Barkeep
Posts: 3890
Joined: Wednesday, 14th August 2013, 23:25
Location: USA
Wednesday, 30th October 2013, 20:51
Re: Summoners
Well, hunger costs aside, and speaking to the more divisive question in this thread....
For a long time when I played casters I would typically neglect training up dodging or stealth ("what's the point?") and only minimal fighting. This habit formed, in part, due to my own inexperience, but was also reinforced by my very low tolerance for victory dancing—spamming spells at the air was bad enough. I'd leave dodging on sometimes but then since I was intentionally avoiding getting in to combat, and as I was loath to do the rat-dance, dodging would tend to be underleveled.
Anyway, once victory dancing was out I started experimenting (for me it was experimenting) with how to allocate my experience and I can say, absolutely, getting a bit of stealth and a good amount of dodging—the earlier the better—will increase your survivability a lot compared to dumping everything into boosting the power of all your starting spells.
Let's take high elf fire elementalist of vehumet as a case study, seeing as how that's a build that I'm very familiar with, and its pretty standard.
Generally, by the time I've cleared D7 or so, I have all my spells memorized, I'm at character level 8 or 9, and have something like "spell casting 4, conjurations / fire ~7, stealth 5, dodging 8." If I'm already worshipping Veh, and I have hit (or am about to hit) ** piety—which comes pretty fast—then all my spells are at less than 5% failure rate, and I can then go on training dodging while keeping my eyes peeled for other things that might be worth investing in—other spells, a lucky good weapon drop, a bit of evocations if I've picked up things worth evoking, etc. etc. Otherwise, I might pick up a couple more levels of spell casting to make sure I have some clear slots for Veh's spell gifts, but then I go immediately back to dodging. Now, if you find some spell book on the ground with awesome stuff in it, that could easily change one's course and make further early investments in magic a solid strategy. But that's not something I plan on—it is something I adapt to, and try to take advantage of, if and when I am fortunate enough that it occurs.
I've found this to be a very dependable way to get characters to and through Lair. The alternative "magic-heavy" approach would presumably include doubling down on magic but this usually nets you comparatively little in return.
In early game, the biggest boost to damage you get is when the next level of spells comes online, this is why a wizardry boost is a huge asset; but once you've got your starting spells reliable, your conj / fire is already at a high skill level for early game, and your marginal gain for each subsequent level of conj / fire is actually very low (under these circumstances). That changes once, say, bolt of fire becomes available—but again, you are not guaranteed (and are indeed unlikely) to have that available right at the moment you are finished with book of flames around D7 or D8.
For a FE, getting much more skill in magic beyond what you need to cast fireball reliably is like getting more than 14 long blades skill when the best weapon you have on hand is a scimitar. Once a great sword comes around, then of course it makes sense to pump long blades—but only once a great sword is actually available. Until then, yes, each additional level of long blades will boost your scimitar's damage output, but the "bang for your buck" has diminished and there are often better ways to invest your experience.
Namely, for fire elementalists, once fireball is reliable it is wiser to invest in defense and/or consider how to make use of what the RNG has given you already. The experience you save with Veh's wizardry (don't need much to get fireball castable) is better spent in this way rather than getting a couple extra levels in conjurations and fire, which translate into a boost to average damage that you don't need at this point in the game, whereas going from 12 EV to 18/19 and "fairly stealthy" to "quite/very stealthy" is a very formidable boost to early game survival. (This is doubly true with elves, who generally have good (DE) or very good (HE) dex and thus get nice returns on dodging and stealth skill, but I've found it is true for nearly all characters, really.)
Now, of course, my strategy with FEs won't exactly map onto other casters, and even with FEs, no scheme is going to work optimally if it is slavishly and unthinkingly followed, because each game is different. Still, what's particularly true in the case of (most) FEs is true at least to some extent for (most) other casters. Most caster backgrounds have a staple spell (or two) that, once it can be reliably cast, is also strong enough in spell power for the early game. So, once that happens, don't neglect defensive skills—even (indeed, especially!) early on—and don't neglect taking advantage of good drops the RNG has been generous enough to provide.
(Perhaps counter-intuitively, part of what makes fire elementalist a strong background is that its spells are not all that dependent on spell power. Inner flame, conjure flame, and sticky flame do a lot of damage with low spell power—above a certain point of spell power their effectiveness is in practice, albeit not literally, independent of skill level. And even fire ball has the nice property that it ignores EV and always hits in exactly same AOE pattern regardless of spell power, so while its damage does increase with conj / fire skill, it is still very reliable even at relatively low spell power. Compare to, say, lightning bolt, which scales with level similarly to fire ball but is much less reliable at lower levels because it tends to miss *and* its range depends on spell power. So, while this may not be obvious at first glance, a big part of how one should play to strengths of FE is by being careful *not* to over-invest in fire and conjurations for the post-Temple early game. This is true, although to a lesser extent, for many other caster backgrounds.)
For a long time when I played casters I would typically neglect training up dodging or stealth ("what's the point?") and only minimal fighting. This habit formed, in part, due to my own inexperience, but was also reinforced by my very low tolerance for victory dancing—spamming spells at the air was bad enough. I'd leave dodging on sometimes but then since I was intentionally avoiding getting in to combat, and as I was loath to do the rat-dance, dodging would tend to be underleveled.
Anyway, once victory dancing was out I started experimenting (for me it was experimenting) with how to allocate my experience and I can say, absolutely, getting a bit of stealth and a good amount of dodging—the earlier the better—will increase your survivability a lot compared to dumping everything into boosting the power of all your starting spells.
Let's take high elf fire elementalist of vehumet as a case study, seeing as how that's a build that I'm very familiar with, and its pretty standard.
Generally, by the time I've cleared D7 or so, I have all my spells memorized, I'm at character level 8 or 9, and have something like "spell casting 4, conjurations / fire ~7, stealth 5, dodging 8." If I'm already worshipping Veh, and I have hit (or am about to hit) ** piety—which comes pretty fast—then all my spells are at less than 5% failure rate, and I can then go on training dodging while keeping my eyes peeled for other things that might be worth investing in—other spells, a lucky good weapon drop, a bit of evocations if I've picked up things worth evoking, etc. etc. Otherwise, I might pick up a couple more levels of spell casting to make sure I have some clear slots for Veh's spell gifts, but then I go immediately back to dodging. Now, if you find some spell book on the ground with awesome stuff in it, that could easily change one's course and make further early investments in magic a solid strategy. But that's not something I plan on—it is something I adapt to, and try to take advantage of, if and when I am fortunate enough that it occurs.
I've found this to be a very dependable way to get characters to and through Lair. The alternative "magic-heavy" approach would presumably include doubling down on magic but this usually nets you comparatively little in return.
In early game, the biggest boost to damage you get is when the next level of spells comes online, this is why a wizardry boost is a huge asset; but once you've got your starting spells reliable, your conj / fire is already at a high skill level for early game, and your marginal gain for each subsequent level of conj / fire is actually very low (under these circumstances). That changes once, say, bolt of fire becomes available—but again, you are not guaranteed (and are indeed unlikely) to have that available right at the moment you are finished with book of flames around D7 or D8.
For a FE, getting much more skill in magic beyond what you need to cast fireball reliably is like getting more than 14 long blades skill when the best weapon you have on hand is a scimitar. Once a great sword comes around, then of course it makes sense to pump long blades—but only once a great sword is actually available. Until then, yes, each additional level of long blades will boost your scimitar's damage output, but the "bang for your buck" has diminished and there are often better ways to invest your experience.
Namely, for fire elementalists, once fireball is reliable it is wiser to invest in defense and/or consider how to make use of what the RNG has given you already. The experience you save with Veh's wizardry (don't need much to get fireball castable) is better spent in this way rather than getting a couple extra levels in conjurations and fire, which translate into a boost to average damage that you don't need at this point in the game, whereas going from 12 EV to 18/19 and "fairly stealthy" to "quite/very stealthy" is a very formidable boost to early game survival. (This is doubly true with elves, who generally have good (DE) or very good (HE) dex and thus get nice returns on dodging and stealth skill, but I've found it is true for nearly all characters, really.)
Now, of course, my strategy with FEs won't exactly map onto other casters, and even with FEs, no scheme is going to work optimally if it is slavishly and unthinkingly followed, because each game is different. Still, what's particularly true in the case of (most) FEs is true at least to some extent for (most) other casters. Most caster backgrounds have a staple spell (or two) that, once it can be reliably cast, is also strong enough in spell power for the early game. So, once that happens, don't neglect defensive skills—even (indeed, especially!) early on—and don't neglect taking advantage of good drops the RNG has been generous enough to provide.
(Perhaps counter-intuitively, part of what makes fire elementalist a strong background is that its spells are not all that dependent on spell power. Inner flame, conjure flame, and sticky flame do a lot of damage with low spell power—above a certain point of spell power their effectiveness is in practice, albeit not literally, independent of skill level. And even fire ball has the nice property that it ignores EV and always hits in exactly same AOE pattern regardless of spell power, so while its damage does increase with conj / fire skill, it is still very reliable even at relatively low spell power. Compare to, say, lightning bolt, which scales with level similarly to fire ball but is much less reliable at lower levels because it tends to miss *and* its range depends on spell power. So, while this may not be obvious at first glance, a big part of how one should play to strengths of FE is by being careful *not* to over-invest in fire and conjurations for the post-Temple early game. This is true, although to a lesser extent, for many other caster backgrounds.)
