ID: the game (tips and tricks)

[taptap]

I am not particularly good at it, but what I do. (I play pacifists recently so don't mind losing a few consumables and the ID game keeps me busy.)

1) Remember (notes) where you found which item first. Early herbs are usually sustenance, terror and rage, early potions slowness, poison, slow poison, quickness or so.
2) Test early herbs when hungry. Helps to ID sustenance.
3) Test other things with slightly reduced hp and voice and if drained before restoring it. Helps ID healing herbs/potions, restoration herbs and voice potions. Otherwise you easily miss the precious restoration herbs (and voice potions).
4) Collect unidentifed rings / amulets and wear while testing herbs/potions. Potential ID for clarity, true sight, sustains, free action.
5) When hungry, eat and wield one potential hunger / sustenance item and keep track of the turns.
6) Don't wear unidentified amulets any longer.
7) Try this amulet again when a Sulrauko is in the room.
8) Unidentified special helms -> if clarity, easy identification with orcish liquor, if true sight, easy identification by sulrauko.
9) Weapons with double damage improvement -> fury or house of hador.
10) Use understanding staffs on staffs, consumables and staffs of self knowledge on items.

[Patashu]

Here's my cheat sheet:

• Murky brown potion is orcish liquour.
• Clear white potion is miruvor.
• If a herb did not auto-ID it could be sustenance, emptiness, restoration or healing.
• If a potion did not auto-ID it could be slow poison, clarity, voice or healing (slow poison is the earliest/most frequent of these).
• Always rule out/try to ID healing, be on less than max HP when IDing herbs and potions.
• Every other potion/herb auto-IDs even if it did nothing.
• If you wear something in the early game and it's cursed, try to find green worm masses, dump everything except the cursed item in a safe space and wait for the green worm masses to burn it until it breaks.

[debo]

Here's my cheat sheet:

- get 7 points of perception
- buy lore-keeper and lore-master

[Raajaton]

I haven't yet dedicated the amount of time to beating Sil that I really need to, but I do make a habit of reading Sil posts to get myself mentally prepared for it.

From reading debo's posts I've noticed a central theme:

Step 1: Get Loremaster
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit

[half]

Good list. Here are a couple of additions.

Quantity of potions:

The most common potions are slow poison -- you can normally tell by quantity alone. Also, there is relatively little value in testing singleton potions (those you only have one of). If they are good and you drink them, you get little value. At least if they were unidentified and still in your pack, you might be able to drink them in a hopeless situation and escape. I usually only drink singleton potions when I'm running out of space in my backpack. At that point I am testing quite a few potions so it makes sense to put myself into a state where they will show their effects (i.e. poisoned, not at full health, not at full voice, stunned/confused), also wearing unidentified rings and amulets. If I can't do these myself (or with nearby monsters), often one of the early singleton potions will give me one of those effects...

Staffs:

Ideally have as many as possible of:
- a (weak) monster in the room
- a closed door
- an open door
- a cursed item being worn

To identify summoning you might want a staircase (though this is more risky) and to identify entrapment you can use all the charges, then see if there was a huge number of them (entrapment and summoning have the most charges), or if you now keep stumbling over traps. I'm not sure it is worth trying to identify these though...

5) When hungry, eat and wield one potential hunger / sustenance item and keep track of the turns.

Even better than eating is drinking. It should give you exactly 100 turns of sustenance.

[taptap]

I somewhat count on most common early potion being slow poison as well, but quaffing a poison or slowness potion next to a distended spider by mistake can be dangerous. I rather get myself poisoned by a worm to test it before it is needed.

Entrapment and summoning could potentially be identified just by taking channeling and looking for number of charges, but I doubt that determining the number of charges of a staff by using them all up is really helpful - not if harmful and not if beneficial. Btw. channeling when it gives you the count of charges remaining should auto-remove {empty} notes on staffs just as lore-master does. I never took channeling before, but with my Nahil singer I found it quite useful (less turns wasted, knowing how many sanctity/understanding charges I have left and helping in emergencies - I had a trumpet of terror for a long time but never had to use it).

P.S. I noticed some other oddities with the ID game. Lanterns of Brightness autoID, but feanorian lamps of brightness do not. Most "of Stealth" items autoID, but a shadow cloak of stealth I found with Nahil did not - I thought it might be Luthien when I already had Song of Lorien but no it was a simple shadow cloak of stealth (with +5 stealth bonus!). I believe all items that are completely revealed (skill modifiers and additional abilities) by a look at the player screen should autoID.

[taptap]

My two last winners went without lore-master. The last one turned out to be a smith and didn't even make the common lore-master item. While the potential for stat drains can be serious, I found the additional experience really strengthens me midgame - and this is where I used to die a lot. Even if it comes at the price of a little less experience over the whole game. Instead of rushing to lore-master my archers now can have concentration quite early. Especially for pacifists (who need listen and probably want the grace point as well) the midgame experience hit from lore-master is huge. Remember all the melee builds that saved and saved experience urgently needed elsewhere for lore-master? Wondered about invisible sulraukar - well, without lore-master you could have taken keen senses ... I singled out lore-master as the source for my midgame difficulties. No more lore-master for me.

[wobbly]

Just had a potion of slowness fail. What's that - free action? or something else

Edit: yep was, so that's probably the easiest for id-ing free action.

You can almost tell helms of clarity just from the fact that defiance & brillance auto-id & anything else is much rarer.

[taptap]

Staffs roll against different difficulties as far as I know, but I am not sure of the numbers. So with sufficiently low will you could guess unidentified staffs by the amount of attempts you needed to use them.

[wobbly]

Are there any boots other then free action, speed & treacherous paths that don't auto-id? e.g. if you can't sprint & your slowed by caltrops/slow potions it's treacherous paths?

[Zireael]

Here's my cheat sheet:

- get 7 points of perception
- buy lore-keeper and lore-master

That's my preferred route, too.

[Infinitum]

Loremaster is where it's at. I'm just not committed enough to keep track of what different consumables remain at large and construct the elaborate setups required to minimize the risk that I fail to identify one.

When looking at other games, Brogue handles the ID game better than any other roguelike I've encountered (with the possible exception of ToME 4, which just omits it altogether) - basically all consumables are automatically ID'd when used in an appropriate fashion (quaffing potions, aiming staves and wands at monsters etc). The only exception that comes to mind is Staff of Digging aimed at a monster, and those recharge charges anyway. There is even a super-handy cheat-sheet available from the menu which tells you which potions you have identified in any given game, and exactly what types remains to be identified.

Bottom line is that ID games in my experience tend to rapidly devolve into metgaming bs unless kept on a tight leash (admittedly so does roguelike combat systems, but tactical combat is so much more, well, fun in comparison). My preference would be, assuming simplifying the id game as above, to have Loremaster available without the prerequisite - basically it would over the course of a game save you one extra potion and/or charge of each type you encountered at the cost of a feat as well as always be wearing the most optimal equipment available to you, which seems about fair

Oh, and for actual tips and tricks inscribing items is your friend ({ button by default), as is keeping lists irl with what items are present ingame. For as long as you can be bothered, anyhow.

[fph]

My preference would be to have Loremaster available without the prerequisite - basically it would over the course of a game save you one extra potion and/or charge of each type you encountered at the cost of a feat as well as always be wearing the most optimal equipment available to you, which seems about fair.

There is another advantage to Loremaster: it gets you back lots of XP. If you don't have Loremaster, you'll get the same XP many turns or levels later, and there are always a few items that you see but fail to pick up or identify (for several reasons: monsters are around and you can't stop, inventory constraints, some flavors are hard to ID-by-use). It almost pays for its cost in XP at the end of the game.

[Infinitum]

Oh, assuming that Potions/Items are easier to use-identify as I aforementioned. Maybe I should've made that clearer. Xp gain might indeed be a concern here, one possible solution would maybe be to have xp for novel items decay much in the same way as monster Xp (albeit slower). This would still act as an incentive for players to Xp as many items as possible whilst lowering the reward side of risk/reward behaviours such as trying to use-id every weapon one finds etc. This might be too harsh on pacifists however.

[fph]

And, I forgot to add: Loremaster also makes you take less risks.

Suppose you see an unID'ed ring in a red dragon lair. Your first instinct is to take a risk and go get it. If you knew from the start that it's a RoCON-1, you wouldn't bother.

("Legolas, what do your Elven eyes see?" "Hmm, that dragon 100 metres away is wearing a RoCON-1 ring.")