Judicious use of stat-swap potions

[Ingwe Ingweron]

I've started to question my habit of immediately quaffing down !Brawn or !Nimbleness (and !Intellect if @ is a mage or !Contemplation if @ is a priest). I noticed in Fizzix's "Let's Play Angband" videos that he tends to store stat-swap potions in @ home until @ stats reach a certain point, but it's not clear to me when that threshold point is reached. Any advice?

[MattB]

I've started to question my habit of immediately quaffing down !Brawn or !Nimbleness (and !Intellect if @ is a mage or !Contemplation if @ is a priest). I noticed in Fizzix's "Let's Play Angband" videos that he tends to store stat-swap potions in @ home until @ stats reach a certain point, but it's not clear to me when that threshold point is reached. Any advice?

Once you get over 18 on a stat, the gains outweigh the losses on average. I think.

[quarague]

18 points in a stat is a natural threshhold. Not only is the effect of one more point in the stat much bigger afterwards than before, you can also gain more than one point from a single potion. The exact stat gain is somewhat random, but I believe the average is higher than 1? One advantage of collecting multiple potions at home is that it drastically reduces the chance that one of the stats you want is lower than you started out with.
Personally I never use any of the stat swap potions and wait for the stat potions that give you a pure gain with no side effects, has worked fine for me.

[Zikke]

I only use these "lesser" stat gain potions for my class' primary stat. They can really help out until the normal stat potions are common. Never regretted that approach; sometimes a STR or CON gets reduced, but it evens out over time.

[Derakon]

In the early game, when these potions are available, everyone has pretty clear priorities:

* Mages and priests want their primary casting stat
* Everyone wants STR
* Melee characters want DEX

That means there are at bare minimum two "dump stats" available (non-casting stat and CON); you have a 40% chance of gaining a stat point in something important without losing a stat point in something else important, which isn't bad! You can always save up until you have potions for the more important stats available, so that if you get an unlucky roll, you can counteract it. But I generally just chug the "important" potions on-sight.

Of course, CON isn't truly a dump stat, but its effects scale with character level (i.e. are small in the early game) and are pretty marginal until you get it up above 18/100, so reducing it early on doesn't cost you a whole lot. And Angband really is in many ways about optimizing for right now, to ensure that you survive a little longer to worry about the future.

[Estie]

Con is a dump stat for a couple of reasons:

1. It´s bonus isn't linear, but increases towards the cap, making early con points less valuable than late ones. Eventually @ needs to max it but immediate benefit of con increase is low. Furthermore, the cap cant be reached without additional +con items which will be found late.

2. The most important aspect of hit points is to get over the 1-hit bar which is at about 650. Getting there is worth a lot, increasing hps below that bar not so much. With monsters that can deal this kind of damage in one round appearing fairly early (ood drolem), @ will be 1-hit fodder for a long time to come, so lowering hps even further isn't that big of a deal.

3. If lowering your hp results in more dpr, you can kill things faster and gain levels, thereby increasing hps. The maxhp/time graph of @ who lowers con to increase damage might have a higher maxhp average than the graph of the @ who doesn't.

The only +/- potion that would make sense to store in the home for later would be the con one, with the idea to drink them once the main stats are at max and there are spare mainstat-potions available to counter any drain.
I never bother to do that though, instead enjoying the benefits of no selling fully by avoiding town trips if possible. Potion of toughness gets squelched as found.

[bron]

not clear to me when that threshold point is reached

When you gain a stat point starting from 18, the boost you recieve is a random number between 14 and 39 (the boost is less for higher starting values). This means you get a net gain in overall stats. I generally try to save up the potions until I have enough to get over that 18 threshold, then quaff the whole batch of them at once. If you don't have storage space, you could certainly just go ahead and quaff potions for your important stat(s). Since there are some stats a character doesn't really care about (e,g, WIsdom for a Warrior), on average you come out ahead. I prefer to store them if I can since otherwise they might get wasted, e.g. +1 Dex and -1 Str, and then later +1 Str and -1 Dex.