Early Game Character Building

Version 0.31: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

This guide gives general character building advice for the early game. Early game generally ends when you've reached the latest Ecumenical Temple spawn level, Dungeon level 7. However, many of these points still apply when taking on the later Dungeon and Lair.

Build a Basic Plan

This guide assumes that you are using manual skill training. Life gets much easier for characters who focus on just a few skills while getting started. You can press m to view your skills menu, and then use the / key to swap between automatic and manual.

Beginning

At the very start, focus on your primary killing skills. If you can't reliably kill things, a few extra turns of survival don't mean much. Melee accuracy and magic success rates are naturally low, and thus, important to raise.

For melee characters, this involves raising your weapon skill until it can kills your foes at a 'comfortable' rate. How much is comfortable?

• There is an important threshold at (base delay - 1.0) * 20 skill. This is the skill required to consistently swing at 1.0 turn, assuring you don't have a shield (as opposed to 1.1 or 1.5 turn). That's 6 skill for hand axes, 10 skill for war axes, etc.
• Your ultimate goal is to hit a weapon's minimum delay, i.e. where no more training can increase your swing speed. You can view this by selecting the weapon in the inventory. But, while it is certainly possible to only train your weapon until you hit mindelay, you may not want to do this. (Skills get more expensive as you level up; e.g. 10 -> 14 Axes could mean 0 -> 10 Fighting.)

For magic-based characters, this is getting the useful spells in your starting book to acceptably low - at least less than 10% - failure rates by training their respective spell schools. Depending on your class, it may require training towards a level 2 spell (like Scorch) or level 3 (such as Frozen Ramparts). More details below.

How much you want to micromanage it is up to you. You may want to keep your weapon skill as your only skill until you hit 1.0 delay.

Defenses

The most logical step after training offense, is to train your defense. Again, you'll want to reach 'comfortable' numbers in that field. But if your offense starts to become lacking again, remember to start training that again. If you aren't into micromanagement, you can just train both at the same time at this point.

First comes your HP. The Fighting skill is a must for any character; not only is the bonus to physical combat useful, but the extra HP is precious, especially for squishier caster types. After all, you don't want your Felid to get one-shot by an orc priest's Smiting. A regular character doesn't want to risk a two-shot, either. You probably don't want to risk melting to any other monster, really.

For those wearing light armour like robes or leather armour, your (next) primary defense is likely going to be Dodging, which contributes towards EV. For those in heavier armour like chain mail or plate mail, the Armour skill, which boosts your equipment's AC bonus, is more helpful. Read more below on which sets of body armour you should wear in the first place.

Shields provide an EV-like boost to your defenses, allowing you a chance to block some incoming attacks. Shields are especially useful for species with body armour issues like Trolls and Octopodes. For as long as you can still attack at a sane delay (< 1.0 deca-aut) or cast your spells at a reasonable rate (< 10% failure), you should be fine on all things shield related.

A note on hybrids

Even if you are aiming to be a "hybrid", don't try training both your magic and your melee at the same time. Having a single highly effective method of killing enemies is better than having two mediocre ones.

Auxiliary Skills

During the very early game, skills like Evocations won't be very useful. A strong wand, like a wand of paralysis, works well enough on D:3 with 0 Evocations. However, they are eventually worth investing into. However, characters a bit deeper in the Dungeon can afford to train it a little. Five (5) Evocations is enough for now -- save further investment for when you get your main offensive skill up and running.

Don't worry about Invocations early on. Most gods have 1* abilities that don't require much training to be reliably invoked.

A small amount of Throwing (~2 points) is perfectly fine at this stage to boost the accuracy of darts or the damage of blunt weapons. However, their relative scarcity makes them unable to pull weight on their own.

A little bit of Stealth (about 5-8 at first) is useful for any character currently wearing light armour, assuming you have a great aptitude for it. Species with low HP, like Vine Stalkers, Deep Elves, and Spriggans will especially benefit from being able to avoid fights with dangerous foes. Species with plain aptitudes can instead get 2-3 points, more so to avoid enemies than to take them down.

Stats

In addition to occasionally gaining stats as you level up, your character gets two stat points of your choice every 6 levels. Where you put these in the early game depends on your character and often your plans for their future. Stat zero will eventually be a valid concern for some starting character combinations, but you don't need to worry about it yet.

Strength

Strength increases most physical damage (everything not boosted by Dex) and alleviates some of the penalties of wearing armour. A strong choice for any physical attacker, especially those who (will) wear heavy armour.

Intelligence

Intelligence improves your spell success rate and spellpower. Spellcasters should almost always use their stat points to get more intelligence.

Dexterity

Dexterity improves a variety of defensive stats, like evasion, shields, and stealth. It also boosts the power of swords (Short Blades and Long Blades) and ranged weapons. For stabbers in particular, it'll improve your chances of landing a "stab" while unseen/unnoticed.

Gods

Main article: Choosing a god

Some backgrounds begin worshiping a god, but characters without one should consider who to initially worship.

Gods found on the earliest floors on the Dungeon -- D:2 and D:3 -- automatically deserve some merit. Worshipping an early god means you'll get more piety, which means you'll get a helpful ability earlier, which means you'll be more likely to survive.

But for simple choices, Okawaru is great for melee-focused characters, while Vehumet boosts the destructive potential of casters. The choosing a god article has much more detail on everyone else.

Skills by background

In the early game, preferred skills are directly based on the character's background, with a few variations due to species.

Warriors

Whether ranged or hand to hand, Warriors kill by using weapons or unarmed combat.

In order to deal as much damage as quickly as possible, all warriors should focus on training their primary weapon skill. As a rule of thumb, they should improve the weapon skill to at least 1.0 delay. After that, begin to branch out into Fighting, Throwing, Armour, or Shields depending on class and character design, but always leave weapon skill turned on during the early game.

It can be argued that you should delay your weapon training, in case you find a good weapon of another type. However, you want said skill threshold at a minimum, so you aren't stuck hitting monsters with a 0 skill weapon.

Zealots

Like the warrior classes, by far the main focus is to improve weapon skill. Cinder Acolytes can also invest a little in magic, but Scorch alone can only go so far.

Hybrids

Shapeshifters have more complex initial skilling than usual. They should start by training Unarmed Combat and later train Shapeshifting to gain access to Flux Form. However, with a great early weapon, it may be advisable to start training that weapon's skill instead.

Enchanters should train Hexes and a little Ice Magic to increase the effectiveness of Ensorcelled Hibernation and Confusing Touch. Once your Hexes have enough power to reliably mess up your enemies, you should pour some XP into Stealth and Short Blades.

Warpers and Hexslingers should focus on improving their weapon skill. The former can then invest in getting Blink reliably castable, while the latter can boost the spellpower of Slow and later Cause Fear with Hexes training.

Reavers should start by training their weapon skill, as they are essentially melee warriors with a few situational spells. However, if you find an early book with useful Conjurations spells (e.g. Book of Conjurations), it may be worthwhile to train for those spells.

Mages

For almost all mages, the actual Spellcasting skill is not particularly important in the early game. It is much more important to get your offensive spells running, so casters should turn off all skills other than the necessary magic schools. Use 'I' often to check how easily you can cast your important spells. After failure rates for your critical combat spells are less than 10%, branching out into spellcasting, defenses, and other magic schools becomes appropriate.

A small exception to this are spriggan spellcasters. Spriggans can use their considerable speed to escape almost anything in the early dungeon, so mere survival is not the necessarily first objective - consider Fighting to raise your measly HP.

• Hedge Wizards and Alchemists should focus on getting their low level attack spell(s) and Mephitic Cloud to <10% failure rates. Two or three points into out-of-the-way schools (Conjuration for Al, Alchemy for HW, Air for both) are useful. These classes, particularly Alchemists, may wish to branch into a weapon so they can kill confused low-level enemies more effectively.
  • Alchemist: Alchemy's early spells and skill levels are quite cheap, and are often worth it for their boost for survival and early game offense. Sting conserves more MP early on, but Mercury Vapours' smite-targeted weakening effect becomes more useful as you gain more MP.
• Conjurers can focus almost entirely on Conjurations. Searing Ray gives you good killing power in the early game and works wonders in corridors; packs of jackals, gnolls or orcs will succumb to it quickly. The Alchemy skill is also used for Fulminant Prism, which deals great damage to nearby monsters after 20 auts.
• Fire Elementalists want to get Scorch up very quickly -- Foxfire lacks effectiveness in the many, many hallways of the dungeon. Then, your next (and lesser) priority should be to get to Flame Wave.
• Earth Elementalists should, in a similar vein, get Stone Arrow for a quick-casting attack spell. Sandblast deals good damage, but its slow attack speed is an issue with stronger monsters.
• Ice Elementalists should try and get Frozen Ramparts, which deals high and 100% accurate passive damage, as soon as possible.
• Summoners hit another key level 3 spell with Call Canine Familiar.
• Air Elementalists are fine with their level 1 and 2 spells, offensively. However, both Swiftness and Airstrike will be useful to have later down the road.
• Necromancers can focus on their spells, though they have a shorter shelf life than most. If the character wants to dabble in melee, branch out to a weapon skill. If you (plan to) worship Kiku, Short Blades are good option, recieving the most benefit from the pain brand. Otherwise, Polearms can reach through your undead slaves, while a staff of death can justify investing into Staves.

Adventurer

Artificers should focus on a weapon they find (a club is not worth training for), as their wands will have respectable power against early Dungeon monsters even at their starting Evocations skill.

Wanderers should wing it. Take a look at your early possessions and try to make a plan based on what you've got available.

Delvers can either focus on Stealth, until they make it up to D:2, or just start by focusing on a weapon.

Weapons

In the early dungeon, most characters will find wielding a one-handed weapon with good accuracy to be more effective than trying to hit anything with a large, but slow weapon. Daggers and whips often have good brands on them, while slings are universally effective in the hands of any character that can find them.

Once you have started training a particular weapon skill, you should usually favour weapons of that skill unless you find something incredible that makes the switch pay off.

Armour

Spell-using characters should avoid wearing anything heavier than leather in the early game. Ring mail and bucklers may seem dandy, but in the early game, the greatest defense is killing your foe reliably and fast. Once you can cast your spells more reliably, you can consider upgrading to somewhat heavier armour.

Melee builds are typically spell-less right now, and should equip the heaviest armour and shield they can wear without seriously affecting their damage output.