Talk:Ashenzari

Some observations

For a long time I used to hesitate and never chose Ashenzari. The concept is not attractive at first sight. Too restricted in case to case choice of weapons, no bows nor rods possible. - Now in 0.12 (Ashenzari Archivists being the tournament team name) I've tried it out, weighting the info and stats boosts on the other hand. Very interesting. But I found also some flaws. a) Ash is not too happy if you don't carry a doublehanded weapon. But more than two thirds of the possible avatars/backgrounds won't favour doublehanded. b) The changing of scolls of remove curse into curse scrolls by praying is completely hazard. My Summoner XL12 never(!) found any scrolls of curse armour nor got them by praying. That's not okay! 0.13 should offer you a choice which scrolls you want. Or at least give you the most missing/needed type. Why do I constantly get more scrolls of curse weapon when I've got five of them spare? c) And blowguns and rods should be made possible for Ashenzarists too. You can wield them with your shield hand. -- Bwijn 09:55, 31 May 2013 (CEST)

Under most circumstances, those curse scrolls are common enough that it's not a MAJOR issue. Admittedly it does make it very unwise to have a melee and a ranged weapon that you switch between, but there are several builds that are content with one. I'm not sure what you mean about Ash not liking one-handed weapons though; he gives equal piety for a cursed 1H or 2H weapon. But the few times I've made good progress with an Ash character, I've tried to stick to a single weapon the entire game and did pretty well that way. --MoogleDan 14:31, 31 May 2013 (CEST)

Well look it up: cursed doublehanded weapon grants "high" bonus instead of medium. That's what I pointed to. Quite a difference in advancing. True, best for an Ashenzarite is to find a decent high damage weapon early on and stick to it longtime. But if you don't find anything better than a short sword of speed (so as it happened to my KoSu XL12 while exploring up to D:11 and Lair:8) that must be sufficient. Provides a good compromise between a mere dagger for stabbing and a melee fighting weapon (supported by summoned ice beasts). And I actually found 11 scrolls of curse weapon (3 by praying), 4 curse jewellery and no curse armour at all! Just bad luck?? - Stupefied I am by what numbers of common Lair monsters (crocodiles, yaks, frogs, snakes) it takes in 0.12 to get very slowly nearer to XL13. -- Bwijn 17:34, 31 May 2013 (CEST)

Ohhhh, I understand. Yes, you get a smaller boost to your weapon skill for using a cursed 1H weapon than a cursed 2H. That's balanced, however, by the boost to your shields skill you get when wearing a cursed shield. As for the complete lack of curse armour, yeah, that's just very bad luck. All of those scrolls have equal odds of generating. --MoogleDan 18:46, 31 May 2013 (CEST)

buggy features of Ash 0.12

I've decided to explore Ash a bit. Two massive flaws I found up to now that the developers should correct.

• A) Draconians are constitutionally unable to wear body armour. But the Ash concept doesn't reflect that. My DrMo wears a cursed cap+2 and a cursed cloak of darkness+0 - all that he possibly can (shields are separate) - but the religios status display tells me: "You are not bound in armour." Clearly a bug! To be corrected ASAP, even before 0.13, because it seems not too complicated.
• B) The random number generator produces irritating results with reference to Ashenzari. To build up piety and get stats boosts you definitely need scrolls of curse (w,a,j). In several games I've observed that the game doesn't provide those scrolls in 0.12. Even the scrolls of uncurse which can be converted by praying have become much more rare than in former versions. You can nowadays easily achieve XL12 without finding the necessary scrolls to fulfil the Ash rules. Don't tell me that this could only happen extremely rare. Because it isn't that seldom. In three games now I've not found those scrolls in D:1-11 and Lair:1-3, sometimes one type of them missing completely, sometimes even all three.

While I can't explain B), A) is easy to explain - you forgot boots. --MoogleDan 15:29, 2 June 2013 (CEST)

You also missed gloves for A). As for the lack of curse scrolls, it's unusual to not find any for three games in a row, but I've had games where common items haven't shown up for quite a while. Curse scrolls also tend to be pretty rare in the early game, at least -- I've never paid attention to how common they are later on because I almost never worship Ashenzari, but I still run across them occasionally in the mid-to-late game. I think you can still put it down to bad luck -- if you keep not finding them over the course of your next twenty games, then I'd say it's a bug. --spudwalt 21:26, 2 June 2013 (CEST)

Okay hombres, in (A) cursed gloves and boots have missed indeed. I' ve even tested it now: one more cursed armour piece gives "partial bound" and two more gives "fully bound in armour" and the desireable stats boost in Dodging and Stealth. It's that *easy*. Nevertheless I'm not happy that cursing two armour components (which is not at all easy to get the scrolls for & reduces flexibility strongly) gives NOTHING - not even a feedback message of orientation. - Just by the way: I had no chance to wear gloves or shoes because I never found any piece up to Lair:4 (a plain gloves). I've seen hundreds of games even in 0.12 now and know quite well that a pair of gloves is *normally* not a rare finding.

Well, that's the quintessence: the random number generator (RNG) in 0.12 is producing level objects that hazardous that you can't reasonably advance with certain characters/gods like Ash. I'd really like to know if any RNG code fine tuning for 0.12 has caused those bottlenecks. -- Bwijn 13:44, 3 June 2013 (CEST)

What armours are light/medium/heavy now?

With EVP having been replaced with ER several versions ago, what armours count as what weight for Ash's skill boosts? Fambida (talk)

I've not code-dived, so can't provide exact parameters. OTOH (from game experience) it seems guessable: leather armor (incl. troll leather) and the lightest dragon armours (steam and mottled) are light weight; chain, plate and crystal plate are heavy as well as shadow, storm and gold dragon armours. The rest is medium. Hope I could be of some help. -- Bwijn (talk) 13:04, 21 July 2016 (CEST)

Code is [here]. I've added the info to the article.

GenericPseudonym (talk) 21:52, 21 July 2016 (CEST)

Thank you, GenericPseudonym, you did a good job! -- Bwijn (talk) 10:34, 22 July 2016 (CEST)

Skill boost calculation

Not sure the math on that example is accurate -- according to the Skill page, it takes 3,750 points to go from level 9 to level 14 (assuming 0 aptitude). Level 9 to Level 14 with three curses sounds accurate enough, though.

The actual calculation might be a few lines earlier in the code (line 767), but I don't know enough about how the game calculates things and what the variables mean to be sure. Maybe there's some sort of factor of 10(ish) somewhere, but heck if I know where it's coming from. --spudwalt (talk) 12:38, 6 August 2021 (CEST)