Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup questions/thread

[trotof]

Just thought of this: What does he gift you if you're a Felid or Octopode?

Octopodes receive standard gifts based on their restrictions, just like anybody else.
Cats are for fags and Oka doesn't like fags, so they get nothing.

 

[MisterStone]

Eh never mind, wiped out by a player ghost. Fuck you, crawl.

 

[trotof]

I'd put anything heavier than leather aside for awhile. Being able to cast meph reliably is definitely more important than AC, as you said it yourself. At least early on. And dragon armor will screw your success rates for a pretty long time probably.
As for hybrids, it really depends on your playstyle. In my opinion and experience TSO worshiper in -3EV dragon armor, with shield and decent blessed weapon, able to cast 6 lvl spells at excellent is very good character for a 15 rune-run. Ogres are my favorite for this, btw.

 

[Zomg]

I'd say that defense on a conjurer is just idiot-proofing, making the character invulnerable enough that you can do stupid shit and live. You can go through a 15 rune run with 0 dodging, fighting, armor and shield on a conjurer and never die - you just can't fuck up or be stupid at all, and you have to have always developed the better tools for each stage of the game. So generally you should always put tools before defense, e.g. mephitic cloud at great or better.

 

[Malakal]

True, I remember seeing reports of a 27hp conjurer winning the all rune run...

 

[MisterStone]

WTF bros, so I had this really sweet conjurer character, had good loot, good spells, good skill levels. I was running around blowing shit up with Orb of Destruction and eating the chunks (amulet of gourmand), so I was always full and ready to destroy. Cleaned out all of the Lair (found portal to hell) walked right through Orc lvl 4 shop area no problem. Nuked Josephine and her pet zombie dragon, no problem. Came across a unique named donald, stated blasting on him. Sent an orb of destruction at him at close range, and he FUCKING REFLECTED IT WITH HIS SHIELD OF REFLECTION and the orb blew me to bits.

Seriously, some fucker just killed me with a gimmicky shield item.

 

[Malakal]

Huh, never knew it works this way. Learned the hard way it seems...

 

[Teepo]

Dis game makez me ANGRY.

 

[Malakal]

All good roguelikes are like that. There have to be "fuck you player" moments otherwise you may as well play CoD. As long as they are not arbitrary and stupid then its ok...

 

[Damned Registrations]

As long as they are not arbitrary and stupid then its ok...

Y hello thar Grinder on level 3. I guess I'll do the smart thing and... oh I seem to be dead before doing anything. Guess that was my fault. Somehow.

 

[JudasIscariot]

Eh never mind, wiped out by a player ghost. Fuck you, crawl.

I delete the bones files because fuck the player ghosts. I play the game my way.

 

[JudasIscariot]

As long as they are not arbitrary and stupid then its ok...

Y hello thar Grinder on level 3. I guess I'll do the smart thing and... oh I seem to be dead before doing anything. Guess that was my fault. Somehow.

Especially when he spams his paralyzing spell on you and starts blinking like crazy.

Best way to kill him off is to play a Death Knight with a pole arm and surround him with zombies if possible. Or just summon spam an easy and cheap summoning spell (Summon Butterlies works well) and run the fuck away.

 

[Malakal]

Or just run? Not hard, provided he doesnt paralyze you, since he blinks randomly.

But I wasnt saying DS doesnt have those stupid random moments since it does.

 

[JudasIscariot]

Fuck death yaks in the ass. Goddamn I hate death yaks so fucking annoying and they hit hard...

 

[Malakal]

They hit hard and have a lot of hp but lack any special abilities or resistances that would make them really dangerous. Pure fighters may have issues though, as always.

 

[JudasIscariot]

They hit hard and have a lot of hp but lack any special abilities or resistances that would make them really dangerous. Pure fighters may have issues though, as always.

Playing a Merfolk DK and while I could use Yred's Life drain ability it really doesn't drain all that much AND whatever I do drain gets whacked anyway because of their goring attacks. They also tear through my zombies like paper :D.

And the game is stingy as hell with decent polearms. Seriously, I'll be finding triple swords, artifact daggers, everything BUT what I need. It does the same with permafood when you play any race that can only eat vegetables and all you get is meat rations...

 

[Teepo]

As long as they are not arbitrary and stupid then its ok...

Y hello thar Grinder on level 3. I guess I'll do the smart thing and... oh I seem to be dead before doing anything. Guess that was my fault. Somehow.

Try running.

Also try not attempting to kill everything in your path. You are not an immortal like in Diablo 3 or something.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Oh wow, such awesome advice. Run from the enemy that teleports and paralyzes me. I totally haven't tried that and died anyways about a million fucking times anyways against tons of different enemies. Run from the enemy that blinks between you and the path you came from and begins hammering you with an enchanted dagger. Best advice ever! I'll just move towards the black expanse of dungeon, I'm sure Grinder + a dozen orcs with wizards and priests couldn't be worse than Grinder alone.

Running feels like cheating in Crawl anyways, because the only effective way to run is to go to the stairs and abuse the fact that they won't follow you down from a tile away and you can use different stairs. It's like using Elbereth in Nethack. And if you ran into a pit fiend on floor three of Nethack and I told you 'LOL just use Elbereth and kill him' (if you're lucky and it doesn't scribble wrong) that wouldn't make it less arbitrary and stupid.

The only time running away is fair advice in Crawl is when it means you're leaving a branch alone until later. Otherwise you might as well be recommending scumming for items for a billion years or starting a new character until you get some awesome weapon in the first two levels. Just because a trick works to let you continue doesn't mean the trick and situation that requires it isn't a load of crap.

 

[Teepo]

"Running feels like cheating in Crawl anyways,".

Wait til you run into a Unseen Horror on D:10. You can't outrun it. Its attacks penetrate you. You can't see it.

You want to start running ahead of time. You don't wont to walk next to him, make him notice you, then start running. If you don't think you can take him out than you need to huff it.

If you exclude uniques you should be able to handle monsters on each level at least in a 1 v 1. So when you run into Sigmund or something you should avoid them them until you get stronger, unless you're a berserker or something. If you're a wizard or a conjurer you could meph cloud it.

You won't get an awesome weapon in the first two levels ever. Awesome weapons are gifted by the gods.

I recommend you try to be a Ogre Berserker and find yourself a giant spiked club. Train only maces and fighting. Get to Lair 2 and drop off your stuff (no humanoids spawn there that will steal your stuff.)

 

[Damned Registrations]

I've actually beaten Crawl before. Spriggan enchanter. Though honestly, by the end it was more 'Spriggan Nemelex rapes everythinger.' Trust me, I'm plenty familiar with running away like a cheesy whore.

And you don't always (or even very often) have the option of being at max distance when you find an enemy you need to run from. Open a door or round a corner at the end of a long hallway, find enemy ~5 tiles away, awake. Now what? Run from the orc priest? It'll smite you ~5 times before you get away, you'll be fucked. Try to fight it? If you win it was because of luck. The only skill involved is knowing which takes less luck, mashing his face in or surviving all the smites it'll throw at you before it falls out of visual range. Of course, this assumes you were lucky enoguh to even have such easy options with chances of survival over 10%. Far more likely you'll meet a half dozen Centaurs (Or Yakataurs, probably with enchanted weapons), have no way to outrun them, with the nearest corner to abuse a dozen turns away. Entire game hinges on whether or not you got a means of blinking/teleporting by then. Unless you found the booze spell, which means you can just hammer on it and kill everything in the dungeon with a blindfold on.

And this all presumes you don't get some random butterfly spawning in your hallway while you run. Those have probably ended at least 1/10th of my runs. Always great whiffing swings at a Kobold with your level 15 character 6 turns in a row until a hydra catches up to you and noms your head off.

 

[Teepo]

Why would you ever run away through unexplored territory?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Because the explored territory is certain death? If your options are:
A: run away from Sigmund.... into an ogre.
B: run away from Sigmund.... into the darkness.

B starts looking pretty fucking good. Well actually it still looks like shit, but everything else does too.

 

[Teepo]

I know shit happens sometimes but you should always run back the way you came towards the stairs.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, I know that shit happens sometimes but you should always beat the game in under 10000 turns. With a Naga assassin.


Shit happens more than 'sometimes'. Shit happens more often than wins do. Situations where making the right choice saves you don't balance out situations where making the right choice does nothing. Having the choice matter is the baseline you're not supposed to stray from. The thing I hate about Crawl is that when I die, I almost never get that 'Fuck, I should have done XXX' feeling. I just feel cheated. That pretty much never happens to me in ADOM (which I also hate, but for entirely different reasons) or Nethack, or DoomRL, or ToME.

 

[desocupado]

What the fuck you're talking about bro? 95% of the times I die in Crawl I have the certainty it was my own stupid ass fault. You usually have some sort of tool available, a potion of berserk, a potion of haste, blink, teleport, heal wounds, healing, meph cloud, potion of invisibility, fear, all of those are available fairly early in the game.

The very early game can have some stupid deaths, like getting poisoned by a snake in d:2, or paralysed by grinder and getting dead (which doesn't happen so often as you would make us believe. Most of the time you can run away from the place you came), but saying that crawl has lots of stupid deaths while DoomRL has few?

What godamn tools DoomRL gives you? Other than run button and the ocasional teleport thing, you have pretty much nothing. I still remember getting to the cyber demon and not being able to kill it because I simply didn't have enough medkits to withstand his missiles. I could see no way to dodge those reliably (I had a scout build with dodge after moving and reloading shotguns with move) and in the end I lost to stupid attrition. There's nothing like that in Crawl.