Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup questions/thread

[Malakal]

I actually killed them all by careful tactics, a lot of running away and using conjure flame. But i the end my carelessness always kills me with mages.

Of course the rando factor in armor and ev makes it even worse.

 

[Zomg]

Man, don't fuck around with (extremely rare) lindwurms in Lair, they have a fire beam attack that does 3d18 damage if you don't have resistance. Lost a demigod wanderer - who I thought was going to be an easy win after he found the book of changes on D6 - to one while I was waiting for a teleport to kick in because I didn't realize it had such a serious damage potential. I had the forethought not to use ice form around it but not the forethought to safely kill it with wands of draining or something.

Other thing I learned from that death: the fear scroll effect stops working if a monster bumps into another monster. So if you have a monster next to you with a monster directly behind it, if you use a fear scroll and both of them get the fear effect, and the closer monster happens to get a turn before the farther one (can easily happen due to the turn randomization shit), it'll bump and immediately lose the fear status. So take a step to position all the monsters so they have somewhere to flee if you can.

 

[Malakal]

Kirche changed me into a swine and raped with summons. Can this be avoided? I couldnt do anything in swineform...

 

[Zomg]

Another job for 2-stacked magic resist.

She has a deflect missiles effect too.

 

[Castanova]

I need to stop playing this game. It's now a trend: every time I get a character past the early game, they are repeatedly cast into the Abyss until they die. Wearing a robe of magic resistance? Who the fuck cares! Clearly I was far too arrogant when I took off my second source of MR (ring of magic resistance) for a few hundred turns and that kind of arrogance is obviously immediately punishable by death. Ironic considering the game isn't supposed to require an Ascension Kit. Right.

 

[Zomg]

Yeah I have come to agree they're a little too trigger happy with the abyss mechanic, because it's like just wasting the player's time with a flat 90% chance of death without recourse. Stasis should block it or something like that, or there should be abyss-escape scrolls, there should be a hard counter instead of just throwing it onto the MR pile with wands of paralysis and confusion and so on. It's also goofy because an endgame character can easily survive the abyss forever with a gourmand amulet (draconians spawn there and have corpses) or some other food trick so it's truly only a place for people without double MR to die bullshit DL12 deaths.

 

[BLOBERT]

ALRIGHT BROS I AM SLOWLY GETTING BETTER I CAN CONSISTENTLY MAKE IT TO DL 9-10 OR SO

MY BEST BROS ARE SPRIGGAN ASSASINS, TROLL BERSERKERS AND ORC PREESTS AND I THINK I MADE IT GOOD WITH A CHAOS KNIGHT ONCE

 

[Zomg]

Jesus I have got the Crawl yips or something, I can't get shit going. Been playing the 0.7 trunk and I am unremittingly dying before Lair.

 

[desocupado]

This game is great, it has lots of races, backgrounds, and ultra next-gen graphics (tiles version), an... let me give a greater emphasis here...

auto-explore button.

But there's one thing that annoys me. It doesn't give me numbers. Fuck, I can't compare what spell is better, how much an enchantment lasts, movement speeds, a shitload of things. It's annoying as hell not to know how much damage you are causing, and if your chance to hit improved after casting that spell thingy Arcane Marksmen have.

 

[Zomg]

Obfuscation of the numbercrunching seems to be a mini-battleground between the main developer guys (and they change the formulas pretty often so it would also be work to keep it all displayed). One point they like to make is that some of the top players on akrasiac don't know the number-crunchy stuff very well or at all, only what you intuit from just playing the game, so therefore it's a waste of time to make it in-line when it's not a concern of skill at the game, just wankery.

You can get some from this link:

http://crawl.develz.org/info/inline.php

Type in something like "weapon damage". That link is also the definitive monster spoiler if you want to know their stats and so on.

 

[desocupado]

Obfuscation of the numbercrunching seems to be a mini-battleground between the main developer guys (and they change the formulas pretty often so it would also be work to keep it all displayed). One point they like to make is that some of the top players on akrasiac don't know the number-crunchy stuff very well or at all, only what you intuit from just playing the game, so therefore it's a waste of time to make it in-line when it's not a concern of skill at the game, just wankery.

Well, of course you can learn what's better by trying shit out, and of course, if you are a top player, you spent a lot of time with the game, and ended up learning. But that's the hard way. It would help people new to the game to know what suits them better.

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS USING THE MOUSE IT SHOWS WEAPON SPEED AND DAMAGE IN THE GAME THOUGH NOT DAMAGE FROM SPELL AFFECTS

 

[Zomg]

Stuff I think from playing 0.7:

They added several new vaults (some portals), including at least one at the bottom of Lair which is nice (there are probably several).

Armor still sucks. You still have to invest a huge number of points into strength to make stuff like plate mail not obliterate your evasion and only the heaviest armor is worth wearing because lower evasion penalty stuff is generally 1 AC for -1EV compared to robes (mostly pointless or worse) AND you have to get a few levels of armor for even ring mail or scale mail to not give extra evasion penalty over and above that, and the guaranteed damage reduction for those armors is barely existent. Not to mention that armor slows your attacks and ruins your stealth too. OTOH the guaranteed damage reduction is 30% for the crystal plate mail, 20% for plate, etc. but you immediately get that damage reduction instead of having to wait for your armor skill to get to 20+ like in 0.6. They also made armor train much, much faster up to like 15 so grabbing some plain/swamp dragon armor in the midgame or a Troggist using crystal plate he finds in one of the late treasure piles might be more attractive and perhaps 90% of akrasiac wins won't be wearing robes of resistance like they do for 0.6.

They added some spellbooks, not sure how they'll change the dynamics.
Edit - sheesh they added a spellbook with fulsome distillation, evaporate AND sublimation of blood in it :facepalm:

 

[Castanova]

Hah, hit Random Good Character for a change of pace, got a Halfing Assassin, and just got my second win out of it. I must have some natural talent for stabbers.

I gotta tell you, speed brand on Short Blades is TERRIBLE. This character was lucky with defensive items so he could stand toe to toe with most enemies in the game but he couldn't trade his soul for one HP of fucking damage on the enemy. It took almost 140k turns to do a 3-rune game and that's mostly because it would take like 100 turns to kill each enemy. Ridiculous. Stupid ass slings weren't helping either. I had a holy wrath sabre for the appropriate enemies but it didn't do anything versus, say, that Shadow Dragon.

I tried to beat Zot:5 in earnest. Even managed to take down an Ancient Lich over what seemed like 10,000 turns. But then I met my first Orb of Fire. Thing almost killed me and it was only lightly wounded. After scrambling to escape, I realized there was no way I was going to actually fight my way to the Orb. But I also didn't have Apportation...

Desperate times, though. I put up a billion buffs, went invisible, and spammed teleport until I ended up near the Orb. Had to run in there with Swiftness and manually pick up the Orb before cTeleporting out of there for the win. Was actually easier to do than I expected. While standing there with the Orb waiting for the teleport to kick in, I just spammed heal wounds / healing wands. Survived quite easily even though I had to switch out a artefact ring for the cTele ring.

Moral of the story: never play a Halfling Assassin unless you get gifted a vorpalized quick blade at some point. Which is sort of a catch 22, isn't it?

Morgue: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Casta ... 235246.txt

 

[Zomg]

The brands like vorpal, holy wrath, etc. only activate after AC, so they don't help you penetrate at all. I guess a shortblade user in the late game is counting on getting so many attacks that enemies get bad AC rolls.

It's hard to feel it intuitively because you might be getting 2-3x as many turns as you would with like a demon blade or some 2-hander at less than 20 skill, so it might not really have been an egregious number of actual segments to kill orbs even though it took many turns. I had an artifact sling of speed on a HaHu and I had to remind myself to notice how many shots I was getting for every step/attack an enemy got to notice how good it actually was, since it was like 2-3 segments a shot while hasted. They added a note to the "@" command in 0.7 that gives you a verbal description of your attack speed, which is nice.

Cool combo: (unarmed race) healer of Elyvilon. The "purification" invocation clears Slow, meaning you can use berserk freely if you find the berserker rage spell or an amulet, and unarmed is awesome for clearing the early game (at about 6-7 skill you can blow through typical early game problem enemies). Trog Berserkers/unarmed specialists are really the only way I feel comfortable using melee in the early game since it's otherwise very luck-based on whether you find decent melee weapons as the starting stuff is horrible. Don't even bother with Ely's pacification schtick, it's worthless, just sacrifice draining/vampiric weapons and reaping ammo as you find them for piety. Use Ely until you find a nice demon weapon then switch to The Shining One, clear crypt and bless it and now you have a 15 rune melee character.

 

[desocupado]

If you don't start with a skill, say armor, but end up using armor anyway, the skill raises from nothing? Or do you have to find a skill book or something?

 

[Castanova]

Yeah, basically skills start at 0 (and they're not listed in the skills screen) but they accumulate points similarly to any normal skill that you can see. Once it levels up to level 1, it appears in your skill screen. No need to read books or anything.

 

[Zomg]

It's worth saying though that even though the initial class seems like it doesn't mean too much since you can eventually develop any skill, Crawl puts enough pressure on you that you usually end up having to stick to the archetype because you just won't have the tools you need to survive if you try to branch too much.

 

[MisterStone]

One fun way to play that I tried a few times is to start as a Elvylion character with a strong combat race and switch to SHining one. Minotaurs are good for this. The healing powers and stuff can keep you alive for a long time until you manage to find a sweet weapon of some kind. Like Zomg said you can switch to the Shining One whenever you want to and suffer no consequences (as far as I can tell) since these gods are allied.

 

[Zomg]

The thing is you have to find like 2-3 good weapons. First you need a good version of a shitty starter weapon to get through the early game, hopefully with some +damage and a damage brand. Then you graduate to the scimitar/war axe/spiked flail tier and you need yet another one. Then finally you either get a great 1-1.5 hander like a demon weapon or double sword or something or you wait until your skill is 16+ to use a true 2hander like a battleaxe. Unless Trog is feeding you weapons to manage the above it's a huge pain in the ass compared to ranged weapon or unarmed whoring, and spells are much better than either of those. And of course you might get a distortion weapon at any point when you're wear-ID'ing those weapons. I think the whole weapon system and design needs an overhaul.

 

[Castanova]

I think that's why a lot of people seem to go Okawaru -> TSO rather than Ely. Oka's penance is apparently pretty tame at the point you make the switch (right before going into the Crypt).

 

[Zomg]

Oka is just a really good god all around for anything, might lets you get a lot more mileage out of a weapon before you have to trade up (and you get it at very low piety, too) and of course he gifts too. The Elyvilon recommendation is for coolness rather than pure power.

I think the worst thing you can get out of Oka for penance is stone giants summoned right next to you + confusion. Edit - a bit worse than that actually, all the higher giants (stone, fire, frost, and titans) are possible and Oka can also simultaneously slow you (very rarely).

 

[Castanova]

Looks like 7.0 has two levels of Sustain Abilities.. what's up with that nonsense?

 

[Zomg]

Huh, haven't noticed. I got a MDGl of oka->tso killed on like level 22 of a ziggurat after doing most of a 15 rune run and I never noticed ability score draining to be markedly different than in 0.6 (aside, my ziggurat opinion: TSO is incredibly good for the hells and Pan but you need torment immunity or tomb cards or shatter or slouch or something for the deep demon zig floors, not that there's any good reason to do them anyway. Also always wear a stasis amulet if you're gonna melee a non-unique pan lord, they get a random brand for their melee attacks, including the chaos brand, and they can easily chain-paralyze you to death with it without stasis).

I remember reading something saying 0 stats weren't going to be instadeaths anymore, might have something to do with that.

 

[BLOBERT]

ALLRIGHT BROS I AM GETTING BETTER I CLEARD THE ORC SHIT ONCE THEN DIED AFTER I AM GOOD WITH MELEE GUYS BUT SUCK SHIT WITH SPEEL DUDES