galehar wrote:Good point. Also, I like that most builds have very little options in the beginning, because it promotes starting the id game as soon as possible. You are not going to wait for ideal circumstances (carrying unided wand and armour, wearing uncursed jewellery,...), because you need to id fear, blink and teleport as soon as possible.
Crawl has no "id game" to speak of. Read-identifying scrolls as early as possible is as close to a no-brainer as you can possibly get. The worst possible result (barring special cases like cursing a non-edged weapon, which is absolutely avoidable to a spoiled player anyway) is to waste a scroll of enchant armor, and with no significant alternative ways to identify scrolls there is no possible gain to be had by delaying identification either. Similarly, potions have exactly one strategy to follow, which is to wait until the odds are in favor of having a potion of healing, and then rapidly quaff-identifying as much as possible and finishing off with the healing to correct anything that has gone wrong. Scrolls of identify will not spawn in sufficient numbers to identify the early consumables in time for them to be useful, although by the late game they'll be the preferred method for everything.
Contrast to Nethack, which has multiple ways to soft- or hard-identify every type of item, contains genuinely valuable items that must not be wasted, and contains genuinely dangerous items that must not be triggered. You can sort out your scrolls before read-identifying them by checking their prices in a shop, by watching monsters use them, by inferring from their frequency of appearance, and by accumulating holy water to bless your scant few scrolls of identify. Rings can be identified by checking their prices in a shop, by dropping them down a sink, by experimenting with a weak monster or potentially dangerous equipment, or again, by using your scant few scrolls of identify. Putting off identification allows you to use a more efficient method, but it also denies the utility of the more valuable forms of treasure.
Crawl does very little of this, and unless I understand incorrectly the move away from Nethack-style identification is a very intentional design choice. Your scrolls won't normally kill you. Your potions won't either, although mutation can be troublesome. Your jewelry will toll you for one scroll of identify, which now serves as a pacing mechanism to determine how quickly you can start to use early jewelry rather than a mini-game in its own right.
Sometimes sacred cows need to be slaughtered, and sometimes it's better to protect and care for them. The item identification sacred cow, however, has already been hamburger for the last several major versions.