The Tavern

Holy for extended, sure, but presuming you're doing a 3 rune game, how do the brands compare to each other?

I'm presuming vamp > elec > fire/ice/drain > venom/protect/antimagic/vorpal, with pain/chain/distortion being very character specific (Trog hates pain for example).

I'm actually not sure if elec is that great on an exe axe though, since it's so slow! Would fire/ice/drain be better in that case? I'm writing a bot, and I'm not sure how to compare brands for axes. I've never actually taken preference except for elec or vamp, and I figure that I might be doing it wrong, and possibly undervaluing distortion/chaos or maybe over valuing elec.

Thoughts?

For reference, elliptic's bot has vamp > electric > everything else, so I'm starting with that. He values antimagic a lot higher than I do, though?

I guess vamp is good for a bot because bots has a harder time retreating and resting or breaking up large groups. Otherwise, wamp is not that good: it does not always trigger, and does not even work on some of the strongest enemies.

A long time ago I calculated elec vs fire/ice on large weapons, if you have big strength than fire and ice is usually better, but by not that much that it matters. However, on smaller weapons elec. is much better, so maybe elliptic simply does not cared enough to distinguish by weapon size? Also, maybe fewer enemies resist elec.

I personally consider antimagic a very good brand if you do not cast spells - I like it much better than vamp or the damage brands. It almost disables many dangerous enemies and you do not care that much about damage on others.

My favorite brand on large weapons is speed though - but it is rare on axes.

Protect is not very good after the early game, and I also consider drain a little bit weak in the late game, and poison is almost useless in late game. I consider vorpal better than all of these (after the early game, where poison and drain is very very good).

Distortion is actually very strong for anyone if you do not switch (or you are with Lucy), just also very annoying. But for a bot that may not be a problem, I am not sure - a distortion weapon can easily win the game.

I prefer antimagic as a swap, rather than as a primary weapon. The problem with distortion is that being unable to swap really narrows down one's options against monsters that one needs to deal with in not-melee. So that requires at least a bit of special-casing in a bot, I'd imagine.

I do not think that distortion narrows your options that much, as bows/crossbows/slings + melee is not a very common combination for me, and everything else works fine. Sure, staffs are useful for spellpower but spells work fine without them, and throwing and evocations - the two most popular options in my opinion - are unaffected.

My problem is that since enemies blink around you need to care more about positioning than I would like to (it also used to teleport monsters away which is very very annoying, but I think this was removed, thank dev). Also really annoying against centaurs and yaktaurs (or anything that has a strong ranged attack when you do not).

Also pain/elec/disto doesn't have it's damage reduced by being a cleaving attack, so if you're cleaving stuff, elec really good (and if you aren't cleaving, why would you use an axe?)

Antimagic is REALLY good when it's good. As sanka points out, there's a significant subset of difficult enemies against which vamp doesn't work, (that's also true for AM, but most of the nastiest stuff can be made notably less nasty for AM), however when vamp works it's pretty good, in particular the worse your positioning the more helpful a vamp axe is (which I suspect will make bots significantly more successful).

The ideal is of course to have the most suitable brand available and use it as appropriate, but that would be harder to do with a bot.

Draining is actually better than fire or cold in the early-to-mid game (it scales less well with skill, and the penalties it gives are a larger percentage for earlier monsters, also there's more that can be effected by it) Probably tied with or perhaps better than elec early on.

Also it's *only* the top-end two-handed weapons with a pretty hefty amount of str where fire/cold will outdamage elec (assuming no immunities/vulnerabilities) in the 1:1 case, and even then it's reasonably close, so calling elec>fire/cold is a good enough metric for most cases, unless you want to get really complicated for some edge cases.

My decision tree looks something like:

speed|(am)>(holy)> (vamp)|(drain)|elec|disto > (venom) > fire|cold > vorpal > spectral|protection > chaos

Where the stuff in parens() is situational, and I probably wouldn't want to have that as my only weapon choice without one of the non-parenthesis brands as as swap if I have a choice, and in some cases get less useful as the game goes by, venom and draining move down as the game progresses (drain probably drops to fire/cold level by the time you're at the vaults, venom drops to spectral/protection level after orc)

Chaos is a weird case, because on average it's a bit better than fire/cold, but in the worst cases it will kill you, putting it at the bottom of my choice list

Sanka, you may like throwing more than I do. But I think if I'm using a 2-handed melee weapon anyway then I usually will want to use either a bow or a crossbow.

Its not that I like throwing that much. Rather, if I train bows or crossbows I ussually do not train a melee weapon, because there's no point.

Distortion is not good for a secondary weapon for bow/crossbow users, but I rarely care that much about my secondary weapon's brand. I rarely use untrained bows/crossbows after the early game, mostly because it's too tedious to switch weapons.

Also as the game goes on the attractiveness of using slow ranged to take pot shots go down. Things can make willpower checks, smite/shoot at you, etc. Better to get into melee and/or get around corners to manage LoS than firing low skill launchers. If you trained up bows or xbows it's another story, but then also training a melee weapon is odd (unless you're a gnoll).

Speed would be the best brand for exe axe, though good luck with that. Holy for extended, otherwise I like vorpal then freeze on the big heavy hitting weapons. Both of those actually do some of the bonus damage to OOF, with vorpal being the most reliable. Freeze also is nice against draconians. Vamp is good, but IMO a bit overrated if you're not a deep dwarf.

Distortion is a lot less annoying now that it doesn't have the "teleport other" effect. Blinking monsters around can still be annoying or dangerous, but you don't have to egg hunt teleported monsters to keep your upstairs safe any more. The possibility to banish can also be pretty strong.

Antimagic is amazing if you don't rely on mana for spells or spirit shield. Unlike silence it keeps messing with demons/OOF/etc.