Apportation

[biffMalibu]

Just a quick question. I see a lot of recommendations to learn apportation. Just wondering why it is good. When do you use it?

[Reptisaurus]

Like three vaults, one wizlab, and extended.

[duvessa]

Apportation is a good spell in any situation where you would like to pick up an item, but are not on the same square as the item. This happens very frequently.

[Airwolf]

One use is to collect any ammo you've sprayed around, especially if you don't have much and need to re-fire.

[Majang]

In the Abyss, you see the rune and need to grab it before you get randomly teleported away.

[Majang]

Another application: You are hungry, go downstairs, get swarmed by lots of monsters, but you manage to explode a beefy guy with a wand. His chunks are all over the place, and you can't stay long enough to pick one up. Apportation allows you to go upstairs to have a well-earned snack.
One more: There are some situations in the game where some goodies are behind Lava or water. You can see them, but you can't get at them. Without apportation you'll have to waste a scroll of blinking or a potion of flight.
Apportation is cheap and easily learned. If you are patient, you don't even have to train any translocations to bring it up to reasonable power. Just your spellcasting skill will be enough after some time to get most things to you from LOS in just one go.

[Majang]

Just your spellcasting skill will be enough after some time to get most things to you from LOS in just one go.

And don't ever listen to anyone who tells you to only train spellcasting to unlock new spell-levels. If you play a caster, SC is the only skill you should never switch off, as each new skill level translates into more power, easier casting and less hunger for all your spells.

[VeryAngryFelid]

And don't ever listen to anyone who tells you to only train spellcasting to unlock new spell-levels.

True. Hard-coded rules are rarely good. If I find a staff of fire and robe of archmagi on FE before temple, all I want is more MP.

If you play a caster, SC is the only skill you should never switch off, as each new skill level translates into more power, easier casting and less hunger for all your spells.

False. Hard-coded rules are rarely good. If I find staff of power and ring of magic power before Temple, last things I want is more MP and less hunger

[Majang]

If I find staff of power and ring of magic power before Temple, last things I want is more MP and less hunger

I think you'd still be well advised to train SC, which helps with the failure rate of all your spells in the same way as the relevant spell schools do. And before reaching Temple, the returns of training any skill are still quite dramatic...

[Magipi]

If I find staff of power and ring of magic power before Temple, last things I want is more MP and less hunger

I think you'd still be well advised to train SC, which helps with the failure rate of all your spells in the same way as the relevant spell schools do. And before reaching Temple, the returns of training any skill are still quite dramatic...

Are you aware that the effect of the spell school(s) is 4 times more than the effect of spellcasting?

Let us see an example. You want to improve the castability of Blink and you have 10 spellcasting and 0 transloc. Going 0 -> 1 in transloc has the same effect as going 10 -> 14 is spellcasting. The only difference is that the former costs 50 xp, and the latter costs 3200 xp.

[Hellmonk]

The effect of spell schools is averaged, so spellcasting provides a somewhat better return on investment for multi-school spells (where you have to distribute more exp to improve the average level of your spell schools) than for single school spells. It's certainly not worth keeping on all game, though*.

*unless you want that kickin' rad title and don't care if you die

[Siegurt]

I think you'd still be well advised to train SC, which helps with the failure rate of all your spells in the same way as the relevant spell schools do.

Actually it reduces your failure rate of your spells between 1/4 and 3/4 as much as the relevant spell schools do. If you're training it specifically to reduce your failure rate, you should train it when it costs the appropriate amount less than the relevant school(s) (depending on the number of spell schools of the spells you're looking at).

If you're training it to reduce your hunger, you've done something terribly terribly wrong, and you need to go back to the drawing board.

If you just want more MP, then you might be doing something wrong, or you might have an uncommon situation (Like the one mentioned above)

[Majang]

Are you aware that the effect of the spell school(s) is 4 times more than the effect of spellcasting?

No, I did not know that - thanks to you and the other responders who set me straight on that. I seriously believed that SC has the same effect on spell success as any of the spell-schools involved.

[njvack]

If your strategy is "kill all the dudes" then apportation will not be very useful to you. There aren't many cases where there's an item you see that will help you in your current fight, but you can't get to it because dudes.

But! If you plan on leaving dudes alive (hint: this is often better than killing all the dudes) then apportation will let you get items and GTFO with way less risk than blundering through eight squares of LOS and dealing with all the monsters you can see (and the others you'll see walking that far). Runes and the orb are the most obvious candidates, because they're the only items in the game you *need* to pick up -- but if I were teleporting around Vaults:$ or something, the odds are pretty good I'd see a few other things that looked useful that I'd rather not walk over and grab.

Basically: apportation can let you ignore a lot of monsters in some of the most monster-y places in the game.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Most floor items come into view on the edge of LoS. There are a lot of useful items, like scrolls, wands, potions, even gold that you want to pick up. While moving towards the item you might stumble into monsters, sometimes dangerous ones.

If you grabbed the item with apportation first, you can just flee from the dangerous monster without losing the item.

It's often better to grab runes and disappear, than to fight everything in the rune vault. This is especially true in places like Hell/Pan/Abyss. This is usually also true for the orb.

[amaril]

Although it is better to grab things w/o entering unexplored terrain, and you very frequently find items at the edge of los that you can't grab w/o entering unexplored terrain, this benefit of apport is so marginal it does not matter. Unless you are speedrunning, how often do you not clear a floor entirely? Past the very early game 1 extra consumable will not make or break any fights, and you'll get the consumable anyways once you've cleared the floor in a typical, relatively-safe manner. Sometimes you are denied a good piece of gear for a couple floors (because you want to avoid a unique or something), but you always end up strong enough to kill the threat and get the item before long.

In terms of xp investment/survivability, you will get a lot better value out of animate skeleton/sbutterflies/blink. Apport is still good value b/c it is so cheap, but apporting optimally is super tedious and provides a negligible benefit (except in Abyss/Pan/Vaults5 maybe, where it lets you circumvent dangerous fights entirely).

[MainiacJoe]

I typically only use apportation for vaults where I can't reach an item otherwise. On a melee character I can take off body armour after clearing the level and use brilliancy if I have to. On one notable instance I used it to nab the swamp rune from Lerny.

[Nod2003]

I always learn apporation if I see it, unless I am a Trog worshiper. If nothing else, it helps get the orb near stairs in Zot

[Sprucery]

I always learn apporation if I see it, unless I am a Trog worshiper. If nothing else, it helps get the orb near stairs in Zot

You do know that apporting the Orb starts the orb run, right?

[Nod2003]

I guess that is new. I play v16.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Apporting the orb is actually pretty good though. Sometimes you end up near the orb, because of some bad teleport for example, and there is an opportunity to take it with you on your escape, instead of coming back for it later. The same is true for runes, and to a lesser degree for useful floor items.