The Tavern

Advice has recently trended towards "ignore dexterity entirely" in favor of str or int. Dex basically just affects the ev provided by dodging to a very small degree: stealth doesn't matter much after the early game and the accuracy bonus matters less than the str bonus to damage. At this point dex is a noob trap for people who view dcss as an rpg and believe in the validity of the stabber archetype.

The problem of dexterity's underpoweredness could also be solved by buffing dex's effect on evasion. However, this is an inelegant solution that ignores the actual differences between strategic character archetypes in dcss. Aside from god choice, the primary distinguishing factor between characters and their capabilities is a function of their melee effectiveness and the investment required to cast spells. In this sense, dex is superfluous: it accomplishes the same thing as str (boosts melee, but in a more opaque way). In the early game when you level up, the decision of "str vs int" is a significant strategic decision that affects the viability of current and future options. You can make armor more viable at the cost of spellpower or vice versa. A character with good ac and good melee damage plays differently from a low-ac character with access to a range of high-power spells. A character with mediocre spellcasting ability, low ac, and slightly higher ev feels similar but weaker to the aforementioned caster archetype. Of course str vs int is not an all-in decision: it is a strategic continuum to which dex is at best tangential.

I think that dodging and stealth should remain skills, and that they should be affected by character size, aptitudes, and armor encumbrance. In this way the game would play similarly to the way it does, except that dex would no longer exist to trick players.

Mod note: It's not a particularly similar vein, please put that in its own topic.

There's probably something to be said for removing stats generally. They play a role very similar to skills, though their effects are harder to explain. Their main advantage is the relative cleanness of their mechanisms of growth and allocation -- you level up, you get some integer amount of stats automatically and you sometimes get to choose which one. Compare with skills where you inexplicably have fractional amounts full of breakpoints, where you go in and out of the menu constantly to manage the allocation, facing significant penalties if you are insufficiently diligent, and where the scaling of XP costs of different skill levels is complex and not well understood by most players, creating incentives like "skill a lot of things a little bit" that are both counterintuitive and unfun compared with "get a whole lot of a few skills."

I would like to see something more like old style TOME skilling where you get a certain number of skill levels to allocate each level. The old tome system, as I recall, also fell into the trap of fractional skill levels and racial aptitude modifiers, so you'd want to get away from that. It also had a pool of these points you'd have to enter a menu to allocate. Both of these are suboptimal -- it is best to confront the player a prompt on leveling and make them decide on the spot, as with DCSS stats, and replace "aptitudes" with scheduled bonus skill points at various levels, again along the lines of crawl stats.

amaril wrote:Advice has recently trended towards "ignore dexterity entirely" in favor of str or int.

Really?

duvessa wrote:If your reason for raising Str is more damage, then "Tr already gets so much Str" doesn't really apply. Strength after 10 provides a linear increase in damage.
I personally think raising str is much better than raising dex on trolls, but I value damage more and EV less than most players.

tabstorm wrote:Dynast never trains Dodging, puts any points into dexterity, and uses axes with shields almost every time.

(To be fair, tabstorm's post isn't necessarily advice so much as an observation. I don't think that he is saying that axes are optimal.)

For whatever reason I feel like I've seen str or int > dex argued for more around here, but I can't remember other specific examples so I could be wrong. I definitely have found myself choosing str or int > dex on almost every 3rd level up in my recent games, especially in hellcrawl where the penalty for making strategic errors is more severe. If you are building a character that needs dex, you are probably building an underpowered character.

This is sort of beside the point though: even if dex were op right now, it would still function similarly to str, except it bears no relationship to the magic system or intelligence. If dex > str, str (and armor) is invalidated. If str > dex, light armor potentially stealthy dodgy characters still have a place because the magic system also penalizes armor. If dex's connection to its associated benefits were more compelling than int's connection to magic, I would argue for the removal of int instead.

If I understand correctly, that quote from duvessa is about Trolls and that quote from tabstorm is about Nagas. I would assume that there are still plenty of other characters that would pick dex.

Haven't only two attributes would be worse than having a marginally useful third. I once attempted to create a statfree version of DCSS but it's not easy.

I don't ever raise dex on other species either. But I'm not seeing how this proposal is better than removing stats entirely. It's not like the choice of str vs. int would suddenly become interesting or even significantly more comprehensible.

So has dex been nerfed somehow recently? A while ago people were certainly adviced to raise dex in many situations. Or was everybody wrong back then?

No, strength was greatly buffed a while ago (new AEVP formula and the effect on melee damage was doubled, and increased a little more by the removal of strength weighting).

In a lot of RPGs stats are a lot like aptitudes, either contributing a direct bonus to skills or determining the cost of training them. Crawl aptitudes have a big effect on how much damage you do, how evasive you are, and how good your spells are, so stats are redundant from a game design perspective... But removing them would involve a lot of rebalancing of game mechanics that they depend on, so it's probably easier to try to balance them by tweaking their effects than to remove them.

But, but, ... Chei?!?

All stats can be relevant for some classes like En and Ne. Str for heavy armour and Confuse/Animate Dead, Int for high level spells like Invisibility/Death Channel, Dex for stabbers or characters in robe/leather with Ozo Armour and short blades/demon weapon of electro/pain/distortion.

Is Dex weak, or does it just have steeply diminishing returns?

The advice I'd always internalized was "raise Dex to 20, then forget about it." Up until around that point, I took Dex to make a nontrivial difference to the EV provided by Dodging and to the effectiveness of light armor. But I don't have anything like a firm grasp of the math here; maybe I'm wrong?

Dex was way better before stat reform with regard to weapon damage as well as charms reform. Mid armour hybrids don't scale into the lategame very well these days.

chequers wrote:Haven't only two attributes would be worse than having a marginally useful third. I once attempted to create a statfree version of DCSS but it's not easy.

Perhaps it would be easier just to improve Dex a bit - if there's a real issue here.

The point of the post is not just that dex is weak. Dex overlaps in terms of effect with str and overlaps in terms of being affected by encumbrance with int. If dex and light armor were stronger than str and heavy armor, the result would be terrible: every character would raise dex instead of str to improve core combat capabilities, and heavy armor (which has a drawback) would be obsolete. As is, we already have a compelling reason to forego str and heavy armor: magic, which is tied to int.

If having three attributes is important, dex should be differentiated, not just buffed. I like the idea of having no stats a lot, however the argument i am making is that the removal of dex would hardly be a radical change: the player would be making the same decision with each lv up (how much armor do i want this char to wear?) except the question would be presented (more) clearly.

The worst part about str vs int is that they both affect spell success.

Suggestion: nerf strength. Specifically, make strength not reduce spellcasting penalties from heavier armour as much (at all). This would give low strength hybrid characters less reason to put points in STR.

I think the core of the problem is that Dex has no clear role. Str is good because it increases melee damage. Int increases spell damage. Dex.... increases your EV, in a way that's minor and hard to predict.

If Dex increased defenses of all kinds (and the similar effects of str were removed) we'd have three clearly differentiated stats.

In fact that gives me another idea. Move ER mitigation from STR to Dex. That would make attribute gain harder for heavy armour fighters. Maybe a little more complex for hybrid characters. But perhaps not much difference for pure mage types.

Another idea might be to include a dex-based play style in the game that does not render itself obsolete on reaching the late game. The stabber play style is no good in Crawl, as no matter how much DEX you have, your stealth will always be ripped from you when approaching more than one monster, and your dex-based defenses will not protect you a bit against fireballs, clouds, or LRD.
When investing DEX (or training stealth) actually leads to a viable winning strategy that does not also depend on having high STR or INT, then there is a point to providing this as a choice, beyond confusing un-spoiled newbies.

For most characters the main advantage of strength in the current system is that it increases spell success.

Maybe put back the Str weight system, but give everything 50% weighting across the board, to make it less spoilery.

WingedEspeon wrote:Maybe put back the Str weight system, but give everything 50% weighting across the board, to make it less spoilery.

"why not?"

Have stab damage scale stronger with Dex. This way, stabbers can chose between leveling int (for more reliable stab spells) or dex (for more potent stabs)

chequers wrote:Suggestion: nerf strength. Specifically, make strength not reduce spellcasting penalties from heavier armour as much (at all). This would give low strength hybrid characters less reason to put points in STR.

I think the core of the problem is that Dex has no clear role. Str is good because it increases melee damage. Int increases spell damage. Dex.... increases your EV, in a way that's minor and hard to predict.

If Dex increased defenses of all kinds (and the similar effects of str were removed) we'd have three clearly differentiated stats.

In fact that gives me another idea. Move ER mitigation from STR to Dex. That would make attribute gain harder for heavy armour fighters. Maybe a little more complex for hybrid characters. But perhaps not much difference for pure mage types.

a major problem of low strength hybrid characters is that they are bad due to the removal of most spells that they used to use, it has little to do with strength mitigating encumbrace. this type of character only really works with summoning, but why bother? you can do a character that uses only summoning and wears robes easily enough.

Low str hybrid characters can easily have higher int. I don't see what's wrong with them.

Majang wrote:Another idea might be to include a dex-based play style in the game that does not render itself obsolete on reaching the late game. The stabber play style is no good in Crawl, as no matter how much DEX you have, your stealth will always be ripped from you when approaching more than one monster, and your dex-based defenses will not protect you a bit against fireballs, clouds, or LRD.
When investing DEX (or training stealth) actually leads to a viable winning strategy that does not also depend on having high STR or INT, then there is a point to providing this as a choice, beyond confusing un-spoiled newbies.

This definitely feels like a core issue to me. The reason that dexterity feels irrelevant in DCSS is that the playstyles traditionally associated with dexterity in RPGs either don't work in DCSS, or aren't actually tied to dex in DCSS.

The whole notion of strength, dex, and intelligence as core stats, each associated with different playstyles, is pretty common and widespread in RPGs. Generally:

Strength is associated with slow, tanky melee dudes who use a shield or a huge two-handed weapon.
Intelligence is associated with spellcasters.
Dexterity is associated with mobile, lightly-armored characters, who avoid getting hit instead of having armor to survive hits, and use ranged weapons, stealth, and/or small, fast melee weapons.

DCSS' stat system was, I believe, designed to reflect these archetypes. Especially since, not too long ago, smaller, faster weapons got bigger damage bonuses from dexterity and smaller damage bonuses from strength. And the strength and intelligence parts mostly hold up. Intelligence is for spellcasting characters, strength is for characters who wear heavy armor and/or what enemies with melee weapons.

The dexterity part is where we run into a problem. All of the things traditionally associated with dexterity in RPGs either fail to be fully viable playstyles in DCSS, or aren't actually closely associated with dexterity:

Stealth is to unreliable for your playstyle to solely revolve around stealth. Stabbing-focused playstyles usually heavily rely on spells.
Neither bows nor fast, light weapons have a strong connection to dexterity in DCSS, outside of the connection between short blades and stealth, which I've already addressed.
Defensively, wearing light armor and dodging attacks mostly just feels like a worse version of wearing heavy armor and reducing their damage. The main reason to wear light armor in DCSS is for spellcasting, in which case you want int, not dex.
Dexterity has no connection to mobility, since effects that increase mobility are extremely powerful and rare in DCSS.

Basically, the character archetype that dexterity is normally associated with in RPGs - someone who wears light armor not to facilitate spellcasting, but rather stealthiness, mobility, and speed - doesn't work in DCSS. Weapons traditionally associated with dexterity have no connection to light armor and little connection to dexterity, heavy armor's benefits outweigh all downsides besides the spellcasting penalty, and stealth is too unreliable to define a playstyle.

So to some extend, I would say the question isn't "does dexterity have a role in the game?" The question is "does a lightly armored character who doesn't heavily use spells have a role in the game?" Because that's the kind of character dexterity is meant to help, but right now that kind of character has no real role in DCSS. If we're okay with that kind of character having no role, then I think it might make the most sense to remove stats entirely (I agree with the sentiment that no stats makes more sense than 2 stats). If that character should have a role, then we need to figure out what that role is, and why a character who doesn't do a lot of spell casting would ever wear light armor.

Removing stats would also have the advantage of making background choice less decisive. It would also remove many uninformed choices, like "+3 to slaying or +3 to strength?"

As for dexterity, maybe new weapon mechanics could make it more decisive. Long blades have made a little step in this direction, but EV still isn't that good, and remains useless in many situations. Having dexterity decide a huge bonus for a chance of stabbing even aware opponents with sb would be nice.

Can we make some weapon classes like Long Blades and Polearms use Dex instead of Str for weapon damage?

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Can we make some weapon classes like Long Blades and Polearms use Dex instead of Str for weapon damage?

That would do something, but it still would be "different flavour strength". There need be some other relevant mechanics to dex to make such a thing work.

Shtopit wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:Can we make some weapon classes like Long Blades and Polearms use Dex instead of Str for weapon damage?

That would do something, but it still would be "different flavour strength". There need be some other relevant mechanics to dex to make such a thing work.

Somebody mentioned melee characters in light/middle armour as a dedicated character type, my suggestion would really help here. Mf with bardiche would barely be interested in Str. Also there are many spells which don't care about spell power so that Mf might not care about Int either, just train enough skills for Spectral Weapon, Animate Dead, Passage of Golubria etc.

I think if accuracy was a real factor in the game, then dexterity would be a more useful stat. Accuracy is largely unimportant as things stand, even low accuracy has reasonably
I would say if accuracy in the game was roughly halved (Increasing the relative effectiveness of evasion, to-hit bonuses from dexterity, and weapon base accuracy) it would go a long way towards giving dexterity a role, and make lighter weapons less unappealing as well (indirectly making shields suck less too)

Unfortunately that also means a lot more button mashing for the same result, which is fine for interesting combats, but fairly tedious for uninteresting, regular combats, making the game take longer, which is unpopular (maybe this could be ameliorated by giving you a bonus to hit against things that are lower level than you or something, but even that doesn't really solve that problem, it just makes it less prominent)

Another alternative that's been proposed before is that "extra" accuracy give you a chance at some bonus damage, This has the disadvantage of making combat more opaque and random than it is presently, which is also a common complaint. (I would, personally treat it like a low level stab with odds based on what percentage your attack roll beat their max evasion) However while the mechanism is different (an occasional damage spike instead of an overall increase in damage) this does ultimately amount to "bonus melee damage" which is similar to (but not exactly the same as) strength, in particular since it applies more strongly to a different set of enemies.

Have dexterity factor into calculating attack delay for weapons (and maybe spells) by one of:
-reducing (or increasing) the amount of weapon skill required to reduce attack delay by 1 aut based on dexterity
-have Dex increase (or decrease) the strength of a point (or a tenth of a point) of weapon skill in all relevant formulas
-reducing (or increasing) attack delay directly (choice on whether or not it can go lower than min-delay) based on dexterity, separate from weapon skill
-Increasing base min-delay values and having Dex lower (or raise) the min-delay
-or some other variation on the above

Doing this would also improve on the current hard breakpoints for weapon skills.

2H staves could get a chance to parry.

One could also make the effect of cleaving and riposte depend on dexterity. That would even fit flavorwise. This would make DEX the key to lots of extra damage for some weapon classes.

I was thinking the same thing. Making aux effects scale with dex could be really interesting - right now, str increases your damage and survivability (in armor), int makes you better at spells, and dex increases your EV and accuracy (which, yes, does increase damage, but it doesn't seem great.) If aux effects scaled with dex, you could move back towards "str builds" and "dex builds," and they'd have appreciable differences, even using the same weapons. I'd personally want to see aux effects on M&F (or at least whips - a -slay penalty for a few turns, maybe?), and it'd be a pretty major overhaul, but it could be interesting...

A relatively difficult thing to do would be to power up dex without making the total of the attributes stronger, otherwise Cheib (and maybe demigods, as well as some quite irrelevant artifacts) would become stronger. So it would have to be either functions that exclude each other in-game (if you use a strong dex-based mechanic you must decrease the efficiency of a str-based mechanic), migrating functions from str to dex, or outright depower some mechanics, maybe through diminishing returns.

Shtopit wrote:A relatively difficult thing to do would be to power up dex without making the total of the attributes stronger, otherwise Cheib (and maybe demigods, as well as some quite irrelevant artifacts) would become stronger. So it would have to be either functions that exclude each other in-game (if you use a strong dex-based mechanic you must decrease the efficiency of a str-based mechanic), migrating functions from str to dex, or outright depower some mechanics, maybe through diminishing returns.

Some games use a "use whichever stat is higher" mechanic which helps mitigate the problem you're talking about.

I really don't think the solve needs to be elaborate and novel, and with stats it probably shouldnt be. Dex got hurt hard from the removal of phase shift, haste, and damage tweaks.

Buff the amount of EV dex gives with a tweak to stepdowns at high levels of dex (compensation for loss of phaseshift) and maybe a slight overall buff to ev from dex, either directly or by tweaking the ER, EV, and dex relationship.

Increase the reliance of accuracy on dex to give dex (characters compensation for damage) but maintain differentiation between str and dex. Specifically, dex lets you hit dodgy creatures better, but does not let you hit low EV high AC creatures harder.

If power creep is a concern, all of this can be offset by slightly tuning down damage from str.

I haven't leveled up dex on a character in a long time, the stat simply isn't in a good place right now.

Heavily tieing evo to dex seems like a pretty easy and semi-intuitive fix if we absolutely must have all the stats deal damage directly. This also removes evo as a "no brainer" option and allows for some fan favorites to potentialy return. Displayed power and wand stacking remove scummy spoilery interactions so the only drawback here is yet another evo reform (At least it's a buff this time).

Personally I'm for a gradual shift to a greater number high ev/ac mobs mid/lategame instead of the cumbersome hp blob spam we have at the moment alongside a nerf/buff to some weapon types raising their base damage at a hefty acc penalty to indirectly buff dex damage. Displaying chance to hit mitigates spoilery interactions here. (Also a nerf to heavy+shield+throwing)

Nobody ever turns down an early +6-10 plate of ponderousness on mele so slow move while overencumbered is probably a less vicous way of "making encumbrance matter" as an indirect buff to ev/light armor than straight up raising penalties/removing gdr would be as long as encumbrance is at least reasonably transparent. Edit: This would be tied to str/armor skill, not dex.

Overall neutral player and game power level, dex competes via semi-incomperable effects. That said this would be an extensive rebuild by crawl sttandards.

NhorianScum wrote:Nobody ever turns down an early +6-10 plate of ponderousness on mele

I frequently do, i would rather have 5 less ac than sacrifice my ability to walk away from normal speed monsters.

try setting EV = dodging + dex/2

I will often sacrifice my ability to walk away from normal speed monsters after I reach lair or sbranches. The game transitions to a one where one monster following you up stairs can be dealt with (up from 0), you have more and varied disengage options, and there are fewer normal speed monsters.

All of these things together means walking away from normal speed monsters is a much less valuable play later in the game, and ponderous becomes more attractive. Ponderous becomes less attractive if you are low on disengaging consumables/options.

Siegurt wrote:
NhorianScum wrote:Nobody ever turns down an early +6-10 plate of ponderousness on mele

I frequently do, i would rather have 5 less ac than sacrifice my ability to walk away from normal speed monsters.

Yeah I was fishing pretty hard with that line. Now to drop a wall of things everyone already knows subjected to questionable logic. Skip to the TL;DR to save your brain.

The choice of wear slowmegabuff plate and punch the 2 headed ogre/hydra (the only normal speed non-ranged enemies on the deadliest monster list) or avoid combat entirely has been debated forever and a year. It's a meaningful decision though god choice/background choice/fixed ego make it completely binary and not-a-real-choice.

An encumbrance slow that can be negated at some arbitrary benchmark of str/skill applys this cost/benefit to every peice of strong armor early on with more possible choices on the strategic level, so while it would still be optimal to end with heavy armor in a vacume it's also optimal to prioritize early power/survivability. Provided dex offers incomperable effects and significant indirect/limited damage scaling a number of games dependant on the benchmark will chose heavy dex/mid str over heavy str/mid dex naturaly due to a semi-random set of choices on all but the slantiest race/background combo's. This also maintains the viability of mid/late plate for most dudes and early plate on super minmaxed combo's.

TL;DR:Would you wear the ponderous plate you found on D3 if you could remove the ego by Lair/mid-Lair/1st sbranch at the cost of no immediate defensive growth?

Pillar dancing becomes less valuable after lair, but walking away remains as strong as ever. I see an increase in movement delay as an increase in the noise cost of all of my attacks/spells.

I don't like the proposed movement delay component to dex b/c that necessarily introduces additional stat-related breakpoints. Tying dex to evo is bad because that further decreases the distinction btwn evo and spellcasting. The same would be true of i.e. tying dex to projectile attacks. If keeping dex in the game is worthwhile (it isn't; the best idea presented in this thread is the removal of stats altogether), the way to do that is by increasing the viability of a stealth-based character.

There's a distinction between evo and magic that actually matters? (Aside from the version dependant difference where one is drasticly better than the other)

Edit: Why would anyone tie dex to heavy armor? That would be dumb.

More edit: I'm not entirely certain why breakpoints are inherently bad, or why that even matters since nearly everything in this game has rediculous amounts of needlessly obscured breakpoints. This is pretty much saying "remove crawl". Edit againagainagain: More accurately it's "remove video games" at some point there will be a moment where your numbers and another set of numbers line up, this is unavoidable.

Edit because not worth another post: I enjoy stat's and strategic complexity in character building and would enjoy more stat relevance in crawl. Some starts have annoying levels of stat varience that I could certainly live without but it does make those dudes feel somewhat distinctive. Dex is a pretty useful defensive stat as is?

Last edit and I'm out: Dex is "useless" until dex is equal to or stronger than Str/Int in optimal play unless str/int are already at breakpoint where dex is the go-to dump. If Dex becomes more useful this creates a similar situation. Making each stat equal is improbable. Making each stat situationaly optimal/universally functional and varying resource/game pacing to force player choice at some reasonable point based on random floorgod on not-completely-minmaxed-starts is a way to have our cake and eat it too.

To be clear, at the point of stabber being a viable midgame conversion/dex stabber consistantly killing unsupported you are perfectly avoiding/controling combat in a rougelike. That's kinda busted?

So I guess I have to be the one to point out the elephant in the room which is that dexterity isn't underpowered at all and advice to "ignore dex entirely" is idiotic (luckily I don't think anybody has ever actually given that advice). Dex is worse than Str on most trolls and centaurs because those species, for whatever reason, are specifically designed to not train dodging unless they are transmuters. It is not worse thane r str or int for conjurers or summoners or stabbers or literally any other character that trains dodging. There's no point in coming up with a bunch of buffs for a stat that doesn't need buffing and this thread shouldn't focus on that.
The reason I never raise dex is that str and int are much better at decreasing the number of keypresses it takes to kill things, and I value that more than almost any other attribute of my character.
The stabber archetype also works fine, the only noob trap is that the Assassin background misleads players into thinking that stabbing without spells is reasonable, and that would be fixed by removing the Assassin background. Enchanter is really good at XL2 and higher.

NhorianScum wrote:
TL;DR:Would you wear the ponderous plate you found on D3 if you could remove the ego by Lair/mid-Lair/1st sbranch at the cost of no immediate defensive growth?

Not any more frquently than i do now. I might go back and wear it once i had removed the penalties. Of course in the game as it is, i will nearly always have viable competing choices by that point. I *think* that is not the comparison you are trying to allude to though, i suspect you are trying to suggest "would i wear such an armour if the other choices were all much less protection" which is why trying to draw the allegorical comparison between the proposal and the ponderous ego doesn't work very well.

As to the actual proposal itself, it seems like it would create a lot of new breakpoints, and encourage backtracking frequently, which i dont like very much, other than that it seems like a fairly large nerf to heavy armour, but one it can probably withstand.

Siegurt wrote:
NhorianScum wrote:
TL;DR:Would you wear the ponderous plate you found on D3 if you could remove the ego by Lair/mid-Lair/1st sbranch at the cost of no immediate defensive growth?

Not any more frquently than i do now. I might go back and wear it once i had removed the penalties. Of course in the game as it is, i will nearly always have viable competing choices by that point. I *think* that is not the comparison you are trying to allude to though, i suspect you are trying to suggest "would i wear such an armour if the other choices were all much less protection" which is why trying to draw the allegorical comparison between the proposal and the ponderous ego doesn't work very well.

As to the actual proposal itself, it seems like it would create a lot of new breakpoints, and encourage backtracking frequently, which i dont like very much, other than that it seems like a fairly large nerf to heavy armour, but one it can probably withstand.

Fair enough answer. As for the terrible allegory the point was imposing a delay on the "best" protection to create more viable choices so it kinda worked? Also I hate D1 plate so much v.v

Ideally (since the idea is to screw with game pacing) this would only be an issue in the chunk of the game where inventory clutter management isn't a huge concern so any breakpoint would be low enough that minmax dudes can mostly ignore it. I enjoy MiBe 3 rune far too much to screw with that setup and throwing more breakpoints at newbies is just mean.

The proposals in that post are just there to offer more (and more interesting) choices to combo's folks play to make choices. It's probably way more work to implement than the dev team is willing to put up with. Just tired of rolling every meledude/Launcherdude Str to ER>dex to diminishing>Str to highest reasonable ER>int to not-gonna-be-brainless>rest in str and I don't see removing stat's as an improvement.

Ahhh finally, I see some people figuring this out. I've been saying this for some time now, how bad dex is compared to STR or INT, and for the most part always poo-poo'ed. I've seen some some very detailed explanations. The more you dig, the more reasons you find and they cascade.

My insight on the situation:

Str weighting should not have been arbitrarily removed in the name of dumbing down the code. I recall just after that change noting how ridiculous it was then to wear super heavy armor, pump all STR and swing a branded dagger over and over a ridiculous number of times (with no skill.) I recall always hearing how "it did nothing", and "it's so complicated, people can't understand it." Well, gee, crawl having more depth of game mechanics has always been a selling point for me.

Dex could reduce the amount of elemental damage you take from cold/fire/lightning. You need STR and Armour skill for AC, then you need items for resists... not a skill, or a stat. This would make it a lot more enticing.

Then, rename Dexterity to Agility.

Notice how the only people who defend strength weighting are people who clearly don't understand how it worked.

That branded dagger had 4 base damage. Before str weight removal, 30 str would effectively increase that to 5.1 on average, and give you the equivalent of +1.5 accuracy slaying. After str weight removal, 30 str would effectively increase that to 6 on average and no longer gave an accuracy bonus. And that's after the effect of str on damage was doubled. Wow, you got almost an entire point of base damage.

The Tavern

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