2007 Warlocks Refuge Tournament Champion
Accepted into d-1337 in January 2008
High Councilman in the Guild of the Black Art
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Longest Game: 98 turns vs. Toyotami (62400)
Closest Game: 42 turns vs. xade, wound up killing him by gesturing P/P and sending Light Wounds through a dummied mirror while both of us were at 1 health and he had an Ogre. (64872)
I'm not super-concerned about Elo or Ladder points, but I do make at least some effort to keep them both up. I tend to prefer VF's a fair amount of the time, as I find them less stressful. If you want to play a ranked game with me, though, challenge me and I'll probably accept it, so long as your Elo is an accurate representation of your skill; if I lose to a 1700 warlock, I deserve the loss of Elo points.
That said, if you're over 300 Elo beneath me, I'd really prefer playing VF's. At these levels, I don't gain any Elo for winning. If it gets too much worse, I actually lose Elo even if you surrender (i.e. I have to kill you just to avoid losing points).
To new warlocks:
Lots of people post tips to newbies in their profile. Rather than duplicate information that's already out there I'd rather sum up how to get good at this game in three easy steps:
1) Go here: http://minmax.ermarian.net/refuge/. This site is a treasure trove of useful information. You may have to play a few games before the articles really start making that much sense, especially the intermediate and advanced ones.
2) Go here: http://slarty.proboards56.com/index.cgi. There's an active community surrounding this game, and lots of people would be happy to help you. There's also some excellent retired players who still troll the forums and make insightful posts.
3) Play a lot of games. At first, I'd suggest playing against other new players just to learn the basics of the game. Once you're familiar with basic gameplay, challenge some experts to learn, then play some more games against people closer to your own ranking in order to practice what you've learned. Rinse, repeat. (When challenging a more experienced player, it is polite to make the challenge Very Friendly, unless you're within 100-200 Elo of them).
Guild of the Black Art:
The Guild of the Black Art exists to train new warlocks and improve the overall level of competition on this site. If you're genuinely interested in the game, ask a member of the guild to help you improve. You can find out more about the guild on the forums (see point 2 above).
Other useful things to know:
Most players prefer playing games with the "maladroit parafc" ruleset. These two rules are pretty widely agreed to make the game more balanced than the default rules. To send a challenge with these rules, just include the words "maladroit" and "parafc" somewhere in the game description.
Panic:
This is a variant introduced by ExDeath as a solution to the problem of Paralysis being extremely abusable. The rules are as follows:
Paralysis is now cast with SFFF instead of FFF. Any instance of FFF that is not preceded by S must be targeted at nobody.
There is a new mindspell, "Panic." It works as follows:
Panic: FFS
Cancels with other mindspells (Amnesia, Maladroitness, Fear, Paralysis, Charm Person, Charm Monster, and other Panic)
If the subject of this spell is a Warlock, on his next turn, he cannot perform any of the gestures that were performed this turn by the caster of Panic.
If the subject of this spell is a Monster, it doesn't attack this turn.
- For example, if I gesture FFS/xxD, then you cannot gesture S or D next turn.
- If you cast Panic and it gets reflected from a Magic Mirror, the gestures that get disabled are the ones that the caster of the mirror performed (probably W/W). This is to keep this spell consistent with how Paralysis and Charm Person interact with mirrors.
- To implement this, whenever one player has FF, all players should target all of their mindspells at nobody on the next turn, and instead announce in the comments whom they wish to target their spells at. The next turn, players should submit gestures as if they were constrained by the appropriate mindspells (in the case of para or charm, use PM to describe which hand is paralyzed/charmed); this requires trust! If there is a monster and a potential PSDD involved, then the monster should be directed to attack nobody and have its target announced as well. This might cause life totals to become inaccurate and/or monsters to wind up being controlled by the wrong player; this requires trust as well.
- The above rule can be ignored when an FF situation has no threat of Panic (i.e. I have FF but get hit with Fear) or when you have SFF, there is no threat of any mindspell from your opponent, and you decide to cast para instead of panic.
- In the case of Invisibility or Blindness, be cautious. I don't want to put forth any specific guidelines, but if the defender has a mindspell ready on the first or second turn out of invis, you might want to consider having people target nobody just to be safe.
- ParaFC and Maladroit are also used in this variant. ParaFDF is not. |
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