User:Bluescreenofdeath/Skills

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SLASH'EM Extended adds a whole bunch of new skills to the game. This page attempts to explain what they do.

  • High heels improves the player's AC, charisma and kick damage when wearing high heels, and adds speed boosts at Master. If the player is restricted in this skill, wearing any high-heeled footwear will have a negative effect depending on the type of heel!
  • General combat improves to-hit and to-damage with all melee weapons and also reduces the risk of the weapon dulling on hit.
  • Shield improves AC bonuses and chance to block when a shield is equipped, and reduces the spellcasting chance penalty when wearing a shield. At Expert or higher, the player's hands will not become unuseable if both the weapon and shield are cursed.
  • Body armor improves AC bonuses depending on how many armor pieces are worn, and reduces the spellcasting chance penalty when wearing metallic armor pieces. This skill also reduces the risk of armor pieces dulling when they deflect an attack.
  • Two-handed weapons improves the damage of two-handed weapons (battle-axe, quarterstaff etc.). At Expert or higher, the player's hands will not become unuseable if a cursed two-handed weapon is equipped.
  • Polymorphing is strictly for self-polymorphing only. It affects duration of the player's polymorph, reduces the risk of breaking armor when polymorphing into something large, increases damage of the polymorphed form's attacks, makes it more likely for the player to take "difficult" forms with polymorph control, and more. Trained only by actually polymorphing into a monster. This skill has no effect on player's attempts to polymorph items or monsters.
  • Devices reduces the odds that a chargeable item (wands, spellbooks, certain tools) loses a charge when used. This skill does nothing on very powerful items like the wand of wishing, but it will come in handy for e.g. wands of death because the player will get more uses out of them on average.
  • Searching increases the chance that the player finds something when using the 's'earch command. This skill is especially useful if the player also has the autosearching in/extrinsic, because it also increases the chance that autosearching finds something.
  • Spirituality makes the prayer timeout faster, i.e. with higher skill the player may pray more often. It also governs saving throw granted from magic cancellation: at Unskilled, MC3 only offers 75% protection from e.g. disenchantment attacks, with every skill point adding 3% chance. Refer to [[1]] for more details.
  • Petkeeping increases the damage output of pets and their healing rate, makes them more resistant to untaming effects, and allows them to follow the player to other levels even when not directly adjacent, with the radius depending on skill level. If the pet isn't directly adjacent, there is a y/n question whether the player really wants to take the pet along, to ensure that higher skill levels don't arbitrarily make it harder to leave unwanted pets behind.
  • Missile weapons increases to-hit and multishot bonuses with all projectile weapons, and for those where the projectiles have a chance of breaking (mulching), higher skill reduces the mulching rate.
  • Techniques speeds up the timeout of all techniques, allowing them to be used more often.
  • Implants is a complicated skill that makes it easier for the player to handle the SLEX-specific "implants" item class. This skill is mainly for handicapped races who get big boosts from implants. Higher skill adds AC bonuses when an implant is worn but more importantly allows the player to take off implants (which is just flat out impossible when unskilled or restricted), and makes it gradually more likely for implants to self-identify when equipped.
  • Sexy flats improves the player's AC and makes stun and dimness time out more quickly when wearing shoes that count as sexy flats.
  • Memorization allows the player to gain additional spell memory when reading a spellbook, and also makes spell memory decrease at a slower rate. This is normally always beneficial, so the player will normally always want to answer 'y' on the prompt whether they want to use memorization to gain additional spell stock; the only exception is if the player specifically wants to forget a spell as quickly as possible (maybe because they want to have a forgotten spell for the confusion on demand). By hitting + to open the spell menu, the player can use the ? key repeatedly to go to "memorization mode": by default, all spells will benefit from the memorization skill. Memorization mode allows the player to dememorize a spell, which will cause a - to appear next to the spell level; the spell in question will not benefit from the skill and be forgotten more quickly. Selecting a dememorized spell again will put it back to memorization mode. There is no limit to the amount of spells that can be memorized, so the general rule of thumb is that the player should have all spells memorized, always, except maybe one spell dedicated to be the one that will become a forgotten spell. The memorization skill level determines how much extra spell memory is given when learning a new spell, and the factor by which spell memory decay is decreased. Refer to [[2]] for a long explanation that also shows how to use the new spell menu.
  • Two-weapon combat is the dual-wielding skill, which was renamed to (hopefully) remove confusion with the new "two-handed weapons" skill. At Expert, the player's off-hand weapon will not drop if it gets cursed, but can still be dropped manually if the player wants to do so.
  • Occult spells is a spell school skill; all spells from this school have a chance of backfiring when cast. Higher skill makes such backfire incidents less likely.
  • Elemental spells is a spell school skill; spells from this school generally take a lot of reading time to learn.
  • Chaos spells is a spell school skill; spells from this school are harder to cast than the ones from other schools, especially high-level ones, so the player may need a lot of skill to be able to cast them.
  • Shii-Cho increases damage with lit lightsabers.
  • Makashi increases damage with lit one-handed lightsabers if the player's other hand is empty.
  • Soresu increases AC bonuses if a robe is worn while a lit lightsaber is equipped.
  • Ataru increases damage when dual-wielding two lit lightsabers.
  • Shien increases the chance of blocking with a lit lightsaber.
  • Djem So increases the damage of thrown lit lightsabers, done by using 't'hrow and selecting the equipped lightsaber (because putting it into the quiver will unlit it, making the skill do nothing) and also improves the chance that the saber comes back to the player's hand after hitting.
  • Niman increases the player's chance to successfully cast a spell while a lit lightsaber is equipped.
  • Juyo increases the chance that a lit lightsaber will cut through an enemy's weapon.
  • Vaapad increases damage with double lightsabers that have both blades lit.
  • Wedi increases the damage a player's lightsaber does with the #force command, and also improves digging speed when using #force at a wall with the lit lightsaber.

Magic cancellation

MC Restricted/Unskilled Basic Skilled Expert Master Grand Master
0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 33 33 33 33 33 33
2 66 66 66 66 66 66
3 75 78 81 84 87 90
4 81,25 83,5 85,75 88 90,25 92,5
5 85 86,8 88,6 90,4 92,2 94
6 87,5 89 90,5 92 93,5 95
7 89,29 90,57 91,86 93,14 94,43 95,71
8 90,63 91,75 92,88 94 95,13 96,25
9 91,67 92,67 93,67 94,67 95,67 96,67
10 92,5 93,4 94,3 95,2 96,1 97
11 93,18 94 94,81 95,64 96,45 97,27

Memorization

The following menu appears when pressing Z to zap a spell.

     Name               Level     Category  Fail  Memory
 a - healing                1 -    healing    0%   78%
 b - detect monsters        4 -     divine    0%  311%
 c - extra healing          3      healing    0%  253%
 d - full healing           6      healing    0%  103%
 e - nerve poison           1*-  elemental    0%    0%
 f - protection             1      protect    0%  162%
 g - light                  1 -     divine    0%   36%
 h - cure hallucination     3 -    healing    0%   51%
 i - endure cold            2 -    protect    0%   80%
 j - slow monster           2 -    enchant    0%   80%
 k - magic missile          3       attack    0%  295%
 l - cutting                1 -       body    0%  116%

Above: an impractical example. Only extra healing, full healing, protection and magic missile will benefit from the player's memorization skill here. The player should probably hit + to open the spell menu where it's possible to hit ? to switch between swap mode (default), description mode, and memorization mode. The sequence +?? should make the screen look like this:

 Choose a spell to (de-)memorize
     Name               Level     Category  Fail  Memory
 a - healing                1 -    healing    0%   78%
 b - detect monsters        4 -     divine    0%  311%
 c - extra healing          3      healing    0%  253%
 d - full healing           6      healing    0%  103%
 e - nerve poison           1*-  elemental    0%    0%
 f - protection             1      protect    0%  162%
 g - light                  1 -     divine    0%   36%
 h - cure hallucination     3 -    healing    0%   51%
 i - endure cold            2 -    protect    0%   80%
 j - slow monster           2 -    enchant    0%   80%
 k - magic missile          3       attack    0%  295%
 l - cutting                1 -       body    0%  116%
 ? - View spells instead

This is the memorization menu, indicated by the text "Choose a spell to (de-)memorize". Selecting a spell here will switch memorization mode on and off. If a - glyph is displayed near the spell level, it means the spell memory will decay at the regular rate, regardless of memorization skill. If no - glyph is present, the spell is on memorization mode and its spell memory will decay more slowly, depending on how much memorization skill the player has. Generally a player will not want to forget their spells, so ALL spells should be set to memorization mode; dememorizing should be used only if the player wants to forget a spell for some obscure reason! In the above example, there already is a forgotten spell (nerve poison); there is literally no benefit for having more than one forgotten spell, so we'll assume that the player wants to keep all the remaining spells in memory for as long as possible. So, the player should hit the following keys: a, b, g, h, i, j and l, to put all of those spells back to memorization mode and thereby make them benefit from the skill. Afterwards, the menu should look like this:

     Name               Level     Category  Fail  Memory
 a - healing                1      healing    0%   78%
 b - detect monsters        4       divine    0%  311%
 c - extra healing          3      healing    0%  253%
 d - full healing           6      healing    0%  103%
 e - nerve poison           1*-  elemental    0%    0%
 f - protection             1      protect    0%  162%
 g - light                  1       divine    0%   36%
 h - cure hallucination     3      healing    0%   51%
 i - endure cold            2      protect    0%   80%
 j - slow monster           2      enchant    0%   80%
 k - magic missile          3       attack    0%  295%
 l - cutting                1         body    0%  116%

That way, all spells will benefit from the memorization skill (except nerve poison, for which it doesn't matter as it's forgotten anyway). Setting the "cutting" spell to memorization mode is debatable since that spell has a mostly negative effect; such spells carry the risk of the player typoing and accidentally casting them, with dire consequences depending on what the spell is, but in the above example it's also the only body spell available to the player so they may want to be able to cast it anyway to train body spell skill, which would again be an argument for memorizing it.

Take note that changing whether a spell is being memorized or not can be done at any time, and will affect how quickly the remaining spell memory will run out over time. Again, there is no downside for memorizing every spell - the reduction in memory decay rate is constant as long as your memorization skill level doesn't change. At unskilled/restricted, the rate of spell memory decay is 100%, and is reduced by 10% per skill point, so with basic skill, all spells will lose their spell memory at 90% of the normal rate - but only the ones that are on memorization mode. Dememorizing a spell will just make it decay at 100% of the normal rate again, so don't do that unless you want to forget the spell as quickly as possible :)

When learning a spell, the question whether it should be memorized will also automatically set the spell to memorization mode if the player answered "yes, memorize the spell", and to dememorize mode (indicated by the - glyph) if the player answered no, but of course there's nothing preventing the player from using the menu to change the setting again.

TL/DR: Always memorize all the spells; access the memorization mode by the +?? key combination and then make sure that no - glyphs show up next to any of the spell levels. If you want a forgotten spell, pick exactly ONE spell and set that to dememorization mode (indicated by the - glyph). Then that one spell will be forgotten quickly while all the spells that you actually use are kept in memory for a longer time.