The Tavern

Hey guys,

Anyone experienced with the tornado spell? What situations is it good for?

I have a DEFE with firestorm reliably castable and tornado (in extended now)

I learnt tornado as it looked interesting but now I'm too scared to use it on the dangerous guys as i dont really know how it works... and im too scared to test it on popcorn in case the noise attracts the dangerous guys!

Can the enemies hit/cast spells at you while they are in the tornado? How much damage does it do? The wiki is kind of light on information.

Char dump here (too long to post in code)

https://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/d ... larado.txt

Tornado doesn't impair enemies, it just damages them, makes them flying, and moves them around.

Determining how much damage Tornado does to a square is extremely complicated. It depends on how far the square is from the center of the tornado, how many wall tiles are within that radius, how long the tornado has been going, and of course your spellpower.

Thanks. I Understand its best to use it completely out in the open, right?

I.e the less wall tiles in the radius, the more the damage?

Just use tornado as a supplementary damage over time ability when you have monsters around you. Keep it up and use other spells to clean up the mess... It's good in conjunction with airstrike for picking off singular non-tanky dangerous enemies off.

Edit: Looking at your char dump I think you would mostly use firestorm. Tornado could help to finish off enemies when you get low on MP as you're following Vehumet. Have you not found staff of energy? You could cheese some MP regen with tornado running and channeling MP while it damages enemies.

That character is unfortunately dead now . Got double tormented then hellfired in Pan, was a pain to lose. 50+ Int. Acrobat amulet giving me 50 evasion when moving. Max spell power on my fire spells. He was really powerful.

I think I did have a staff of energy, but 1-3 MP per channel is pretty pathetic. Whether its right or wrong, I tell myself that it's better to kill stuff for the MP regen than it is to channel MP.

Add to that a staff of fire gives you spell enhancement and also a fire branded melee attack with decent evocations, I've never managed to find a way to convince myself its a good idea to ever use a staff of energy...

The next time I get a character to that stage (And I Am working on a 15 rune DEFE at the moment) I will remember that about Tornado. I wanted to have an alternative to firestorm for RF+++ enemies... and I think Tornado will be great for Ziggurats too.

Personaly I always learn Tornado last. I prefer Shatter instead of Tornado if I have a choice.

My reason for wanting Tornado was in case I came across a silent spectre in a ziggurat. Cast it and charge it and hope it dies... I'm just going on what the Wiki says though

You're following vehumet. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's possible to blast silent spectre outside of your LOS with firestorm?

I'm not sure honestly...

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Silent_spectre

The wiki says "12 tile aura". The last time I saw one was more than two years ago, and I seem to remember being silenced well before it even came into LOS. TBH, I'm not sure the tornado strategy would even work in a Ziggurat because I don't know if you'd be able to get far enough away from it to cast anything...

If you're not going for megazigs where you can get first turn silence I found that as soon as you see that aura coming, cast a few passages of golubria (just in case), cast PProj and try to snipe that silent bastard. If you run out of steam, just step into your passage and reset the fight.

Man, I talk a lot about how terrible the wiki is...but this particular piece of advice is utterly insane even for the wiki. That page is amazing.

point noted Thanks!