need advice for fire elementalists

[drag0n]

I recently made the switch from fighters to casters (mostly deep elf fire elementalists of vehumet). The early game tends to go well, but I always die after clearing the lair and the mines (right as I'm getting fire storm castable). So I'm looking for tips. I've made some stupid mistakes (standing in my own freezing cloud, not blinking away from an alligator). Centaurs (and javelineers) seem to get me a lot, even if I'm lucky enough to find repel missiles.

At this point should I have trained fighting/dodging/armour/stealth at all? I usually train fighting to 5 or 10 for a little extra HP. I'm never sure how high spellcasting should be. What non-fire-based direct damage spell is best -- lightning, bolt of cold, or another one? Should I wear robes, leather, or troll armor?

Here's a bunch of sad deaths:
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/drag0n/morg ... 003449.txt
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/drag0n/morg ... 222423.txt
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/drag0n/morg ... 032905.txt
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/drag0n/morg ... 064605.txt
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/drag0n/morg ... 192530.txt
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/drag0n/morg ... 225255.txt
http://dobrazupa.org/morgue/drag0n/morg ... 064700.txt

Thanks in advance!

[Psieye]

Somewhere along the line you should have had Dodging to around 10. Poison arrow or Iron shot are the default choices for "I need to kill this fire-immune thing fast" once you've gone beyond Mystic Blast's usefulness. Personally, I'd recommend you get some summoning first before going up to fire storm: you are guaranteed to get spellbooks with Vehumet so put them to use.

The job of your minions is not to do damage, but to hinder and tank - summon small mammals, summon scorpions and demonic horde are the recommendations for this task depending on what point of the game you're at. You're a DE, you will always have more than enough spellslots to cover all this.

Repel Missiles is no longer so critical when you have a big army take all the shots for you - don't feel any guilt over shooting your own minions in the back with fireball/bolt of fire just to kill whatever they're tanking. If you do feel guilty, learn summon elemental and use it with conjure flame to get fire immune minions who won't bat an eye at you blasting them with fire.

[Konebred]

If I know I am going Vehemet, I usually stop leveling fire at 7 and take conjurations to 11 or so. Then I stop and dump everything in to dodging and a little fighting. When you start getting gifted books pump earth magic. Once you get Iron shot castable, you are set. IS and fireball will take you through pretty much most of the game barring a couple uniques with shields. DEs of Vehemet are cool in that you can get your casting failure low despite wearing armor, so don't be afraid of the -2 penalty to the armor skill. Your fireball and iron shot will take care of pretty much anything before it gets near you. A bit of stealth helps avoid getting jumped by centaur/yaktaur packs. The only real problem I have had with DEs is the extremely early game before sticky flame gets up, but that is a lot of characters.

[Psieye]

DEs of Vehemet are cool in that you can get your casting failure low despite wearing armor, so don't be afraid of the -2 penalty to the armor skill

The armour skill is pretty much irrelevant for negating casting failure. It's because of DE aptitudes and Vehumet's Wizardy bonus that you shouldn't be afraid to wear heavy armour. What the -2 armour aptitude means is you don't get that much benefit from wearing the heavy armour until you pump in some expensive armour skill levels.

[drag0n]

Somewhere along the line you should have had Dodging to around 10. Poison arrow or Iron shot are the default choices for "I need to kill this fire-immune thing fast" once you've gone beyond Mystic Blast's usefulness. Personally, I'd recommend you get some summoning first before going up to fire storm: you are guaranteed to get spellbooks with Vehumet so put them to use.

The job of your minions is not to do damage, but to hinder and tank - summon small mammals, summon scorpions and demonic horde are the recommendations for this task depending on what point of the game you're at. You're a DE, you will always have more than enough spellslots to cover all this.

Repel Missiles is no longer so critical when you have a big army take all the shots for you - don't feel any guilt over shooting your own minions in the back with fireball/bolt of fire just to kill whatever they're tanking. If you do feel guilty, learn summon elemental and use it with conjure flame to get fire immune minions who won't bat an eye at you blasting them with fire.

Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for. I didn't even consider summonings!

[crate]

If you learn only one summoning spell, imo it should be shadow creatures. DEFE with no summons at all is just fine though.

I would not wear heavy armour on DE of vehumet, you don't really get better defenses unless you train armour skill, and in exchange it's harder to cast spells (notice there's no good side to this). If you want more AC, mottled dragon armour is fine and only barely hurts spellcasting.

[njvack]

mottled dragon armour is fine and only barely hurts spellcasting.

Troll Leather Armour is also pretty nice for the same EVP.

[drag0n]

If I know I am going Vehemet, I usually stop leveling fire at 7 and take conjurations to 11 or so. Then I stop and dump everything in to dodging and a little fighting. When you start getting gifted books pump earth magic. Once you get Iron shot castable, you are set. IS and fireball will take you through pretty much most of the game barring a couple uniques with shields. DEs of Vehemet are cool in that you can get your casting failure low despite wearing armor, so don't be afraid of the -2 penalty to the armor skill. Your fireball and iron shot will take care of pretty much anything before it gets near you. A bit of stealth helps avoid getting jumped by centaur/yaktaur packs. The only real problem I have had with DEs is the extremely early game before sticky flame gets up, but that is a lot of characters.

I don't know why, but I'm having a pretty easy time with the early game!

I'm surprised that you leave fire and conjurations so low. What about spellcasting?

[njvack]

Absolutely. However! Sometimes you don't get a mottled hide, or find a good robe.

[Psieye]

Mottled dragon armour is rare for a reason, yes.

[Anorm]

Your spell selection could be better. I notice that you have no deflect missile, no haste, no poison cloud, no poison arrow and you keep memorizing fire storm waaaaay too early just wasting spell slots. As a DE I would always train conjurations and ice or poison until I get failure rate below 5% on my main attack spells (xxx cloud and poison arrow usually) and then if I have deflect or haste I train charms. If I have nothing I need to get castable at the moment I just train spellcasting.

If I was playing fire elementalists I would also get ignite poison to combine it with poison cloud.

In my opinion, cloud spells are the best attack spells in the game and once you get them castable and hungerless you can easily clean up most of the dungeon with them. If you do not have deflect missiles, you should definitely get poison arrow. With it you can take out centaur and yaktaurs as soon as they step in your LOS in one hit. Or take out even poison resistant and elemental resistant enemies and uniques in 2-3.

Do not memorize fire storm until you can get it below 10% at least.

Also get flight (which I notice you do) along with swiftness (which you don't). The rest is tactics. Hope this helps.

[some12fat2move]

Spellcasting is something you only train if you want more spell slots. What's really important for you to train midgame is conjurations, as it does exactly what you're looking for - Iron Shot, Poison Arrow, OOD, and Poison/Freezing Cloud are all great stepping stones from Fireball to Firestorm and all fall under conjurations. Charms is also really important - with the ridiculous DE charms aptitude, you can pick up Swiftness, rMsl, and Flight pretty much as soon as you see them, Haste doesn't take much time at all, and afterwards dMsl can replace rMsl. A bit of stealth and fighting is good since the first few levels are practically free, and dodging is fairly important as it works very well with rMsl/dMsl (they work by reducing the enemy's to-hit, which is a lot like multiplying your EV).

For dealing with dangerous groups (yaktaurs, top-tier orcs, whatever), hit-and-run is a very effective tactic for conjurers as you may not have enough MP to blast through the whole group, but you can kill a few and then get away (with swiftness/haste/getaway scroll if needed), and come back with full MP to finish the job (or repeat the process). This obviously isn't going to work against a single, strong enemy, but if something looks too hard, just avoid it. If you want the satisfaction of killing it, come back when you have fire storm

[drag0n]

Thanks for the advice, everyone! After a few more sputters, I took it home with 15 runes. Here's my victory thread:
https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6432