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Positioning is hard, get very good at melee and you will be good at positioning.
There are two things you want with good positioning: you want to fight from a place that has a safe route to a safe staircase (for healing after the fight if nothing else; this is very important for using spells which make a lot of noise), and you want to be in LOS of as few enemies as possible.
One thing that a lot of players do that is usually wrong (but often harmlessly so) is approach melee enemies. 95% of the time or so it is a better idea to let the enemies come to you, since you are in a safer position to begin with. For speed 10 ranged enemies this is also true, though for things faster than you it is a competition between the distance to the enemy and the distance to the nearest corner (if the nearest corner is more than about twice as far away you possibly want to approach that centaur instead of making it come to you, for instance).
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How do you decide whether to wear armor as a caster (DEFE)? I have a +2 robe of magic resistance, and a +5 ringmail that gives +3 int (a randart). I can have 7 str with a ring, so ev isn't a problem. With the armor i have 17 ac 8 ev, with the robe 11 ac 14 ev.
Worshiping Vehumet so spell failure really isn't an issue in the armor ( i have zero armor training, and really not a lot of EV either).
When is it worth it to take the armor?
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The higher the EV penalty of the armor, the more it hinders your spellcasting success. Generally as a DEFE you want to stick with robes (MR is very nice too to protect from Banishment etc). If you need more physical protection, try making a mottled dragon armor. It's the highest AC you can get with no EV penalty I believe. Str doesn't affect EV. Ringmail is pretty shitty... you can get 2 more AC, more GDR and poison resistance with swamp dragon armor with the same EV penalty.
TLDR stick with the robes and don't bother training armor skill unless you're a fighter using high AC armor.
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United States10328 Posts
My last run ended to Mennas (can't even read ?tele... though I apparently had an unidentified /tele, go figure.). Trying to run _around_ him (through a vault room) instead of away turned out to be a grave miscalculation 
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On July 28 2012 02:55 Mothra wrote:
The higher the EV penalty of the armor, the more it hinders your spellcasting success. Generally as a DEFE you want to stick with robes (MR is very nice too to protect from Banishment etc). If you need more physical protection, try making a mottled dragon armor. It's the highest AC you can get with no EV penalty I believe. Str doesn't affect EV. Ringmail is pretty shitty... you can get 2 more AC, more GDR and poison resistance with swamp dragon armor with the same EV penalty.
TLDR stick with the robes and don't bother training armor skill unless you're a fighter using high AC armor.
Mottled is -1. Steam Dragon Armor is the best with no EV penalty at all, though mottled/swamp are usually acceptable.
I don't think I would ever wear anything besides robes or low-pen dragon armor as a caster. Maybe if you found some godly randart scale mail, but even then...the main thing that matters is +res, not armor value, so your best non-artifact bet is something like highly enchanted Robe of Resistance/Archmagi or Steam Dragon Armor.
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The first 0.8 points of EVP are completely free with respect to spellcasting penalties, so -1 EV is very nearly the same as 0 EV assuming you do not also have a shield penalty. -2 is then between six and infinity times as much penalty as -1.
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Here's something i don't really want to test with my lvl 15 DeFE: can i orb-of-destruction things right beside me? I know it does reduced damage... but it's not going to destroy me, is it? ( I don't think it should it's not AoE, but you never know...)
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Unless something has been changed you can't hurt yourself with OoD outside of rare boomerangs or haste/blinking mishaps.
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The only way your own iood will hurt you is if you collide two of them (this is very easy to do by casting the spell on consecutive turns while hasted), or if you manage to hit yourself with one directly (usually by either blinking into its path, or missing and having it circle around).
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On August 02 2012 11:51 crate wrote:
The only way your own iood will hurt you is if you collide two of them (this is very easy to do by casting the spell on consecutive turns while hasted), or if you manage to hit yourself with one directly (usually by either blinking into its path, or missing and having it circle around).
Ok, makes sense. next question: how the hell do i Kill mara. This seems dangerous, since he's spawning clones etc...
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With most characters I would simply not kill Mara. He is usually reasonably easy to escape from since he spends turns doing things like blinking away and cloning you and cloning himself instead of attacking, and at that point in the game you should have some escape consumables. And like you mention, killing him is kind of risky with many characters.
If you must do so then just be prepared to try multiple times. There's no real secret other than to escape early if things look like they might be going bad and then go back and try again and hope to get luckier. Obviously things like iood are bad against Mara (iood is kind of bad in general) and things like summons tend to be good.
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I almost always leave Mara for later. He's not hard to walk away from. If you really want to kill him now, clear the whole floor then wait somewhere else for his illusions to disappear, then lure him to an open area -> haste -> enter his los -> launch iood -> back off so he doesn't clone you -> go back in for another iood.
This requires a bit of luck and skill though so you may as well just leave him be.
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On August 02 2012 12:07 crate wrote:
With most characters I would simply not kill Mara. He is usually reasonably easy to escape from since he spends turns doing things like blinking away and cloning you and cloning himself instead of attacking, and at that point in the game you should have some escape consumables. And like you mention, killing him is kind of risky with many characters.
If you must do so then just be prepared to try multiple times. There's no real secret other than to escape early if things look like they might be going bad and then go back and try again and hope to get luckier. Obviously things like iood are bad against Mara (iood is kind of bad in general) and things like summons tend to be good.
Alright, yup. I did a whole lot of stair dancing, ran away and reset the fight like 10 times, and finally got 4 lucky connections with ood and killed him. iood = ? is this just to distinguish it from out-of-depth, or is there an actual player-learnable improved version?
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The original name of the spell is Iskenderun's Orb of Destruction, which I guess got shortened at some point (though the description probably still mentions it? Haven't checked). I find it convenient to call the spell iood since, yes, it distinguishes it from out-of-depth.
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On August 02 2012 13:08 crate wrote:
The original name of the spell is Iskenderun's Orb of Destruction, which I guess got shortened at some point (though the description probably still mentions it? Haven't checked). I find it convenient to call the spell iood since, yes, it distinguishes it from out-of-depth.
The description mostly talks about how monsters get a cooler version of the spell than you do because someone fucked up scibing it (hence me asking if there was a super-secret improved version (which would explain the i in iood))
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if you have both a potion of mutation and a potion of cure-muation in your stash, and no current mutations, would you gamble and chug the mutation potion?
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Unless you worship Jiyva don't intentionally mutate yourself.
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Cure mutation is very rare. It may be the difference between win or loss if you get one of the more crippling mutations, so listen to crate.
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United States10328 Posts
On August 03 2012 08:41 crate wrote:
Unless you worship Jiyva don't intentionally mutate yourself.
Hmm, I remember you (?) saying that if you have like 10 !mut in the mid-late game you can probably just chug them all (and if you get screwed, convert to Zin or something)?
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I did that in the past with a larger number but I wouldn't recommend it any more.
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EPT
