Blades Runner
Posts: 616
Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19
Popular, but stupid notions
You should use all your enchant weapon and armour scrolls right away:
No, you shouldn't. Wait until you get a weapon type you are satisfied with. Treasure troves are also a thing in the meanwhile. There are cases where it may make sense to use them sooner than later, such as a tough portal dungeon, but these are exceptions rather than the rule.
Stealth is good, especially when it is cheap:
No, it isn't. More solid builds have AC. It's difficult to have AC when you dump points into DEX. Many tactics require beings surrounded by some popcorn. You'll have to spend a lot less time chasing stuff down for XP. Training it wastes XP. Daggers won't pierce heavy armour very well. Get a mace and/or axe fool.
Dex is good:
No, actually it mostly sucks. You want as little dex as you can possibly get away with. As time goes on, accuracy of your weapons will get enhanced a lot by skills.
Evasion is good:
No, it's pretty bad in fact because, see above: Dex sucks. Relying too heavily on evasion probably will result in one of the following outcomes: you misjudge incoming damage and die to a damage spike, you get paralyzed and killed, you get blasted by one of many sources of damage which cannot be evaded and die. That being said, it's worth putting at least a moderate amount of XP into simply because the value of defenses overall is quite high.
You should use two-handed weapons:
By the time you have them trained high enough to take full advantage of them you could have pratically already won a 15 rune game. If you dump all your XP into your weapon and nothing else to reach the highest levels of usage, you're a moron. Their additional base damage is offset by their lower accuracy for a lot of cases. There are cases where it may make sense to use a two-handed weapon, but these are exceptions rather than the baseline.
You shouldn't use shields:
See above ^^. Defenses are key to delivering damage because it's much harder to deal it if you can't receive it. Adding a third method of mitigating damage besides AC and EV considerably increases your survivability and resets the XP cost of increasing defenses back to zero again when shields are being brought up from 0 skill. A buckler is extremely easy to train to skill of 4 to simply remove it's penalties.
Longblades are great:
See above ^^. Shield blocks thwart parry. I've heard in response that "parry doesn't really factor in when choosing to use longblades." To that, I say "cleaving shouldn't really factor in when choosing to use axes." Dum, dum dum dum, dumb! I won't go so far as to say they suck, use them if you find something awesome otherwise go with maces since they cross-train with axes, or just axes.
Losing XP using summons makes no difference:
This has to be one of the most boneheaded arguments I've ever heard. Particularly now with levels which don't respawn enemies, XP is most certainly a limited resource with a few exceptions (abyss & pan which come with heavy considerations.) Furthermore, as the game progresses, enemies continue becoming more difficult. The notion that receiving less XP is fine because it "saved you", allowed you to get that XP in the first place just means that your character sucked to begin with because there are certainly characters that don't need summons and/or allies in order to kill everything. Last tournament, summoners was the least won profession, it's not even very good compared with hitting something on the head much harder. Once upon a time in crawl, it was overpowered, so now today it blows in the other direction.
Faith amulets are soo awesome:
Not. I'm not going to bother to explain, just believe!
I've posted 7,000 times so I know everything better than you:
No, it could just mean that you have had less time playing and more time dramatizing.
My online stats are better so I must be a more knowledgeable player:
Unless, another person just doesn't care and likes to fool around with the game. Another shocking fact is that there are people who play offline, potentially much sooner than ever playing online and potentially currently more than online even if they do currently play online.
...to be continued...