snow wrote:I'm criticizing your HOWz build and not your personal character. If anything as someone who's ascended multiple times I hold you in high regard and just... I don't know... expect MORE from you. I mean you level conj too? How many skills are you putting XP into exactly? And HO isn't exactly known for having high int or casting apts.
If you're going to argue for some conj/dodging/armor/melee/etc./etc. sort of hybrid I'm going to question it because there's just not that much XP early in the game... and by mid game if you just went all into armor and your weapon skill you can easily tab your way to Zot (the early game is the hardest part IMO).
"I honestly think some people who post here have never actually won before" is not a logical criticism of the HOWz build. Saying "your arguments are just silly" doesn't help the discussion. Again I'm not trying to villainize you here I just don't like reading statements like those and I'm pretty sure nobody does.
I actually find tabbing through Zot to be pretty darn tough, which is interesting since my favorite build used to be MiBe. I do much better with DEWz, MuWz, OpWz, and SpWz. Perhaps I'm just a sucker for magic but my brute characters tend to die out after early game. I have to admit my hybrid characters don't do a whole lot better, but they seem fairly effective. While it might be a saner choice to start out purely physical and work magic in when armour skill is higher, you lose the benefits of having awesome spells like Meph to protect you from early-game perils, and the gigantic INT gain from the Wizard class. I'm not saying hybrid builds are the best, but they work and definitely have some cool advantages.
However, it could be that I've just gotten used to them after playing a ton of them. A couple of friends of mine play crawl, and we used to get together and have our own sort of tournaments in which one of us would click random species and then random background, all three of us would play a single character of the resulting combination, and the highest scoring player would be declared the winner. I learned a lot about the game this way from seeing the many different species and backgrounds in action, trying to get as much score as possible on every character I played, and watching others play the same exact character and learning from their mistakes and triumphs. It also brought me into contact with a lot of hybrid or "battlemage" characters - not that good at melee and not that good at magic, but powerful in their capacity to do both.
In any case, from looking at CIPs and such on this forum, I got the impression that a hybrid style was pretty common... Is that not the case?