Time for Basic Strategy Q's?

[petvan]

Been enjoying some recent threads and was hoping to ask a few q's here as I continue my quest to actually figuring this game out - played the same way for years off and on and have a perfect losing record ;-)

Are staves / wands of confuse, hold, sleep etc monsters useful and do you carry them? I tend to fully ignore as most of what they work on are easy kills, and high level monsters seem to ignore fully? Maybe I'm missing something?

How do you tell the relative power of bows? Inspect on weapons gives you a damage number (I assume an aggregate of blows + dmg per round etc). Bows I can see a +dmg number, but is there a way to tell your effective damage per round?

On character creation, I notice some people seem to roll a lot. I just generally take the first setup and go assuming all equals out in stat gain anyway? Am I giving up an edge here?

Thanks for any insights.

P

[Philip]

Status effects are supposedly useful in the new version. I haven't played enough of it to know, but what you describe is sort of how it worked past dlvl 15 before, but hopefully it doesn't now. Give it a shot I guess.

On bows you find out average by inspecting ammo the same way you would inspect weapons.

I recommend using point buy for stats. It makes the early game significantly easier, and gets you to important breakpoints (0% fail and such) faster.

[Monkey Face]

Point buy on stats is definitely the way to go. That way you can put everything towards STR and your next most important stat (INT for mage, WIS, for priest, DEX for everything else) so as to maximize your initial mana or blows per round.

[Derakon]

Agreed on point buy. Everyone has at least one stat that they really don't care about (WIS for INT-based casters and vice versa) and warriors have two. And the main value of CON early on is just that it reduces the amount of CON potions you have to find before you start getting useful HP bonuses; in the early game its effects are insignificant. So you definitely want to prioritize STR/DEX/casting stat, as the stats that have the greatest impact on your character's power early on.

[flechette]

- of stunning are very useful now, even down past Clvl30. You can stun/slow/sleep/hold a lot more uniques than we used to be able to, which gives a lot more options for combat/escape.

[Gwarl]

Status effects are supposedly useful in the new version.

I still disagree with the change in strong terms. They were more useful than before, with the exception fo stun which has other problems I've gotten into before.

[Estie]

I still disagree with the change in strong terms. They were more useful than before, with the exception fo stun which has other problems I've gotten into before.

I dont understand what youre saying - do you think they are too good now or is it worse than before ?

[NimrodPE]

Concerning Wands/Staves/Rods of "input_negative_effect_here" I never used them in 3.5.1 since they didn't do much imho.

Now, in 4.1.0, I've found out that those items got a lot better but beware: Right now, I never went past DL 43 and I still die around DL 38 around CL 32-35 ;D

But at least to this depth in 4.1.0 those items are good against uniques and strong monsters imho.