Monday, 29th January 2018, 16:52 by severen
For the most part, Unarmed with a shield and very careful play supplemented by throwing with either spells or berserk is enough to 3 rune any Op. People on this forum tend to scoff at my advocacy of unarmed on Op, but it works. Unarmed is not the necessarily the optimal for end game or whatever. A sacred Scourge will do better for less XP investment. But unarmed on Op is 1) fast, so more aux attack (which are a big deal for Op UC since squeeze and offhand) 2) consistent, it is usually better in early and mid game even with god gifts 3) works great with forms (including tree form which should absolutely not be overlooked for Op). If you invest in UC/Fighting all the way to 27 it is quite effective, but this is of course a very large XP investment, but its also entirely predictable.
In general for any melee Op start I train only UC up to about 9-10 initially. I immediately wear any shield I get (except maybe a large shield). After that UC I will train a defense (dodge or shield) and fighting. Specifically for Be and sometimes Oka I also train throwing. If I find certain spells (like Oka armor) I will try to get them castable ASAP, this may include training shields more and fighting less to reduce casting penalty.
I currently have a 3 rune OpBe(pure no god switching) that has cleared down all of Zot 1-4, not sure if I will just do the orb run or go for more. This Op clear a V2 floor that had Boris, Mennas, Sojobo and Donald on it. He also killed Khufu with a pack of 2 Greater mummies I have won hellcrawl with 4 Op including a branchless run. And 15 runed 3-4 Op in earlier versions of DCSS, including a 15 rune mostly melee unarmed OpFi of Oka->Zin that used no transmutations at all.
Here are some general points:
1) AC is not as big a deal as its made out to be, but it of course is valuable and past a certain point of EV/SH is where you are most likely to get defense gains. The OpBe I mentioned above currently has 9AC 38 EV and 33 SH. This is sufficient defense to kill most nasty things. If I remember right my 15 rune no tranmute guy had similar but since he could use Ozo armor he had like 20 AC. Since he flat out killed Cerebov and Antaeus purely duking it out in melee I consider this a good demonstration that its fine. Obviously a statue-pode with those same EV/SH and 35 AC instead is safer. You eventually need good combined defenses and will most likely use high offense + other helping strats (wands, needles, stealth etc). If you get unlucky and never get any defense rings (AC or EV) and nothing better than a buckler after clearing say half of each Lair branch then you may be screwed. But that is pretty rare, 90% of the time you get something. Even just having a large shield and a few scrolls of enchant is enough to get combined defense close to 50 (3/24/24) or so. Ok well that sounds ok, but people who have played melee OP are going to realize that 50 combined defense alone seems ok in a lot of fight but key fight are still unacceptably dangerous. So let us consider a common case; an 8 headed Hydra. You can easily run into many of these if you get swamp. At totalDef=50 you can kill a 8H hydra or you can get a lot of your life taken in one round if you are unlucky. This is one of the problems with my second point below, you can do fine for 3 rounds and then get suddenly smashed so your feel for what is dangerous can involve many many Op deaths. This case however is entirely managable when you supplement that totalDef=50. This can be supplemented in many ways and you usually only need one thing. For example Berserking will reliably win this fight, you simply just flat out do enough damage to kill it before it really whacks you, same is true of Finesse+heroism. Wands of disintegration with good evo (say 9 or so) or throwing can often take about 50% of the life off the hydra, this is usually enough to be fine for finishing the fight in melee. Tree form will almost certainly work and with good shield (about 30+) is enough to kill Lernie as well. Some of these strats are not going to be available for all the hydra you encounter either due to consumable limits or piety limits. But in general you can typical get by rotating a few of these for situations like this.
2) You absolutely need to understand what will kill you fast, certain things like melee brands take on a whole different significant when you have low AC and are not yet at decent HP. Also confuse is even more dangerous since it nullifies SH. You absolutely cannot allow yourself to get overwhelmed and surrounded in the Lair Branches, you are highly unlikely to be strong enough defensively.
3) Many people gravitate towards statuepode due to the AC, and this is fine it works great and in certain circumstance like Tomb it is probably superior, but I have come to the conclusion that Dragon Form is actually superior for most cases on Op due to its offense and extra speed. But in general to play Op to its greatest potential being very offensively minded and killing fast can work very well. This seems strange since I said above "with very careful play" and it is strange. This is one reason #2 is of critical importance. Op is a strange blend off being extremely careful (which is why I like to have 5+ or 6+ stealth) and extremely offensive. This is probably why some people have had great success with Dith (stealth and shadow form to GTFO).
4) Berserk, might, and Tree form are much much more valuable. Slaying+str with unarmed (since you get extra aux) kills VERY fast. Tree form is very damaging in UC and gives you the AC/resistances to patch up certain things. An unarmed Op with a shield and tree form should always clear a pack of ugly things for example, or in my case kill Khufu and Mennas.
The best starts (IMO) for Op are Fi and IE. The worst start is OpBe, berserk does help a lot but no spells on an Op is a crippling handicap and the equipment is worse than Fi which can go for another god that is far less crippling and whose positives are close to as good (or arguably better, but since Trog is so incredibly crippling for an Op the alternate god's positive only need to be close).
Fi gives you a shield and shield + god powers or a few key spells is enough to get an Op going. Shields seem to be more common in recent versions of crawl so maybe Fi is not so key anymore. On various OpBe starts (3 of which were quite promising, I just made dumb mistakes) I found a shield of some sort on like 80% of them.
IE is just a great start in general but on Op specifically you starting offense is enough to train summon ice beast to castable almost every single start. SIB basically solves all your problems and will clear Lair and down to D13 or so. At that point, unless you are very unlucky, you can have either trained another useful spell of some sort (many options) or have trained UC and shield enough to supplement SIB. What you train kind of depends, you don't need shield immediately if you get statue form going and its useless in dragon form. But eventually you probably want it on a 15 rune, but maybe not on a 3 rune. A blaster Op is going to go in a similar direction to any other blaster etc. But as a general statement a melee focused Op with a shield and and SIB+Ozo armor can take on most things fine the extra armor makes 15 AC reasonable and 15SH + 25 EV is quite good, 3 IB do ALOT of extra damage. Unless you really are worried about stats and don't want the points in Int IE is actually really good start for an Op you actually want to make into a melee guy. You may not be true melee until mid game, but it guarantees you Ozo armor and a highly reliable route to mid game.
OpIE is consistently winnable and winnable in multiple different ways. What god you take for OpIE can vary quite a bit since the start itself is so strong. I suppose OpTr is too, but I think the Tr start sucks.
However winning all starts is another matter entirely. I agree that Op melee in the first few levels is strong enough to make them very easy (not just because of constriction, this helps, but the squeeze Aux is actually a major killer that people overlook). In fact on the OpIE start I rarely even need to use Freeze. As long as you can deal with ogres/Ice Beasts and/or avoid major poisoning by adders you are fine for d6 or so.
If you want to do a start and go melee from the outset then, IMO, you either need a shield eventually or you need to do one of the hybrid-ish styles like stabbing or whatever.
In general the extra beginning offense is enough to get an Op to the temple fairly easy fairly often. So using the Vehumet to blaster strat is viable for melee starts (since Op have good int). On the other hand but for similar reasons you can often find at least a buckler and take Oka on most melee starts and go pure melee. You don't need a shield until about lair or so. And Heroism and finesse can be used to kill most anything. Oka will almost certainly give you a shield and/or hat by the time you really need it. Hopefully you find at least a buckler before Lair. I haven't seriously tried it in a while but I think the Oka rush can work on any melee Op start. In general liberal use of Finesse can clear depths on an OpFi fairly well. Any other melee start can do the same its just that OpFi guarantees the shield.
Some people may disagree, but for me, I don't see how an Op can be a straight up melee brawler without a shield if they are not in a form (including statue form but obviously UC+shield is best in statue form).
The fairly high likelyhood(stealth+offense) of getting any Op start to Temple can be leveraged in a few ways:
1) Go vehumet and make a blaster. I personally don't like this, but it can work.
2) For melee, go Oka. You'll need a shield.
3) Go dith, various ways to play this (stabby or ranged for mimic or both). UC mimic sucks don't do it.
4) Go qazlal. Some people will think this is crazy, but qaz gives you SH and is another way of being a blaster. Not for the faint of heart. If you are comfortable playing Qaz its an option.
5) Go Chei. I have 15 runed Op of chei before. I don't reccomend it but it can work. The high dex means you can get high EV regardless of luck, if you find a shield your SH will be even higher but as melee you don't need a shield as badly. High int makes any spell you find castable nice and early. Same problems as any other Chei guy.
6) Go Fedhas and do typical Fedhas strats on dangerous stuff.
7) Go the necro style gods
For the strong starts or ones with a ready built strat you can do whatever seems appropriate.
For me the most straight forward for melee is the Oka option, it can work just fine. But as with any Op you can die pretty easy and you need a shield by a certain point. Nothing is really gonna change that.
Last edited by
severen on Monday, 29th January 2018, 17:10, edited 1 time in total.
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