[YASD] Broke an 8-streak and died in zot5. Summoning: NEVER EVER AGAIN

[Berder]

morgue

I had an 8 streak going: OpWn, OnWr, OpWn, FeSh, FeSH, FeSh, FeSh, FeSh. Then I tried a DgCj because another player was asking for advice about it.

The main problem with DgCj is finding the right spells. For other blaster mages, Vehumet will usually fill out a few crucial spells to make your character viable. By around vaults:2, I had no higher-level spells besides Orb of Destruction (with 15 Conj skill) and it was time to decide what spell school I was going to focus on. I had picked up Eringya’s Surprising Crocodile earlier, and then I found Summon Horrible Things (nicknamed XXX), which I know to be pretty strong. At the time I had nothing in my library like Starburst, Fireball, Plasma Beam, Arcjolt, etc, and no level 9s. So… I decided on a whim, I’m going to go summonings. Hey, low-level summons suck, but surely XXX is worth it!

For a while it did work well. I had XXX, and then later in Depths I picked up Dragon’s Call. A cast of that and then I just had to wait until stuff died. It was quite MP-efficient.

But the Summoner’s Curse: while you’re standing around waiting for your summons to kill stuff, you’re going to be hit with lightning bolts, bolts of dispelling energy, smite, airstrike, etc. It was manageable for a while, though some fights ended with a lot lower HP than I’d like.

I was using Dragon’s Call to assault the orb guardians in the orb chamber in Zot:5, and it was going alright. Until I started getting low on MP and a little low on HP and I figure, hmm, it’s time to think about getting out of here. But then… orb of winter from behind. (There had been tele traps so enemies had gotten scattered around Zot).

What follows was a long, desperate attempt to stay alive and get out of the lungs, lasting almost 60 turns since spotting that orb. I ran out of blinks and heal wounds. Throughout it, my dragons and horrible things just wouldn’t kill the damn orb of winter. I’d fled halfway across the map, with half a dozen of my dragons on the screen at all times, and still when I xv’d the damn orb it still said “lightly damaged.” The same thing was happening just prior to spotting the orb of winter, with an electric golem that my dragons must have spent a dozen turns failing to kill, which was part of how I got in trouble in the first place. I wanted to run out of the lungs while hasted, but unfortunately a quicksilver dragon blocked the way, and then another orb of winter. Tried to tele out and hide in fog, but it was too late.

Suffice it to say that this would not have happened if I was casting Firestorm. Heck, even if I was just casting exclusively Orb of Destruction, I wouldn’t have gotten into that situation. Orb of Destruction kills orbs of winter in like 3 turns, not 50! I know from experience that clearing Zot:5 with just Orb of Destruction is tedious but possible to do safely.

Perhaps part of the reason it took so long for the orb to die is that I didn’t have a spare turn to order my summons to attack it, since I was too busy quaffing haste/resist/magic, casting passage of golubria, reading fog, and running away. Another part of the reason it didn’t die is that the dying summons left fog behind that kept blocking LOS to the orb so they couldn’t target it.

Also, there was a tele trap that I was hoping to lure the orb into, but my summons died and their deaths fogged and blocked LOS to the orb at a crucial moment, resulting in the orb taking a step sideways instead of straight at me, and therefore missing the trap. I might have survived if that hadn’t happened, or at least my chances would have been better.

Summonings: not even once. They seem strong until you’re in a situation where something shoots past/through them at you. Then they don’t kill the thing quickly enough, compared to blaster spells, and your HP just keeps going down. I need to remind myself, next time I’m in a situation where I have no high-level blaster spells and am thinking about XXX or malign gateway or something… NO. DO NOT. IT’S NOT WORTH IT.

Maybe if you had Elyvilon to keep healing you as you get damaged it would be ok. You really need both MP regen and HP regen to make it potentially be as good as a blaster-caster imo. Or, maybe my problem was going for dragon’s call and using it as a source of main damage. XXX by itself seems potentially useful to keep melee attackers off you, if you rely on blaster spells most of the time.

[Lici]

Is this the char? https://cbro.berotato.org/morgue/Berder/morgue-Berder-20250801-193846.txt

Why did you train so much Shields here? In general I don’t get why you trained so much Armour or Dodging either compared to how little Fighting you had…

Anyway you’ve basically one this, unlucky death due to combo of noise and long kill time!

[Berder]

Yes, it’s that char, I linked the morgue at the top.

The excessive Shields training I think is because I had planned to switch to a kite shield once my shields skill was high enough to still cast Dragon’s Call, but never got around to switching. I don’t see anything wrong with 10 Dodging + Armor and 14 Fighting at that point in the game.

Certainly I could have played better - noticing the tele traps I should have been patrolling back and forth to the stairs to keep my exit path clear. That would have certainly saved me. I also had opportunities to step on a tele trap while escaping, which I was reluctant to do due to my very low health and no heal wounds, but it might have saved me. Yes, the noise of Dragon’s Call likely had something to do with it. Mostly it’s the summons-kill-slowly-and-don’t-protect-you-against-beams problem, which I’d been having a lot in that game.

[Lici]

Ah sorry I somehow missed it!

I felt like the gain from training Armour and Dodging on this char was quite low, 0.3 AC and 0.4 EV per skill level. Upon checking the math with skill points it turns out it was probably better anyway with Fighting being around 3-4 HP per skill level! I guess this is the matter of how much HP does one think 1 AC or EV is worth

[Berder]

Against an orb guardian, 3 AC or EV is worth roughly 10% of your hit points.

Explaining this chart, when the Orb Guardian tries to hit you, it has a chance to be stopped by your shield, a chance to be stopped by your evasion, and an average percentage of damage reduced by your armor. These multiply, so that perhaps for each 1 point of damage the Orb Guardian attempts, you only lose 0.333 hp on average. So your defenses give you effectively 3x the hp (compared to 0 ac/ev/sh). The “defensive value” is the logarithm to base 1.1 of that multiplier, so in this case log_1.1 (3) = 11.5. Because the logarithm is base 1.1, a single point of defensive value is worth roughly 10% of your hit points.

Getting a point of ac, ev, or sh will increase your defensive value by an amount independent of the other two defenses. The “marginal defensive value” is that amount. For instance, the chart shows that if you have 20 AC at GDR 0, getting one more point of AC has a defensive value of around 0.23, worth around 2.2% of your hit points. This will be different against different enemies. The orb guardian in particular does high damage which means ac is less effective against it, and has the Fighter flag which means ev is less effective against it, so by comparison sh is relatively more effective.

(Note: the “sh with 2 attacks/turn” line is from an older shield calculation which no longer applies.)

So if you’re right about how much ac/sh/hp the skills grant, then 3 levels of armor grants about 1 AC, equivalent to 2% of your hit points, or around 4 HP for this character. 3 levels of evasion grant about 1.2 EV, equivalent to around 5 HP. This is roughly the same as 1 level of fighting

Now, according to https://www.reddit.com/r/dcss/comments/bzcsqh/table_of_relative_skill_costs/ , at 10 dodging the relative skill cost is 15, and at 14 fighting the relative skill cost is 25. 3 levels of dodging or armor cost about 45, and 1 level of fighting costs 25, so indeed it would be better to train more fighting and less dodging/armor on this character.

Although we also have to consider healing items, such as heal wounds or an item of regeneration. Because healing items heal for a flat amount, they add more survivability if your character has more ac/ev. If you are at 20% of your max HP and trying to use heal wounds or regeneration to stay alive, you want more ac/ev, not more max HP.

[PaperRat]

There’s a thing with summons that sometimes they’ll get stuck on ‘follow’ order. It happens most often when you break LoS a lot (say by reading fog and such). They will just stand there and take the punishment, and you gotta manually snap them out of it by ‘ta’.

You also had two charges of Gell’s Gravitambourine, which is like blink almost, great tool for damage as well (just pin your summons and your target in place and let them tear stuff up).

My last win, coincidentally, was a summoner DgWn and it went pretty smooth. XXX, Malign Gateway and Sphinx Sisters were enough to kill everything super safely, even though I got bottlenecked a bit trying to get to tesseracts, so they spawned a bunch more than usual. Kinda surprised your char struggled even after getting Dragon’s Call online, that spell is usually enough to win by itself.

[Lici]

This is some really cool stuff! Thanks for the info.

Did you do this in Matlab? Can you post the file so other people can play around with it?

[Berder]

I used python. There was a post on the old Tavern, crawl.develz.org/tavern, where I explained it all. Maybe the internet archive still has it. However, there’s no search feature so I can’t find it.

For now, here are the marginal defensive value diagrams for some other monsters.

and source code here.

You save it in a file such as crawl.py, then do like:

$ python3
>>> import crawl
>>> crawl.plot_monster_vitals(crawl.iguana, "MDV")

and it will generate a comma-separated table of marginal defensive values for the iguana, which you could plug into Excel or something. I also give instructions in the file for how to plot it with gnuplot. Supported monsters are iguana, yak, deathyak, deeptroll, veryugly, direelephant, hydra6, orbguardian, juggernaut, bonedragon, alligator, blackmamba, adder, stonegiant.