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[tompliss]

They are, but they are very rare, as most of them actually are "broken" (in term of how they play relatively to the rest of the game), so having them 1% of the time only means it's not "normal" content.

[Moron]

I've been finding that portal vaults in general are a lot rarer than I remember in earlier versions.

Might just be because there are less levels in total now (since 5 levels of Depths replaced 12 levels of Dungeon) so there is less opportunity for them to generate.

[flame99]

Really? Because I've been seeing Ice Caves and Volcanoes pretty reliably in the Lair. Sewers and Ossuaries do seem to be considerably rarer, though.

[Uristides]

So, uh, there's that general advice of focusing on being able to kill things with one kind of thing before investing in defense and then in other assorted skills. The way I've been implementing that is by training fighting and then start training the skill of the first acceptable branded weapon I find. Reasoning being that fighting gives some damage/acc bonuses and later on scales for some nice hp gains and that it would absolutely suck to train lots of my starting weapon only to find some awesome weapon of another(non-crosstrained) category a bit later.
But then I realized most of my characters don't get far enough to see the survival benefits of fighting and the offensive ones might not be nearly as big as the specific weapon ones(I admit I haven't found all the information I'd need to carry out the maths). What to do? Is there even a drastic difference between the approaches?(If there were I should've noticed already, but then, I'm fairly dumb and reckless most of the time)

[tompliss]

With non-book starts, most of the players start by enabling only the weapon skill.
The overall offensive bonus is much higher than with fighting. With some races (orc, minotaur, maybe others with high aptitude in both fighting and the weapon), I train 33% fighting and 66% weapon.
After a while, training armor OR dodging improves your defenses as expected, and then it mostly depends on your god, species, books, and loot.

[EnigmaticHat]

So... I'm worshiping Nemelex Xobeh and I'm 'p'raying over corpses and items and items on his altar and nothing is helping.  I remember sacrificing stuff to him in a previous version so... what should I do differently?

[Robsoie]

It's been changed in 0.15 :

Code: [Select]

* Nemelex has been revamped.
- Nemelex only gives piety for exploration rather than item sacrifices or
deck usage.
- Peek at Two now reveals the top cards of a deck but cannot be used with
other Nemelex abilities.
- Nemelex now only gifts decks of war and escape.
- Various cards have been changed, added, or removed. See the Cards section
for details.

Cards
-----
* New cards.
- Fortitude, which gives Damage Shaving and a bonus to strength.
- Storm, which can make shallow water, a tornado, or cause swiftness.
- Cloud, which spawns dangerous clouds around the user and on hostiles.
- Degeneration, which polymorphs nearby monsters into weaker ones.
- Shaft, which creates a shaft under the player. This is an old effect of the
Flight card.
- Illusion, which summons an illusion of the player.
* Revamped cards.
- Velocity card now hastes the slow and slows hasty rather than simply
speeding up the player.
- Potion card has a new list of effects.
* The Mercenary card can generate base demonspawn instead of spriggan riders.
* Decks of war now contain the Dowsing and Potion cards.
* Decks of dungeon are no more.
* Removed cards: Experience, Sage, Water, Vitrification, Trowel, Minefield,
Shuffle, Warp, Portal, Frost, Flame, Spark, Flight, Battlelust, and Genie.


[EnigmaticHat]

Oh... huh.  So he only gives two decks now, one of which can banish you to the abyss?  That seems not the best.

[Robsoie]

Yes, i guess that was a change to nerf Nebelex and avoid people switching to it later and having tons of items in the dungeon to build faith fast.

[Retropunch]

Yeah, not to moan again, but this is yet another 'simplifying' change which just sucks more of the uniqueness and interest out of the game. Sure, people found hoovering up stuff a bit tedious, but the whole point was that he was supposed to gift you loads of really different abilities - some of which were good, and some were bad (a gamble!), whereas now he's just turned into basically 'blast or teleport' with a few extras lobbed in - all of which are good.


 

[Graven]

You know, occasionally I start suspecting I'm not as good as I believe I am.

Can someone spot the error in the following sequence of events, since I sure as hell couldn't, in the 0.05 seconds I devoted to each turn.

- Snake:5
- Get heavily poisoned fighting 100 000 nagas as a HoAs with 26 axes, 20 fighting and 15 armour skills and a +7 randart Exec Axe
- Randomly teleport next to the rune at 60 HP
- Run over to the rune
- Pick-up rune
- Read Teleport
- Quaff all your potions of Heal Wounds to stay alive
- Teleportation hasn't kicked in
- Quaff Cancellation to cancel the poison
- Somehow despite all this tactical genius die in Snake:5

[DJ]

fighting 100 000 nagas

That's your problem right there.

[hops]

I still don't quite understand why the scroll of teleportation take a while to activate.

That sort of ruin the point of it being used to escape.

[Graven]

Escapes in Crawl are, by design, meant to be either limited and extremely valuable - Scroll of Blinking - or unreliable - uncontrolled blink, Teleportation, Scroll of Fear. Unlike, say, Tome 4, which takes a completely different approach with escapes and consumables.

Whether this is good design or not, and whether you personally like it or not is a completely different issue

I'll be honest, I'm used to them to the point I barely notice, the same way I barely notice DF's incredibly horrible interface. However Crawl's focus on more tactical combat and the importance of realising a bad situation is bad shortly before it going bad wouldn't really work if 100% safe and secure escape mechanisms were in.

Also I've noticed I've started playing Crawl less like a Roguelike, and more like a Hack&Slash, which makes me think I need to play something else for a while, since charging into the biggest crowd you can gather isn't good even in Diablo II. Too bad my laptop chokes on Low details Titan Quest.

[Robsoie]

If there's a scroll i never use on a rune level, it's really the teleportation one because unless you have control teleport (and i usually rarely find one in a whole play), the teleportation is too unreliable.
Especially with the cooldown that is really deadly when the game decide to teleport you into a crowd of endgame monsters, the time the next teleport kicks, you nearly dead, and the game can still decide to teleport you into another endgame monster crowd.

I always progressively kill the opposition between stairs and rune trying to drag the less possible amount of monsters in view toward safer areas to avoid being overwhelmed, always retreating if needed to rest health and magic, a rune level is really one i don't want to rush.