Sunday, 14th October 2012, 06:57 by Sjohara
I've been playing a bunch more fighters. I never really wound up in an endless parade of awfulness like I did in my first attempt, so maybe that game was a fluke. Some of them wound up cornered with no consumables and died. Some of them were doing okay but died due to negligence on my part. Some did really well. One even got the Gossamer Rune before dying in a crossbow-related accident in the Vaults while healing up before going to finish off the last remnant of the V8 welcoming committee (cold-branded bolts hurt bad when you're in fire dragon armor, even if it's just from a lowly orc). I doubt I've had more than 6-8 characters get runes across my career, including my two wins.
The ones who excelled were categorically ones who found a great mace. Wow, I never knew how amazing two-handed weapons were before I did this. Back when I tried in vain to get MDFis off the ground I would actually ignore two-handers so I could keep using my shield. But a warrior with a great mace is a killing machine. It two- or three-shots practically everything. Between that and your god, you can coast through the Lair easy. The first one to go crazy like this actually started with the falcion. I threw away my weapon, my shield, and probably over 75% of my experience--absolutely everything my background gave me--and immediately went from a harmless kitten to an unstoppable death-dealer. The Fighter's whole deal is the shield, but the absolute best-case scenario for a Fighter is being afforded the opportunity to throw it out.
That got me to thinking...and then I started running Wanderers. I'd ignore everything I started with and set whatever combination of Fighting, Maces & Flails, and Armor I could as my only active skills. Now, Wanderers have a definite tendency to splat on D1 and D2 to any old random thing. Any who made it past that, though? I found them utterly indistinguishable from my Fighters in their capabilities. You're guaranteed to find an equal or better weapon and body armor than what Fighters just lying on the ground almost immediately, so after that, the only difference is your stats, a couple of skill points, and the lack of the shield. And it seems like the shield wasn't doing crap for me, because anything that threatened or killed one of these Wanderers would have been equally dangerous for a Fighter, and anything that a Fighter could handle the Wanderer could too. The sole exception was Adders and, to a lesser extent, Giant Ants--the Wanderers were somewhat more likely to get hit with lethal doses of poison. This is the only context in which the shield confers a noticeable benefit. The overall course of the game is the same: you're basically helpless without good consumables, but if you survive long enough to get a two-hander or a plussed-up artifact, you're fine from then on.
So while it's true that Fighters aren't has hard to play as I initially thought, I'm now more convinced than ever that they're a junk background. The shield is barely better than worthless. It sounds really good on paper. You totally negate a non-trivial number of hits against you. Great! Except it's irrelevant. Say I run into an ogre on D4. With my base weapon and no shield, I have a (for the sake of argument) 30% chance of evading enough attacks to kill it in melee if I were to attempt it. Add the shield and maybe my odds go up to 60%. But who cares? The correct response to either scenario is to run or use a consumable that guarantees victory. Ditto for orc warriors and the nastier gnoll packs and uniques and basically everything else which is even marginally dangerous.
Fighters have two categories of enemies: those they can kill with 100% certainty, and those that they can't. If they want to live, they can never even ATTEMPT to engage anything in the latter category without a powerful item handy. The shield is not enough to move anything from the latter category into the former; only reliable offense from a good weapon can do that. So what you're left with is a character called the Fighter who is too weak to fight anything of note with their starting equipment, and nothing they have makes them more likely to survive long enough to get the equipment they need than any other background in the game. I have no doubt whatsoever that a Gladiator who turns off Dodging on turn 1 and puts on the first metal armor they find will outperform a Fighter in all circumstances, because their nets give them three guaranteed wins that the Fighter couldn't have taken, and they lose effectively nothing in return (same weapons, same opportunities to make use of heavy armor). I haven't tried it yet, but I assume Monks and Artificers who learn only Fighter skills and seek out Fighter equipment will outperform actual Fighters as well, as long as they don't die to poison on D2. I can't see how they couldn't.