Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup questions/thread

[Dirk Diggler]

With spell casters I actually run them to dungeon level 3 or 4 ASAP and try to get some kills on stuff that gives more xp than kobolds. You've got better odds of winning a fight with 1 ogre than the 60 different kobolds you'd need for the same chunk of xp. Especially if you find any of the offensive wands (And most of them are offensive)

I never even thought of such a thing, I'll give that a shot.

And magic dart is the spell that it seems to happen the most often with. That, throw flame, and throw ice.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

And magic dart is the spell that it seems to happen the most often with. That, throw flame, and throw ice.

It was a good idea, because now I've finally made it over the hump. I took out Pikel and Prince Ribbit with my lvl 9 sludge elf magician, who is currently decked out with a blowgun, level 6 throwing, ice, conjuration, and spellcasting skill.

Unfortunately, I may well end up starving to death.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

After a while at lvl 10 with 1500 xp accumulated, I got taken out by a zombie brain worm and a gila monster. My ice magic didn't do much against some yaks, so I distracted them with a mephitic cloud and ran off. Unfortunately, I ran into some nasty stuff and it was game over.

Oh well, I seem to be getting the hang of things moreso now. If the game was easy I would have quit already.

 

[Malakal]

Ice magic kinds sucks because of undeads. OTOH fire magic sucks because of demons. That leaves us with air magic, which just sucks (other than enchantments). And of course earth magic, which is good, but hard to use.
Still I think I am going to try an earth elemantalist.

I think that the best overall mage would be fire-earth elementalist with summoning abilities and blinking. Or enchanter-warrior worshipping Makhleb for summoning and damaging invocations. Gonna try.

 

[Dragula]

A phantom just killed me, why do I keep dying against piece of shit enemies? I mean I killed a player ghost earlier.

 

[Castanova]

For Phantoms/Imps vs. your lower level character, you should lead them to an up staircase, wait till they're next to you, go upstairs, hit them a few times until they blink, then go downstairs by yourself. When you run a Fire Elementalist you have to do this about 15 times to deal with all the fire immune Imps until you get a non-fire spell.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

For Phantoms/Imps vs. your lower level character, you should lead them to an up staircase, wait till they're next to you, go upstairs, hit them a few times until they blink, then go downstairs by yourself. When you run a Fire Elementalist you have to do this about 15 times to deal with all the fire immune Imps until you get a non-fire spell.

Yeah, I'm sorry, but hearing stuff like this makes me feel like quitting the game. I understand that the suspension of disbelief is less than paper-thin already, but fiddle fucking around with the rules like that in order to win just seems ridiculous.

 

[Zomg]

Probably ought to quit then because stairfuckery is pretty ubiquitous. Although for that particular case it's not entirely necessary for imps and phantoms since you can go into a corridor-laced area and they'll usually lose you after blinking a few times.

I lost that drac EE in elf 7 because I finally found a book with statue form from Roxanne and such was my glee that I forgot it would meld away my robe of magic resistance. A demonologist I considered xp on legs via abjuration then banished him and he died in the Abyss.

 

[Raghar]

For Phantoms/Imps vs. your lower level character, you should lead them to an up staircase, wait till they're next to you, go upstairs, hit them a few times until they blink, then go downstairs by yourself. When you run a Fire Elementalist you have to do this about 15 times to deal with all the fire immune Imps until you get a non-fire spell.

Yeah, I'm sorry, but hearing stuff like this makes me feel like quitting the game. I understand that the suspension of disbelief is less than paper-thin already, but fiddle fucking around with the rules like that in order to win just seems ridiculous.

Have you never seen an Imp teleporting in front of you and an Ogre running at you from behind? You kill that Ogre and then run away because of your wounds.

Or Imps with weapon of distortion...

Remember using wand of cold against Imps doesn't need to be shame.

 

[Calem Ravenna]

From reading the thread I'm getting the impression you guys play mostly casters/lightly armoured characters, but I'll still ask: Any idea how to train Armour skill quickly? I've got a fairly promising Mountain Dwarf Fighter nearing the endgame and, while his primary combat skills are close to the the cap, his Armour skill is barely in the early teens. Earlier on it levelled slowly, similiarly to Stealth on robe wearing characters, but now it's really slow, even when I have ~10 000 xp in reserve.

 

[Malakal]

Find a low hitting multiattack enemy and stand near him with spare xp. The best You can count on. The same about shields and dodging.

 

[Castanova]

Yeah, training Armor is tough. There's a Armor Guide on the Crawl Wiki which seems to imply that you need to grow into heavier sets of armor. So, like, you should start by wearing leather armor and then upgrade to ring mail and so on. Maybe your current armor is "too good" for your Armor skill? Not sure how it works exactly.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Or too light. I think once your armor is heavy enough (Something like 3-4 times the evasion penalty?) it stops leveling because it's practically light armor for you now.

Are you wearing heavy ass dwarf plate or some sort of sort of heavy crap like dragon scale or chain mail?

 

[Zomg]

I think you wear the body slot with the highest evasion penalty you can find to train armor faster. So crystal plate mail or gold dragon armour, failing that plate mail. The advice for "growing into" armor on the wiki is for new characters that will die horribly if they strap into the first suit of plate they can find because they won't be able to hit with any attacks.

I've done this with the minotaur berserker (although eventually I found some -3 evasion penalty artifact dragon armor so I threw away my GDA) starting at like the late midgame and I ended up with uhh 16 armor skill I think. Armor is really one of those skills, like fighting or spellcasting, that you need to be training from the first turn if you want to get it into the 20+ levels.

I'm pretty sure the racial modifier doesn't matter much in 0.6 (well, aside from getting a same-race bonus and for spellcasting) because they got rid of the arbitrary light/heavy armor distinction.

 

[Calem Ravenna]

Thanks for the tips, will check the guide on the wiki (somehow missed it before).

I found a magic resistant plate mail before Lair and nothing better later on. Well, except one artifact Crystal Plate from Okawaru, but it had some ridiculous attribute penalties so I left it on the floor.

So that's wearing the plate mail from level 8 or so. Armour skill went slowly, like Stealth on an assassin/enchanter with average aptitude, but it didn't bother me that much since the other skills weren't exactly great yet and there wasn't that much xp to spare. However, with hordes of Deep Trolls and Stone/Fire Giants in D:20s Shields and Maces skyrocketed into the 20's and Armour got stuck at 15 (I was wrong with "early teens" apparently, I resumed this character after three weeks). Indeed, probably hit the max I can get with standard plate mail.

And yeah, AC from heavy armour sucks somewhat. I find deep dwarves in lightly enchanted robes, with decent dodge and a buckler not much less resilient than this guy, who has 32 AC in rather mediocre gear and ~50 Shield Value.

 

[Zomg]

Wow, that's a really high shield value. I'd imagine the armor skill would slow down if only because you'd never get hit.

 

[Calem Ravenna]

Indeed, that was the case through most of the middle levels, with a somewhat lower shield value of course. Snake Pit, Shoals, the upper Vaults were a breeze for the most part. I started running into problems when Stone Giants and other hard-hitting opponents started to appear in larger numbers. I mean, I might block an attack or two, maybe completely negate one through AC and then get hit for over 30 damage. Also, shields seem to work really poorly when it comes to blocking magical projectiles and steel bolts shot by yaktaurs/yaktaur captains. Evasion seems more consistent than SV and AC combined.

 

[Zomg]

I wish I knew the exact mechanics of blocking vs. evasion, but I don't. I think I remember seeing somewhere that every block you make lowers the SV of the next block attempt until it refreshes on your next turn, so a pack of yaktaurs going firing squad on you will zero out your blocking rapidly.

AC randomly subtracts between 1-AC points of damage (I think it's shallower than a normal/Gaussian distribution but not linear) so there are going to be times where a stone giant rolls his max damage and you roll a terrible AC subtraction. In most games evasion is all-or-nothing while damage reduction is "dependable" and prevents damage from coming in bursts, but they're basically similar in Crawl, they only work on averages and you always have to be ready to compensate for a few bad rolls in a row. There is a separate guaranteed damage reduction mechanic that goes entirely off of the base AC of a piece of armor but I think it's negligible in 0.6, might be worth understanding when 0.7 is released for real.

 

[Dragula]

ADOM is pissing me off to no end. Fucking fucking fuck. I'm copying my saves in order to prevent perma-death just because the amount of pissing-offness it brings.

 

[Zomg]

Ugh player ghosts on akrasiac are such huge pains. Had to run from like 3-4 that were spamming horrible spells on my way to getting my MD hunter killed by a melee ghost on a stair rape with 3 slime creatures on a cut-off part of D11 with only one staircase leading to it (up or down). Hate it when Lair is deep

 

[Castanova]

That's OK, Zomg, cuz I finally won the damn game. Spriggan Enchanters are just BEASTLY. Basically, you just sleep/confuse every monster and run away from stuff that resists too much or is a heavy damage dealer. After the early game, it feels like it'd be tough to die without you making a major mistake.That being said, if you check out the morgue file below, I ended up with some ridiculous equipment although the last couple pieces I only got at the very end when I raided Vault:8.

On the note of Vault:8... nothing like Invis/Stealth/Haste/cTele to make any branch end ridiculously easy. I did Swamp:5 and Shoals:5 waking up only a handful of enemies, let alone actually killing them.

Morgue File:
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Casta ... 042822.txt

 

[Zomg]

Fuckin yeaaaaaaaaaa <bro headbutt>

 

[Dirk Diggler]

Have you never seen an Imp teleporting in front of you and an Ogre running at you from behind? You kill that Ogre and then run away because of your wounds.

I would hit the ogre with a mephitic cloud and then bang the imp with a wand of cold/throw ice, it's highly doubtful that I would be wounded at all...

Remember using wand of cold against Imps doesn't need to be shame.

...what? It seems a lot less shameful than exploiting the mechanics around the stairs.

 

[Castanova]

Roguelikes are all basically exercises in system manipulation, so I'm surprised you're drawn to them. Stair hopping in Crawl is really quite minor in the scheme of things. Do you also balk at the idea of manipulating which skills are on and off? What about backing into a hallway to fight enemies one on one? You have a representation of a physical space so why not use it?

 

[Raghar]

I would hit the ogre with a mephitic cloud and then bang the imp with a wand of cold/throw ice, it's highly doubtful that I would be wounded at all...

And when would you learn fighting skill? Also certain characters doesn't have cloud spells during Ogre encounter, or there can be something more deadly for example tentacled monstrosity.

...what? It seems a lot less shameful than exploiting the mechanics around the stairs.

Imagine this situation in real live. You are running around on stairs, then you run around until you lose the imp. You run back down stairs and imp is running around trying to find you. Is there any problem with that?