daggaz wrote:Only newbies and people who are probably going to die anyhow because of early adders getting lucky and no !cure do the quaff-ID thing.
I regularly advocate for quaff IDing early game while you have potions in stacks of more than 1 to allow yourself easier access to resources in the event of a bad situation. A run in with a spriggen enchanter player ghost, sigmund, or an unlucky run in with an ogre are all situations that become a lot easier to deal with when you don't have to waste valuable turns using potions that won't help you.
But lets put the argument of correct gameplay decision aside, I'm not saying its optimal play, what I AM saying is that "nobody quaff ID's unless its an emergency" is far from the truth. A newbie strategy is tabbing on d:1 with 2 hobgoblins on the opposite end of your LoS(lets ignore speedruns here), a newbie strategy is pillar dancing a player ghost, it is NOT a newbie strategy to choose to identify potions through quaff IDing based on personal preference. Very rarely is the life of your character going to depend on that potion of might you drank on D:2 simply because you were curious what that stack of 3 potions was, its very common for players to choose to do sub-optimal plays for the sake of maintaining their sanity. If anything, you are more likely to die of boredom than a lack of consumables in most cases.
I for one think potion of degeneration and poison should be removed and replaced by 2 more instances of mutation potions, since quaffing a mutation potion is far more interesting and actually leads to interesting decision making unlike the other 2. Normally I try to find positives and counters to my own viewpoint simply for the sake of showing I put genuine thought into my response, but I really don't see the need for these potions to exist no matter how I look at it. I've never once been killed as a result or even partly the result of potions of poison or degeneration, and I've died a lot of times. The biggest threat they pose is costing people a turn when quaff IDing in an emergency situation on the first few floors, but at that point you might as well just have potions of random uselessness.
I think I can see where the devs were going with this early on, but they seem really out of place now, like traps but much much worse and harder to grasp on their original intentions.
For the record, I dislike both suggestions in the OP because they generally are going to end up serving the same purpose as poison and degeneration do now. You quaff or ID them out of battle and laugh a little when you realize your stack of 6 mystery potions were poison you got from the orc mines entry vault.
To all new players: Ignore all strategy guides posted on the wiki, ask questions in the Advice forum, players with lots of posts normally have the best advice.
crawl.akrasiac.org:8080 <- take this link to play online or spectate.