Team JellySlayer - Free Beer with Our Victory Party

[JellySlayer]

Welcome everyone to the pre-victory party thread for Team JellySlayer in the Roman Republic Challenge!

As you may know, we will be having a Multi-class Tournament in the upcoming weeks, and all members of the forums are welcome to attend. Players who sign up on this thread will have the privilege of playing for the winning team of this tournament, and will get to partake in a number of potions of booze upon its completion and our inevitable victory. As captain, I am more than happy to help in any party-related arrangements that need to be made, and will also see to the general administrative running of the team during the tournament, and will more than happily provide advice or assistance to anyone who needs it.

Please note that this is a server league. This means that all of our characters will be played on Jaakos' server, and your exploits can be watched and kibitzed by your teammates and your opponents. If you have never played on the server before, but are interested in doing so, you are of course welcome to join the team. All I would ask is that you please try the server out before you do... some players have serious issues with lag or compatability that need to be sorted out before they can play. You should be able to play comfortably on the server--if all goes well, you will be playing an entire game there.

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Current players:

1. JellySlayer (captain)
2. lotuskip
3. quik
4. Al-Khwarizmi
5. Conundrum

Our characters:

ConuNecro, the Drakeling Necromancer (Salamander) on account beer4
Ale, the Gnome Bard (Cup) on account beer1
Teeth, the Troll Fighter (Sword) on account beer3
Madeleine, the Human Wizard (Raven) on account beer2
Grik, the Orc Barbarian (Candle) on account league1

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Mission 1 status:

JellySlayer - NecroJelly - Completed!
lotuskip - Ale - Completed!
quik - Teeth - Completed!
Al-Khwarizmi - Madeleine - Completed!
Conundrum - Grik - Completed!

Mission 2 status:

Jelly - Madeleine - Completed!
lotuskip - Grik - Completed!
quik - Ale - Defeated. Beaten to a pulp trying to kill a group of ogres stunned, blinded, and naked.
Conundrum - ConuNecro -Defeated. Frozen to death by a misnamed ogre magus.
Al-Khwarizmi - Teeth - Completed!

Mission 3 status:

Jelly - Teeth - Completed!
lotuskip - Madeleine - Completed!
Al-Khwarizmi - Grik - Completed!

Mission 4 status:

JellySlayer - Grik - Completed!
lotuskip - Teeth - Completed!
Al-Khwarizmi - Defeated. Liquified himself with a magic missile while looking for his portable numpad.

Mission 5 status:
JellySlayer - Teeth - Completed!
lotuskip - Grik -Completed!

Mission 6 status:
JellySlayer - Grik - Completed! Saved the world and went on to become a great ruler.
lotuskip - Teeth - Defeated. Was caught robbing a Great Water Dragon.

Final Score: 16 Points out of a possible 30 Points.

[JellySlayer]

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Strategy Discussion:

Our starting races are Human, Drakeling, Orc, Gnome, Troll. This is, in my opinion, the second-best, if not the best race assignment of the teams, and is pretty nicely balanced overall. Here are the considerations for each race, and my feelings on what works well for them:

Human: One of the weaker races in ADOM. Terrible skillset and mediocre starting stats. Equipment tends to be average, but usually has a few points of PV from leather armor or something similar. Lifespan is modest, but usually long enough to avoid problems with careful play.

Jelly's Class suggestions: As one of our weakest races, my preference would be to balance this with one of the stronger classes. Human fighters, paladins, and priests all start with excellent PV and otherwise reasonable skillsets. Of the races we have, humans would also probably be our best archer kit, although orcs aren't bad either once they get going.


Drakeling: Arguably the best race in the game. Excellent skillset, plus nice acid breath ability. Good starting stats, including decent To. Starting equipment is usually junk except for one or two classes. ToEF and D:49 have special issues, but these aren't usually a huge problem as long as you're prepared. Lifespan is dreadful, but they always have a ranged attack available at least. In fact, most people consider drakelings to have a huge advantage in the ToEF.

Jelly's Class suggestions: Pretty much anything goes here. Drakelings can be good casters in a pinch, although if the RNG is cruel they may have dreadful learning to start with. Thanks to decent To and St, they also make pretty good melee fighters, and are complemented nicely by ones that generally have poor starting gear anyway: monks, beastfighters, although assassins are respectable too. To be honest though, given the early game advantage of drakeling breath and decent To, I think it would be our best bet to put this race with our weakest pick: a weaponsmith, mindcrafter, farmer, merchant, etc.


Orc: Great To and St, starts with Find Weakness. Equipment is usually pretty good for most classes--orcs rarely start with less than 5 PV unless they're playing a caster. One of the shortest lifespans, poor shop prices from Waldenbrook.

Jelly's Class suggestions: First in line for barbarian, beastfighter, and maybe ranger. Some people really like orcs for casters as well, since their high starting To helps push them through the early game despite their low Le and Ma. Orc priests and druids aren't bad, then, and wizards and necromancers are playable if the roll is halfway decent. Good starting race for any of our new players. If need be, we can also put this race against one of our bad picks--an orc merchant or farmer isn't as terrible as it sounds, for example.


Gnome: Our only real natural caster pick. Le and Ma are above average, and To is respectable. Minor bonus to crossbow proficiency, decent lifespan. One free talent at startup. Levels very fast.

Jelly's Class suggestions: If we land a bard or thief, I think it might be worth trying our gnome on them, since that will greatly increase the chances of getting an heir gift. If we don't get the gift though, a thief in particular will be at a huge disadvantage. Otherwise, any caster or semi-caster is good: wizards, necros, elementalists. Gnome archers are also pretty playable, as are assassins, although the early game is tricky. Gnome paladins also are decent, although we have better paladin races IMHO.


Troll: Incredible St, To, but pretty much all other stats suck. Levels 3x slower than other races, needs twice as much food to survive. Starting gear is basically always the same--which is usually pretty good. Dreadful lifespan. Did I mention they level 3x slower than other races? Don't count on getting to level 50 without being very scummy.

Jelly's Class suggestions: Any class that doesn't care about levelling is good for trolls. Druids, rangers, and maybe fighters are pretty solid choices for a troll--druids may be one of the easiest choices if food problems can be dealt with early on. Healers are popular, of course, although I haven't seen many troll healers get to completion, actually. I also like assassins and monks because the skillset is absolutely insane (monks also negate the troll's food problems). If need be, a troll farmer or mindcrafter is also playable.

[lotuskip]

All right, let me sign up.

I don't know if I have any useful input on the class choices, but here is what I thought I would do, were I to make the decisions on my own:
1. First, match drakeling with the weakest class we get, whatever it is (unless it's thief, in which case gnome comes in question, too). And don't hesitate to use the acid spit. In particular: merchant, mindcrafter, farmer.
2. For the troll: monk (think food), elementalist (think poor level bonuses and no need to learn spells), or ranger. If we get none of these three, let me think again.
3.-4. Orc and gnome need to be thought carefully. Gnomes have good De, so by taking speed talents and using missiles even the thief without a heir gift can do pretty good. If we get a spellcaster other than elementalist, it should definitely go with either the orc or the gnome. If we get a melee class such as (beast)fighter or barbarian, I would match it with the orc. If we get a bard, it should absolutely be a gnome.
5. For the human: whatever class is left after the above.

If I understood correctly, we are to match the races&classes before we see the star sign, right? (If not correct, then getting something like Wolf for the troll might change things...)

[quik]

Count me in!

My preferences:

Human Archer -> I don't really know what class to put here... So I'd go for archer.
Drakeling Beastfighter -> Powerful melee and the acid spit to save your ass.
Orc Barbarian -> Barbarians are great. Barbarians with Find Weakness are AWESOME.
Gnome Wizard -> Gnomes are excellent wizards. My only ULE is with a Gnomish Wizard so... easy choice here.
Troll Healer -> A machine of staying alive.


On the other hand, if I understood the rules correctly, the classes must be ranked in order to be assigned (something like the choice of the semifinal of the Weakest Link). So, the ordering I like is the following:

1 Wizard
2 Beastfighter
3 Archer
4 Barbarian
5 Healer
6 Monk
7 Priest
8 Paladin
9 Ranger
10 Druid
11 Bard
12 Elementalist
13 Necromancer
14 Fighter
15 Assassin
16 Weaponsmith
17 Farmer
18 Merchant
19 Mindcrafter
20 Thief

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I like the server, booze, and winning. So sign me in then!

My opinion about races is more or less the following:

Gnome -> I agree with quik on this, gnomes are good wizards: nice Le and Ma, and pretty decent To for survival. But as we probably will have our class choices constrained (how is this done? I didn't see it in the challenge thread), we may have to assign it to a wannabee caster (necromancer or elementalist).

Drakeling -> An awesome race for early-game survival with its good To and the spit (coupled with food preservation). I usually play drakeling wizards and they are great if you roll a decent Le, but probably it wouldn't be a good choice for this challenge since we need to maximise all the characters' chances of survival. So here I agree with JellySlayer, we should give the drakeling a weak class. If we can't survive with a drakeling thief, we probably can't survive with any thief.

Orc -> Either melee class (barbarian, beastfighter, etc.) or something with some casting and a good melee like a paladin or a priest.

Troll -> If we get a Healer, this is clearly its place since troll healing rate + healer healing rate gives good survivavility. If not, we could assign a melee class (barbarian, fighter, etc.)

Human -> I don't really play humans but I understand that it's an overall crappy class. We could just leave this for the end and assign the class that doesn't fit very well with any of the others. And if we get a very crappy combination like a human farmer, see if we can switch it with other race.

[Conundrum]

Sign me up! YE.

And now edit for some thoughts:

Not much opinion on humans, having never played them. Guess it falls a lot to what classes we get in the draw.

Drakeling:

Jelly's Class suggestions: Pretty much anything goes here. Drakelings can be good casters in a pinch, although if the RNG is cruel they may have dreadful learning to start with. Thanks to decent To and St, they also make pretty good melee fighters, and are complemented nicely by ones that generally have poor starting gear anyway: monks, beastfighters, although assassins are respectable too. To be honest though, given the early game advantage of drakeling breath and decent To, I think it would be our best bet to put this race with our weakest pick: a weaponsmith, mindcrafter, farmer, merchant, etc.

I agree with the 'couple Drakeling with our weakest class' thing. With enough food, the SMC is safe enough, and anything tough in the UD can be handled.

Agree with Jelly's thoughts on Orcs, though I guess that's fairly obvious. Find weakness is amazing.

Gnome:

Jelly's Class suggestions: If we land a bard or thief, I think it might be worth trying our gnome on them, since that will greatly increase the chances of getting an heir gift. If we don't get the gift though, a thief in particular will be at a huge disadvantage. Otherwise, any caster or semi-caster is good: wizards, necros, elementalists. Gnome archers are also pretty playable, as are assassins, although the early game is tricky. Gnome paladins also are decent, although we have better paladin races IMHO.

If we get thief, put it here, and give it to an experienced player to start in case of the rare event that we don't get 3 starting talents.

Troll has pretty much been covered.


In general, I think we have a fairly decently wide spread of classes, so we don't need to think too much about changing up our class rankings to suit our classes. IMO we throw them in in the most powerful order irrespective of classes, and then match up what we get to the relevant classes as discussed above in the style of lotus' post.

My 2c

EDIT2:

Oh, another thing I forgot to mention, obviously if we get a class that needs healing which is lacking healing, then we should pair it up with a Chaotic race for easy access to healing.

[JellySlayer]

Welcome everyone and thanks for joining the team!

Would everyone be able to give me an idea of what classes (particularly matched with these races) that you personally would feel comfortable playing? This will help us determine how we like to have things ranked. Also, I'd also be interesting in knowing in particular if anyone really likes/hates trolls--I know a lot of people have very strong feelings about this race. If it's possible, I'd also like to try to get an idea of how difficult a character you would be comfortable with--eg. if we end up with a drakeling mindcrafter, do you feel comfortable getting through the UD with that class?

Here's what I'd like to propose as far as our rankings go: we first try to pick the strongest classes for our most difficult races, and then leave progressively worse classes for easier races. This, in my mind, tends to balance things out a bit better. The exception to this would be if anyone has particular difficulties with the early game, then we would try to fit a strong race/class combination for that player first. So my preference would be to try to pick our choices in this order: Human, Gnome, Troll, Orc, Drakeling. My reasoning is this: nobody seems particularly comfortable with humans, and they aren't really actually that good, anyway, so we try to balance this out with a decent class: the only one that anybody has any real feelings about is archers, so that would be our pick. The inclination for most people is to make our gnome a caster: wizard is the obvious first choice, but will also likely be the most contested. I would suggest we arrange to have necromancer as our fallback position for our gnome. Trolls have their own special needs, so I would here go with whatever class the troll player is most comfortable with--monk, ranger or healer are the current thoughts. Druid is good too, but gut's team intends to take druid as their 1st or 2nd pick, so it's unlikely that we'd get that. For our orc and drakeling, I'd basically suggest ranking the remaining classes in order of difficulty. As we've discussed, there are particular classes (particularly thief and bard) that would probably be better off as our gnome than our drakeling or orc, but that can be arranged as appropriate. In light of this, these are the rankings I'd suggest:

1. Wizard (if it isn't first pick, we won't get it... I would be okay with ignoring this pick completely though).
2. Archer (human)
3. Necromancer (gnome)
4. Monk (troll)
5. Ranger
6. Healer
7. Priest (we won't get this pick at this point, but it doesn't hurt to try)
8. Druid (we won't get this pick at this point, but it doesn't hurt to try)
9. Barbarian (we won't get this pick at this point, but it doesn't hurt to try)
10. Beastfighter (ditto)
11. Paladin
12. Assassin
13. Fighter
14. Elementalist
15. Weaponsmith
16. Bard
17. Farmer
18. Mindcrafter
19. Thief
20. Merchant

Advice/recommendations are strongly encouraged.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

OK, here is the ranking of classes that I *personally* would feel more comfortable with (not necessarily matching the best for the team).

1. Wizard
2. Priest
3. Paladin
4. Necromancer
5. Elementalist
6. Healer
7. Barbarian
8. Beastfighter
9. Druid
10. Archer
11. Bard
12. Weaponsmith

The rest of the classes are more or less tied in my ranking, I'd say (I haven't tried some of them at all, and others like mindcrafters I have tried a bit but haven't ever been able to survive much and see if they are good or not).

Thinking from a more team-oriented perspective, I mostly agree with JellySlayer's suggestions. I would only do minor changes. Probably lower the priority of Ranger (a crappy class IMHO), perhaps place Healer before Monk for the troll but only perhaps, I would probably move Paladin upwards, and elementalist too. (Elementalists are not so bad. They are mostly seen as useless because they clearly lose in the comparison to wizards. But my first characters who got past the ToEF were elementalists, the innate spellcasting - especially burning hands - makes them quite survivable).

I think what we could also do is post the strengths/weakness of each of us players so that we can assign the best mission to each. For example, I'm very used to the UD run, as I always do it in my games (although what I really do is a blanket run, not going down from the SMC without the blanket, and this gives me a low survival rate - but it would probably go up a lot not worrying about the blanket). I have a quite aggressive playstyle and I never scum in my normal games, of course I would scum in here if the team requires it but it's not something I'm used to do or feel comfortable doing. I'm not very scared of the Tower as long as I have a character that can cast bouncing bolts or missiles, it has been a long time since the ACW killed a caster of mine. However, with melee chars I don't have much experience clearing the Tower, I only did it two or three times and mostly by spamming wands or with slaying ammo. A clear weakness is that I haven't ever closed the Gate, my experience at D:50 is zero and my experience at the Mana/Air temples is only a couple of games. As for races, I play wizards 90% of the time, although I know how to handle a melee char. I haven't ever used mindcraft seriously.

[JellySlayer]

I guess I should post my own credentials and preferences here.

I've won 15-20 times I would guess, mostly ULEs and gate closings. I tend to play most of my characters as a mixed missile-melee hybrid, and don't spells nearly as much as I probably should, even on pure casters. I've won a few times with wizards and archers, and also have wins with an assassin, monk, priest, druid, paladin, farmer, thief, and merchant. "Easy" melee characters like barbarians, beastfighters, and fighters haven't worked out very well so far for reasons I haven't yet pinned down. I usually play somewhat conservatively and don't often do UD dives, but I usually look around the SMC and try to find the stairs early on unless my character is prohibitively weak, so I can normally get to the UD when I need to.

Class wise, I favour archers, priests, assassins, and monks, but there's only one or two classes that I haven't really played and would feel really uncomfortable with (mindcrafters, elementalists, and healers). I usually try to match my race to my class, so I don't have any real likes or dislikes there. I have won with one or two trolls before, and wouldn't mind playing one with the right class.


On an unrelated note, I think we should carefully consider the ranking of the bottom four classes. Pretty much every team is choosing Merchant, Farmer, Thief, and Mindcrafter as their bottom four, which means there is an extremely high chance that we will be stuck with one of these classes, whether we like it or not--this means that our ranking of these classes is, in my opinion, at least as important as our rankings of our top class. My feeling here is that we should put merchant as our bottom pick. All of our races are dexterity deficient, which makes blinging unpleasant, and merchants always start with terrible gear. I don't particularly relish trying to do a UD run with nothing but acid spit. Top choice of these four is an uncontested farmer for me. By level 4-6, a farmer can get a stable herb patch up with morgia and pepper at the least, which, with a bit of scumming, will give the farmer a huge survival advantage: a level 6 farmer with 25 To and a pocket full of pepper petals should be able to make it through the UD without much difficulty. I think mindcrafter should be the second of those four, since drakeling mindcrafters aren't half bad. Between spit and confusion, you should be able to neutralize most early threats. Since we have a gnome, I'm not opposed to trying a thief, although there is a major need to get healing before this class will be viable. Without an heir gift, this will be a very, very difficult class though.

[furious_styles]

I'd like to participate in the challenge, and as always, I'd prefer to play on the server, so if there is a slot free here sign me up. Time constraints mean I can't pontificate as extensively as I'd like about the r/cs and what have you right now .