HenryFlower wrote:"I would never quaff a potion that would raise all my trained skills by a point or two for a reasonable duration"
I just don't understand the logic there.
First you would have to be carrying the potion. Since item destruction still exists, it is quite clear that the developers do not want players to carry potions. Any potion you do carry must be of very high utility, enough so that you are willing to risk it being destroyed countless times throughout the game on the basis that it will make a
major difference at a critical moment. Additionally any potion you carry must compete directly with things like haste and heal wounds and curing and elemental evokers for inventory space. Carrying restore abilities, even bothering to pick it up, is a waste of time and valuable resources.
Stat drain outside of extended is functionally non-existent. And stat drain in general is functionally irrelevant unless you somehow acquire a huge amount of stat drain all at once. You can lose half your int on a caster and barely notice the effect. Even if you do manage to get major stat drain (by being very bad at crawl) you can just 5 it away, so that restore abilities is at best an unnecessary convenience. Unless you are a deep dwarf, carrying it is insane.
Draining is similar. In the vast majority of situations, it is insignificant. But on the flipside, if you actually through terrible play manage to get enough draining to be a real concern, then you have far more serious concerns, namely the fact that the shadow dragon over there apparently hit you with draining breath a dozen or so times, which means you shouldn't have been trying to fight it in the first place, so you should already be fleeing for your life for reasons unrelated to draining, after which you will be free to clear out elf 1 or whatever to cure your drain. You still gain nothing but convenience with restore abilities, convenience which is rendered utterly useless by the much great inconvenience of taking up inventory space. Inventory space which could've gone to another potion of speed or a potion of agility or a fan of gales or rod of warding or some other thing you could've used to just not get drained in the first place.