Training armor and dodging
Gibbering
and dodging skill.
These two skills are a bit laborious to train up to higher levels.
Even with melee fighters, in the course of normal fighting, your
weapons and fighting skills tend to take the lion's share of your exp
pool.
So to train these up, I fall back to a boring, grindy behavior of
spending hundreds if not thousands of turns letting lesser monsters
beat on me, doing little damage. This is tedious work, which I know
the developers of crawl must cringe at.
The problem is if you have a cloth caster who does this. While a
couple of grey rats wont kill you, a few rounds from a spiny frog
will. Sure, you can carefully rest one turn at a time to make sure
nothing sneaks up on you, but it is VERY boring work. I tend to get
impatient and just hold down the rest key, and a couple of times now,
something has come along and killed me before I could let up on it.
Now I know this is all due to my carelessness, but it makes me wonder
if there shouldn't be an easier way to train up the armor and dodging
skills? Even if I lock all other skills, these seem to climb ever so
mind-numbingly slowly. Could the skill-gain checks possibly be
altered to make it easier to increase them?
Öö Tiib
> These two skills are a bit laborious to train up to higher levels.
> Even with melee fighters, in the course of normal fighting, your
> weapons and fighting skills tend to take the lion's share of your exp
> pool.
It is less painful if to play races with good aptitudes there. When
you want to get lot of armour skill then play mountain dwarf. When you
want to get high dodging skill then play merfolk. When you really want
to have both high then play minotaur.
> The problem is if you have a cloth caster who does this. While a
> couple of grey rats wont kill you, a few rounds from a spiny frog
> will. Sure, you can carefully rest one turn at a time to make sure
> nothing sneaks up on you, but it is VERY boring work. I tend to get
> impatient and just hold down the rest key, and a couple of times now,
> something has come along and killed me before I could let up on it.
Your hybridizing caster probably wants a fighting skill too anyway (HP
is your last circle of defense). Why not turn off weapon skill
training and melee the easy critters instead of that boring and
dangerous resting practice?
rlund
>
> Your hybridizing caster probably wants a fighting skill too anyway (HP
> is your last circle of defense). Why not turn off weapon skill
> training and melee the easy critters instead of that boring and
> dangerous resting practice?
It's not so much that I'm hybridizing. I've found that casters are
very very easy to kill in melee, so I try to defend myself by wearing
say, ring or scale. When I do that, my casting and dodging go to
hell. So to mitigate that, I try to get a mere 4 or 5 levels in
armor for the extra AC, and improved casting, and the ability to train
dodging again.
Even if I do want a few levels of fighting, at some point, I'm going
to get enough, and still need to train up the armor. And as it is,
the only real way to do that is to get a boatload of exp in your pool,
and let small critters attack you till it's drained.
Öö Tiib
> On Nov 9, 11:26 am, Öö Tiib <oot...@hot.ee> wrote:
>
> > Your hybridizing caster probably wants a fighting skill too anyway (HP
> > is your last circle of defense). Why not turn off weapon skill
> > training and melee the easy critters instead of that boring and
> > dangerous resting practice?
>
> It's not so much that I'm hybridizing. I've found that casters are
> very very easy to kill in melee, so I try to defend myself by wearing
> say, ring or scale.
All that you get from switching leather armour with such stuff is 2
AC. Learn Ozocubus armour or Stoneskin and you get these 2 AC just for
2 mana. Or go peek around in Elf 1 and take elven ring or scale
instead.
> When I do that, my casting and dodging go to hell.
You gave up your primary safety sources like spellcasting and stealth
for 2 AC. No wonder your spellcasters die easily.
> So to mitigate that, I try to get a mere 4 or 5 levels in
> armor for the extra AC, and improved casting, and the ability to train
> dodging again.
I would anytime take a deep elf with 11 conjurations instead of one
with 6 conjurations and 5 armour skill.
Lee Huber
Also, you don't have to hold down the "rest one turn key" to get fully
healed. Hit "5" to rest for a lot of turns. It will automatically
interrupt if a monster comes into sight.
George Moyer
> nothing sneaks up on you, but it is VERY boring work. I tend to get
> impatient and just hold down the rest key, and a couple of times now,
> something has come along and killed me before I could let up on it.
Ugly solution - get yourself cornered with a rat then hold down
search... but who knows, maybe an orange rat will show up.
eoghan griffin
@f20g2000prn.googlegroups.com>, rl...@google.com says...
Spell school skills are much more important for casting in armour, than
armour skill. If you really want to wear armour, just wear it and forget
about trying to train it. I advise against armour though, ime, unless
its dragon armour. Youd be better off to spend that xp on dodging.
Mark Mackey
Gibbering <rob...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Due to carelessness, I've lost a few casters trying to train my armor
>and dodging skill.
Most spellcasters don't need much of either. Conjurors and elementalist
shouldn't be letting anything get into melee range, and summoners and
necromances have meatshields (or boneshields...). The top-scoring
offensive spellcaster on akrasiac is Kjoery's MuIE, who at the end of an
all-rune win had Dodging 5 and no Armor skill at all.
Enchanters and transmuters are the exceptions: transmuters will train
dodging just fine, and although enchanters often kill critters in melee
said critters shouldn't be hitting you back very often.
In summary, if you think that your spellcasters are dying due to lack of
dodging skill (or even worse, armor skill), then you're doing it wrong.
--
Mark Mackey
The Association for the Advancement of Dungeon Crawling
Hints, tips and spoilers
http://www.swallowtail.org/crawl/
thiskidrob
> In article <8beb6c2d-2f44-465d-8913-ea6293c1f...@a37g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,
Agreed, it is pointless to attempt to train dodging or armor. Will
lead to death more often than good.
Either have it on or off, and let it do its thing.