Role difficulty
Role difficulty is the general difficulty of being able to successfully ascend with the various roles. It has been demonstrated that every role is ascendable, but opinions vary as to which roles are the easiest and hardest to ascend.
Contents
Starting Difficulty Versus Ascension Difficulty
Usually when people talk about class difficulty they are mainly referring to the beginning of the game. This is because the early game is by far the hardest part of the game, to the point where you could argue that starting difficulty is the only factor that matters.
However some classes have advantages over other classes in the late game in spite of having a lot of advantages in the early game.
For example, barbarians start with poison resistance, which allows them to eat poisonous monster corpses and protects against instadeath from poisoned arrows and spikes, common causes of death for early-game players. However, tourists have a number of advantages over barbarians. Their quest artifact is vastly more useful than the barbarian's, because of blessed charging on-demand, and eventually get a good enough weapon and armour to match a barbarian's.
Starting Advantages
- High Strength and Constitution
- Good starting equipment
- Access to good ranged attacks (especially daggers)
- Good starting intrinsics (especially poison resistance and speed)
- Access to strong artifact earlygame
Ascension Advantages
- Good Quest Artifact
- High maximum statistics (determined by race)
- Good acquired intrinsics (for example wizards gain warning and teleport control at high levels)
- Access to useful weapon and magic skills
- Good artifacts available by sacrificing
- Starting with highly enchanted or hard to find equipment
Roles' Difficulty Levels
Most agree that valkyries and barbarians are the easiest classes - possibly followed by samurai - due to the strong physical combat options presented by the roles from the very beginning (arguably minimising the amount of strategy necessary). Barbarians have the advantage of poison resistance at the start of the game (as do orcs), and Valkyries have the advantage of some easy access to early artifacts (Excalibur and Mjollnir), an easy quest with an excellent quest artifact (the Orb of Fate) plus intrinsic cold resistance. It is notable that Valkyries cannot be Chaotic, and Barbarians cannot be Lawful. However these classes are similar, and strong options for beginners - some suggest that a beginner should play as a Barbarian until they learn which corpses are and aren't poisonous, and then switch to Valkyries for the cold resistance and artifacts.
Samurai start the game with powerful physical combat capabilities (both melee and missile), but have fewer advantages as the game enters the middle phase. In particular, their quest is riskier than either the Valkyrie's or Barbarian's. The luck of the draw (finding a longsword to dip for Excalibur or an altar for sacrifices) has a big impact on how easy it is to manage this phase of the game. Their starting speed intrinsic is also less useful than the Barbarian's poison resistance.
Wizards are usually easy due to their good starting equipment (for this reason, wizards are often start scummed) and powerful late game (thanks to e.g. magic missile and finger of death). They also have potential to cast spells with no hunger penalty, and easy access to Magicbane. Those that attempt to play them as physical combat characters will, however, find them difficult due to their bad starting attributes.
The priest's innate ability to detect the BUC status of an item can be a tremendous advantage, starting out, but they are restricted in all edged weapons and cannot advance any ranged weapons past basic, meaning their weapon choice will be very poor later on.
The knight's codes of conduct can be cumbersome, though the penalty for breaking them (1 point of alignment) is minor, unless you are roleplaying or playing a pacifist.
Rangers and rogues can either be difficult or easy, depending on how capable one is of making use of their powerful ranged weapons (especially in the early game).
Cavemen can be considered a more difficult version of barbarians.
Monks are a unique class whose early game is relatively easy compared to its tricky midgame, mostly due to Master Kaen and armor and weapon penalties.
Healers start with poison resistance, and are the class best-equipped to attempt the Protection racket, which can give them a good defensive boost early in the game.
Archeologists have the advantages of starting with speed and stealth, and have early access to a good weapon -- the dwarvish mattock. Starting with a pick-axe (for digging out vaults or gems embedded in rock) and the ability to identify precious gems, they are also well-suited for the Protection racket.
The Tourist's best early-game advantage is their starting stack of +2 darts, which are good ranged weapons for the early game and can be poisoned; their expensive camera is also useful for evading non-Elbereth respecting monsters. Tourists, while very weak to start, enjoy a lot of advantages which make them arguably one of the stronger classes in the endgame--they have access to a large number of weapons, they start with a Hawaiian shirt which can be enchanted for extra AC later in the game, and their Quest Artifact, the Platinum Yendorian Express Card, is one of the best artifacts in the game.
Role Difficulty Chart
This chart is a rough ranking of the roles from easiest to hardest. This chart is subjective.
| Rank | Role |
|---|---|
| 1 | Valkyrie |
| 2 | Knight |
| 3 | Samurai |
| 4 | Caveman |
| 5 | Barbarian |
| 6 | Wizard |
| 7 | Rogue |
| 8 | Ranger |
| 9 | Tourist |
| 10 | Monk |
| 11 | Priest |
| 12 | Healer |
| 13 | Archeologist |
SLASH'EM Roles
SLASH'EM has several new roles with varying levels of difficulty. Also, some of the original classes may be more or less difficult in SLASH'EM than in vanilla NetHack.
