Dungeon Master
Posts: 291
Joined: Wednesday, 6th June 2012, 18:59
Discussion: Improving Skalds
At time of writing, skalds have the second-lowest win rate of any background in recent (>= 0.11) versions of Crawl in online play*, at 0.38% (for the curious, only transmuters are worse off, at 0.33%), and have a significantly worse chance of reaching Lair than average (2.64% vs. 7.17% average). To put that last bit in perspective, even chaos knights, artificers, and *wanderers* (considered challenge classes) have a better rate of reaching Lair than this (5.85%, 6.55%, and 3.99% respectively.
Yes, apparently a largely random start is in a better position to clear the earliest obstacles in the game than Skald is right now. Take a moment to let that sink in.
Now, let's take a look at the Skald starting kit and compare it with some other backgrounds' starting kits; perhaps we can gain some insight as to why Skalds seem to be so underwhelming.
A skald starts with: one of the basic weapons (short sword, mace, hand axe, spear), unenchanted; leather armour (or a robe, if the race can't wear it), also unenchanted; and a book of War Chants. Ignoring the spellbook for the moment (I'll touch on that shortly), let's look at other backgrounds that have other similar starting equipment.
- I mentioned chaos knights earlier, so I'll take the opportunity to note that they have the same choice of starting weapons, only their weapon is chaos-branded (it used to be a +2-enchanted weapon); they also have leather armour (and/or a robe) enchanted to +2. (Granted, they start as a toy of Xom, but the effect this has on the game is... unpredictable, rather than a clear advantage or disadvantage.)
- Death knights start with a +1 basic weapon and +0 leather armour (or robe), and follow Yredelemnul at game start (the level of advantageousness of this could be argued, but I view it as a clear advantage).
- Abyssal knights start with a +2 basic weapon and +0 leather armour (or robe), and follow Lugonu at game start (arguably less advantageous).
- Warpers start with a +0 basic weapon, +0 leather armour (or robe), a book of Spatial Translocations, a scroll of blinking, 15 darts, and 10 darts of dispersal. (This is a good opportunity to point out that despite the relative unpopularity of Warpers, they have both a higher win rate - 0.91% - and higher Lair rate - 5.01% - than Skalds.)
- Artificers start with a +0 short sword, +0 leather armour or robe, and wands of flame, enslavement, and random effects.
With that in mind, let's take a look at what's in the Skald's book of tricks to start with - a set of level 2 and 3 Charms. This points to one immediate disadvantage - for a hybrid class, a Skald doesn't have the ability to do anything special from the get-go (our comparison backgrounds either have god abilities or items/spells they can use immediately, if of limited utility).
Let's suppose we have a Skald tactically minded enough to survive his first few harrowing encounters with hobgoblins and kobolds and their friends to reach XL2. Look - they can memorise spells now! Except - unless they are one of a handful of races and/or distributed their skill points carefully - they can probably only cast one spell at a time. So they might be able to deflect a couple of attacks from that adder lurking near the D:2 stairs, or they might be able to land the occasional extra flame/freezing damage on it. Hooray! Oops - another adder came up the stairs and I'm out of MP because we were just killing that last adder...
Our next character is resourceful enough to reach XL3, and has been clever enough in skill allocation to be able to cast more than one spell at once. Hooray, now maybe I can go take on that pack of gnolls and have enough MP left over to deal with that next monster! Oops, I've been so busy getting those buffs up and running to actually be able to survive that I can't hit and/or dodge well enough to deal with these ogres that turned up on D:4...
Anyway, enough with the contrived examples; regardless of the particulars, I think we can sense the problem at the heart of this - in order for Skalds' spells to be useful, they need to be able to kill things somewhat independently of their spells, and in the very short term they're not especially capable of doing so.
Looking at the other backgrounds I brought out for the sake of comparison, I can think of four immediate approaches to take:
- Come up with a workable level 1 charms spell to add to War Chants. This would let Skalds start training their Charms skill from the get-go, and possibly give them the slight boost they need in order to kill dudes from the get-go.
- Give skalds a better-quality starting weapon. To paraphrase a popular ##crawl learndb entry, "first be able to kill dudes; once you're killing dudes well enough, focus on not dying to dudes"; this makes them less absolutely reliant on their spells and also lends a bit more power to the branding spells in War Chants.
- Conversely, give skalds better-quality starting armour; with slightly better defences, they possibly have more time to recover and get their buffs up and running.
- Give skalds some other additional item to start with. This was mostly inspired by Warpers having a scroll of blinking. Perhaps the item could be a potion of berserker rage (in a nod to the old Crusaders)? I'm not really sure what could work here.
Anyway, please feel free to pick through my bad logic (bard logic?), offer suggestions, feedback, etc. - I hope that through doing so we'll be able to bring a little more utility and viability to a class that I thinks deserves a little more love.
* I'm excluding quits and dungeon escapes from these statistics, in the hopes that this mostly counts games that players are trying to take seriously.
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