The Tavern

What are the breakpoints for Lesser Beckoning? I understand how spell power works, but there seems to be no information for how spellpower relates to the range of Lesser beckoning.

Lesser Beckoning appears to be almost unique for having an obvious breakpoint in a spell, which means that being drained or stat loss can drastically change the nature of a spell..

I'll give you some help in investigating. In
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/mas ... spl-data.h you will find the following code block:


You can use this to perform a search in the source code for SPELL_BECKONING to find its effects. It's probably in source/zap-data.cc

I'm on my phone and don't really want to do all the legwork anyway, but if you post the code blocks we'll help you break them down.

Since you generally don't know your exact spellpower and just see how many #'s you have, I'm not sure knowing the breakpoints are all that important to know.

Practical guide to lesser beckoning: At low spellpower it's not terribly useful as you probably don't need to grab monsters who are only 1-2 tiles away from you very often, but it can be helpful. Train translocations a bit more and you can easily grab monsters from range 4 or 5 which makes it quite helpful as that cuts down a lot of possible ranged attacks they could have been making on you, especially from shorter ranged spells like LCS/iron shot.

It's generally difficult to get it up to full LOS range, unless you've got very high int and want to train a lot of translocations. If you're planning on learning Cblink, well, you can probably beckon full LOS by then.

If I remember correctly, full LOS is basically unreachable unless you have incredible Int and train a ton of Translocations. (The Nightstalker DS mutation is great, as usual.)

Not impossible to Chei worshippers, who benefit the most from lesser beckoning, and are likely to train translocations anyway.

I don't remember offhand but I feel like some of my characters have had full LOS? Maybe it was one tile short. Here's an example character:

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Tason ... 042649.txt

For those who don't want to look: Vinestalker with 47 int (Chei + equipment), 18.4 spellcasting, 18.6 translocations (Cblink at 1% fail, lesser beckoning 0% fail). 8 #'s of spellpower (between 100-149), but thankfully the game protects me from knowing exactly how much spellpower I had

That's obviously overkill for just getting lesser beckoning range, but if you're going to learn Cblink anyways, you get some handy beckoning range "for free".

The exact spellpower of a spell is one of the few things you can work out easily in crawl. Knowing how much extra you need to train to change range can be important, as well as how much to have a comfortable buffer, as your tactics can change, it's not as if you will have cblink first or whatever spell.

Maybe someone with more code searching experience can find it, I did a 10 minute search and I can't seem to find where the breakpoints are determined. What spellpower do you need for 4/5/6/7 range, and what spellpower did my above VS have?

I think my VS's spellpower would be (18/2 + 18 * 2) * 4.7(int/10) = 211. After the stepdown this should be roughly equal to 120 spellpower, although if someone wants to calculate it more exactly go for it. I didn't even include my partial skill levels, so....

man lesser beckoning was so good for a few days before it was nerfed by increasing the spellpower cap. shame about that.

I still think it's great, but I would lower the breakpoints somewhat. It's now mostly just useful to chei characters, so I do still use it often, but I'd understand if most people don't. I'd think getting to around 120 spellpower giving full LOS would be reasonable, since you're almost never going to hit 200 spellpower on a translocations spell (would need wild magic most likely). I don't think hellcrawl has changed the spellpower formula and with 15 spellcasting, 12 translocations, and 46 int I still only have 68 spellpower and range 4 lesser beckoning. At least hellcrawl shows me the 68 spellpower

No translocation enhancers without Wild Magic or a few items. Remember most people who hit max spellpower have 3 enhancers.

The question I'm still waiting for an answer on is what spell power is required for range 7, aka full LOS range. Do you have to have 200 for this, or does it come at 150 or something more reasonable? Bonus points if you can list all of the breakpoints for range, but I think the range 5/6/7 are the most important (it's fairly easy to reach range 4 if you train translocations moderately with good int/spellcasting).

pretty sure it is 200 or very close to it.