Best way to level?

[Stridey]

I posted this on reddit.

--

I'm playing this classic again. I'm looking for and tips on the best way to level

Fighter skills: Is XP award on the amount of damage you do with a weapon or the amount of times you swing it, is it better to swing or chop?

Ninja skills: I'll be punching screamers at the screamer generator, any better ideas?

Priest: I started by casting stamina/health potions and will move onto shield/fireshield, Any other suggestions?

Wizard skills: Lots of fireballs. Any suggestions?

Any other levelling tips?

Last question. I'm at the screamer generator. I've always used that for levelling, but I was reading up about the rat generator (level 8?) and I was thinking of moving there ASAP because the XP should be better. Your thoughts?

I'm in no hurry to complete the game, it's all about levelling at this point.

Any other suggestions?

[ChristopheF]

Have a look here for information about how experience works: http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/692 (and also http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/691)
Tips here: http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/222#toc15

[Saumun]

What are you using to play it?
Original disks? emulated? CSBwin/DSB/RTC?

I ask because RTC doesn’t have an Xp multiplier, so going to a lower level of the dungeon wouldn’t make a difference.
Pretty sure the multiplier works for everything else though.

[Ameena]

I don't really bother with that kind of grind-training 'cause I can't be arsed. But I know you get Fighter exp for hitting anything and for being hit (I don't think attack type matters) - I've gained a Fighter level from walking into a wall, so it doesn't matter what it is that hits you as long as its damage is physical .
Ninja exp you can get from throwing stuff - I tend to utterly neglect this skill till I'm way down on like, Level Nine or something, and then have each character chuck a chest repeatedly until I have to actually move to pick it up (about Journeyman level) and then switch to the next character .
Wizzy and Priest exp you get from casting or being hit by the appropriate spells - I'm sure I've gained Wizzy levels from being hit by Fireballs in the past now, similar to gaining Fighter levels from walking into walls/being clonked on the head by a door.
For actual specific numbers, check oout the Encyclopaedia links provided by Gambit - that site is probably the best resource for any of the actual mechanics of the game .
Oh, also, welcome to the forum!

[ChristopheF]

It is true that you get experience for being hit by creatures. But you do not get any experience by bumping into walls, I checked in the source code (I'm talking about original versions of DM/CSB only, maybe that is different in some clones).

[MasterWuuf]

If all you're really interested in is leveling up as fast as possible?

Find the stairway that runs all the way down to the bottom floor.
Go to the bottom, close to the winged-keyhole.

From there, unless this is untrue on a version I have not played, leveling up is fast and pain-free.

The vorpal blade can be used, time after time, to up your wizard levels too.

I used this option to get my first character to Arch-Master in all four skills, with no firestaff in hand.

[Ameena]

Hmm, I'm not sure which version I was in when I levelled up from wall-bumping. The only clones I've played are RTC and CSBWin but I can't remember which of those it would've been. Maybe RTC, then, since that's not entirely "correct" to the original?

[Stridey]

Have a look here for information about how experience works: http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/692 (and also http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/691)
Tips here: http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/222#toc15

Ah bugger, I skimmed these articles too quickly, thanks.

[Stridey]

What are you using to play it?
Original disks? emulated? CSBwin/DSB/RTC?

I ask because RTC doesn’t have an Xp multiplier, so going to a lower level of the dungeon wouldn’t make a difference.
Pretty sure the multiplier works for everything else though.

I'm playing emulated Dosbox, I don't know if that answers your question.

[Stridey]

I don't really bother with that kind of grind-training 'cause I can't be arsed. But I know you get Fighter exp for hitting anything and for being hit (I don't think attack type matters) - I've gained a Fighter level from walking into a wall, so it doesn't matter what it is that hits you as long as its damage is physical .
Ninja exp you can get from throwing stuff - I tend to utterly neglect this skill till I'm way down on like, Level Nine or something, and then have each character chuck a chest repeatedly until I have to actually move to pick it up (about Journeyman level) and then switch to the next character .
Wizzy and Priest exp you get from casting or being hit by the appropriate spells - I'm sure I've gained Wizzy levels from being hit by Fireballs in the past now, similar to gaining Fighter levels from walking into walls/being clonked on the head by a door.
For actual specific numbers, check oout the Encyclopaedia links provided by Gambit - that site is probably the best resource for any of the actual mechanics of the game .
Oh, also, welcome to the forum!

Thanks for the welcome

[Stridey]

If all you're really interested in is leveling up as fast as possible?

Find the stairway that runs all the way down to the bottom floor.
Go to the bottom, close to the winged-keyhole.

From there, unless this is untrue on a version I have not played, leveling up is fast and pain-free.

The vorpal blade can be used, time after time, to up your wizard levels too.

I used this option to get my first character to Arch-Master in all four skills, with no firestaff in hand.

Not 100% sure what you mean because I don't have that level 'opened up' yet

[MasterWuuf]

If you're working near the 'screamer regen' room level, you'll have a few more levels to get to the place I mentioned.
It's been awhile, but I think you have about three more levels to get there. You'll find it in a great area, with a large, open area with a few 'friendly' creatures and some awe-inspiring special spells just 'floating around' the place to make you wish you had a good pair of sunglasses to make your adventuring more pleasurable.

All in all, I've always found that section ahead of you, to be one of the more interesting sections of DM. Good memories, to be sure. An area I would encourage anyone to check out. Have fun.

[Ameena]

The initial entrance to that stairwell is on Level Eight, if I recall, but you'd have a problem just going straight down it because as far as I remember, the entrances can't be opened from within the stairwell itself - the locks are on the outside, plus you'd need to search each of the levels for a Skeleton Key. So it's probably best to just continue as usual and if you really want to train, it sounds like actually staying at the Screamer Room (if you can find whichever invisible trigger it is that respawns it) might be worth doing if the exp doesn't actually increase as you go deeper.

[MasterWuuf]

I believe your experience bonuses go up, the lower the level of the dungeon, so the 'stairway to the bottom' I mentioned should make a difference. This is the stairway that has a scroll on one level that says something like, "The only way out is another way in" or something close to that.

If anyone knows for sure, please clarify if the experience of using the four classes is increased by going to a lower floor.

P.S. I believe the experience gets higher, the lower the levels, but even if it gave the same experience bonuses, the place I'm mentioning is a 'safe' place, other than the obvious need to occasionally sleep, eat and drink.

[slickrcbd]

Thing is, you get significantly more experience in combat (when a creature is in an adjacent square) than on your own. Otherwise, for solo training in a safe place, yeah, going from level 8 (The Void) right to the bottom of level 14 via the central staircase is probably the best place to train solo. You can't enter the level proper without the winged key, and therefore the dragon can't hurt you. You can throw stuff to your hearts content or use the rope to "climb down" (although IIRC the latter uses 4 stamina each use) to gain ninja levels. Swing your weapons at empty air to work on fighter levels. Cast spells that won't kill you if they hit the wall (try the light and darkness spells for wizard, along with the invisibility/confusion spell). I can't recall if there is enough room to practice fireballs, lightning bolts and poison clouds, but poison bolts, harm non-material, light, darkness, and invisibility all work.
Master the fireshield spell for priests.

One tip I found was that when wasting mana for practice is to try to get it so you can cast every spell in the game at MON level reliably, it seemed to level up faster than just focusing on what you use all the time like fireball and VI potions.

That said, I'm not convinced practicing by yourself on level 14 is not more efficient than battling pain rats on level 9 using a variety of tactics.
Kill them with lightning bolts, stab them with daggers (using daggers advances ninja levels instead of fighter levels. I believe stabbing with arrows or poison darts does the same), punch and kick them, use all those less used weapons and spells. They WILL retreat from poison clouds, but not as fast as some monsters so casting that spell can be worth it while working on ninja levels. If you get too low on health and mana, close the door, retreat and rest. You've got plenty of food killing pain rats, so rest and eat some drumsticks (unless you've still got worm rounds or screamer slices, in that order). There's a fountain nearby, so don't worry about food and water. Just chow down on drumsticks.

[MasterWuuf]

One tip I found was that when wasting mana for practice is to try to get it so you can cast every spell in the game at MON level reliably, it seemed to level up faster than just focusing on what you use all the time like fireball and VI potions.

That said, I'm not convinced practicing by yourself on level 14 is not more efficient than battling pain rats on level 9 using a variety of tactics.

Using the level 14 spot to 'up' your ability to cast high-level spells is a good use of this option.

Using the Vorpal Blade for the wizardry/sorcery levels does not cost mana, so no waiting time for the mana to be restored.

In regard to the unlimited supply of rats on level 9: You still have to go somewhere else to wait for them to regenerate, which took a great deal of time (in my opinion). Fun to blast them, or chop them, to bits. But the level 14 option allows a person to hammer away on the experience, with only occasionally napping and running back upstairs for food or water.

[Paul Stevens]

You still have to go somewhere else to wait for them to regenerate, which took a great deal of time (in my opinion)

There are two rat generators on level 8 (base 0).
One regenerates every 21 seconds and the other
every 246 seconds.

[slickrcbd]

Using the level 14 spot to 'up' your ability to cast high-level spells is a good use of this option.

Using the Vorpal Blade for the wizardry/sorcery levels does not cost mana, so no waiting time for the mana to be restored.

In regard to the unlimited supply of rats on level 9: You still have to go somewhere else to wait for them to regenerate, which took a great deal of time (in my opinion). Fun to blast them, or chop them, to bits. But the level 14 option allows a person to hammer away on the experience, with only occasionally napping and running back upstairs for food or water.

In regards to the Vorpal Blade, it takes a while between each use of "disrupt", one of the slower options especially compared to "jab" or even "cleave".

As for pain rats, perhaps the thing to do is to empty the rat room and completely fill your inventory with drumsticks, go have a drink and fill up your waterskins plus four flasks, then go down to the basement to practice some more. Use up all your water (you should have plenty of drumsticks for food, though you should eat any worm rounds or screamer slices first since drumsticks give more food for the same or less weight), then go back up and deal with the pain rats.

Also, as I said, when stocking up on drumsticks you should use some of the lessor used abilities and tactics. Equip your champions with daggers and stab or slash the pain rats to death to gain a ninja level, then kill the next pair barehanded with only a shield in your off hand. Cast other spells besides fireball. Try out YA IR and YA BRO when working on those ninja levels.
Kill some with lightning bolts since I rarely use that on anything but animated armor (stone golems I tend to use YA BRO or YA IR and punch them to death, retreating to drink VI potion when they land a hit since each hit is usually devestating) and use poison bolts if you don't use that very often.
When working on those ninja levels, cast a poison cloud as well. Also have your rear ranks brandish a staff or blow the Horn of Fear. Pain rats are fearless (but they will retreat from EE or higher level poison clouds) but you still get priestly experience. Heck, when working on barehanded ninja skills have the rear ranks use war cry.
I don't mention fighter skills because that is something I tend to level up practically automatically and find the other skills lagging, especially ninja. Which is odd since I tend to fight mummies and trollins with thrown items and missile attacks almost exclusively on the early levels, and while I do use fireballs and poison bolts respectively on later levels, I tend to still use ranged on a variety of things, especially skeletons (although wasps and wizard eyes seem virtually immune).

[Phoenix]

If you look at the stats, fireball gives the most xp for wizard. I like to train ninja and priest at the same time once I get a rope. The 'climb down' for the rope give the best ninja xp, but it depleats your stamina. Have the other champions create stamina potions and they will level up in priest while you train your ninja.

Stamina potions are the most efficient use of mana for priest, and you don't even need a flask. Take a neophyte priest without a flask and cast LO YA. It will say that you need a flask, but if you keep trying it will fail with the message that you need more practice. Repeat until you only get the message about needing a flask. At that point, increase the power rune by one (UM YA). When you cast the spell again, you will immediately level in preist. This can be repeated until MON YA at which point you will need a flask.

DM is a little harder if your party has less than four champions, but you level faster with one or two since the xp is not divided between four champions. All training requires a good amount of food and water.

The bottom two levels of DM have the highest level multiplier of 6.

[slickrcbd]

As I said, there are multiple subskills in the Fighter/Priest/Ninja/Wizard skills, so training a variety of stuff helps level faster. I'm not saying to use all that stuff, just when you are grinding (which I rarely do save for clearing out the Screamer Store on level 4 using lessor attacks like daggers and lightning bolts, once before killing the mummy, and then again before descending to level 6 to restock on food. I also clear out the pain rat room whenever I return to level 9 for water)

[Phoenix]

As I said, there are multiple subskills in the Fighter/Priest/Ninja/Wizard skills, so training a variety of stuff helps level faster.

I'm sorry, but the math doesn't support this supposition. There are certain actions that by definition produce more xp than others. If I have a champion cast a fireball and another cast lighting, the fireball user will have more xp. Now if you have one champion cast fireball and another cast window (see through wall) they will each gain the same xp, but window has a higher mana cost than fireball, so the fireballer will gain levels faster due to quicker mana depleation of the window caster. Paul Stevens can give a better explanation of the hidden skills, but number are numbers. It would take an incredible amount of time and effort to level up via the priest influence skill.

[slickrcbd]

Maybe I'm going on outdated info, but I thought the levels were partially determined by averaging the various hidden sub-skills, and that by leveling them more evenly you would need less XP to go from say UM Master to ON Master than you would by focusing on one skill exclusively.

I think it was stated along those lines in the hint book, before the World Wide Web was invented.

[Phoenix]

I just pulled up the character stats from my last DM game. There is no averaging of skill stats, it's a direct sum.

Gothmog
fighter
Swing: 54123
Thrust: 192035
Club: 27687
Parry: 62902
Total: 336747 = UM Master fighter

ninja
Steal: 153240
Fight: 2195
Throw: 110534
Shoot: 0
Total: 265969 = ON Master ninja

priest
Identify: 0
Heal: 266119
Influence: 0
Defend: 6672
Total: 272791 = ON Master priest

wizard
Fire: 249930
Air: 99878
Earth: 28095
Water: 238
Total: 378141 = ON Master wizard

[slickrcbd]

Well, I know the 2nd edition hint book had errors navigating the pit maze on level 5 Treasure Stores, and at least one other error, so the part about it being beneficial to level evenly as you level up faster could be wrong also.
I haven't really looked at it in years save for the well-worn divide on the solution to the teleporter maze and glancing at a few of the maps to refresh my memory like "wasn't there an invisible wall around here?" or "Did I miss that weapon or was it found elsewhere?".
I did think the teleporter maze and pit maze were great puzzles, but I never could remember the right solution and got tired of getting lost or not figuring out the right pattern.

[ChristopheF]

I looked at the source code again, and I have added some details here: http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/691
Experience in a base skill may be greater than the sum of experience in hidden skills (a few actions grant only base skill experience)
To compute the skill level of a hidden skill, the game takes the average of the experience in that hidden skill and the experience in the associated base skill.
It means that if you start with a reincarnated champion (experience = 0) and only cast fireballs until Wizard experience = Fire experience = 1000, then your champion is a 'Novice' (1000) in the 'Wizard' and 'Fire' skills, but is a 'Neophyte' (500) in 'Air', 'Earth' and 'Water'.

[mancini]

You can add milestones to add the experience for the party after completion

[slickrcbd]

I looked at the source code again

Am I understanding that, to carry on your example, if your wizard only cast fireballs until he was an "Adept wizard", he'd be an adept at "fire" skills, but only an apprentice at any other wizard skill?
I know some people say they only use fireball, magic torch, and harm non-material. Myself I tend to throw poison bolts at trollins or gigglers

[ChristopheF]

If your Wizard casts only fireballs, he would get base wizard XP = Fire XP = 32000 XP, and Air = Earth = Water = 0.
For hidden skills, the skill level is computed from the average of the hidden skill XP and the base wizard XP:
Fire level = (32000 + 32000) / 2 = 32000 = Adept level
Air/Earth/Water = (0 + 32000) / 2 = 16000 = Artisan level

[jayrshaw]

Hi all,

Do any of you have a reference of some sort showing how much experience you will earn by casting a particular spell? I have read posts/guides stating that casting EE FUL (i.e., Level 4 Magic Torch) is more efficient for gaining experience than casting MON FUL (i.e., Level 6 Magic Torch) and that casting fireballs is better for experience than casting lightning bolt spells, but I haven't seen an actual guide or formula showing exactly how much experience you gain for casting a given spell. My natural inclination is to err toward casting spells that cast more mana since it is easier than casting a zillion Level 1 spells, but if you can gain levels significantly more quickly casting a Level 4 spell than casting a Level 6 spell or by casting a magic torch instead of a fireball, I might be willing to try it.

Also, does anyone know if the bonus you get for gaining experience while being attacked by an enemy applies to casting spells as well as to using combat actions (e.g., war cry, stab, etc.)? I find that I end up pausing and casting a bunch of magic torch spells in non-combat areas to gain experience if my mana gets too high while I am exploring the dungeon, but I'm wondering if it might be better to wait until I'm near an enemy to start casting those spells. Thoughts, anyone?


--Jay

[ChristopheF]

Check here for some information: http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/692
Any experience gained while being in combat is doubled, so yes it applies to spells as well.