Talk:Spriggan

Sorry, looking at my charachter 's overview ingame I see that slow metabolism is only "2" for a spriggan. The wiki says "3" which is probably false. I'm gonna correct that. BTW it's a 0.11.2 game. -- Bwijn 17:48, 6 February 2013 (CET)

Spell Hunger & Spriggans

Working through a clean up of the final third of the species pages, but I have larger concerns here than just clarification or a bit of rephrasing, so I wanted to flag them for discussion before a substantial edit.

In my experience, new players tend to vastly overestimate the importance of hunger and worry more than they should (certainly more than they need to) about the availability of food. I don't think the wiki should encourage this misguided anxiety. So long as people are not preposterously wasteful and extravagant in using the highest-level spells they can, hunger is very unlikely to be an issue, even for Spriggans. (Perhaps one specific background, Spriggan Healer, will be liable to run into serious food problems, but that's it. Even Spriggan Berserkers don't have too much of a problem here.)

At most I've found that I might train a bit more spellcasting skill with Spriggans than I would for other species, especially if the RNG seems to be stingier than usual with spawning vegetarian food. However, with Spriggans' good intelligence and excellent spellcasting aptitude—plus their crazy high aptitudes all around—I've never felt that this made a difference on any of my characters or put any noticeable strain on experience allocation.

Yours, and into

Strategy: Spriggan

Okay I just had to cut this out, I will paste it below if anyone wants to workshop it, but as it stands it is problematic enough that I think it should be taken out, then edited and re-added, rather than working on it on the main page. Or just left out entirely. Some quick points inserted in brackets below.

Yours, and into

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!-- taken in part from http://www.thewholeclan.com/will/crawl/index.php/Spriggan --

[Website no longer exists, but I assume this means it isn't even original text...]

Spriggans make excellent Enchanters and Transmuters, and generally have a very easy time in the early game thanks to their blazing speed (and unlike Centaurs, they don't need to eat all the time). The middle game is where things begin to get tough for Spriggans, as more enemies have decent ranged attacks, and their speed/dodging is no longer so insurmountable an advantage. Spriggans are also among the most frail races in Crawl; they have very low HP, compounded by the severe restrictions on the armour they can wear.

[Spriggans' speed helps just as much, if not more, in the middle game. But more to the point, even the accurate information just seems to say things that are true, but which don't really constitute advice.]

Spriggans have several tools for dealing with this, however. Their Spellcasting is keen enough that in practice, they have little trouble with attack spells, despite low aptitudes for Conjurations and elemental magics. They are also bar none the best sneaky assassins in the game. Aside from their uber Stealth and speed, their Hexes aptitude makes them great with invisibility, confusion, and other magical means of making enemies vulnerable to Stabbing (which they also excel at).

[Okay, letting people know that bad conjurations aptitude shouldn't necessarily scare you off from using conjuration spells might be useful. But I think that can be included in the "difficulty of play" section. The rest here doesn't seem to be of use. The paragraph is ostensibly about "tools for dealing with [Spriggans' frailty]," but EV and dodging aren't mentioned once. And it is unclear to me how conjurations and the like help with frailty. It sounds like it is going to go into some helpful pointers about how to handle Spriggans such that their low HP isn't an issue, but then doesn't deliver.]

Spriggans also have tremendous ability at Evocation. A Spriggan with a rod of destruction is nigh unstoppable, at least by monsters. The problem is to survive until you can acquire or find (good luck with that!) one, and then to survive the hunger from the rod (intelligence and spellcasting skill help with spellcasting hunger, slow metabolism 2 helps with walking about, but no matter how high your Evocations skill becomes, you can never reduce hunger from evoking a rod to zero).

[The above paragraph was what pushed me into "cut first, ask questions later" on this section, I'm afraid.]

Finally, they can get a lot of mileage out of gods who grant allies (Yredelemnul, Makhleb, Fedhas, or - for an offbeat choice - Trog), as they can happily use all the meatshields they can get. Even better, all of these gods accept blood sacrifices or have other uses for corpses, which is great for Spriggans who don't need meat anyway. On the other hand, Sif Muna or Vehumet could add a lot to a Spriggan's already great magic game. Zin can help compensate for the Spriggan's picky diet through his Sustenance ability, and Spriggans are utterly unaffected by his dietary restrictions as theirs are already more severe. Jiyva can also help provide sustenance, and he may also provide useful resistances through mutation gifts; Spriggans also won't experience many of the disadvantages of the body-warping mutations they may acquire, as their size already limits the equipment they can use, and their high speed can help them get to useful items before hungry jellies do.

[Yes, many different gods can be good for Spriggans. None of the diet advice or points about more corpse sacrifices are really all that relevant; at most you may hit a certain ability slightly earlier or get maybe one or two extra god gifts per game. Not really anything worth writing home about. Recommending Jiyva without qualification or even mentioning that he only rarely is available before Lair is really bad. I am saying that with new players in mind, in particular. I don't doubt that the intent was sincere and non-malicious, but this is almost in the territory of "objectively trolling" regardless of intent.]

This wiki also contains a Spriggan Enchanter Guide.

Yeah, most of that needed to be cut (that site dates from the days of Linley's Crawl, by the way). I think I might try and write something describing which builds/classes work well with Sp: for instance, the almost-iconic (as much as anything in Crawl is iconic) SpEn deserves a mention. Also worth mentioning are backgrounds that benefit from being able to kite: As, Hu, VM.

As for god choice, I pretty much agree with you: there isn't much about Sp's innate mutations/abilities that suggests a particular god. In fact, it's probably worth mentioning that they work well with most gods. -Ion frigate (talk) 06:11, 8 February 2014 (CET)

Okay, tried to keep everything reasonably race specific. The gods I put are the five most popular for won Spriggans on CAO, so I think it's fair to say that they're solid choices.

It's worth mentioning about the increased piety. It also leads to more gifts, gets you abilities faster and lets you use them a bit more, so it's not a totally minor thing, though I'd agree it's hardly game breaking. As for the bit about rods - it is worth mentioning that they're good with them, but it should not come off like something you purposely build a character for - just something that's nice if you find it. -Ion frigate (talk) 06:43, 8 February 2014 (CET)

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