Comp 226

[debo]

It's nice to see us having such a spirited debate.

[Gwarl]

Congrats to wobbly for an impressive win.

I accidentally gave this competition a full month rather than the two week sprints we've done for the other classes, which was just as well. I think we can surmise that necromancers in this version are not-OP.

[wobbly]

So it sounds like a fair few people had trouble with necromancer, so maybe I should ramble a bit? I mean part of the reason is because they are actually hard, but they do have some good stuff, & eventually they get powerful.

The Start
I bought a wand of magic missile. A bit of a cop out really, but hey, effective. So I have my wand of Minor Massacring & now I can pick of small kobolds with impunity, but perhaps I don't really want to do that? Its limited charges & you just spent all your gold on it... So I used the crazy technique of walking the other direction every time I spotted a kobold or similar evil(nether resistant) enemy. And this was my answer to most of their problems really, if its hard to kill things, then don't. Simple. Now of course you do want to kill some stuff to level up, but it's not hard to nether bolt some beetles to death & the cats/vortex/etc. get in your face & almost demand to be killed... you end up levelling anyway.

Light & Spell Penalties
Didn't end up with many problems here. It seems the solution is one of those obvious solutions that's only obvious once you realize it. Then you go, oh yeah, obvious. I just cast from the corridor. Quite often you can target stuff in a lit room from outside, but if you can't the AI will usually be happy to oblige you. Just draw it out into the corridor first.

Book 1 "Book of the bat"
Bat-form is amazing. Like someone rolled a mouse ring into a ring of escaping & added an amulet of infravision to it amazing. Keymap it. Spam it. If you are exploring you want to be in bat form all the time. Enter level, map, detect, bat-form. Reach 8 SPs (4 for read minds+4 for batform), change back, detect, map, bat-form. In the early game this was all my SPs. I didn't care. If you can't kill things, then don't right? loot, loot, loot.

Book 2 "Town book Core"
Tap - obvious. Just lead with disenchant for casty undead. Loop it. Phase away from melee. Loopy loop loop.
Fumes - Good. Don't underestimate just because its annoying. It's decent damage. It's cheapish. You don't have much else for crowd control. I collected a stack of rods of curing. Getting rpoison is a relief here.
Disenchant - Obviously good. Expensive. You get a power spike here when your int goes over the critical point & you can start spamming this. Always lead with this against summoners. Poor Gothmog, I had wand of stunning on top, he just really struggled to get a summon out.
Stone to Mud - Wait that's not in there. Ever notice how much damage rock remover actually does? I hadn't, but at the stage Xorns started showing up I didn't have SPs to kill them, but I did have wand of stone to mud.

Book 3 "Insert Witty Name"
Frighten - Surprisingly, I used this. Hydras aren't nether bolt resistant, but they do move fast. they run away fast too. You can see them with infravision. I haven't mentioned infravision yet, you want a bunch of it if you can.
Vampire Strike - I watched someone, Squeak maybe, spam this like a cheap base attack spell. Clever & seemed to work out ok.
Dark Spear - Not much resists. Wraiths don't resist. weird.
Warg Form - Brutal. Didn't use a lot. Mage hps, if you can safely Warg Form you probably don't need it. I seem to remember Bron saying something similar.

Book 4 "Book of Goodies"
Goodies. Another power spike. They seem to have a spiky progression in general. I think these are mostly self explanatory. Except for Unleash Chaos which fires a chaos bolt, aggravates things & causes butterflies to stream from your nostrils while every monster dances the hokey-pokey. Do I ever really want to cast this spell? Perhaps. Who knows really.

Book 5 "Book of Confusion"
So ok Power Sacrifice & Vampire-form make sense & I used the vampire a fair bit. Always a sucker for vampiric damage. The rest.... ah... interesting?
Crush - Ok I know what to do with this. Ignore it & dark-storm everything just so I don't have to guess how many hps they have left.
Curse - Damages player & monster by an amount dependent on the lunar phase. I used this a bit & I'm still not sure if it was less or more then annihilation, but annihilation didn't cost me any hps.
Command - Needs work

So yeah book 5 spells could be mostly trash. Could be totally OP. I have zilch idea.

Not sure if that was all I had to say, I've lost my thread. I'll post again if I think of stuff.

[DavidMedley]

This mini-guide makes me want to run another necro!

I agree with everything you said, but will share my perspective anyway.

Light: I almost never used Create Darkness. I just stayed or went to where it was dark and my enemies were still visible. Used rods of light a lot since they don't brighten your own square. Also, the number of spells that are harder to cast in the light diminishes greatly as you level up. Supposedly new code lets necros dim equipment light 1 point as well.

Bat: Perhaps I don't have the discipline you have. If I was in bat form and saw non-evil target... necros gonna necro, right? (But I agree - amazing and should be used whenever you don't see a fight coming.)

Disenchant: I was shocked to learn that Disenchant and Stun could stack to reduce casting chance. After digging through code... I don't think Stun reduces casting chance at all! Stun seems to reduce accuracy and damage by 25% but not casting. See monster_spell_failrate in mon-attack.c. I guess this is my one point of disagreement with the post, then.

Curse: For comparison, at CL48+ this does 5d100 (average 252.5) to a monster 50% dead. Annihilate does 192 at CL48 and 200 at CL50. Curse costs 2.5x more MP and 100 HPs. A monster 75% dead would take 5d125 (average 315). Morgoth at 98% dead has 400 HP left and would take 5d148 damage (a 39% chance to kill him). The situations where Curse is better than Annihilate are scant at best, probably non-existent. Also, it rolls 1 less die prior to CL48.

Thanks again for the tips!

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Thanks, wobbly, for the great guide. Wish I'd had that during the comp!

As for Warg form, I actually did use it a bunch once @ had a lot of hps and was going to engage in melee. I found the damage boost fantastic.

[wobbly]

Disenchant: I was shocked to learn that Disenchant and Stun could stack to reduce casting chance. After digging through code... I don't think Stun reduces casting chance at all! Stun seems to reduce accuracy and damage by 25% but not casting. See monster_spell_failrate in mon-attack.c. I guess this is my one point of disagreement with the post, then.

Got round to double checking this. There's a chance the monster misses it's turn while stunned in mon-move.c

[DavidMedley]

Good to know.