvessa wrote:
Lasty wrote:Stealth is not very strong offensively, but is pretty strong defensively.
I'd love to see someone explain why they think stealth is strong defensively. I know exactly what stealth does, and it still seems basically useless for anything other than En and Hu.


Stealth is generically good for any character who has low EV penalty and high stealth apt. It helps you fight less monsters at once and helps them forget about you once you can break LOS.

Think of it as a shitty version of fast move speed, if fast move was only for running away and not for kiting.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 03:54
by scorpionwarrior
fwiw stealth is pretty great for dith worshipers

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 05:18
by VeryAngryFelid
Stealth is strong defensively because it allows you to avoid or delay fighting some monsters. If it kills monsters (via stabbing), it is also strong offensively. I almost always train stealth for extended because it can be more useful than armour/dodging/fighting pretty often there.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 06:41
by papilio
one who say tavern meme "hey, DECj^Veh is crappy" never knows the value of stealth.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 06:53
by VeryAngryFelid
papilio wrote:one who say tavern meme "hey, DECj^Veh is crappy" never knows the value of stealth.


and also what current best score combo is.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 11:18
by sanka
Not waking up a monster can be useful, but even with very high stealth they sometimes simply wake up, and you need to deal with those cases also. Yes, it can save some consumables, but I found it a non-issue: very early on stealth is not a good idea, since focusing on offense is much better, and later on there are a lot of consumables.

Losing monsters behind a corner is also not very useful, since if it is the same speed or slower than you, than you can lose it anyway via a stair. If it is faster, then it is really unlikely that you can lose it - stealth does not worth it.

Stealth is useful in the abyss and pan, mostly because those places are incredibly annoying in the first place, and stealth makes them much less annoying. But I would not claim that a skill is "useful" if it makes abyss and pan less annoying. Late in the game there are a lot of XP, so yes, I maybe would train stealth of course, because my late game strategy is usually "which method will make it the less annoying to play trough this part".

In general I have found that sometimes it is convenient to have good stealth, it makes the game more smooth, but it is absolutely useless to prevent deaths not due to boredom.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 16:30
by stoneychips
sanka wrote:In general I have found that sometimes it is convenient to have good stealth, it makes the game more smooth, but it is absolutely useless to prevent deaths not due to boredom.

I'm not sure what all bores you... But I think that sometimes it's more boring to have to kite a strong opponent a further distance, when some Stealth might have helped shake them off much sooner.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 16:56
by VeryAngryFelid
Casters really appreciate stealth when they are low on MP after hard fight and then another monster comes into view and does not notice you. It's more boring to lure monsters than to train stealth for me.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 18:16
by sanka
stoneychips wrote:
sanka wrote:In general I have found that sometimes it is convenient to have good stealth, it makes the game more smooth, but it is absolutely useless to prevent deaths not due to boredom.

I'm not sure what all bores you... But I think that sometimes it's more boring to have to kite a strong opponent a further distance, when some Stealth might have helped shake them off much sooner.


VeryAngryFelid wrote:Casters really appreciate stealth when they are low on MP after hard fight and then another monster comes into view and does not notice you. It's more boring to lure monsters than to train stealth for me.



I think you both misunderstood me, probably because of my bad English. This was exactly what I tried to say. It is less boring when you are somewhat strealthy.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Friday, 17th February 2017, 23:22
by TwoLeggedMammal
Sprucery wrote:
tabstorm wrote:once a monster notices you, you are screwed.

Except that when you are stealthy, you can lose the monster just by walking behind a corner.

Doing the Abyss with a stealthy char vs. a non-stealthy char is enlightening.


This. I was watching one of Demise's videos and was amazed how as soon as he went around a corner as a stealthy character the monsters seemed to forget about him. It made it way easier to engage monsters 1-on-1 and to find places to rest.

However, he still doesn't train Stealth on non-stabber characters. Neither do I, the XP is just too precious. Perhaps it's worth the investment but it's just really tough to evaluate if the monsters you're fighting would be more broken up if you had more stealth, or if that nasty monster wouldn't have woken up the second you came into view. Could just be a PR issue.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Saturday, 18th February 2017, 04:09
by bel
I don't think XP is too precious, especially by the time you get to very high density areas. I train stealth (at least the first few levels) or any character which doesn't wear heavy armour, because it helps in many situations.

Here's one: you encounter a pack of ugly things and one of them notices you and shouts (or gurgles). If you have decent stealth, the others would probably not chase you at first, which allows you to split the pack much more easily.

Here's another: If you are a summoner, and some monster is distracted by your summons, then stealth helps (a) get some good stabs in, or (b) stay in the background while your summons take care of the monster.

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Monday, 6th March 2017, 10:55
by Zargon
Stealth is invaluable on a level where you can't get back to the upstairs, because of enemy density (e.g. vaults 5), or because of the floor layout (e.g. depths layouts where you have the whole level between the upstairs and the downstairs) or because there isn't an upstairs (like in the extended game). This is because it creates points of safety where there were none before. Just trying savescumming a melee dude offline before doing vaults 5 with shadow DA and rElec, then going back and trying the same thing with storm DA (same GDA, AC, ER but different stealth) - you'll soon notice the difference. (NB I hardly ever play offline, and I don't savescum when I do - just making a suggestion)

Re: Was stealth buffed?

PostPosted: Saturday, 11th March 2017, 11:46
by Scuka
Stealth allows you to have a better control over which enemies are gonna agro.
You can separate groups of enemies into managable chunks more easily. They don't have to be asleep. It's enough that they're walking around with a question mark-