Tuesday, 26th January 2021, 22:07 by Siegurt
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
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