Hardest species!?!?


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Snake Sneak

Posts: 129

Joined: Saturday, 27th August 2011, 22:00

Post Sunday, 11th March 2012, 18:14

Hardest species!?!?

What's the hardest species to all-clear the game with as a:
1) Melee-damager
2) Ranged-damager
3) Overall ???
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Abyss Ambulator

Posts: 1189

Joined: Friday, 28th January 2011, 21:45

Post Sunday, 11th March 2012, 19:04

Re: Hardest species!?!?

1) Deep Elf or Octopode.
2) Felid in general (no ranged weapons, wands, or rods, but can still do magic).
3) Whichever species supports the playstyle you suck the most with.
The best strategy most frequently overlooked by new players for surviving: not starting a fight to begin with.
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Eringya's Employee

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Post Sunday, 11th March 2012, 19:20

Re: Hardest species!?!?

Everything can all clear the game, you just have to be skilled enough to do it. And also, not unlucky.

Surviving the early game is one of the biggest concerns of most combos.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Joined: Sunday, 2nd January 2011, 02:06

Post Sunday, 11th March 2012, 20:23

Re: Hardest species!?!?

Generally speaking, species is a much smaller contributor to success than background. Backgrounds range from wildly overpowered to chaos knight, while species tend to range from vanilla to quirky. If you pick a power background suitable for your species and learn the quirks of your species' gameplay, you should do all right. Pick a wretched background and even picking one of the stronger species won't really compensate.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 12th March 2012, 02:32

Re: Hardest species!?!?

KoboldLord wrote:Generally speaking, species is a much smaller contributor to success than background. Backgrounds range from wildly overpowered to chaos knight, while species tend to range from vanilla to quirky. If you pick a power background suitable for your species and learn the quirks of your species' gameplay, you should do all right. Pick a wretched background and even picking one of the stronger species won't really compensate.



So no one won the nemelex's choice of hill orc air elementalist?

Oh wait, they did: http://crawl.develz.org/morgues/0.10/El ... 225934.txt

And they did it as a berserker. Go figure ;)

Slime Squisher

Posts: 390

Joined: Friday, 24th December 2010, 07:29

Post Monday, 12th March 2012, 06:55

Re: Hardest species!?!?

KoboldLord wrote:Generally speaking, species is a much smaller contributor to success than background. Backgrounds range from wildly overpowered to chaos knight, while species tend to range from vanilla to quirky. If you pick a power background suitable for your species and learn the quirks of your species' gameplay, you should do all right. Pick a wretched background and even picking one of the stronger species won't really compensate.


Really? I've always heard the exact opposite. The background is simply some items and skills, while racial mutations and stats are things that can never be changed.

As for melee-damagers, I don't think Octopodes are so bad. Have you tried an OpMo of Kiku? It works surprisingly well, although you will have to branch out into magic considerably past the Lair.

As for species though, I was thinking... perhaps we could compile a tier list of overall species strength. We would have to look at all aspects including but not limited to HP, mana, stats, mutations and intrinsics, aptitudes, hunger, and religious, spellcasting, and equipment restrictions. To balance out the fact that different races are good in different roles, we could also factor in such things as the strength of a race's particular niche relative to the niches of other races, e.g. Deep Elves' niche is magic and Ghouls' niche is unarmed melee, but DEFE is generally stronger than GhMo so that would be an argument for putting Deep Elves in a higher tier than Ghouls, despite GHFE probably being more successful overall than DEMo (because those are irrelevant, non-niche combos). Also we would factor in general game-progression power curves, such as the difference between that of that of the Troll and that of the Octopode. I think this would be a really interesting idea!
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Shoals Surfer

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Joined: Monday, 4th July 2011, 16:26

Post Monday, 12th March 2012, 08:29

Re: Hardest species!?!?

Melee mummies are surely the worst. No berserking, no potions, awful aptitudes all around, and negative fire resistance to top it off.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Joined: Sunday, 2nd January 2011, 02:06

Post Monday, 12th March 2012, 08:50

Re: Hardest species!?!?

tormodpwns wrote:Really? I've always heard the exact opposite. The background is simply some items and skills, while racial mutations and stats are things that can never be changed.


Species changes the method of play, but ultimately almost all of the game's difficulty is packed into the pre-Lair section. Starting equipment greatly affects the pre-Lair section's difficulty. A spriggan winner and an ogre winner will look, play, and feel entirely different, but the vast majority of the dead spriggans and ogres on the way to those winners will be in the early game where background still has a major impact.

Compare a berserker to a chaos knight. They're both melee-biased starts, but they're respectively the strongest and weakest melee-biased starts in the game, for any species except demigods.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Joined: Thursday, 10th February 2011, 18:30

Post Monday, 12th March 2012, 15:28

Re: Hardest species!?!?

KoboldLord wrote:
tormodpwns wrote:Really? I've always heard the exact opposite. The background is simply some items and skills, while racial mutations and stats are things that can never be changed.


Species changes the method of play, but ultimately almost all of the game's difficulty is packed into the pre-Lair section. Starting equipment greatly affects the pre-Lair section's difficulty. A spriggan winner and an ogre winner will look, play, and feel entirely different, but the vast majority of the dead spriggans and ogres on the way to those winners will be in the early game where background still has a major impact.

Compare a berserker to a chaos knight. They're both melee-biased starts, but they're respectively the strongest and weakest melee-biased starts in the game, for any species except demigods.


A summoner mid-game won't be as experienced as a conjurer mid-game because the summoner likely used summons to make kills.
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Slime Squisher

Posts: 365

Joined: Friday, 25th November 2011, 17:22

Post Tuesday, 13th March 2012, 13:52

Re: Hardest species!?!?

tormodpwns wrote:Really? I've always heard the exact opposite. The background is simply some items and skills, while racial mutations and stats are things that can never be changed.
He's not saying that Background have the most effect on how the game is played, but on likely is the game to be won.

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