How Do Forms Work in Relation to Other Skills

[Shtopit]

For the first time, I am playing a transmuter draconian training one skill at a time. I begun training only transm, then poison, then transm again, then ice, then transm. Now I have all of my spells around or below 5% success (first book) and I am training a bit of invo for banishing my foes.

However, I wonder if and how UC (and, in a lesser way, fighting) influence the attack power of the forms. Is it useful to train UC? What about dodging? Do they impact forms, and how?

[Fingolfin]

Is it useful to train UC?

Yes. Training UC will reduce attack delay (and maybe increase damage/accuracy).

What about dodging?

Also yes.
More dodging = more EV, form or not, and more EV is always good.

Training armour is useless, unless you use a form that doesn't meld your armour (e.g. Blade Hands only melds gloves)

Training Fighting gives more Health.

[nago]

For a tm your skill level order should always be:

UC > fighting > dodging > armor (if using armor and not a melding armor form) > transmutation > other magic skills.

Training UC does decrease delay attack and base damage, both in forms and with plain punch

Except maybe up xl3 when getting spider form castable is much much better than raising UC

[Shtopit]

For a tm your skill level order should always be:

UC > fighting > dodging > armor (if using armor and not a melding armor form) > transmutation > other magic skills.

Training UC does decrease delay attack and base damage, both in forms and with plain punch

Except maybe up xl3 when getting spider form castable is much much better than raising UC

Well, it worked: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=24261

[MainiacJoe]

What is the relative value between Stick To Snakes and Spider Form for early-character survival?

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Sticks to Snakes is a summoning spell. Summons are extremely powerful in crawl. The spell is good for attack, defence, escape, managing LoS, etc. Even though spider form is quite good, in my view s2s is the strongest spell in the book of changes. With more power you get more adders!

Spider form on the other hand doesn't much depend on power and having a reasonably low fail rate is usually fine. Since you start with a bit of transmutation, and you can train some more for s2s, it's often not necessary to train much more for spider form.