regarding heavy armor

[drag0n]

I've got a pretty good MiFi game going on. I'm hoping for a five+ rune win. Right now I'm closing in on Vaults:8. I'm using an Executioner's Axe of venom (which, of course, is two-handed). I have +1 Crystal Plate Armor but I'm waiting for Gold Dragon Armor (and I've got a big stack of Enchant Armor scrolls which I haven't touched yet).

How far should I train dodging? I feel like I have to compensate for the lack of a shield, but Gold or Crystal armor obviously nerfs that quite a bit. Is it worth dodging if I ramp it up to 27, or is the experience better spent on other things?

[drag0n]

Why is CPA so much better? It's AC 14 vs. 12 and GDR of 48% vs. 44%. That seems pretty close, is it really a big difference? And right now I'm amazingly short on resistances.

[Deimos]

I'm going to have to disagree with minmay here. If the difference really is 2 base AC and 4% GDR, thats not enough to make me want to take off 2 pips of resist.

[drag0n]

You are saying that the difference in AC gets larger as your armor skill gets higher? That's totally counter-intuitive!

[KoboldLord]

It's 4AC better, not 2, plus multipliers for armour skill, and you have ring slots to get your fire/cold/poison resistance from, assuming you don't luck into equipment with those on some other slot. More to the point, AC works on almost everything, while fire and cold resistance only work on fire and cold attacks. Fire and cold attacks that are significantly dangerous become less common as the game goes on, and AC works just fine on them, too.

A mid-game character tootling around in barely-enchanted plate armour will want some fire resistance, because a dragon will probably be able to two- or three-shot the character in spite of AC and hit points. Later in the game, though, that same character will have MUCH higher hit points and MUCH higher AC, but those fire bolts will mostly have the same damage output they always did. A modestly higher set of damage dice from additional monster hit dice, sure, but nothing that causes the endgame character any real concern. New attacks that are gradually becoming more common, like Torment, Hellfire, and Fire Storm, mostly ignore both AC and fire resistance.

Really, resistances are not all that awesome. You kind of want that first pip, especially earlier on in the game when you're hitting out-of-depth monsters with elemental attacks, but a monster with such an outrageously strong attack that you need the second or third pip for it would absolutely splatter a character who didn't find resistances, so the design team didn't include many locations where multiple pips of a resistance are particularly necessary. Orbs of fire come to mind, and also Gehenna and Cocytus, but even those can be handled comfortably by a non-expert player simply by stacking some vanilla resistance rings, or in the case of orbs of fire bringing a potion of resistance.

[drag0n]

Thank you guys, consider my mind blown! I'm pretty sure this isn't covered in the wiki. I will buff up my CPA and let you know how it goes.

[drag0n]

Damn. I was kicking a lot of ass (killed TRJ, Mara, Geryon) and a stupid Green Death caught me with my ring of poison resistance off and no potions of curing (been short on them all game). I've never been poisoned that badly before. I had been juggling my jewelry for a while to mitigate some bad mutations and a lack of resistances. GDA actually might have saved me.
http://crawl.develz.org/morgues/0.10/dr ... 160313.txt

Thanks again for your help.

[smock]

I'm not convinced about the advice to take CPA for a reason closely related to the cause of your demise.

Maybe before deciding a should look should be taken at resists. If you don't have rF, rC, or rPois at all, perhaps it's worth sticking with GDA. If you can get rF/rC/rPois by swapping a weak ring (with some drawback, eg) for strong ring (with a EV bonus, eg), it may still be better to stick with GDA. The +5 AC of CPA is great but with GDA you might be able to get +dam or clarity or whatnot on while maintaining rF. Of course, if you already have rF++ and rC+ on your first-line set of swappable items, go with CPA. Poison isn't be much of an issue in most late games, but if you're out of curing then I think that equipping GDA could be stronger than equipping CPA. Poison rarely comes into play, but you might have to burn a tele/blinking to deal with it, even if you do swap in an rPois item quickly enough.

[crate]

If you already have the 27 str for gda I suspect that gda is better in a lot of cases. But part of the draw of cpa is that 3 extra dex or int is very good (it's an extra gloves of dexterity or helmet of intelligence).

[Mankeli]

Yeah, I don't really understand how CPA is four "muches" better than GDA (even if one would agree with that CPA is usually better). There are most certainly many cases in which one would prefer GDA over CPA. Depends on your other gear, obviously. And sometimes you can find or buy GDA so it's not that you always need to enchant the hide first. The hide option is, on the other hand, a plus at least in my books because one can somewhat reasonably expect to find (=butcher) a gold dragon hide during a normal game (adds predictability and enchances the chances of planning at least for extented).

Also, I think Gehanna is a perfect example of a place where my char would not want to wear CPA over GDA and compensate it with vanilla resistance rings because regeneration rings are at their nicests in Hells IMO. The biggest threaths in those places cannot be dealt with AC anyways. But I play a lot of spelless dudes (for the challenge and simplicity) so I can't necessarily fully appreciate the -1 evasion modifier difference.

[KoboldLord]

I'm not convinced about the advice to take CPA for a reason closely related to the cause of your demise.

Maybe before deciding a should look should be taken at resists. If you don't have rF, rC, or rPois at all, perhaps it's worth sticking with GDA. If you can get rF/rC/rPois by swapping a weak ring (with some drawback, eg) for strong ring (with a EV bonus, eg), it may still be better to stick with GDA. The +5 AC of CPA is great but with GDA you might be able to get +dam or clarity or whatnot on while maintaining rF. Of course, if you already have rF++ and rC+ on your first-line set of swappable items, go with CPA. Poison isn't be much of an issue in most late games, but if you're out of curing then I think that equipping GDA could be stronger than equipping CPA. Poison rarely comes into play, but you might have to burn a tele/blinking to deal with it, even if you do swap in an rPois item quickly enough.

Yes, the gear you actually choose does and should depend on the gear that actually ends up being available in-game. Crystal plate armour is generally better than gold dragon armour when considered in a typical game situation, but loads of game situations by that point are not going to be typical. Even so, the OP didn't post a dump, so we were talking about the general case. Certainly it would be unreasonable for us to give advice assuming the OP was packing double rings of dam+8 or something.

Yeah, I don't really understand how CPA is four "muches" better than GDA (even if one would agree with that CPA is usually better). There are most certainly many cases in which one would prefer GDA over CPA. Depends on your other gear, obviously. And sometimes you can find or buy GDA so it's not that you always need to enchant the hide first. The hide option is, on the other hand, a plus at least in my books because one can somewhat reasonably expect to find (=butcher) a gold dragon hide during a normal game (adds predictability and enchances the chances of planning at least for extented).

Well, in the case of the OP, drag0n had a crystal plate armour and didn't have a gold dragon armour. In such a case, four 'muches' is a shocking understatement on minmay's part, but I suppose he got tired of adding them and figured his point was made. Passing on what is probably the best heavy body armor in the game for a heavy armor user who is exactly suited to using it in favor of some other armor that isn't even available yet is not conducive to surviving to the point where that second-best armor finally makes it appearance.

Also, I think Gehanna is a perfect example of a place where my char would not want to wear CPA over GDA and compensate it with vanilla resistance rings because regeneration rings are at their nicests in Hells IMO. The biggest threaths in those places cannot be dealt with AC anyways. But I play a lot of spelless dudes (for the challenge and simplicity) so I can't necessarily fully appreciate the -1 evasion modifier difference.

Fire resistance doesn't help against hellfire attacks at all, you know. Gehenna is actually much easier to negotiate without fire resistance than Cocytus is without cold resistance, and there's more generic melee brutes down either of them trying to punch you in the back of the head than there are actual fire and cold attacks.

[Mankeli]

Well, in the case of the OP, drag0n had a crystal plate armour and didn't have a gold dragon armour. In such a case, four 'muches' is a shocking understatement on minmay's part, but I suppose he got tired of adding them and figured his point was made. Passing on what is probably the best heavy body armor in the game for a heavy armor user who is exactly suited to using it in favor of some other armor that isn't even available yet is not conducive to surviving to the point where that second-best armor finally makes it appearance.

Ok, I was kind of talking about it on a general sense and minmay was answering to this particular fellow.

Fire resistance doesn't help against hellfire attacks at all, you know. Gehenna is actually much easier to negotiate without fire resistance than Cocytus is without cold resistance, and there's more generic melee brutes down either of them trying to punch you in the back of the head than there are actual fire and cold attacks.

You missed the point: I was talking about the opportunity cost of a vanilla resistance ring (in this case, it is the regeneration one) which arises (for example) from the possibility of a character that has zero resistance (or even vulnerability in case of mummies) in Cocytys or Gehanna choosing vanilla CPA over GDA and having to make up for that with a vanilla resistance ring thus removing the possibility of wearing a ring of regeneration in that particular finger. There is only one finger on each hand, you know (writing this last sentence feels a bit strange ).

I was certainly not suggesting that you should try to block hellfire with fire res.

[crate]

You can do gehenna with rF0 if you are in cpa just fine usually, the only actual fire attacks of any consequence are balrug fireball and Asmodeus's fire attacks (and some fire giants in evilmike's Geh:7). The AC any cpa character has will be enough to survive balrugs anyway.

In general a lot of players dramatically overvalue resistances ... it is very rare you ever need more than one pip of any specific resistance (pretty much only for cocytus, orbs of fire, some of the unique hellpan lords, and some ziggurat floors) and most of the time you do not need resistance to more than one element at once.

[KoboldLord]

You missed the point: I was talking about the opportunity cost of a vanilla resistance ring (in this case, it is the regeneration one) which arises (for example) from the possibility of a character that has zero resistance (or even vulnerability in case of mummies) in Cocytys or Gehanna choosing vanilla CPA over GDA and having to make up for that with a vanilla resistance ring thus removing the possibility of wearing a ring of regeneration in that particular finger. There is only one finger on each hand, you know (writing this last sentence feels a bit strange ).

So you throw on a ring of fire resistance for one ring and a ring of regeneration for the other. Swap if you run into something that calls for something else, and then swap back. Or heck, you could even swap from regeneration to fire resistance if you see a tier-1 fire-themed demon, and then swap back once it's dead, and you're good on fire resistance. CPA with decent armor skill is more than adequate to handle hell hounds, sun demons, lava snakes, and the other assorted fodder in Gehenna, even without resistance.

[smock]

Is going from 35 to 40 AC more important than going from, for example, 15 to 20 AC?

I don't know. I'm really wondering if there are constant returns to AC or decreasing returns to AC.

[rchandra]

cerebovssquire said that his Minotaurs in plate got good benefit out of raising dex and training dodging.

e: I should add that his last one wore GDA, finished with 26 EV.