Talk:ARCHIVED Buddy23Lee's Minotaur Staff-Madness guide

Just read it and think its a great guide and idea. But I found two things I wanted to ask:

-Doesnt Trog still make me loose piety for training Magic? So wouldn`t he be a rather bad god to pick here? (Also aquirement says Trog worshippers always get rods)

-Why train Fighting more than Staves? From a Damage output consideration, Staves is cheaper and adds more damage. So shouldn`t I pour as much xp in fighting than in staves after raching min delay?

--BlueCrake (talk) 01:59, 7 June 2014 (CEST)

Trog would get angry at you for training Earth Magic even if you never cast a single spell. I think Yredelemnul or Makhleb might be the best choices for this sort of character; good support abilities that require only moderate Invocations training, excellent panic buttons, and a pathetic divine retribution for when you bail on him in the end game. As for Fighting vs. Staves, Fighting gives a smaller damage boost, but also comes with heaps of HP. Neither skill really improves the damage of a magical staff all that much, however, as the majority of a staff of earth's damage comes from the magical effect, which is Earth Magic and Evocations based. --MoogleDan (talk) 07:33, 7 June 2014 (CEST)

You both make an excellent point. I played through a number of these guys and yet never tried it with Trog. Dumb move. I'll revise that section. BlueCrake, what Dan said. I do fighting all the way for the HP. Crazy high earth magic and evocations will more than make up for any higher in staves...provided you use the staff of earth. :) --Buddy23Lee (talk) 11:03, 7 June 2014 (CEST)

Right, didn`t think that part through ; ) --BlueCrake (talk) 19:51, 7 June 2014 (CEST)

Isn't it saying too much when you claim that a staff of earth deals non-resistible extra damage? The extra damage output is reduced by the AC of the opponent, which for some late-game bosses is quite significant. Cerebov for example has 30 AC, so I guess he will have cut and burned you to pieces before you have him down with the staff of earth. Majang (talk) 14:15, 4 August 2014 (CEST)

The wiki admittedly has an issue with this terminology. We interchangably use non-resistible, irresistible, and physical all for the same thing. Personally, I think physical is the best choice, as it brings AC-reduction to mind most clearly, but the game never actually uses the term. Technically, damage reduction from AC isn't resistance, so the other two are also accurate, but I wouldn't mind a hard and fast term being selected here.

As for Cerebov winning a straight melee fight, you overestimate the power of that silly greatsword he carries. I'd put my money on the hasted, mighted, well-armoured, rF+++ minotaur smasher over that war toaster any day :P Admittedly, I'd prefer an antimagic lajatang, but this seems like it'd do the job admirably. --MoogleDan (talk) 14:39, 4 August 2014 (CEST)

I really like this guide. Right now I am playing it, but I started out as a minotoaur fighter, taking the flail as starting weapon. This gives me the advantage of having immediate shield protection. When a minotaur trains maces and flails up to 14, in the new cross-training system the staves skill automatically climbs to above 9, so there is not such a long way to go to bring it up to the 12 needed for swinging the staff of earth with minimum delay. Maces and flails have excellent one-handed weapons, which give you more flexibility and good fire-power until your earth and evocations skills are strong enough to use your staff. You also may have good special branded weapons for taking out susceptible opponents, for example I use a TSO-blessed eveningstar against anything susceptible to holy wrath. So you may want to mention this option of starting out as a flail-armed fighter in your guide. Majang (talk) 08:21, 17 November 2014 (CET)

Within a week this guide has first been flagged to be misleading, and then archived. Why? I don't think it is in any way obsolete, and following this guide has given me a couple of fun games. And like all of Buddy23Lee's guides it was very well written. What was wrong? Majang (talk) 10:58, 9 January 2015 (CET)

Well, the misleading aspect is honestly pretty accurate, and until that's fixed, it shouldn't be included in the Character Guides. While I recognize this isn't designed to be an efficient or particularly min/maxed character by any means, there's a lot of bad advice in here. Raising a magic skill to exceptionally high levels with no intent of using any of the spells contained within is just a massive waste of experience and turns. Suggesting the player farm experience in the Abyss is really unnecessary (and tends to result in all kinds of miserable malmutations). The worst part here is simply that the guide seems to think that magic-heavy characters with staves are inherently equal to or better at melee than heavily-armoured brutes with massive weapons; while it's true that a staff of earth can land very heavy blows, it's a phenomenally large investment for at most an incremental improvement in performance over a well enchanted lajatang of speed or holy wrath with maxed out Fighting skills. In both cases you wind up with extremely capable weapons. And if your argument is that the staff lets you use a shield, sure, that's true, but so does a demon whip / sacred scourge / eveningstar. Meanwhile, all that Earth Magic XP could be put in all sorts of other places to very significant effect (better defenses, Charms/Air Magic/Translocations for awesome spells, Evocations for cool non-spell spells, Stealth for stabbin', etc.). I realize there's something fun about the idea of using the staff of earth as a brutal beating stick, but the core principle of this guide could basically be summed up as, "In the extended-game, you can train staves to 12 and Earth Magic to 27 and get a really great one-handed weapon." While I admit the idea is kind of fun, that's a LOT of excessive XP-burning. The fact that you came up with a better, more efficient build that largely involves using Maces & Flails for the majority of the game does not speak well of a "staff-master" guide. --MoogleDan (talk) 14:36, 9 January 2015 (CET)

You’ll have to forgive my extended absence; my wife gave birth to our first child earlier this year and attending to my Crawl Wiki guides took a backseat to consuming endeavor of childrearing. Dan, you know I respect your work and wisdom. While achieving my guide is perhaps not how I would have preferred you had handled your problems with it, I do believe I understand where you are coming from and I’ve tried to take your criticisms quite seriously and work to ameliorate rather than get quarrelsome about it. Reading your above critique about my guide, it would seem that it mostly boils down to the distribution of experience points, to wit: that this type of crazy, magic-ish warrior could be equal to, or even surpass the orthodox strategy of a pugilistic minotaur. It’s a valid point that what was once the sole guide on the melee-centric minotaur could put people down this unusual path when it’s pretty clearly for a dungeon crawler of a more eccentric (read: not pragmatic) bent. Because of this, and the potential of leading crawlers astray, I will revise the guide, applying my own disclaimer (in addition to all the wiki-formatted ones which already exist), in my own words, doing my best to keep inexperienced crawler from going down the perhaps silly paths I have tread. In fact, I will even change the title of the guide, so that no one is misled or beguiled by the word ‘master’. I hope this helps satisfy your concerns, and I would urge you to voice them to me as soon as they arise (for example, my minotaur guide existed on the wiki for 6 months before you mentioned any of this and shelved it). You know that while we clearly have very different opinions on what constitutes a worthwhile crawl experience, we still share the same ends on trying to make this wiki the best it can be, for both novice and expert dungeon crawler alike. --Buddy23Lee (talk) 21:00, 12 August 2015 (CEST)