Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 5382
Joined: Friday, 25th November 2011, 07:36
Cheibriados (split from the wiki thread)
KoboldLord wrote:tasonir wrote:I think it's useful for newbies to have relevant general info included in the guide. For example, suggested spell lists/light vs heavy armor suggestions. These could be found on other pages (all spell pages, the various armor tables) but it's good for newbies to have it discussed in the guide.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. For a beginner who is reading a character guide, clarity is vitally important. A beginner cannot be presumed to understand what parts of your guide are always going to be important, and what parts are only going to be important in certain circumstances or based on previous choices or lucky drops. If you don't yet have any criteria to judge what's important, everything looks important, so you start memorizing that big old wall o' text and start gearing up your naga for Statue Form when you're actually still on D3 looking for the Temple. Because there's a whole lot of text on Statue Form, and poison spit only got a single mention as a way to 'waste turns' while things approach to melee range instead of extensive emphasis as one of your essential early-game survival abilities.
I'll make a point of emphasizing early poison spit more - it is useful early on but by the mid-late game the damage is really fairly negligible against anything dangerous. A lot of the other claims here are already clearly explained in the guide - I have an explicit skill order which focuses first on unarmed, invocations, and shields. They'd have to completely ignore the "skill training order" section in order to make the mistake you mentioned.
KoboldLord wrote:Unfortunately, I don't think that would do much good, on account of confirmation bias. If you throw enough splats at the wall, eventually you're going to pull off a win or two just by dumb luck. A sufficiently persistent player will eventually rack up a couple wins with their Felid Chaos Knight that remains loyal to Xom no matter what, but that doesn't change the fact that felids are terrible and Xom is terrible and they aren't any better when you put them together.
I'm not making the claim that because it's been won once or twice that it's powerful, certainly any combination could be won...but attached morgue files provide a lot of detail about how the game was played and are great ways to learn about the character. Also, I have actually spent a fair amount of time talking to the people who have read and liked my guide. I haven't heard any newbies dislike it, of course you could claim they simply weren't good enough to know better, but they have said they have gotten farther with it than before. For direct evidence, check this YAVP:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4431
The first character he ever got a rune on, and he won? So he's never gotten past swamp/snake, and then cleared the rest of the mid/late game without dying. I'd say that's a very strong testament to chei nagas getting strong past midgame. I'll admit they can be a bit tricky at the start, of course
KoboldLord wrote: She seems to actually be pretty popular, too, for some reason or other. I do think it's probably a good idea to make the theme of the guide clear in the title, though, as you mentioned. Certainly there's no drawback to making clear from the start that you only talk about Chei and never talk about anybody else.
for the incredible durability and extreme power, of course I suppose I'll mention the guide is for chei only, though, as you say, no real harm in that. Won't be able to update it just now as I don't have the time but if someone else wants to they can, or I will tomorrow. I have no problem with people helping update and edit the guide, unless they do something silly like insult chei!
Officially ruining greatplayer statistics since Jan 18th, 2015.
I wrote the Melee Naga Guide.
Recording of my 15 rune 40k turn VSMo^Chei speedrun!