Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 718
Joined: Monday, 14th February 2011, 05:35
So You're Finally Getting Farther in the Game
Almost invariably, I see a novice playing something like mifi and using a one handed weapon (often a morningstar or some other subpar mace) and a shield. Sometimes they're advised to use a two handed weapon on characters like that, and they say something like, "Well, maybe that's good for advanced players, but I expect to make a lot of mistakes, so a shield helps me survive that." Does it really? Let's roughly examine how these things work.
Wearing a shield provides the SH stat in exchange for some disadvantages. SH is sort of like evasion except it mostly just has a chance to avoid damage against the first attack made against you on that turn, and it doesn't work against as many things. So while SH has its uses, it's by far the least reliable of the three defensive stats. Shields also have two major disadvantages. The first is that it costs experience to use shields without slowing your melee attacks and worsening your melee accuracy and spell success. So in other words, to use shields, you have to make your character weaker in every other way because of opportunity cost; this is true for all skill choices, of course.
The second disadvantage is precluding the use of two-handed weapons. This is really important because of another mechanic we should examine a bit of: melee damage. Melee damage is one of the only ways a character in crawl can have 'multiplicative scaling'. Unlike for spells or evocables or whatever, the relevant stats, weapon skill and fighting, act as multipliers for the base damage of your weapon. At maxed skills, they roughly double the weapon's base damage, so that a weapon like a great mace will be doing 1d34 damage and a weapon like a morningstar will be doing 1d20 (both before AC, which means the great mace will also be getting through AC more often). So a character like a typical mifi almost always will want to use a two-handed weapon because it relies on its weapon for most of its damage.
From this brief examination, the reader might also figure out which types of characters *should* use shields. Shields are better on characters that don't rely on weapons to do the majority of their damage, aren't as negatively impacted by their experience cost, and may be lacking in one or both of the other two defensive stats. A troll is commonly a good shield/large shield user because it's typically unarmed and has poor defenses, and trolls require fewer skill levels to remove shield penalties. A character casting high level spells probably wants a buckler and in a few cases a shield. But to figure out examples like this, we need to develop a basic understanding of the game mechanics we're interacting with, many of which are different from those in other games.