by Ultraviolent4 and hellmonk
Difficulty: Advanced
UV4 SpCj of Qaz Full Playlist
hm SpEn of Qaz Part 1 / Part 2
Posted: August 8, 2018
Crawl Version: 0.22
This combo is bad.
If you'd like to play a Spriggan Enchanter "properly", refer to elliptic's immortal SpEn guide.
Don’t. You really shouldn’t do this.
If you insist, it’s probably because you’d like to do something silly and out of the ordinary.
Qazlal causes a ton of noise all the time, which will pull a lot of the level to your position. This is a huge drawback much of the time and is contrary to the natural playstyle of Spriggans who excel at being sneaky. A combo like Hill Orc or Demonspawn Fighter of Qaz can try to mitigate being swarmed by being tanky and stairdancing a lot.
Spriggan combos mostly try to deal with the noise by being really, really fast.
UV4: Don’t even think about playing a non-Beogh Hill Orc, you heathen.
Pros of Spriggan:
Cons of Spriggan:
Passives:
Actives:
Big Disaster Area Takeaways:
Spriggans are very flexible. How you build them should depend on what you find in the Dungeon and your own personal preferences. You can see this by looking at the 2 winning morgue files of hellmonk and Ultraviolent4:
One thing is constant, though: as a Spriggan of Qazlal, you want as much Invocations skill as you can afford. Somewhere in the realm of 18 to 20 sounds about right.
Dodging is also always very strong on Spriggans due to the +4 aptitude.
Fighting and Armour depends a bit on your personal preferences. Looking at the morgues:
Spriggans have a unique experience with the food clock because they naturally hunger less due to a slow metabolism but they can’t butcher and eat corpses. As such, they depend on the Dungeon to provide rations. Note, however, that these rations only provide 55% as much nutrition for Spriggans as they do for regular characters. The result of all this is that Spriggans feel the effects of spell hunger more than any other species. While starvation shouldn’t actually happen unless you mess up pretty badly, you do need to keep a bit of an eye on your food situation. If, somehow, you are about to starve, it’s possible to convert to Gozag then fund a food shop.
Train enough Spellcasting to not starve. Your spells don’t all have to all be hungerless but you don’t want them making you extremely hungry every fight. A Spriggan’s +2 Spellcasting aptitude is really good anyway, so you usually want to train a decent amount for spellpower and success, not to mention spell slots.
Kite. Any tool with range such as a polearm, sling, conjuration, etc. will effectively give you infinite turns to kill an enemy. And, if the enemy has no range itself to retaliate, you shouldn’t ever take damage in return. A special mention is given to crossbows: while Spriggans are restricted from most large weapons because of their small size, all crossbows can be used. With a +0 aptitude in Crossbows, an arbalest-using Spriggan of Qalzal sounds reasonable if you can manage to find enough bolts.
Keep an eye out for bucklers. While the -3 Shields aptitude isn’t great, a buckler can help with resistances or AC if you’re lucky enough to find a buckler of protection. A buckler is also nice with the bonus SH from Qazlal and will make you more survivable if you’re forced to stairdance due to all the noise.
Try to find spells that use Hexes. Your +2 aptitude makes them very viable. Also, Confusion, Cause Fear, and Summon Mana Viper are overpowered.
While summons have anti-synergy with Qazlal since they’re not immune to your clouds, the best summoning spells such as Summon Lightning Spire and Summon Mana Viper are so strong that they could still be worth it.
The +4 Translocations aptitude means that Controlled Blink might actually be a viable option for a 3-Rune game. If you do manage to get this spell online, it represents a very large survivability increase (at least until you get to Zot, where the spell becomes an overpriced and uncontrolled Blink).
Train lots of Stealth because you have a +5 aptitude which is tied for the biggest in the whole game. JUST KIDDING LOL - the amount of noise you make with Qazlal will wake everything up. You can train Stealth if your plan is to confuse/invis/distraction stab things, since it gives you better stab damage. It’s not a “defensive skill” with Qaz, though.
Spriggans are normally very good at doing Abyss due to their fast speed and stealth. This isn’t true with Qazlal because your noise will constantly pull the infinite hordes of monsters to you. Do not go there.
Either Vaults 5 or the Slime Pits works fine. Disaster Area is strong at the Vaults 5 stairs and against the Royal Jelly (and you can mix in a scroll of immolation for maximum explosions).
If you’re doing Vaults 5, you can use Upheaval to snipe Vault Wardens who try to lock you in.
Know what things are faster than you because they’re especially dangerous. Special mention goes to killer bees, black mambas and shrikes.
Also know what things can one-shot or almost one-shot you. A max-damage Lehudib’s Crystal Spear from an ancient lich can do 144 damage, for example. Where possible, stay out of range of those spells or monsters.
Spirit shield on a spriggan with a lot of Spellcasting investment is like having a robust 4 mutation (+40% HP). Even if you’re dumping a lot of MP every fight, you’re still getting a significant survivability increase. Faith is also an extremely good amulet with Qazlal as it allows you to spam your god abilities.
hm: If I didn’t have either of those I would use acrobat or maybe reflection or rage. I guess this is just my standard amulet advice lol.
UV4: I especially like how reflection gives you extra value with the bonus SH from Qaz :D
You can kill things passively with your Qaz clouds. Rather than using . to wait a turn (and risk the monster moving and then hitting you with random energy), you can perform a fast action such as wielding and unwielding a weapon.
hm: Or you can just kite it lol.
UV4: But what if it’s a ghost moth and an entropy weaver so you have no MP and -32 slaying?! What then?!
About the Authors:
Ultraviolent4 loves Beogh, round numbers and helping noobs. In case you haven't noticed, he runs this site. You can find Ultraviolent4's DCSS Let's Plays on YouTube.