rangers and ammunition

[Timo Pietilä]

My current ranger ended up wearing a ring of escaping: http://angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=17321

I just drank a !brawn, but before that the lance was too heavy for melee anyway. So basically I gain 4 stealth and get positive speed at the cost of losing a ~40 damage melee attack.

At one point I used to use rings of escaping with ranger just to get that speed-advantage, but it does require that you are already pretty good with the bow. Rings of escaping do seem to hurt your accuracy quite a lot (if you use one you can as well use two, additional ring doesn't seem to increase that penalty).

Mage and rings of escaping, if you can handle the drop in failure rate, is a quite good combo too. Those rings are not completely useless.

[Bogatyr]

Mage and rings of escaping, if you can handle the drop in failure rate, is a quite good combo too. Those rings are not completely useless.

I made a pleasant discovery on my current gnome mage: I was at the point where I was still using magic missile on everything, and I was at just the right clev with the right INT so that the Ring of Escaping didn't affect the first two spellbook's failure rate! So I wore two for a while and made pincushions of those orc packs, early uniques, etc. So quite useful for a while.

[Tibarius]

re: magic missile

Just curious - what CL were you? Once i hit CL 7 i stop using MM because frost bolt has the higher average damage, even if it also has the higher failure rate.

[quarague]

Magic Missile has the best damage per mana point for a long time. Casting three MMs will do more damage than one frost bolt. If you have the same speed as the monster that might not help much because it takes three times as long, but if you wear two rings of escaping and are much faster the time difference is not relevant anymore because you don't let the monsters hit you.

[Bogatyr]

Magic Missile has the best damage per mana point for a long time. Casting three MMs will do more damage than one frost bolt. If you have the same speed as the monster that might not help much because it takes three times as long, but if you wear two rings of escaping and are much faster the time difference is not relevant anymore because you don't let the monsters hit you.

Yes, this. In fact, doesn't MM always have best damage per mana point, always? That's the beauty of wearing two rings of escaping: the monsters are all in slow motion and the MMs just tear them to shreds, with plenty of mana left to spare.

[Timo Pietilä]

Yes, this. In fact, doesn't MM always have best damage per mana point, always?

With regen it does. Infinite MM, you don't run out of mana ever.

[Tibarius]

re: MM

While this is all true from the mana perspective i guess it also goes for the Award of the most masochistic way to Play the game.

[Jungle_Boy]

While this is all true from the mana perspective i guess it also goes for the Award of the most masochistic way to Play the game.

Have you seen some of the threads on here? This is not even close to the most masochistic way to play the game. I think that would go to no weapons or winning with a shovel, or not killing anyone.

[Tibarius]

re: Jungle Boy

*laugh* You are right ...

[Bogatyr]

There's nothing odd about this really, at the late beginning game, it's really the way to go: most damage per mana and most normal speed monsters don't stand a chance given sufficient space at the start of the fight. It makes great sense.

BTW I've tried that endgame MM with regen thing and it never worked out, mana kept going down more than going up. It did make it last much much longer, though. I have a clev 37 gnome mage on dlev 98 now with a defender weapon (regen), I'll try it out against something that doesn't have a distance attack and see how it goes .

edit: I stand corrected, with regen and firing MM in quick succession the mana only goes down by 2 or 3 before climbing back up to max, fun!

[werepacman]

According to d&d rules shooting and custing from short distance provokes additional melee attack.
But you can cast and shoot from any distance.