Dumb AM ranger question 3 - Stats

[grinrain]

In a lot of games, strength plays to melee fighting (both effectiveness and how fast you skill up), dex to range fighting and defense (effectiveness and skill ups), while int plays to magic (effectiveness and skill ups). How does it work here?

[petercordia]

Strength is good for weapon damage and shields, and it reduces the penalty to spellcasting and dodging you get from wearing heavy armour.
Dex is good for accuracy and dodging (via the dodging skill)
Int is good for spellcasting in a variety of ways.

see http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Strength etc

[svendre]

STR is good for reducing penalties from wearing heavy armour for stealth, spell casting, evasion, accuracy... and it increases damage, oh and ability with shields too.
INT is good for spell accuracy and power, and chance of failure to cast. It's not worth much unless you also have STR to wear decent armour (see above) This is due to the principle that you need to be able to receive damage in order to have time to deliver it. So once you also have decent STR you may as well have melee too, which leaves a few AOE spells and necromutation (for mutations and torment in extended games on races that cannot worship TSO) as the primary reasons to even use magic.
DEX is a dirty secret noob trap that only a few people want to admit is bad. It enhances stealth (which gets you killed as much as it helps), evasion (which lulls you into a false sense of security or worse when paralyzed, but is still probably the most legitimate use for dex when combined with AC), and helps with weapon accuracy (which isn't much of an issue if your fighting and weapon skills are trained to levels they should be anyways.)

[petercordia]

Svendre, why do you hate pure mages so much?

[svendre]

Svendre, why do you hate pure mages so much?

Because it's so much harder and tedious to play in a glass cannon manner where you perfectly, amazingly survive every encounter without eventually going splat in a game where they've designed so many different ways for you to be forced to eat damage. Yes, it is possible.

It just annoys me to no ends though because it comes across to me as a severe imbalance between methods of play. The crux of the matter is how obtaining AC more drastically affects spell casting than anything else. Even a stealth stabber has shadow dragon armour, which actually enhances stealth. Why isn't there a heavier armour better than steam dragon which doesn't impede spell casting? Poor elven armour which wasn't even that great and was limited to elves was ripped out long ago.

But even more beyond that point are a hundred other points. I once wrote a doc entitled "If Melee were like Spell Casting" which made fun of the extreme imbalances. Maybe I'll dig it up sometime. A few samples: you would have melee miscast effects where you stab yourself, you would have fatigue where you run out of energy to attack with your weapon, you would need INT in order to wear heavier armour and still hit things (but wouldn't use it for anything else). You would need to train five different weapon skills to overcome monster resistances... your weapon could be disarmed like silence....you could be instantly drained of all melee strength by invisible moths....confusion would allow spell casting attempts but completely block all melee, swinging bigger weapons would make you ravenously hungry, and on and on and on.

The classic comeback is, but why should every method of play in crawl be of equal difficulty? Because there shouldn't be any no-brainers when deciding which way to play will often yield the best results. If it's just about picking some insanely difficult race with major handicaps, that is fine. If it's about the core design between melee/ranged/spells for all races and throughout the core of the game, then it just seems like sloppy game balance to me. For all the core strategies in crawl, I think they should be roughly equivalent in effectiveness though approaching problems from different angles, modified by racial and starting profession difficulties for variety.

If not that, then it's someone claiming they are balanced. Go look at some tournament results and see how many fighters there are doing well versus pure spell casters. Maybe that's simply because people enjoy playing that kind of combo so much more? Yeah? Right? No way it could also be related to the fact that people like to win more than lose on the whole right? Tell me another good one.

Spells need a lot of help, so does dex and stealth. AC, axes, melee in general need a good nerfing. Ranged needs an overhaul first, and probably a nerfing to a lesser extent.

I'm barely glossing over this topic.

[acoolguy]

I think you underrate the strength of pure mages quite a bit. General melee focused characters have a better time on d1 and d2 and generally have a better UI (tab is super convenient). However, most book starts do a much better job against threatening enemies (ogres, etc) than melee characters and later game have a much easier time disposing threatening enemies late game (it's a lot less scary iron shotting, ood or using malign gateway a orb of fire or an ancient lich than meleeing it). Furthermore, the noise of spells can work in a convenient manner when on the stairs allowing for safe stair dancing. The lack of mp I find is rarely a problem except in select areas like Vaults 5, and the Hells or a bad tp into a Zot 5 lung (though that's a problem for all characters). Generally the biggest reason for me to be a pure mage is worshipping Vehumet (where going for lvl 9 spells is pretty viable in a 3 rune game), when I find lots of good books and lots of spell enhancers. Even on these pure mages, I may devote 5 - 10 levels of weapon skill just because it is pretty cheap to do so.

[grinrain]

Ok, skip dex, which is too bad. Human AMs start with high dex, was hoping it was important!

Thanks all