Dr. Weirdeaux Monsters

My current tools, knowledge and scripts (primarily WHAM) don't do as well on the Dr. Weirdeaux monsters as I might like. Is there any automation that will work reliably (such as not spell slinging at snail parts) that I might have missed? If not what needs to happen to support that?

In the latter case I can imagine something that parsed the initial monster description, generated a list of defenses and then developed a combat strategy using the remaining weapons and skills. I can also imagine things might be different if the fingernail quest is in progress of not. Superficially this probably involves KoLmafia (for the monster part detection and exposing the results to a script), BatBrain and WHAM. However this may be enough of an unusual niche case that it should be handled by a non-WHAM CCS instead. I note the irony of constructing a Dr. Weirdeaux CCS from bits and pieces of WHAM, SmartStasis and BatBrain.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Thanks.

Actually WHAM/BatBrain are pretty close to handling DrW monsters. As I reported in the WHAM thread, I had some trouble at the start, but eventually it was able to kill a whole bunch of them for me and more optimally than I would have. I suspect as things get spaded out and entered into those scripts they will work very well. However, eventually the monsters get too hard for WHAM. As far as writing your own script, that depends a lot on what skills you have and what cost you are willing to pay. You probably already saw this combat script.

I've included my script here as a guide. It is not useful as is. I hard coded the aura damage. My character doesn't have most of the skills needed to make this work. This script spams divines and stuns with CSA grenades. There are better ways if you have the skills. Divines got too expensive, so I had to quit. The script runs away from monsters it can't beat and from monsters that don't rank well (too expensive for the stats gained).

Thanks. I'll revisit WHAM at least to gather data about the wrong choices. Never ascended ~135 Pastamancer so I can pretty much get three clippings and one shot but I was getting beaten up or not finishing in (say) 10 turns with automation. Probably less than 100 turns in the area at this point but since I am coin farming I'm fine with only netting 5 coins some days to feed my Jungle Juice habit.

I wish I'd had the time myself to see what was off. My monsters are too huge now on that account. One thing you can do is turn on mafia's reporting of damage to the monster. Then you can compare what WHAM expects with what actually happens. There's a bunch of discussion in the KoL forum thread about resistance and such. I don't know if BatBrain knows about their 10% base resistance.

Hmm. This got me interested in testing. Yes, WHAM works better when you tell it they're resistant. However, WHAM/BatBrain doesn't know about auras. It doesn't do a very good job using multiple stunning items. Both of those are really needed to fight these at a low level. On my high level character it wasn't so bad. On my level 13 character, WHAM is aborting and I haven't even done that many fights.

WHAM is doing better than I remembered. The two things I note are that it doesn't want to use the fingernail clippers which makes sense until there is support for the clippings as a goal and it doesn't avoid spells when the snail shell is there to bounce them back.

Having not played anything for a few months now I don't know exactly what that means, but if the snail shell is something you can match on then it should be possible to add something to WHAM that disallows spells in that case.

Winterbay said:

Having not played anything for a few months now I don't know exactly what that means, but if the snail shell is something you can match on then it should be possible to add something to WHAM that disallows spells in that case.

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My experience has been that if the monster has a snail shell and I cast a spell, the spell bounces off the monster and damages me. There is definitely something in the initial monster text that has "snail" in it so it does seem as if WHAM has an opportunity to excel. Thanks.

BatBrain.ash contains code to deal with snails. I thought it worked for me.

Crowther said:

BatBrain.ash contains code to deal with snails. I thought it worked for me.

Code:

            case 5: setmatt("spellres",""); break;  // snail: reflects spells (didn't bother coding reflection)

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OK. Next chance it looks like I amp up the debugging. Thanks.

If it doesn't work for some reason you can try the Beta-version of WHAM which now has code to try and remove spells if fighting a snail-containing monster. If BatBrain's code works I can remove that again

Forgot to pick up beta version :-( Whatever I thought I did to up verbosity didn't give me output I could find. Massive fail on my part. I did get a spell reflected back on me but the snail body part was in the auxiliary message, the "You think you can also identify" in

When a monster contains body parts, the intro will conclude with this message, with "and [a] <animal>" being repeated for each body part:

You think you can also identify some parts from [a] <animal> and [a] <animal> and [a] <animal>... in there.

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so perhaps there is a parsing error. I'll pay more attention next time.

Eh, the way I do matching on body parts in my own script is just look for the image, since that isn't dependent on the intro text being present.

The way I set it up in WHAM beta was to check the text that gets sent to the consult script (which I believe is the raw code for the first fight page) for "snail" if we are in the Mansion. I think that should work.