Topic: Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Or: THAT DAMN SIGMUND. (Read 1681887 times)

cganya · « **Reply #4245 on:** November 10, 2010, 12:05:43 pm »

so i have been rolling random characters for awhile. most dont make it out of the starting gates (damn you hobgoblins and first floor jackal packs) but then I rolled a transmuter demon spawn. i now have:

a +4 dagger of venom (the most powerful item i've made to date)
I'm well on my way to becoming poison resistant through mutation (just need one more green scale)
I have first degree claws to help out in combat
I have two books on necromancy (a starter and an intermediate volume)
A fist full of wands
A ring of sustenance
And i have identified 13 kinds of potions and 15 kinds of scrolls

I am level 8 :3

edit: annnd i'm dead, damn super demon rakshasa

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

FilthyMonkey · « **Reply #4246 on:** November 10, 2010, 11:54:20 pm »

Quote from: cganya on November 10, 2010, 12:05:43 pm

edit: annnd i'm dead, damn super demon rakshasa

As for some suggestions, first off, turn off some of your skills. You're necromancy is unnecessarily high compared to your other skills, and you need to build your spellcasting. Likewise, you probably shouldn't have short blades turned on, so you can build more fighting skill. You really don't have any excuse for having fire magic turned on. Fighting and spellcasting are tougher to build than other skills, so you want to turn off some of your skills so that they can get a bigger chunk of the experience.

Speaking of short blades, why are you using short blades as a transmuter? You should be bladehandsing it up by early/mid lair, as that will completely and utterly outclass a dagger of poison.

Speaking of lair, why on earth did you skip right over lair? Provided you have a way of dealing with hydras (usually ice/spider form in a transmuter's case), lair is eight levels of free experience. The big goal of most early characters is simply to make it to lair, where the extra exp can build them up to be more deadly and survivable. You skipped right over orc too, which is traditionally done post lair for more exp.

Your spell list is odd as well. Spider form is usually an early pick for transmuters, due to a poison attack, extra speed, and extra evasion. You went with Kiku, which isn't a bad choice for a transmuter, but you skipped over some of the more useful and abusable Kiku spells. You want to be using Kiku's corpse drops with spells like sublimation of blood and twisted resurrection. Animate dead is something you can usually skip.

I might suggest Mahkleb as an easier to use trasnmuter god for somebody who isn't already extremely familiar with the game. Kiku is definitely not a bad choice, as stated, especially for somebody considering post-game branches. The quick mp regen from sublimating kiku-dropped corpse chunks can be extremely useful for taking out bosses in corpseless branches like hell and pan, and everybody likes torment resistance. Mahkleb's hp and mana for kills is pretty much always useful though, for anybody, and it is much easier to understand and exploit.

You probably don't want to mess with rakshasa until you have see invisible either.

cganya · « **Reply #4247 on:** November 11, 2010, 02:14:58 am »

Quote from: FilthyMonkey on November 10, 2010, 11:54:20 pm

Quote from: cganya on November 10, 2010, 12:05:43 pm
edit: annnd i'm dead, damn super demon rakshasa
As for some suggestions, first off, turn off some of your skills. You're necromancy is unnecessarily high compared to your other skills, and you need to build your spellcasting. Likewise, you probably shouldn't have short blades turned on, so you can build more fighting skill. You really don't have any excuse for having fire magic turned on. Fighting and spellcasting are tougher to build than other skills, so you want to turn off some of your skills so that they can get a bigger chunk of the experience.

Speaking of short blades, why are you using short blades as a transmuter? You should be bladehandsing it up by early/mid lair, as that will completely and utterly outclass a dagger of poison.

Speaking of lair, why on earth did you skip right over lair? Provided you have a way of dealing with hydras (usually ice/spider form in a transmuter's case), lair is eight levels of free experience. The big goal of most early characters is simply to make it to lair, where the extra exp can build them up to be more deadly and survivable. You skipped right over orc too, which is traditionally done post lair for more exp.

Your spell list is odd as well. Spider form is usually an early pick for transmuters, due to a poison attack, extra speed, and extra evasion. You went with Kiku, which isn't a bad choice for a transmuter, but you skipped over some of the more useful and abusable Kiku spells. You want to be using Kiku's corpse drops with spells like sublimation of blood and twisted resurrection. Animate dead is something you can usually skip.

I might suggest Mahkleb as an easier to use trasnmuter god for somebody who isn't already extremely familiar with the game. Kiku is definitely not a bad choice, as stated, especially for somebody considering post-game branches. The quick mp regen from sublimating kiku-dropped corpse chunks can be extremely useful for taking out bosses in corpseless branches like hell and pan, and everybody likes torment resistance. Mahkleb's hp and mana for kills is pretty much always useful though, for anybody, and it is much easier to understand and exploit.

You probably don't want to mess with rakshasa until you have see invisible either.

i looked into blade hands but i was unsure of how it would work with my mutations, same with the other shape changing spells. I was using the dagger because it was poison branded and highly enchanted and i was getting plenty of unarmed attacks with my mutations.

the dagger and animate dead spells were completely necessary for taking out hive and establishing a stash. I skipped orc mines because i have lost all my most powerful characters there (my very best was curb stomped by a frost giant on orc mines 2 >.< ). I skipped lair because I was relying on mostly poison and my dagger to kill things and I didn't feel i had enough wands of nuking to take on hydras and spiney frogs.

My plan was to grab enough spell levels to learn agony and head back to lair. I chose kiku for the corpse drop, necromancy books (was focusing on necromancy with transmutations and melee as back up. was hoping to rock the world as a lich because of the draining unarmed attacks though i again wasn't sure of the transmutation would cancel out my mutations while active.) and sweet passive protection from deadly late game stuff like draining and torment.

the main problem with focusing my experience training is that i don't know when to start or stop really. I'm not experienced enough to know the benchmarks. I left fire on because it was only trained when i used evaporate so it wasn't going to be a huge hog of experience. Besides, turning into a dragon late game also sounded pretty sweet.

I look up everything i encounter in the wiki. the wiki is painfully lacking in details (blade hands, transforming in general) or sometimes completely lacks correct info (rakshasa page shows that it has 1hp, thought i could take it.)

I understand that fighting and spellcasting are very important but i don't know what levels i should start focusing on them and when i should start training other skills again. I tend to pick 2-3 main branches and let them grow (melee, necromancy and transmutations in this case)

Mr.Person · « **Reply #4248 on:** November 11, 2010, 03:07:40 am »

Dragon Form sucks.

The Wiki sucks. Use this instead. Good for strategies, but lacking in exact numbers. I think there's an IRC bot or something that will help there, although you can quite easily beat Crawl without knowing the exact numbers of anything.

The general thing to remember about skills is that you only need as much as will be useful. The thing about Fighting and Spellcasting/Invocations is that they're always useful to pretty much everyone, so they should pretty much never be turned off. With other skills, they should be off unless there's a spell you're working towards casting well. For instance, if there's no Fire Magic spells to work towards, turn if off. Already capable of casting all the Necromancy spells available to you? Turn off Necromancy until new ones become available. Capable of casting everything well? Turn all your spell skills off and victory dance Fighting/Dodging/Armor/Spellcasting. That's the general thing, turn off skills that won't be useful to be better with what you have right now, not what you might have in the future.

Dr.Feelgood · « **Reply #4249 on:** November 11, 2010, 03:08:05 am »

Quote from: cganya on November 11, 2010, 02:14:58 am

i looked into blade hands but i was unsure of how it would work with my mutations, same with the other shape changing spells. I was using the dagger because it was poison branded and highly enchanted and i was getting plenty of unarmed attacks with my mutations.

Claws and hooves mutation are great for unarmed combat. Unarmed attacks are more powerful than any weapon. With Claws 3 and hooves 3 you would be stronger than a troll. Your weapon hand deals the most damage when unarmed, followed by your other hand.

Quote

the dagger and animate dead spells were completely necessary for taking out hive and establishing a stash. I skipped orc mines because i have lost all my most powerful characters there (my very best was curb stomped by a frost giant on orc mines 2 >.< ). I skipped lair because I was relying on mostly poison and my dagger to kill things and I didn't feel i had enough wands of nuking to take on hydras and spiney frogs.

Ice form is great against hydras. Spider form can handle bees if you're careful.

Quote

My plan was to grab enough spell levels to learn agony and head back to lair. I chose kiku for the corpse drop, necromancy books (was focusing on necromancy with transmutations and melee as back up. was hoping to rock the world as a lich because of the draining unarmed attacks though i again wasn't sure of the transmutation would cancel out my mutations while active.) and sweet passive protection from deadly late game stuff like draining and torment.

Necromutation is mainly useful if you're going for 15 runes. It's unnecessary for a normal game. Blade Hands or Statue Form is more than enough to beat the game with.

Quote

the main problem with focusing my experience training is that i don't know when to start or stop really. I'm not experienced enough to know the benchmarks. I left fire on because it was only trained when i used evaporate so it wasn't going to be a huge hog of experience. Besides, turning into a dragon late game also sounded pretty sweet.

Dragon Form requires a lot of Fire Magic skill to be usable (about 15) and I wouldn't recommend it to a newbie. It's extremely powerful, but it has some major downsides.

Quote

I look up everything i encounter in the wiki. the wiki is painfully lacking in details (blade hands, transforming in general) or sometimes completely lacks correct info (rakshasa page shows that it has 1hp, thought i could take it.)

The wiki has the clone's stats, not the real monster.

https://crawl.develz.org/info/index.php?q=rakshasa

Quote

I understand that fighting and spellcasting are very important but i don't know what levels i should start focusing on them and when i should start training other skills again. I tend to pick 2-3 main branches and let them grow (melee, necromancy and transmutations in this case)

This guide might be useful to you:

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=Sludge_Elf_Transmuter_guide

FilthyMonkey · « **Reply #4250 on:** November 11, 2010, 03:13:45 am »

The only mutation blade hands would override when active are your claws. Your base unarmed damage when blade handed completely eclipses your claw bonus damage, so I wouldn't worry about that. Blade hands is a ridiculously powerful spell.

As for hive, it really isn't a very dangerous mini branch, especially with rPois. I know spider form doesn't get innate rPois any more, but it alone should be good enough to whack bees. If you are blade handed, those bees will be dropping like ... dead bees. Transmuters are generally meant to be an unarmed fighting class. Just look at how they start with unarmed skill, get spells which transform them into unarmed critters, and the allmighty blade hands (which uses unarmed).

If your most powerful characters are dying in lair and orc, I would shelve the lich idea for a while. Don't get me wrong, lich form has its uses, but I think you might want to focus on more immediately beneficial spells. I am not saying that planning for the future is a bad idea, but you don't sound like you've seen that future yet. Lich form is overkill for low rune wins, and not even a necessity for high rune wins. It even has a few disadvantages, like the inability to drink potions. Getting confused as a lich can be a dangerous thing.

As for interactions between spells like blade hands and lich form, that is something I am unfamiliar with. I've never used lich form with a dedicated transmuter. All of my lichform capable characters have been wizards and fire elementalists. Even then, I usually didn't bother seriously training any necromancy or transmutations until late in the game. I would normally do it around vault8/elf7/slime. You don't have to do necromancy early to be liching it up in the extended endgame.

As for focusing your experience, I wouldn't really say that there are hard and fast rules. General advice you might hear are things like "keep your weapon skill turned off" or "turn off your main magic schools". For the most part, this is good advice, but it shouldn't be treated as some sort of unbreakable law. My advice would be to simply try to keep your skills in balance, according to your goals. In general, weapon skills increase much more quickly than fighting. In order to balance this out a bit, try turning your weapon skill off for a while. It will still go up, but more slowly. Because less experience is going into your weapon skill, you will be floating more exp in your pool, which will have a chance at going into fighting.

It isn't a bad idea to have some base level of weapon skill before flicking it off though. In most cases, I would say that 4 or 6 is sufficient. For characters with great aptitude in their weapon, like a MfCr, I would probably turn the weapon off at 4. For something like unarmed, you could potentially say 8, since unarmed damage is so heavily tied to unarmed skill. Again, this is hardly some absolute rule, so don't treat it as one. It is just a suggestion to try to get a more balanced skill distribution. If you feel your weapon skill is lagging behind, or if you have too much floating exp, turn your weapon skill back on to burn some of it. Most melee characters will be able to leave their main weapon skill off for the vast majority of the game though.

Likewise, individual magic schools tend to go up much more quickly than spellcasting. My suggestion would be to keep the schools on until you have your immediately usable key spells castable at 'very good' or so. If a new spell is on the horizon, but not castable yet, turn the school back on and power it up a little. I'll usually end up doing that to get something like firestorm castable later in the game.

You can even purposefully burn off floating experience into particular skills by force casting spells at some empty square, or standing around while a rat hits you, or performing some other skill increasing action purely for the purposes of putting experience into the skill. This is usually referred to as victory dancing. For example, when offing at the ogre at the beginning, a crusader might repeatedly cast repel missiles (with air magic turned off), to burn the exp off into enchantments in order to get haste castable more quickly. You might also do it after offing a high exp early unique like Pikel, or after hydras or death yaks in lair.

Heck, it is almost a necessity to dance or manual away experience in some places just to keep yourself from hitting the exp cap. The one that immediately comes to mind for me is tomb. Greater mummies give a lot of experience, and you are very unlikely to be burning it off quickly enough from your normal activity. I usually end up bringing a manual with me, or work on training something new up like translocations there.

As for looking enemies up in the wiki as you encounter them, that is fine, but I would suggest using learndb instead.
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/learndb.html
It tends to be more up to date.

Leafsnail · « **Reply #4251 on:** November 11, 2010, 05:21:09 am »

I hit the xp cap for the first time as a Spriggan Enchanter on Lair: 8. All those Dire Elephants were giving ridiculous amounts.

EDIT: Can I just say I love the way quite a few of the "bad ideas" on the learndb page have actually been implemented.

Niveras · « **Reply #4252 on:** November 11, 2010, 12:12:40 pm »

Does Oka gift jewellery with his "armor", or is that only actual armor like helmets and robes/mail/plate?

Planning on a demonspawn something of Jiyva, but starting with Oka for his early gifts so it won't matter as much when slimes start eating everything (of course, consumables will still matter; I may not have thought my cunning plan all the way through). Maybe transmuter to maximize the effect of horns/hooves, but maybe not since weapons and/or shields seem important.

Frumple · « **Reply #4253 on:** November 11, 2010, 12:39:24 pm »

Only actual armor/weapons. It basically pulls from the weapon/armor acquirement choices, with some changes due to being a god gift, s'far as I know.

cganya · « **Reply #4254 on:** November 11, 2010, 12:45:11 pm »

ninja'd kinda

i was playing random characters and came up with troll transmuter. worked surprisingly well despite slow magic growth.

I will try it again after my latest surprisingly good character (a centaur conjurer, kiting for the win but you still feel hungry).

The idea is that you can purge bad mutations with jiyva (i knew it could be done, i knew i wasn't crazy). since trolls require so little equipment and stand to lose so little from mutations they could just chug potions of mutation and hope for extra unarmed attacks (hooves, horns, ect).

I would turn off unarmed at about 10 but keep training transmutations and necromancy untill I could transform into a lich. This would solve much of the late game hunger problems for a troll and give it an added bonus of draining to it's melee attacks.

Dr.Feelgood · « **Reply #4255 on:** November 11, 2010, 03:02:29 pm »

Quote from: cganya on November 11, 2010, 12:45:11 pm

ninja'd kinda i was playing random characters and came up with troll transmuter. worked surprisingly well despite slow magic growth.

I will try it again after my latest surprisingly good character (a centaur conjurer, kiting for the win but you still feel hungry).

The idea is that you can purge bad mutations with jiyva (i knew it could be done, i knew i wasn't crazy). since trolls require so little equipment and stand to lose so little from mutations they could just chug potions of mutation and hope for extra unarmed attacks (hooves, horns, ect).

I would turn off unarmed at about 10 but keep training transmutations and necromancy untill I could transform into a lich. This would solve much of the late game hunger problems for a troll and give it an added bonus of draining to it's melee attacks.

Trolls are too stupid to learn lich form. At least, not without devoting most of their precious item slots to spell boosters or grinding until you go insane.

You would either need two rings of wizardry and an archmagi robe to cast it reliably or nearly maxed out skills. Statue Form is much easier to cast, grants hard to get resistances, and does much more damage.

Jiyva sucks, especially for new players. You can't keep a stash and you'll have to scramble on every floor to grab the few items you can use.

FilthyMonkey · « **Reply #4256 on:** November 11, 2010, 03:54:08 pm »

I would tend to agree on the Jivya sucking. Most Jivya wins come from speedrunners, who only take the god in order to quickly get a free slime rune. It is absolutely not an advisable newbie god.

Another common god option for transmuters is Cheibriados. The big gain is that the stat boosts from wearing ponderous gear turn your blade hands into tiny nuclear bombs. Seriously. Blade hands damage is "12 + str/4 + dex/4 + unarmed skill". No melee weapon will ever beat that, period. Use spider form when you need to quickly run from things as a Chei worshiper (unless they changed that). I wouldn't call Chei an easy god, since slow movement does suck, but it is something immediately useful and probably manageable by a new player with spider form.

For the most part, I would suggest sticking with Makhleb, Okawaru, or Vehumet for a new player. Chei is also an option if you are a transmuter, and Sif if you are a mummy (don't play a damn mummy). The other gods all have their place, but they can be tougher to use for somebody new (Nemelex), weaker outside of the extended endgame (TSO, Kiku), made purely for masochists (Xom), or generally underpowered (Fedhas, Zin, Elyvilon).

As for trolls, they are kind of a tough race to play. Certainly, they have large advantages early on with their claws, but the lack of item slots really hurts when it comes to resistances later on. They usually bite the bucket somewhere around vault without some careful play.

Edit: I guess I should say that Kiku does have some more substantial use for short blade characters like stabbers outside of the extended endgame. A pain branded dagger or quickblade can be a very useful tool for a stabber.

Leafsnail · « **Reply #4257 on:** November 11, 2010, 07:01:28 pm »

Spider form still works fine with Chei. The thing is, trolls of Chei will never get his full stat bonuses, so I'm not entirely sure they're compatible.

I actually prefer Sif Muna to Vehumet most of the time. The spells granted are generally better after a short while, and the channeling is great (especially for kiting

).

Frumple · « **Reply #4258 on:** November 11, 2010, 09:20:12 pm »

Vehumet's probably better for low-int/casting apt races, though. The conj/summoning success boost can be seriously helpful, even (perhaps especially) if the combo is going heavy into some other spell school. Bit of blasting (especially with spider-form kiting or swiftness, ferex) and damage-inflicting (i.e. beyond butterflies) distractions can be a lifesaver. Vehy lets you do that without as much investment. Sif just makes it less likely for screw-ups to kill you.

It'd probably be even better if Vehu's upper level stuff (mana save, conj range increase) actually work, but I've never seemed to notice them actually do anything despite getting the messages (probably just inattention on my part there.). S'a shame you can't get costless darts, heh.

Real trouble is deciding between the two for book access, I think. Temple's too early in the game and choosing a god early too important to know if you're going to have trouble there for your primary schools (In which case Sif would be the hands down choice). Sif's kinda' like the Okawaru of spellcasters, the one you go to if you think loot's going to be an issue.

If you're after on-kill regen, you go to Mekkie. Not really the point of Vehumet -- he's there for conj/summoning spell access and easier casting.

cganya · « **Reply #4259 on:** November 11, 2010, 09:47:00 pm »

i'm still going to try for making an overly mutated troll transmuter of jiyva. I'm new because i have only just started playing stone soup a few weeks ago and haven't yet won the game but i know the basics.

I have decided to turn off unarmed at level 10 and so far its gotten me a nice big xp pool to work with, hopefully i will get transmutation up enough to cast ice form by lair since i haven't gotten any poison resistance yet.

I realize that trolls are greatly crippled at spell casting but i hope to build up to stone and ice form. I wont need blade hands because of the claws.

With jiyva i hope to build piety quickly because of my low dependency on items (save consumables which if they are in danger i can just pray and make jellies stop eating things for a short time). Once I have high enough piety I can just mutate myself beyond recognition then use jiyva's if in the likely scenario I gain debilitating mutations. I hope to gain multiple intrinsic resistances from the mutations and maybe horns/ hooves/ sharp teeth/ whatever.

at that point i feel I'll be a force to be reckoned with. maybe i can get transmutations up high enough to get my hands on dragon or lich form. (yes i understand that dragon form is risky because it makes your ac/ev plummet as well as bumps you up a few size categories)

now i have a question about spider form and dragon form and transforming in general. Blade hands overwrites your claw mutations. do the various forms overwrite other mutations (transform into a dragon = lose your hooves till its over) or just redundant ones (ice form poison resistance doesn't stack with mutation poison resistance for instance)? or do all things stack except blade hands?

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Author Topic: Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Or: THAT DAMN SIGMUND. (Read 1681887 times)

cganya

Re: Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. Or: THAT DAMN SIGMUND.

FilthyMonkey

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cganya

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Mr.Person

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Dr.Feelgood

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FilthyMonkey

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Leafsnail

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Niveras

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Frumple

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cganya

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Dr.Feelgood

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FilthyMonkey

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Leafsnail

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Frumple

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cganya

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