stat potentials

[auricbond]

Watch out for some black shields and cat's claws.

I pick up and id almost everything, but I guess it's possible for it to slip by (particularly the shield). If I get to extremely close and the prayer fails I'll just give up, I don't have a viable means of jumping three levels.

I recall Ln wasting two hours precrowning for the second or third time and getting the black thumb for his efforts.

That's what I thought. I don't even know why I'm torturing myself with this, when I already have protector and hammerhead, and the mino maze and greater vaults are right in front of me. But I feel like I can't stop now...

*UPDATE Got hammer of the gods. Meh. Well at least that's a piece of crap that can't be generated in other places, now.

I noticed this as well, which is why I try to avoid more than one precrown, unless the altar is on a cavernous level. I think this sudden and unexplained drop of piety might be related somehow to alignment as I've seen N and C chars lose it faster than L chars.
It might be just an observation inaccuracy though.

Good to know.

I always had trouble training mana as a mindcrafter and I think just regenerating PP isn't enough.
It's good to booze up some wands of wonder and cast random spells until you learn something that you have a spellbook for.
Although mindcrafters pretty much can't learn spells, they are quite proficient at bookcasting them and that definitely trains mana.
Also with some luck you might actually get a useful spell and train mana at the same time.

Hmm, it just twigged that I have acid ball spell and book. Oops.

[auricbond]

ARGH. Seems I fell afoul of this issue. Ate Keriax, knowing it would be heavily corrupting, and got jack and shit. In fact I think some stats actually lowered (I wrote down the unmodified ones, but I think I must have written them wrong since I have before strength as 50 and after strength as 38... that can't be right...). Oh well, that's 8 of my 9 corruption removal scrolls used up.

Not sure if anything new has changed regarding this, but I do think certain corpses should act as potential boosters, and especially rare/boss ones.

It's also kind of weird that potential potions are coveted in early game but become utterly useless past 25/26/27 in that stat.

[Blasphemous]

Actually potions of potential strength are quite useful even past St:30.
I once spent a lot of time in FGJC with a char that had food preservation and around 20(35) strength.
Eating corpses got me to 30, which was sufficient for most of my needs but I don't see a reason they shouldn't give even more.
Experience shows that eating titans and fire giant kings at that point also has a chance to increase strength if the potential allows.
Same is true for learning and reading books like petrification, remove curse, divine digger etc.
With learning I even noticed training occurring up to 40 just by reading lots of difficult spellbooks and that was around the potential limit for that particular elven character.

I think the game lacks certain effective methods of training most of the attributes if your potential permits and it would be nice if unique/special/boss monsters could boost relevant attributes or increase potentials of a particular related attribute.

[_Ln_]

I can imagine rolling that gray elven farmer and starting a giant herb farm at character level 5 just to get that To to 20, Dx to 38 or so and enjoy some mid-late game DV on coward and plenty of HP for the squishy elf.
A hurthling weaponsmith starts with gardening and 18 strength, does the druid quest and grinds morgia & moss for 25 Wi & To and 40 Dx without even getting to CoC. Fun stuff.
Or take a ratling ranger, do the druid quest and roll 35 toughness before level 10 with excessive morgia scum.

I'm all in for getting rid of the invisible hard caps on herb training but then the potentials would *really* have to be thoroughly reviewed to avoid some extreme situations.

What extreme situations? You want to grind and ease the game, go for it. Want absurd Dx values? Play and elf. Wand absurd To values? Play a troll.

What needs to be changed concerning herbs is the amount of training they give. 3 morgia roots are almost guaranteed for any value from 1 to 25. If you want balance, introduce "weakening" - your body gets accustomed to herbs over time and is less affected. Thus, an elf will get first 5 points of To from 13 to 18, a troll will get first points of To from 23 to 28 pretty easily. Then they will require more and more (even more funny, herb effect weakens regardless of whether you get the increase or not). Grinders will need to grind more but still have a practical way to get that, game balance purists are satisfied as well by 100+ morgia roots to get your from starting To+20 to starting To+21.

With this solution there is still a problem of stat drains and recovering from that. At least the mino emp corpse will become less of a no-brainer choice.

[auricbond]

Gah, another mistake. Won barney's corpse (for the first time), ate it and got 'you feel ecstatic'. No stat increases. Worst part is it turns out I had a pile of potential stat potions in my inventory that I could have drunk beforehand.

From the wiki:

"Eating the ancient blue wyrm grants intrinsic shock immunity, up to +6 to Dexterity, up to +5 to Mana, up to +5 to Toughness, +1 to Perception, and an increase in speed."

Bah!

Oh well, my char is overpowered already, not like I need more, I just want more.

[_Ln_]

Gah, another mistake. Won barney's corpse (for the first time), ate it and got 'you feel ecstatic'. No stat increases. Worst part is it turns out I had a pile of potential stat potions in my inventory that I could have drunk beforehand.

From the wiki:

"Eating the ancient blue wyrm grants intrinsic shock immunity, up to +6 to Dexterity, up to +5 to Mana, up to +5 to Toughness, +1 to Perception, and an increase in speed."

Bah!

Oh well, my char is overpowered already, not like I need more, I just want more.

That still won't work if your stats are in 30s (the chance is incredibly low). Only Orb Guardians give guaranteed increases.

[auricbond]

That still won't work if your stats are in 30s (the chance is incredibly low). Only Orb Guardians give guaranteed increases.

And minotaur emperor, for some reason. I wish everything would obey the same rules.

Ate the chaos wyrm and got +1 str and mana, decided not to try it with the rest of them.

[mike3]

Probably to keep the game challenging. You don't need super high stats to achieve a normal victory.

*EDIT realised what you mean now. I suppose it wouldn't be completely busted with the new potentials system, but it still probably doesn't fit Thomas' vision of how the game should be played to be able to handily meet whatever your stat potential is.

Some stat drains are rough I'll admit (minotaur mages, ugh). I'm wondering though if they slowly recover like with necromancy/writing sets? If not, perhaps they should.

A better method to achieve that goal (to make it so you can't just "handily meet" your potential) would be to remove all the fixed number caps and instead make training methods simply get harder and harder as you approach the potential (though you might want to also take into account the value of the stat when the character was first started as otherwise gaining a +1St to a new character with 11 St potential and 10 St now would be too hard even though it should probably be easier to keep things balanced), becoming very hard to squeeze those last point or two out. Make a smooth curve with an asymptote at the potential, instead of a hard numeric cap. So if you have, say, potential Toughness of 45 and you're at 20 now, you could blast through 25 easily with morgia, get up to 30 or even 35, but then as you get into that regime it starts getting harder and harder, requiring more and more morgia to inch it further, until you're like at 43 and now it's taking like 40 morgia to inch it to 44 and 80 to finally max it at 45. This also seems more realistic, since as you approach your limits, training (or steroids, or whatever, in this case) gives diminishing returns.

[auricbond]

A better method to achieve that goal (to make it so you can't just "handily meet" your potential) would be to remove all the fixed number caps and instead make training methods simply get harder and harder as you approach the potential (though you might want to also take into account the value of the stat when the character was first started as otherwise gaining a +1St to a new character with 11 St potential and 10 St now would be too hard even though it should probably be easier to keep things balanced), becoming very hard to squeeze those last point or two out. Make a smooth curve with an asymptote at the potential, instead of a hard numeric cap. So if you have, say, potential Toughness of 45 and you're at 20 now, you could blast through 25 easily with morgia, get up to 30 or even 35, but then as you get into that regime it starts getting harder and harder, requiring more and more morgia to inch it further, until you're like at 43 and now it's taking like 40 morgia to inch it to 44 and 80 to finally max it at 45. This also seems more realistic, since as you approach your limits, training (or steroids, or whatever, in this case) gives diminishing returns.

I don't mind the basic idea, but I think the numbers are way off. I think there's a reason 25 was chosen as the sweet spot for terminating progress with herbs (and often, corpses).

I think it would be interesting if there were some challenge game implemented where the stats are hard capped at 25, 35 etc. instead of 99, just to see how beatable the game is with those stats.

[gr3ybird]

You know, herbs are not a particularly good idea...

Guaranteed stat increases whether pc has herbalism or not (you're like 99% likely to get a stable patch of morgia/marelon going), and it's even more mindless than grinding killing monsters...Although you will probably do that and get ancillary grinding in while herb harvesting.

You literally have to do nothing more than watch the grass grow and you get stat bonuses. Fun, right?

Problem is, there's no chance of failure. Give even stable herbs a chance per turn dying out, or put a fixed timer on them. Have herbalism counteract these things. Make it worth something.

Herbalism was probably supposed to mitigate this grindiness (by giving you cursed marelon), but because the base item type wasn't changed, you can just take off the curse and go on. Without x herbalism level make marelon and morgia patches give devils roses or whatever.