by Darvin on Fri Jan 31, 2014 6:20 pm
When you "spike" you use a large number of resources at one time, requiring significant effort to replenish the lost resources afterwards (if it's possible at all). So, for instance, a human fighter who casts fireball twice would not be thought of to be spiking; that's a normal level of mana which requires a normal amount of effort to recover. An Elf Sorcerer with 24 mana who casts four fireballs would be thought of to be spiking, because his expanded mana pool takes about twice as much effort to refill. By leveraging his racial and class advantage, he's able to produce a bigger "spike" of instantaneous damage than other classes. Similarly, the use of one-time effects like potions or boons, or limited-use effects like the fire heart are spikes. Pre-buffs like CYDSTEPP and ENDISWAL are also spikes.
The opposite of spiking is efficiency; doing things to reduce the amount of effort required to win all future fights. Increased damage, reduced mana costs, heightened resistances, increased regeneration from exploration; all of these are efficiency tools. Regen-fighting is more on the efficiency-side of things, since anything you recover in-combat is matched by the monster you're fighting. All strategies revolve around using both efficiency and spiking to win. No character, however well-built, is strong enough to just plow through a boss effortlessly and will need to "spike" to pull it off. Similarly, higher levels of efficiency make your spikes more potent. Good play is about using a combination of these approaches; the real question is how much you may focus on one side or the other.
To illustrate the difference between efficiency and spiking, consider old BLUDTUPOWA and new BLUDTUPOWA. The old version of the glyph converted health regeneration into mana regeneration. If your character could leverage mana more efficiently than health then this was an overall increase in your resources. The new version of the glyph allows you to sacrifice health and unexplored tiles to regenerate mana. Monsters do not heal when you do this, effectively allowing you to expend resources for a burst of consecutive damage. The new BLUDTUPOWA offers no efficiency gain (since you're still trading 1 tile for 1 MP, in addition to other costs) but instead offers you the ability to spike better with mana-based resources.