Abyss Ambulator
Posts: 1249
Joined: Sunday, 18th September 2011, 02:11
Data: Most- and Least-used Spells
- First, 27 games used no spells at all.
- Conjurations are by far the most-used spell school, with 18 of the 25 most-used spells being conjurations (the other 7 are Regeneration, Apportation, Stoneskin, Phase Shift, Shroud of Golubria, Tornado, and Haste).
- Among Conjurations, Fire Magic and pure Conjurations spells win the day. Flame Tongue, Bolt of Fire, Fireball, and Fire Storm are among the top 10. The notable exception is Throw Flame, which was not cast once in 100 games.
- Charms/utility spells are similarly dominant when you look at the number of games using a spell. More than 10% of the characters learned Repel Missiles, Apportation, Blink, Regeneration, Haste, Deflect Missiles, Phase Shift, Song of Slaying, Passage of Golubria, Shroud of Golubria, Spectral Weapon, Silence, Stoneskin, Ozocubu's Armour, Portal Projectile, Controlled Blink, Magic Dart, and Aura of Abjuration.
- Summonings is on the other end of the use list. The 100 games only contained 3 that used summonings more than a tiny bit, and Call Canine Familiar, Dragon's Call, Monstrous Menagerie, Summon Horrible Things, Summon Hydra, and Summon Ice Beast were not used at all. (Summon Mana Viper, though it was used in only one game, was cast more than 500 times).
- Poison magic was similarly unpopular, with only 2 games learning any poison spells at all, and Alistair's Intoxication and Olgreb's Toxic Radiance were never cast.
- Swiftness has fallen into near-complete disuse. It was cast only 8 times over 5 games, in stark contrast to its past.
- Necromutation is vastly more popular than Borgnjor's Revivification or Death's Door, neither of which were cast at all
This data is naturally incomplete, since I had to manually get each dump from Sequell, and my patience stretched only to 100 there. If anybody knows how to automate pulling spell counts from dumps, I can plug it in to give a much more thorough picture of things. As it is, a few games cause large swings in spells, and a few schools are probably under-represented (notably transmutations). There's a lot of cool stuff even from 100 games, though. Enjoy!
(mods: even though this isn't a proposal, GDD seemed like the most appropriate subforum available for it. If you'd prefer it to be elsewhere, no worries)