The Tavern

What's is your collective advice on leveling up a casters spellcasting vs. specializing in a specific school in the early game. Should you aim to get all your good spells in your starting book to be hunger less, or concentrate on getting your main spells to max power ASAP?

I almost always train spell schools over spellcasting. When I need more spell levels, I'll pick up a bit of spellcasting. I'll also train it a bit if I have food issues, and stop whenever my food consumption rate feels managable.

However, this all tends to mean that my spellcasting skill is usually at a reasonable level. Just lower than individual schools, especially early on (when success and spellpower matter a lot more than spell hunger).

There are exceptions: some races have a very high spc apt, which makes it easy to train it super high. Also, there are some cases (staff damage and pain brand) where it can make sense to train individual schools to extremely high levels, while keeping spc low (since in these cases, the skill is for weapon damage, not for spell power).

I have a proposal for the removal of Spellcasting as a standalone skill somewhere in the dev wiki.

The cool thing about crawl is that there isn't one collective answer to this. It totally depends on the race you choose, the background you choose, the approach or playstyle you'd like out of that particular character, and the circumstances of the particular dungeon you find yourself in!

Most interestingly once you understand the rules/how the skills work, you can figure out what to do on your own. I'd say one basic rule is that if there's a spell you're casting several times on every floor, you probably want it to be hungerless. Other than that there are situations wherein you might want to avoid putting any exp into spellcasting, and just max out necromancy (say, a Kiku worshipping melee-focused character), and times where you want to max spellcasting out and minimize your points into other magic schools for the moment (melee/magic buffs hybrid or swiss army knife-type Wizards). There are so many combos and circumstances that its more about understanding than having rules.

For the early game, success is generally more important than hunger, in my opinion.

Getting spells hungerless is just a nice bonus; I've rarely seen a situation when there is no food at all as long as you press on in the dungeon. But I guess some people get more attached to Permafood than I do. I'll always use a Chunk where available, but I'm not averse to popping a ration if I hit Very Hungry. I personally think spellcasting is mainly for the MP and spell-levels.

For me and, I think, quite a few players, there's a non-trivial line-in-the-sand psychological dference between sultana and hungerless. Yes, it means walking around with an auxillary school at 5 points higher than conj/whatever, and yes it means ending the game with 30 unused honeycombs, but there you are. One feature of veterans and skilled players, I've noticed, is caring less about the food cock for most charactrs. But I'm no veteran (yet.)

That said, for spellcasters I get my small gun online, get my small gun hungerless, get my big gun online, get my big gun hungerless, big gun becomes small, rinse and repeat (until necromutation.) Mp and spell levels are also important of course.

I've moved the discussion about that to the relevant thread in GDD (which was handily linked from the wiki page).

I find that leaving spallcasting and your main spell school(s) on at equal learning gives the benefits of boosting spellpower while increasing MP and reducing hunger. The hunger hurts when your level 5 spell costs a ration and having those few mp points more allows more casting before fleeing.

I always have Spellcasting on normal with my school on focused. With summoners, spellpower has a much greater importance than with most characters, hence why my current charcter is still training Summonings long after everything has hit 1% success. I'll turn it off when it reaches 20.