STR to 8 then INT

[snow]

Will STR or DEX past 8 ever be a valid choice for a caster?

[KoboldLord]

I suppose if you're planning to wear dragon/ice dragon/pearl dragon armour you'll want a strength of 9. It is still perfectly feasible to get 9th-level spells usable with these armours.

Leaving that particular case aside, a point of int one way or another is a fairly minor issue. There's ample permafood to last for an entire 15-Rune game even if you're slightly slower than normal at getting your spells hungerless, and you can compensate for the slightly lower spell power by dumping an extra level of xp in your kill spells. If you feel that your stash runs to unload consumables at strength 8 are entirely too irritating and you'd like to do them less often, you can feel free to pump strength to 10 or even 12. It isn't like this resource is tight, at least in most games. The fact that an activity is annoying to you is ample reason to alter your play choices to avoid it.

You are unlikely to find many situations where you'd be wrong to choose int, and it will be nice when the plans to correct this imbalance are implemented, but ultimately it doesn't matter much.

[Jeremiah]

I guess if you are using necromancy there are sometimes occasions when you want to carry corpses around, and in these cases your carrying capacity might matter. (eg you want to carry that hydra corpse to the next level so you can animate it as a zombie there.)

[XuaXua]

How the hell did I never think about carrying corpses to other levels?

That is awesome. Double-thank.

[RFHolloway]

Troll unarmed necro? - how heavy are those corpses anyway?

[XuaXua]

Troll unarmed necro? - how heavy are those corpses anyway?

Drop any potentially useless crap at the top of the stairs, grab a body and haul downstairs, immediately animate dead, clear area if necessary, animate more dead, go back upstairs and get your crap and come back down.

I just did that with a storm dragon body/zombie; was awesome.