should I train a melee weapon on a vinestalker with an xbow?

[petercordia]

I got Damnation in the early Dungeon, and have gone Oka to supply me with bolts.
So far, the crossbow is totally carrying me.
I feel a bit that not using my anti-magic bite is a bit of a waste, but can't figure out which melee weapon I'd like to train. Maybe I should just not bother and use xbows for everything.
Any advice on which weapons to train?
character dump: https://underhound.eu/crawl/morgue/pete ... ordia4.txt

[TheMeInTeam]

Doesn't damnation have a 100% mulch rate? I'd find something else to use on popcorn, even with Oka giving ammo you will burn through it if you throw damnation at every random adder or goblin that wanders into view.

"Curses when equipped" is a problem though, because it prevents freely switching. I normally play VS as stabbers, but it's hard to pass up just using such a great weapon. Maybe you can kill lesser stuff with magic? An alternative would be tmuts, especially blade hands (you already have it available, though nowhere near castable right now), which would let you meld damnation out of the way for popcorn + use bite and then switch back whenever you want/need the range.

[Airwolf]

The usual advice on ranged is that it's perfectly sufficient to win. I suppose Damnation is annoying when monsters are adjacent—can't you target 2 squares away and fire with '.' so the explosion hits them but not you? And the bolts always mulch. But you'll get an alternate crossbow before long to solve both of those.

I wouldn't for a while, or maybe a little in Short Blades for the dagger of electrocution. Short Blades are strong all game for Vine Stalkers with the aux bite and a dagger of electrocution is great. A quickblade is an upgrade, when and if you find one.

Edit: I missed *Curse. That changes the story...

[njvack]

Wait, did Damnation always have *Curse?

[TheMeInTeam]

I don't recall curse-on-equip being a thing on the damnation crossbow in previous versions, so it's likely new.

[petercordia]

it's probably a feature of bcrawl.

[mopl]

  Code:

Action                   |  1- 3 |  4- 6 |  7- 9 | 10-12 || total
-------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------++-------
 Fire: Hunting sling     |       |       |    68 |       ||    68
       Arbalest          |       |       |    30 |    76 ||   106

  Code:

 s - 301 bolts (quivered)

Even with Oka gifting ammo, Damnation 100% mulch rate (unless bcrawl changes it...) makes it impossible for me to use, as *Curse doesn't provide easy swap...
I would totally rely on another weapon type, unless you have another good crossbow somewhere...

[njvack]

Ah... if it's a bcrawl mod, I'm betting they don't do 100% ammo mulch. Mixing that with *Curse sounds super frustrating.