Too much stuff.

[Timo Pietilä]

Priests have much slower starts than most other classes. They have bad melee and their only practical attack spell is fairly expensive, which means lots of resting.

I don't think priests are slow starters. Especially with right race/class combination. With Dwarf Priest you get 18/50 WIS to start, which means 3 new spells / 2 levels, with very low XP penalty and high XP reward from casting spells first time. That means you get clevels fast. Nearly as fast as warrior. Faster than Rangers, for example.

Biggest early slowdown for me is usually lack third spellbook in Temple or lack of money to buy it ASAP.

Melee is also decent. Not excellent, but not bad either. You can melee your way thru early levels without problems using bless as your help to hit monsters. Potions of heroism help too, but that is tiny bit later in game.

OoD isn't that expensive, it is much better than any mage spell (except maybe now that mage spells have lower costs). Early you need to choose when to use it. Use it as major artillery against evil creatures. Two of those is usually enough to soften entire groups of orcs in missile-weapon tolerable levels. Bless helps to hit those orcs. Protection from evil hinders their counter-attacks (with combination of bless AC bonus). Three OoD is enough to kill most low-level uniques. That's only 21 mana.

Slow part is not the beginning, it is when hounds start to appear and you haven't yet found Godly Insights. Priests do not have any means to detect non-evil monsters unless you have ESP or some other method of detecting non-evil creatures like detection rod. That means very risky adventuring at 1500-2500'.

[Derakon]

Well, it took me about an hour and around 8k turns to get a half-troll warrior down to 1000'. It took me about 30k turns to get a half-troll priest to the same depth, and in realtime terms probably took more than three hours. Of course, half-troll warriors are an extreme example since they can bull through everything in their path, but in general, compared to a class with strong melee, priests are slow.

[Timo Pietilä]

Well, it took me about an hour and around 8k turns to get a half-troll warrior down to 1000'. It took me about 30k turns to get a half-troll priest to the same depth, and in realtime terms probably took more than three hours. Of course, half-troll warriors are an extreme example since they can bull through everything in their path, but in general, compared to a class with strong melee, priests are slow.

Which clvl are those? Player active turns (active because it takes *you* half a second to rest) or game turns? Anyway Half-Troll priest is a bad, bad combination. That's like using Half-Troll mage when you can use High-Elf mage.

Try Dwarf Priest with 18/50 starting WIS, put two points to DEX and rest to STR. Get a bow and ammo. Use bless to boost your shooting. Compare again.

[Derakon]

I don't know the clvl; I don't pay that much attention to it, preferring to use recall depth and HP total as proxies for my progress. Those were player turns, not player active turns, and I gave my estimates for real time taken too.

As for half-troll priests being bad, I'd wager they're better at melee than dwarves are (thanks to higher STR, higher CON, and regeneration). Of course their spellcasting is terrible until they get some WIS-boosting equipment.

[Timo Pietilä]

I don't know the clvl; I don't pay that much attention to it, preferring to use recall depth and HP total as proxies for my progress. Those were player turns, not player active turns, and I gave my estimates for real time taken too.

As for half-troll priests being bad, I'd wager they're better at melee than dwarves are (thanks to higher STR, higher CON, and regeneration). Of course their spellcasting is terrible until they get some WIS-boosting equipment.

Dwarves are second best at melee (tied with Dunedain), HP is very close to same as Half-Troll, CON is only one point less and way better WIS gives spell gain speed that speeds up level gaining process remarkably. I think I can get Dwarf Priest at 1500' faster than Half-Troll Warrior. Definitely way less than three hours. And definitely much faster than Half-Troll Priest.

They are slower at *very* start (nothing beats warriors at that, even hobbit warrior would be faster than anything else), but it very soon changes.

[fizzix]

Which clvl are those? Player active turns (active because it takes *you* half a second to rest) or game turns? Anyway Half-Troll priest is a bad, bad combination. That's like using Half-Troll mage when you can use High-Elf mage.

Try Dwarf Priest with 18/50 starting WIS, put two points to DEX and rest to STR. Get a bow and ammo. Use bless to boost your shooting. Compare again.

My fastest character so far was a half-troll priest...

[PowerDiver]

Dwarves are second best at melee

Half-trolls can be better at melee because of the stats, not the racial melee bonus. If the str bonus gives the half-troll an extra blow with a light weapon, that pretty much dwarfs the melee bonus of the dwarf.

[Timo Pietilä]

Half-trolls can be better at melee because of the stats, not the racial melee bonus. If the str bonus gives the half-troll an extra blow with a light weapon, that pretty much dwarfs the melee bonus of the dwarf.

That is true, but "bullying through early levels using melee" is not what priests do to get deep fast. You can use melee, it is not too bad for priests, but main method is to pick your fights from the beginning and use distance-methods when approriate. Early OoD helps a lot. Half-troll has so bad WIS that it can't use OoD or even detection much, while Dwarf can.

[Timo Pietilä]

My fastest character so far was a half-troll priest...

"fastest" is a bit difficult consept here. Half-Troll has regen, which helps *a lot* for mana recovery time, but it doesn't do much difference in real-time. So fastest real time can be quite different to fastest in game time.

Pretty soon after I started to try to get low turncounts I realized that regeneration is in top three abilities to get: ESP, FA, regen. And FA is questionable if you have very good saving throw and enough AC in current vanilla

[buzzkill]

"fastest" is a bit difficult concept here. Half-Troll has regen, which helps *a lot* for mana recovery time, but it doesn't do much difference in real-time. So fastest real time can be quite different to fastest in game time.

I knew that trolls had regen, but I just assumed, I don't know why, that the regen was limited to HP's. Should trolls regen mana fast too? I don't think so. Regardless, should half-trolls?

You can throw this in with the how to make V harder thread.

[ekolis]

Heh, yeah, I too assumed trolls only regenned HP quicker, not mana... guess I never bothered playing a troll mage! :P

Maybe gnomes should regen mana faster, seeing as they're such cunning little bastards...

[Derakon]

All regen affects both HP and SP. And yeah, splitting that into physical and mental regen has been suggested from time to time; it'd be worth bringing up again.