Tm mid-game/defenses?

[GuideCritic]

Hello kind people. I am in need of your assistance.

So I kinda like playing ??Tm^?? and the early game actually runs pretty smooth for the most part but then I'm starting to struggle a little because of the papier mâché AC/EV values of most forms,
at least in my mind any character doing a lot of melee should have proper beef because you can't oneshot everything and you will eat return damage at some point no matter how good or cool you think you are.

Ozo's is a good band-aid (and the only thing that keeps Charms as a shool existant LUL) but you can never count on finding it.
Stoneskin is gone and Cigotuvi's kinda bad (more on that in another topic) i but I'm starting to seriously consider it if I can't find Ozo's.
Statue form has good AC at least but again, you can't count on finding it plus it has it's own fair share of risks.
Many races have either bad slots or bad dodging or both or at least bad armour aptitude which makes actual armour + blade hands not exactly ideal either.

Any tips?

[duvessa]

Try training fighting and dodging

[bel]

If you are mostly stuck in the mid-game, try a NaTm of Chei (other gods like Oka are also possible). Early game is tricky (but spider form conquers all). Train normal things (fighting, UC, dodging) early. By the time you reach the mid-game and have lots of Chei piety, you will have excellent defences, even if you don't find statue form. Blade hands with medium to heavy armour is possible.

There are, of course, many other ways. For instance, try MfTm or DrTm of Fedhas or Yred or Ru.

[Stonar]

You could try TrTm^Trog and just run around yelling "BLADE HANDS" while clawing things to death, that works pretty well.

My actual suggestion for playing transmuters is to play sludge elf, which I realize isn't helpful since they don't exist any more. But it's the best I've got.

[tasonir]

As someone who's won a sludge elf, it's basically exactly the same as a merfolk is now. Personally I don't think that statue form "has its own share of risks" unless you're counting 1) not finding it, or 2) the experience required to get it online. Especially on poor caster races, #2 can be a bit of a problem, but if you can get past it all is well. Maybe I play too many trolls in statue form

In seriousness, duvessa's answer is mostly complete, it is that simple. You won't have incredible AC on most standard transmuters unless you're in statue form, any other form is usually EV based, at least early on. The mentioned naga with blade hands will get very high ac in the late game since it's pretty easy to cast a level 5 spell in heavy armor once you overtrain it a bit. And then scales and barding...generally speaking if you wear something "medium" like fire/ice dragon scales and fully enchant your armor you can expect roughly 40-50ac.

[nago]

As someone who's won a sludge elf, it's basically exactly the same as a merfolk is now. Personally I don't think that statue form "has its own share of risks" unless you're counting 1) not finding it, or 2) the experience required to get it online.

Except 10% hp less, which is kinda important.

Statue form has slow+body armor melting, I'd say they are quite relevant drawbacks that make statue form highly situational and only sometimes better than blade hands + good body armor - which is quite bad considering SF is a lv.6 double school spell while BH a lv.5 single school of the school a Tm trained since turn 1. SF is strictly good only to an handful of races (Tr, Op, cat) and eventually swappable with Dragon Form in most cases.

@OP as said by others, your main defences are fighting and dodging until you get blade hands (which you should get mid\past Lair). With blade hands you can effectively swap to "medium-heavy armor" if you want and get some AC too. Otherwise light armor +ozo if available is 100% good - albeit more annoying.

[tasonir]

I've got something like 40 wins which used statue form for 100% of fights (once getting it comfortably castable) including a 40k turn speedrun (lower exp, less items). It's been done in 20k turns by better speedrunners, and not with any of those three races (it's vine stalker). I'm really not sure what you'd think makes it 'highly situational' when so many people use it for literally every situation. My recent hellcrawl win, which has permanent forms, never cancelled statue form; it was active all game long.

Maybe the confusion here is combining statue with chei - I suppose if you weren't with Chei you could cancel it to run away from a fight, which seems valid to me. But aside from running away, I can't see a fight that you want to actually engage with being a bad one for statue form. If you're going into a fight I think you're always better off having statue form on than not (make reasonable assumptions about the character being built for statue form, and likely unarmed). There's some edge cases like if you're a swimming race and you're in water, you have no penalty, but in statue form you do, or don't use statue form without also flying vs Jorgrun, etc. But if you are flying, then it's safe.

Dragon form is also good and I don't mean to marginalize it, but in my personal opinion the defenses are a bit too low to just tab everything, and you have to actually play carefully. I'm pretty lazy.

[tabstorm]

to be fair VS^Chei and Tr^Chei are sort of cheating because of the huge boost to auxes and huge str with old statue form, respectively... with other species, I think it is fairly easy, but not as overpowering as VS^Chei or Tr^Chei. The trick is of course surviving to the point where you can cast it...

Anyway OP just use Oka with BH and a moderate weight armor with high base enchant like an artefact chain or ring mail and take str every levelup.

[tasonir]

There's definitely tiers of which races are best suited for a statue form/unarmed/possibly Chei sort of playstyle, I think that's basically inevitable. Troll and VS are definitely in the top tier, but you could sort all the races into tiers if you wanted to. I think I may have done this at some point probably years ago. Op and Fe aren't top tier, but are the most improved, due to never getting any body armor (Dr doesn't count since while they don't get body armor, they get AC, and that AC doesn't stack in statue form).

While not as good as troll, don't underestimate a Ogre statue form character - they still have the massive +30% racial hp and they are very good in statue form. Of course, not having the claws is a big loss. They can at least learn magic somewhat easier.

[biffMalibu]

I was having same issues with transmuter. Finally got a win with one. The things that worked for me were:

1 - training dodging & fighting as was previously suggested. Dodging really seemed to really scale EV in scale in spider form and that was good enough for many fights

2 - use spider & ice through lair - should be able to handle all of lair using those two forms. Bladehands can be good too if you are are a species that can get some type of AC, otherwise, it can be a little like a glass cannon.

3 - don't feel like you need to kill everything, my more successful transmuters just outright skipped harder stuff early on

4 - abuses sticks to snakes - even if it doesn't kill much later in the game, you can still spam it to gum up the ground & run away (see #3 above). I used it into the depths

5 - branch out a bit in mid-game if you don't find statue or dragon soon enough and original book spells aren't holding their own. Maybe a god power, summons, or necro. My last successful run used Hep and animate dead - found that those helped to take some pressure off from being surrounded and enabled escapes if things got too hairy