Training heavy armor

[Moose]

I just finished playing a berserker, mainly because I wanted to test the new armor changes. One thing I noticed, is that after about 14 or so skill, Armor is incredibly difficult to train.

I was using shields at the time too, and even with shields and dodging turned off, I needed to spend thousands of turns letting things whack on me in order for my armor to train. I spent almost the entire time in Zot with my exp pool maxed out at 20,000 begging monsters to bash on me trying futilely to get my armor over 20. It is very dangerous and scummy, and I probably wont do it again as I had some really close calls when drac packs would sneak up on me during my victory dancing.

The crux of the problem for me was that in order to train armor, I need to be hit. This means an attack has to get past my very good shield, as well as hit be in spite of my dodging. So, if I went some place safe like the hive, those bees would never get past my shield, and I'd starve to death trying to train armor. Yes, I could put on a cheapo scale mail, remove my shield, and let bees bash my 20,000 pool down maybe, but why should I have to do that? Not to mention this whole process is very costly food-wise.

The only way to get the exp pool to drain relatively quickly was to let Orb Guardians bash on me, but they hit so hard, I could only do it for about 20 or so combat rounds (about 2,000 worth of exp) before my HP got too low, and I needed to kill them. This would leave me in the dangerous spot of being on Zot:5 with ~80 hp from my victory dancing.

I'm not looking for replies on how to victory dance armor training more efficiently, I'd rather hear some potential solutions to the problem. I think it should be just as easy to attain 27 in armor as it is to do so with dodging (which just requires a successful dodge in order to train).

[danr]

I think the game should just let players decide how to spend their XP. That would eliminate victory dancing completely.

At least, armour should be trained just by wearing it, moving in it, and fighting in it.

[galehar]

Can you post your morgue file? I'm curious about what kind of char victory dance armour in Zot:5 by letting Orb Guardians hit them for 20 turns.

[szanth]

I think the game should just let players decide how to spend their XP. That would eliminate victory dancing completely.

At least, armour should be trained just by wearing it, moving in it, and fighting in it.

I'm pretty much in favor of the 'choose where your exp goes' option.

[Moose]

Can you post your morgue file? I'm curious about what kind of char victory dance armour in Zot:5 by letting Orb Guardians hit them for 20 turns.

here's a link to it:
http://crawl.develz.org/morgues/trunk/M ... 071836.txt

[KoboldLord]

Why did you want to train Armor with that character, anyway? The benefits are largely meaningless when you could have been training Crossbows, Traps, Stealth, or Evocations instead.

You also might have tried upgrading to Gold Dragon Armor. Armor skill caps out or nearly so as a function of the heaviness of your armor, so switching to a heavier set will return you to the brisk pace of improvement you had during the early game.

[Moose]

Why did you want to train Armor with that character, anyway? The benefits are largely meaningless when you could have been training Crossbows, Traps, Stealth, or Evocations instead.

You also might have tried upgrading to Gold Dragon Armor. Armor skill caps out or nearly so as a function of the heaviness of your armor, so switching to a heavier set will return you to the brisk pace of improvement you had during the early game.

I was under the assumption that the higher your armor skill, the higher your AC. The higher your AC, the more GDR you had.

As far as why I didn't upgrade to GDA, I didnt find a set until Zot. I had already enchanted my plate mail to +8 at that point, so the AC bonus from my plate was higher that what I would have had with the GDA.

I didnt need a ranged attack (crossbows), and my traps skill was high enough to be comfortable already. As a berserker with a +13 broad axe, I had no need for stealth as I could pretty much mow down anything that got into my path that didn't spam torment. Evocations would have done little for me as well.

That being said, how I victory danced, or why I decided to wear plate mail over GDA doesn't mitigate the existing fact that training Heavy Armor is a very very difficult thing to do. Asking why someone would want to do that in the first place is just avoiding the issue.

Using heavy armor intrinsically carries enough in-game penalties as it is, and I don't think that the difficulty in training it is fair to those who choose to take that route.

[danr]

Check out my suggestion in the thread about skill training. It's a bastardization of Galehar's "study skill" proposal.

Basically, a major problem with the skill system is that it encourages players to bore themselves with "victory dancing". So basically just automate it - let players designate a skill to practice and it will train XP while they rest. The game currently lets you train skills without actually fighting, it just forces you to do it manually. The manual part is the problem.

[MrMisterMonkey]

moose, the GDR is only dependent on base AC, but you indeed get bonus AC from armour skill

koboldlord, stealth doesn't work well with heavy armour, and if I recall correctly, hard capping is long gone, but I imagine it could indeed slow down considerably

as for victory dancing in general, I agree that it's ridiculous and should die; I'd be fine with a hybrid lemuel/galehar system (get rid of skill pool from lemuel's, get rid of dancing to tweak training rates in galehar's -- downside: victory dancing still a tiny bit possible), preferably with some additional manual override, or some way to configure how to (automatically) allot skill points (since paying directly for skills all the time would be an annoyance -- downside: interface)