[Announce] FrogComposband 7.1.chocolate released
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So, odd question.
What are some good class/race/whatnot combinations?
I mean... Say you just want to win or feel powerful? What do you play as? Or just want to learn the game? Goof around?
Or say you wanted to show off something FCPB has that other variants doesn't? What then?
Is there a general, not "walkthrough" but general guideline to what dungeons you need to go and when? Or what dungeons you shouldn't enter without certain resists / HP totals / etc?Comment
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Everybody has their own preferences; but if you just want to be really strong, I'd point first of all to Human Warlock which is the combo ster used in his record speedrun. (ster picked Hound pact to be extra-strong, but any warlock is strong.) Also human weaponsmith, human weaponmaster (most specialities are very strong, a few less so like Shields), human rune-knight, human alchemist, human gray-mage. The rather vanilla-seeming pick of human may be a bit surprising, but human is a strong and versatile package with fast leveling-up. Demigods, Balrogs, Archons and Klackons are very strong races but don't level up as fast as human does.
If you just want to learn things I'd suggest Klackon (new players die so much to confusion that the innate rConf on Klackon is huge) with a melee-oriented class (strong in the early game so you stay alive longer); if you want to get a hang of the spell system at the same time, perhaps priest or paladin so you still also get decent melee, or ninja if it doesn't need to be a book-caster. But a pure melee-er, like Weaponsmith or even Warrior, is good if you don't want to learn everything at once
If you want something that's uniquely FrogComposband... a werewolf Yeqrezh disciple. Werewolves are strong, and fun, and different, and Yeqrezh disciples can end up being almost anything. Chaotic personality, or Split if you're playing the dev version. I also really like Politician but other people seem to get headaches from it, so it may be more of an acquired taste
There are bits about when to enter dungeons in the help, but it's not really that complete and everyone has their own style, basically you can improvise as long as you know the basics (like "there's an ethereal dragon at the entrance of Crystal Castle who will kill you dead if you try going there early"). The general advice is that Reflection is good to have in Camelot, though you can certainly get by without if you're strong or just know what you're doing. Lonely Mountain is probably a saner place to level up in than the comparably-leveled Giant's Hall and Witch Wood - more favorable terrain, dragons that give good loot/XP, and a less nasty boss especially compared to Giant's Hall. My purely personal tendency in the endgame is to mostly hang out in Arena and R'lyeh, maybe Mine, and just visit the other DL40+ dungeons to kill the bosses. The bosses of Olympus, Pyramidal mound and Dark cave can be safely left alive if you want, the former two can't be summoned by the Serpent and Null from Dark Cave isn't a big issue. I personally often also let the Icky Queen liveThe Complainer worries about the lack of activity here these days.Comment
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Seems like if you get Eldritch Blast working for you, that's 95% of Warlock.Please like my indie game company on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/RatherFunGamesComment
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instead of playing a klackon to get rconf (beastman and bronze draconian also strong) it's technically possible to play composband and take advantage of the short confusion resistance that potions of clarity provide. Of course, nobody actually does this.Comment
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Everybody has their own preferences; but if you just want to be really strong, I'd point first of all to Human Warlock which is the combo ster used in his record speedrun. (ster picked Hound pact to be extra-strong, but any warlock is strong.) Also human weaponsmith, human weaponmaster (most specialities are very strong, a few less so like Shields), human rune-knight, human alchemist, human gray-mage. The rather vanilla-seeming pick of human may be a bit surprising, but human is a strong and versatile package with fast leveling-up. Demigods, Balrogs, Archons and Klackons are very strong races but don't level up as fast as human does.
If you just want to learn things I'd suggest Klackon (new players die so much to confusion that the innate rConf on Klackon is huge) with a melee-oriented class (strong in the early game so you stay alive longer); if you want to get a hang of the spell system at the same time, perhaps priest or paladin so you still also get decent melee, or ninja if it doesn't need to be a book-caster. But a pure melee-er, like Weaponsmith or even Warrior, is good if you don't want to learn everything at once
If you want something that's uniquely FrogComposband... a werewolf Yeqrezh disciple. Werewolves are strong, and fun, and different, and Yeqrezh disciples can end up being almost anything. Chaotic personality, or Split if you're playing the dev version. I also really like Politician but other people seem to get headaches from it, so it may be more of an acquired taste
There are bits about when to enter dungeons in the help, but it's not really that complete and everyone has their own style, basically you can improvise as long as you know the basics (like "there's an ethereal dragon at the entrance of Crystal Castle who will kill you dead if you try going there early"). The general advice is that Reflection is good to have in Camelot, though you can certainly get by without if you're strong or just know what you're doing. Lonely Mountain is probably a saner place to level up in than the comparably-leveled Giant's Hall and Witch Wood - more favorable terrain, dragons that give good loot/XP, and a less nasty boss especially compared to Giant's Hall. My purely personal tendency in the endgame is to mostly hang out in Arena and R'lyeh, maybe Mine, and just visit the other DL40+ dungeons to kill the bosses. The bosses of Olympus, Pyramidal mound and Dark cave can be safely left alive if you want, the former two can't be summoned by the Serpent and Null from Dark Cave isn't a big issue. I personally often also let the Icky Queen live
Do any of the personality types have unspoken benefits? Because some of them sound like they're only there to be a challenge, like "Unlucky."
I kinda wish FrogComposband had a spoilers wiki or somesuch.
I just checked the git for the upcoming licorice update's changes, split seems interesting but I'm not sure how it would be so powerful. I guess the partially suppressed personalities keep some of the benefits but none of the downsides?
Oh, I remember Jelly from PosR. That's the one with only like 6 or so equipment slots, but they're all omni slots, right? I've had good luck with them before.Comment
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Thanks for the suggestions. Warlock reminds me of the class from NWN(2?), which is probably intentional.
Do any of the personality types have unspoken benefits? Because some of them sound like they're only there to be a challenge, like "Unlucky."
I kinda wish FrogComposband had a spoilers wiki or somesuch.
I just checked the git for the upcoming licorice update's changes, split seems interesting but I'm not sure how it would be so powerful. I guess the partially suppressed personalities keep some of the benefits but none of the downsides?
What you say is true for Sexy, it's a good personality to have suppressed. But in general, suppressed personalities keep more of their downside than upside; it's just that Sexy's only real downside is the aggravation, which it loses when suppressed.
Unlucky's upsides are fairly obvious: +stats and a high life rating multiplier. It tends to be a tough personality but it's not pure challenge like Fragile and Lazy. (Lazy does give you access to the extremely powerful "lazy artifacts"... if you can kill the strongest uniques in the game without them.)The Complainer worries about the lack of activity here these days.Comment
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Basically: Three *grand* artifacts dropped by late endgame monsters that (since nerfs) don't make up for the fact that it's the late endgame, and you already did the work.
This was the former variant maintainer's shit-show.Comment
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(Minor) Bugs, request and advice
Trying a Sorcerer for ever since Poscheng and now in Frog. Here are some random notes for Chocolate version:
Minor Bugs:
- Several dragon armors (up to now: pseudo, law, chaos) have only A: Breathe in their description (instead of, say, A: Breathe Chaos), both in the in-game description and html dump.
- In the spell cast stats, different fire and frost bolt spells are conflated, e.g. fire bolt from Nature Mastery and Sign of Chaos are counted as being the same spell for casting numbers even though they have different damage dice and mana costs.
Question:
- Warding True in the Book of Unicorn is illegible for sorcerers. Is there a particular rationale for it?
Requests:
- an inscription like !sdkv does not work, one has to use !s!k!d!v. Not a big deal, and do not know how hard it is to implement, but it would be a small QoL improvement.
- in keymap .prf files one can "import" other files. Would be nice if the same could be had for pick preference mogaminator files.
- also, keymap files can be "filtered" and are loaded automatically by class, race, etc. but as far as I am aware pick preference files are only automatically loaded by character name, not by class or race.
- Lights like Armageddon Stone say that Armageddon magic is "greatly enhanced" (or something to that effect), but its effect is not seen in the spell descriptions, so there is no way to gauge its effectiveness, besides trial and error, I guess. Could the spell descriptions take into account the effect of such stones so one can at least make some sort of guesstimate whether it is worth having more powerful spells or not?
Whether or not it is the case with Frog in general and with stones in particular, this "challenge through obscurity" stuff drives me nuts, but I admit this is a personal pet peeve.
RfA:
- The latest Sorcerer got to level 37 which is pretty good for my counts. Was a Demigod of Hermes parentage. For first power chose evasion, but what would you advise for the second power choice at level 40? If I had gotten there, I would go for One with Magic, because dispel or antimagic seem pretty nasty (even though I plan to make frequent use of the polymorph self spells). Arcane Mastery is only 3% and does not seem to me to be worth it; Fell Sorcery makes a sorcerer more powerful but even more squishier and what I think a Sorcerer needs is survivability; Infernal Deal seems to imply that, to have a noticeable effect, one has to be surrounded by enemies which seems a pretty bad idea; Unyielding is +50 hps at level 50, which is what, 10-15% more? Does not seem enough of an hp buffer to justify.Last edited by grodrigues; December 7, 2019, 19:49. Reason: a question and a second request; two more requests; fix a typoComment
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False. They come from Hengband. You mean Chris, the last but one maintainer no doubt. He removed the lazy artifacts from his version. They were re-added for frogcomposband.Comment
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in keymap .prf files one can "import" other files. Would be nice if the same could be had for pick preference mogaminator files.
- conversely, pick preference files can be "filtered" and are loaded automatically by class, race, etc. but as far as I am aware pick preference files are only automatically loaded by name, not by class or race.
That is very reasonable, but I'm not sure how to best implement that. (I do know I should improve handling of situations where characters basically share the same name but have new numbers or Roman numerals appended to them; but even if I could do that, it would only partially solve the problem. I should also allow the Mogaminator to tell when no-selling is on, so it can use that information to help determine which items are junk. That would mitigate the problem on no-sellers, you wouldn't have to always tell it again that items you have no slots for are junk.)
Lights like Armageddon Stone say that Armageddon magic is "greatly enhanced" (or something to that effect), but its effect is not seen in the spell descriptions, so there is no way to gauge its effectiveness, besides trial and error, I guess. Could the spell descriptions take into account the effect of such stones so one can at least make some sort of guesstimate whether it is worth having more powerful spells or not?
RfA:
- The latest Sorcerer got to level 37 which is pretty good for my counts. Was a Demigod of Hermes parentage. For first power chose evasion, but what would you advise for the second power choice at level 40? If I had gotten there, I would go for One with Magic, because dispel or antimagic seem pretty nasty (even though I plan to make frequent use of the polymorph self spells). Arcane Mastery is only 3% and does not seem to me to be worth it; Fell Sorcery makes a sorcerer more powerful but even more squishier and what I think a Sorcerer needs is survivability; Infernal Deal seems to imply that, to have a noticeable effect, one has to be surrounded by enemies which seems a pretty bad idea; Unyielding is +50 hps at level 50, which is what, 10-15% more? Does not seem enough of an hp buffer to justify.
I'm sneakily curious, though, about how Cult of Personality would play out on a sorcerer. It's admittedly fiddly (always have to figure out if new summons are hostile or friendly or pets) and sorcerers can't really handle very many pets (so you'd have to dismiss stuff regularly which makes it even more fiddly); but sorcerers almost always have high CHR, which ties well into that mut, and a big summon not being hostile sounds like it would be even nicer than normally when your @ is so squishy.The Complainer worries about the lack of activity here these days.Comment
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Trying a Sorcerer for ever since Poscheng and now in Frog. Here are some random notes for Chocolate version:
Minor Bugs:
- Several dragon armors (up to now: pseudo, law, chaos) have only A: Breathe in their description (instead of, say, A: Breathe Chaos), both in the in-game description and html dump.
- In the spell cast stats, different fire and frost bolt spells are conflated, e.g. fire bolt from Nature Mastery and Sign of Chaos are counted as being the same spell for casting numbers even though they have different damage dice and mana costs.
The second one's a real bug but probably an eternity bug, stats are counted by spell name which doesn't work in this case but is really convenient otherwise because it avoids the need to give each spell a distinct spell ID that would require lots of work and constant maintenance and is otherwise unnecessary. For the book spells alone that would be a workable system, but when you add all the class and race and monster-race and mutation stuff...
Question:
- Warding True in the Book of Unicorn is illegible for sorcerers. Is there a particular rationale for it?The Complainer worries about the lack of activity here these days.Comment
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