Saturday, 8th June 2019, 17:43 by svendre
I'm not a fan of shortbows primarily because they preclude the ability to use shields, and a normal shortbow sucks compared to a more well defended basic melee character. If you find sniper early on enough, it is a good enough case to consider a substantial investment in crossbows and foregoing the use of shields. Because sniper is perfectly accurate, it is actually pretty good for even lower levels of skills. The trick is to utilize it strategically. A few recommendations for it's use:
Stealth works well with sniper, because you'll get the drop on a lot more monsters at range. Keep it wielded as your primary weapon, and then take the first shot at range, followed by subsequent shots based on how far away the target is and how many other targets are behind it. Leave yourself time to escape and not get hit a bunch by melee. Don't use sniper at close or zero range unless there is a reason, instead switch to a melee close to or when they reach melee range, if you plan to continue the engagement. Crawl has so many exception cases, it's hard to give them all to you, when to break general guidelines, but let's say in the case you run into a highly evasive spriggan that you may have difficulty hitting with a melee weapon, here's a time when you might consider keeping the sniper wielded into melee, because it'll still hit it, and even if you aren't doing the maximum amount of damage it can deliver (which is significant), highly evasive creatures also tend to have fewer hit points, so it can still be a good choice. Use your brain and think about the capabilities of your weapons and of your targets is the best overall advice. If you want to stick with crossbows as your primary weapon, all the way into late game and extended, I prefer velocity or TSO blessed holy crossbows. Portal projectile and apportation make handy utility spells to invest towards. Translocations isn't a waste on almost any character because of lesser beckoning and the basic blink spell as well. You don't need to spend a lot on it, it shouldn't be focused on much until after your basic defenses and offense are in place, with exception of blink spell perhaps. It depends mainly on what kind of body armour you find.
Remember that you don't have to only use sniper, or use sniper. Most people know by now that I scoff at two-handed anything, but sniper is one of the rare weapons I make exception for, so take that into consideration. It's good. It's certainly way better than any run of the mill junk you'll typically find by even mid-game.
Good luck