The Tavern

Post here to talk about the new background, Devler

You start on d:5, on staircase leading down, at clvl1, a (3) wand of digging, scroll of magic mapping, fear and fog, and a potion of haste. I have absolutely no idea how to play it. I think you need a strong melee character like troll or a fast species like spriggan to hope to survive what I think is the goal of getting to temple, getting a desirable god as fast (turncount wise) as possible before getting back up to d:1



Here I am shortly before finding out duvessa, a jelly, and a scorpion were all it would take for me to get to my first goal. I died, of course. Maybe you can do better?

I think the devteam's idea was more that you race for D:1 as fast as possible. Don't know if that would have gone any better, though. I assume they're supposed to be very much a challenge background.

Have had decent success (8/11 runs with random species delvers getting back to dungeon exit) so far. Seems very important to avoid fighting as much as possible until you find good shit, whether that be a god or floor loot, that lets you kill something worth hella xp. One run that was a stack of poison darts to kite an ogre to death, one run it was like a venom scim that let me kill a few popcorn and gnoll guys, one run it was an iceblast wand. Then you just get strong enough to go up and come back down, or at least not get oneshot by an orc priest. Haven't tried diving for temple first, though I did find it while climbing once or twice and I've taken some dungeon altars. Seems hard to avoid everything all the way up, but you do get a ton of free starting stealth and it's actually kind of valuable when you cannot simply kill the dudes and don't have safe floors to retreat to.

But there's no species for which they're a recommended background, correct? Any species for which you think they should be?

Centaur. Sadly, you will never play one.

The solo winning legendary CeDe:

https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/Li ... 040905.txt

Any fast species works well with De. I did have success with a troll until swamp. Probably won't play that again. I believe the idea is to find temple ASAP, then get to d:1 and go back down. If not, I don't know what the hell this background is about. It also looks like lightli started on d:4, not d:5 like the current De

Spriggan delver is an interesting image.

Any species with decent +stealth apts and stealth modifier does well as delver. Starting with 6+ stealth allows you to kill enough stuff to level.

Just wish the "short blade" start would be a dagger instead of short sword, to go with the stabbing theme.

((cries in horse))

Having played a few delvers now I'd say that stealth-capable + the ability to not immediately die to an (awake) popcorn monster are key; so races that are strong melee fighters at levels 1-3 (octopode, demigod) can do the initial delving OK. Of course you loose a few starts to walking around a corner or up a stairway right into something deadly, but it's kind of fun to hunt the way up.

The larger problem is from that point forward: the role is just *so weak* overall that the transition from stealth-and-run to being able to actually kill non-popcorn can be very difficult. You have zero spellcasting so even if you find a book it takes way too long to get even level 1 or 2 spells online (and forget about doing it in any armour, which you need to wear to live, but which also kills your stealth....). You don't have poison or hexes to complete a stabber build. And the lack of fighting-related skills plus need to stumble upon a decent weapon quickly makes even stabilizing as a fighter hard.

Granted, sometimes the RNG provides so if you are playing a character with flexible apts (again, a 'pode or demigod or similar) then you can lean on whatever excellent weapon you find on the floor long enough to sustain into another nice gift (had a 'pode find a dagger of pain, then books with all the necro spells, an end-game-quality randart ring.... yeah that can work). But I've lost several delvers after clearing level 1 and heading back down as an L3 or L4 character... you have to *keep playing keepaway* from most of the threats all the way down the dungeon.

I'd maybe recommend boosting armour & dodging skill a bit, or looking into some way to make delving + spellcasting more possible (start with 2 spellcasting but no spells?) to preserve the build-what-you-find but just make it a little easier to do so.

But still, when viewed as a total challenge character (not just the initial survival, but building the character into something functional) like wanderers, it's fun!

Is it walled off from the class? Or is it being cut?

Cut at the (nearly the) same time delver was added.

That makes me rather sad. I know I wrote negatively about Ce in the past, but in the meantime I have learnt to have fun with it and changed my position (mostly because of ranged tab).

Not directly related to delver, but this background does make me wish sif muna would give a random basic starting spell book at 1*. Having a third "break into spellcasting" god would greatly improve the lives of our delving deep elf and felid friends.

Played a gnoll and won (15 runes game), tried like 3-4 more and they all died. IIt really reinforced the senselessness of early deaths, amplified it even. In most cases I didn't find any stairs up on level 5, ended up finally getting something that could crush me chasing me down to level 6, running into something that killed me. I don't really see the point. You can certainly play better or worse, but this start seems to be very luck based, and I don't quite get what advantages it really has besides the few consumables you start with that pretty much need to get burned to have a chance.

If I want this sort of fun, I could always just avoid killing anything and try to run down to level 5 and then find a different set of stairs up to get back up or something silly like that. I guess if it had more of a point than just seeming like it was mostly luck I'd be more interested. It feels kind of like a game of rolling a d20 dice and seeing how many times it takes to roll 1 100 times.. pretty exciting!

Yep, this is so true. The problem is not the initial climb upwards (that's luck-based, but also fun!); it's the subsequent slog, with a character that's a sort of... Assassin (excuse me, Brigand) with a few motley books/weapons/evokables picked up in the journey upwards. I would play Delver each time if it was another game mode (Think: Dungeon Crawl/Dungeon Sprint/Dungeon Delve) or an option at startup (like weapons).

In other words, I would like to try a "delving octopode enchanter", a "delving spriggan wizard", and so on, detaching the delving option completely from the race/background combo. Heck, it'd be great to be able to choose the initial starting level too! Wanna start at D:7? At D:12? Be my guest, suicidal spriggan! Get ready to run a LOT

The background is poorly designed. It's not skill hard, it's luck hard: the exact opposite of what crawl tries to accomplish. I recently beat one: you just climb to floor 1, then play normally. It felt so pointless.

The only people who will bother with it are those who are just going for rare wins, since theres nothing interesting about it, and the whole time they'll be feeling annoyed thinking: why was dev time wasted on this?

Whatever. I beat one, and will never bother with it again.

Also, I agree with the above poster. What the background is trying to be is a new game mode, but it is severely limited by being set up as a background. I wouldn't mind if there were some challenge modes, but as a background it's just lame.

To be honest I'm not convinced that delver is less reliably winnable than chaos knight so if we are removing backgrounds for being luck hard then we should get rid of that one first.

The problem with delver is not the difficulty (you just die even more in the first few minutes), it's the utter un-interestingness of the game...