Tips for Song of Mastery builds?

[protopulse]

Planning on running a song of mastery build character sometime. Anyone that ran one before have advice?

I'm mostly having trouble seeing how it works.

It takes a long time to get mastery up unless you're smithing a crown of mastery. But even with mastery, you'd have to beat the opponent's will by a ton for them to never get a turn in. Meaning you'd still want some evasion investment? And even if you have enough song to permanently paralyze them, what do you do when you are low on voice and the monster is still alive? !Voice are not that common. Neither are !miruvor early on if you're planning to use that as a !voice substitute. Yet you want to be singing it almost constantly since you probably have low evasion investment and will die in battle instantly without it.

I am thinking song of elbereth/vanish combo coupled with an amulet of regeneration and sprinting could somewhat solve this issue. Are there more graceful ways?

[protopulse]

Actually, am I thinking about this wrong?

When someone uses song of mastery, is it merely to supplement core stats? i.e. you never go all out on song and skip evasion but instead have a modest song score and sing mastery so that sometimes the enemies skip their turn?

It's much cheaper to get 20 melee, 10 song and 10 evasion, than to get 20 melee and 20 evasion after all.

0 to 10 of any stat is 5500 XP. 11 to 20 is a whopping 15500 XP.

With that 15.5k experience, you could divide it and get 15 evasion and 15 song...10 to 15 of any stat is 6500 XP. You'd still have 2550 XP to spare afterwards.

For reference, great cold drakes have 17 will. Assuming you have 2 grace and 16 song investment. That's 18 song.

Song is checked against difficulty = enemy Will skill + 5 +1 per square of distance along the shortest sound path +5 per closed door along the shortest sound path. Basically 22. You roll a d10 on both...the dragon would be frozen 15% of the time by song of mastery, if my math is correct. The rest of the time you better hope your 15 evasion is enough for him to miss. Against other enemies, it'll be more effective since dragons are high-willed creatures. I'm still not convinced this is better than simply pumping evasion.

What if you smithed...

Amulet of grace +2, robe of grace +2, faenorian lamp of grace +1, and crown of grace +1. 3 base grace. 9 grace. 20 song investment. 3 bonus from potion. Suddenly it seems much more viable. The additional grace will give you more voice to use so you won't run out as often. So you have to smith to make it work well? But you have to also factor in the steep smithing requirement...

Idk, right now song of mastery seems like an extremely interesting playstyle but also hard to make work.

[DavidMedley]

Sorry if these are obvious suggestions, but since no one else is chiming in...

The 50k birth option in Sil-Q is a really nice way to test builds. You don't have to spend all 50k at once. You can set milestones that you'll try to follow in the regular game.

The ladder is very helpful. The dumps list when each Ability gets taken, not just the final state.

[wobbly]

I've never played a mastery build, but if you search the ladder for the latest clouded dumps you should find some

[protopulse]

Okay, thanks for the replies. I realized there were probably dumps in the ladder using mastery but didn't want to click through every one to see if they were mastery builds. Wish there was a way to search dumps by skills taken or something. I'll go find clouded's dumps. Didn't realize he played with song of mastery.

Also, while you can find out what skills are taken at what depth, you have no idea how that person actually played, especially because you don't know what stats he put his experience into. e.g. if he got both finesse and disguise, you know he put minimal investment into both melee and stealth, but how did he use those? Where else was his experience going into?

I found this dump file by Nivim from 1.2.1-mpa.

http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=15719

I don't know what differences are between mpa and 1.2.1 instead of vanilla 1.3.0, but it seems next to impossible to emulate his experience, at least in 1.3.0. He had 4 points in evasion in a dwarf that started with 1 dexterity and 1 strength. One strength! I mean it makes sense to tank other stats for grace since mastery relies on grace, but he had no access to song of mastery until turn 10,914 on 550 ft where he made The Crown of the Overlord (+1) <+2> 2.5 lb. Without being able to watch the replay of the game, even though he comments about how he dealt with the low evasion, it's still hard to imagine how he managed to survive until 550 feet. He had 0 stealth investment. Even with slaying weapons and extra light for trolls, what about the things you can't slay? How did he handle huge packs of easterling warriors?

How does he obtain [+6, 7-13]? Armor that heavy would tank his evasion, not raise it from the 5 he would have if he was naked. For 7 on the low protection end, he would have to had something like helmet is [-1,1d3], mail corslet is (-1)[-3,2d4], boots is [0,1d1], gauntlets is (-1)[0,1d1], shield is [0,1d3], and cloak is [1,1d1]. The mail corslet is usually -3 evasion and the helmet is usually -1 evasion. To have +1 net evasion, he must have had evasion somewhere from his equipment? 4 extra evasion...I know he had a +2 evasion ring, so then mail corslet is (-1)[-2,2d4], and helmet is [0,1d3]? But is [+6,7-13] really enough when you only have 1 dex and 1 str?

People have pulled some insane feats in Sil, but with only the dump file, it's just hard to see how they accomplished it.

Anyways, that aside, maybe after perusing through clouded's dumps it'd make song of mastery builds make more sense.

Haven't found clouded's mastery playthrough but did find Scatha's...so far it does seem you have to couple it with smithing builds. http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=14647 Scatha's file makes a lot more sense to me. I think I can give it a shot.

Here's another from Psi. http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=13491

Nevermind, found clouded's. It wasn't a win so it took me a while to find it. http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=19484

So it does seem like you have low evasion investment to begin with, then use mastery and smithing to supplement it.

What are the main differences between 1.0 versus 1.1 versus 1.2 versus 1.3 versus mpa versions of those? Is there somewhere that lists them? Just noticed clouded mostly played on the earlier versions.
Oh, here's some of them. http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/...il/changes.txt