"Spike" definition ?

[Lujo]

Spike still doesn't sound useful... Contrast the superfluous -spike suffix to -stacking. Stacking is simply collecting, but as there are many different things to collect, that's a useful term to have differentiators for: Dodge-stacking, DP-stacking, Burning-stacking, Poison-stacking, Resist-stacking, CP-stacking, etc.

That also makes sense, but stacking is more of a setup term than execution term. If you're firing off stuff that you stacked and use term the in the "stacking damage/attacks via X" then you get as arcane as with "spike". I guess some of the players simply differentiate between setup and execution and needed terms for it, and we ended up with an arbitrary one (much likeanyone would). "Stringing" was also a term I used as in "a string of free hits".

The concept of "spike" is most useful when you think about how aiming for a spike is going to affect you opportunity cost tradeofs and resource management while you play.

Gods certainly don't each have a "spike" by design because that's not a concept that's meaningful to us. They each have different angles of efficiency and tradeoffs though.

They really don't - JJ and Pactmaker don't have one at all. All the other ones do, but it certainly didn't have to be an intentional decision to make them that way. I was more that they were recognized as such by players when Gods became preps and as such "answers" to dungeons/PQI. It helps have a cohesive picture of sinergies. The game existed in the alpha without the prep system, and that might be why the beta playtest brought this bit of terminlogy up.

Apparently just playing the game is always some form of spike. So, yeah, we probably do when we play, we just don't think of things that way.

You could call it a "banana" (or a "saga" lol), but when your thinking just in terms of strategy and a dungeon puts specific challenges before you you sort of need either a plan or a system of reading the board. Dragon Isles put a set of challenges before you - you need to find a way to get around, find a way to, well, stack resources and buffs, deal with one boss, deal with the guards or manouver them out of the way, deal with another boss. All of that is "playing the game" but not all of that is a spike. Just killing the firstborn and the matron is, and dealing with the guards can be but doesn't have to be.

So you can plan for it - I'll stack my health while I explore, and then XP-banana the firstborn. I'll stack my piety while I'm at it, and potion-banana the guards to get rid of their debuffs. Then I'll piety-banana the matron. If I find the wonnafyt, I can save my potions, level up to 10 and ignore the dragonguards...

If there was always only one boss, then the word for banana... er, "spike" would be "endgame" or "endgame plan", but since there are more than one ussually, it's not the endgame but just a point where you turn resources into damage instead of just other resources, moving space or whatever. If you can tell what your options are in advance, you can tune the rest of your "playing the game" to support your angle of attack the best...

Hence:

Spike still doesn't sound useful. We never designed around the term or the concept.

And yet, you can feel it in-game. Think of a Warlord against Bleaty; between CYDSTEPP and GETINDARE he can be assured three free attacks, enough to be within shooting distance of a KO. Then think of that same Warlord against SMM; no matter how much mana/potions he gets for consecutive DP's, he's not going to get through all those hit points and needs to change his approach. Alternately, a Paladin will have significant trouble just surviving a hit from Bleaty, but has no problems wearing down low-damage SMM with attrition strategies.

Since you can use tools to replicate or support either approach, and have to for 100% completion, you have to know what you're replicating. And you're not replicating a Warlord or a Paladin, you're replicating their "Spike". Except you possibly need to "stack" more stuff on yourself to be as good at it as them since they're built for it and others might not be.

[dislekcia]

Spike still doesn't sound useful. We never designed around the term or the concept.

And yet, you can feel it in-game. Think of a Warlord against Bleaty; between CYDSTEPP and GETINDARE he can be assured three free attacks, enough to be within shooting distance of a KO. Then think of that same Warlord against SMM; no matter how much mana/potions he gets for consecutive DP's, he's not going to get through all those hit points and needs to change his approach. Alternately, a Paladin will have significant trouble just surviving a hit from Bleaty, but has no problems wearing down low-damage SMM with attrition strategies.

Yes, because that Warlord vs Bleaty situation is actually a spike. If you were to graph out damage received vs dealt per enemy, that would be a visible, actual, noticeable spike in that graph. It'd be temporary, not a direct statement about the play of DD in general. That's a useful definition of a spike, so yeah, neat.

The way Lujo seems to want to use the term "spike" or now the term "stacking", seems to be to make it a general thing, applicable everywhere, somehow turning it into a pass-phrase that shows you know some arcane piece of information about a different kind of thinking instead of a usefully descriptive thing to say about playing the game.

"So I hoarded potions for the boss" makes much more sense to say than "I potion spiked the boss". Hoarding implies collecting a resource and spending it for a specific purpose, which is what half of these "spikes" seem to be about. Why they have to be called "blackspace spikes" is beyond me. All it seems to do is create a special term that needs to be learned, not a term that immediately explains itself to new players. Obviously it's in my interests as a designer to have as open a community for DD as possible, so adding complexity for the sake of having more complexity doesn't do it for me.

Since you can use tools to replicate or support either approach, and have to for 100% completion, you have to know what you're replicating. And you're not replicating a Warlord or a Paladin, you're replicating their "Spike". Except you possibly need to "stack" more stuff on yourself to be as good at it as them since they're built for it and others might not be.

That paragraph is nothing but an exercise in obfuscation. You have to know what a Paladin or Warlord plays like to know what's being spoken about with the term "spike" there. Worse, that single word refers to two completely different things and methods of play - healing vs DP. "Stacking" also doesn't lend itself to comprehension there, what's being stacked, why and with what result? It's all just a great big "I'm smarter than you because jargon" and that's annoying. I'd prefer it if this sort of communication wasn't widely adopted across the community. This would be much better:

You could play like a Warlord or Paladin with almost any class, but you'd need to hoard death protections somehow and maybe up your damage in the first case, and stack resistances in the second to make healing more effective.

[The Avatar]

I define spike as using a resource disproportionately to how you would use it for a normal fight. This lends itself well to potions (because you don't use them every fight), DPs (Warlord as exception), and even black space. That makes backspace spike (a term I would normally avoid for regen fighting), a term for when you use a very large amount of tiles to defeat an enemy (like half the map). Then again, unless you are trying to be very specific, I would just go with regen fighting.

[flap]

Well well well, then there are 2 trends for the spike definition (I didn't expect to launch a debate there...) :
- The purist's (and developper's) one : a short burst of high damages
- The philosophical one : the disproportional use of resources for a single fight

It might be time to wikify this. At least newcomers will be able to read the many AA reports and annotated play-through.

[Lujo]

Hey, I'm not bringing personality into it, please don't do so. And there's no "excercises in obfuscation", dear god. Noone has to use the term "blackspace spike", it got invented when I was thinking about how stuff fits togather, I don't use it either - it's just the explanation of what you do when you have a specific gameplan which revolves around stackign resists/poison and using a lot of blackspace to win a big fight. First you're really conservative aboout your blackspace (hoarding), then you throw it all at the boss like mad (spiking).

"I hoarded potions for the boss" doesn't imply spending the resource, just hoarding it (with intent). First you hoard them, then you spend them. The realisation of this intent is to produce a "spike". But you can potion spike something without hoarding the potions, too. So when I say "I potion spiked the boss" it means I blew some/all of my potions on the boss - regardless of whether I put any effort into having lots of them. You can decide to spike something else with them half-way through: "I was hoarding potions for the Matron, but decided to spike dragonguards with them".

You could play like a Warlord or Paladin with almost any class, but you'd need to hoard death protections somehow and maybe up your damage in the first case, and stack resistances in the second to make healing more effective.

What I'm trying to say is that "playing like a warlord" = "stacking mana and prepping mystera". "Going for a DP spike" = "hoarding what you said". No need to bring the warlord into it at all - except as an example of a guy built for a DP spike. So when PQI tells you to go Tinker against Bleaty (hypotethicaly), you don't think "I need to scum up a cydstep to make myself a warlord". You don't prep a particular class every time a specific challenge crops up - if you're aware that you can perform the spike in question with other stuff. "Warlord" isn't a very widely applicable solution to Bleaty, his "spike" is. So it TT's spike - they're the same kind of spike with different fuel. But try saying "TT is a solution to Bleaty" and think of how confusing that is - what ABOUT TT is the solution to Bleaty? Then try the same with "TT potion spike is the solution to bleaty". Much more specific.

I do admit that you can say "TT potions are a solution to Bleaty", except when you say "spike" you imply that you can and should heavily invest in them. Hoard them, yes. Why? Because you can spike the goat down with them alone.

- The purist's (and developper's) one : a short burst of high damages
- The philosophical one : the disproportional use of resources for a single fight

They're the same in that regard, but there seems to be some other misunderstanding about dividing resource/buff acquisition and bursting stuff down. And posibly linguistics. Dislekcia seems to think both "hoarding" and "spike" have wider meanings then I do, I guess... I like the second definition, since it necessarily includes the first one, that would be what "spike" is.



EDIT: And noone's making anyone use any particular terminology. Dev's didn't force theirs on us, and I don't know about forcing any on anyone...

[Darvin]

The way Lujo seems to want to use the term "spike" or now the term "stacking", seems to be to make it a general thing, applicable everywhere, somehow turning it into a pass-phrase that shows you know some arcane piece of information about a different kind of thinking instead of a usefully descriptive thing to say about playing the game.

I disagree with Lujo's definition, so I suppose we're on the same page there.

"So I hoarded potions for the boss" makes much more sense to say than "I potion spiked the boss".

Eh, I'd call that semantics. Potion use is spiking, regardless of whether you save them all for one big spike against the boss or use them throughout the run for many smaller spikes. In that sense, I guess I agree that "spiking" is redundant when talking about potions.

The idea of spiking and hoarding go together in a way; you are accumulating a large amount of resources to spend all at once. Whether that's an expanded mana pool for a large number of consecutive fireballs, a collection of potions, or a number of death protections that can be activated back-to-back, that represents spiking. The key point is that replenishing the expended resources either requires exceptional effort (refilling a 24-point mana pool requires a lot of exploration, refilling a crystal ball requires a lot more spellcasting still!) or is not possible at all (substantial piety cost increase from deity boon usage).

[Lujo]

The way Lujo seems to want to use the term "spike" or now the term "stacking", seems to be to make it a general thing, applicable everywhere, somehow turning it into a pass-phrase that shows you know some arcane piece of information about a different kind of thinking instead of a usefully descriptive thing to say about playing the game.

I disagree with Lujo's definition, so I suppose we're on the same page there.

What definition is that? If what Dislekcia wrote about it was my definition I'd disagree with it too. What you wrote below is fully in agreement with how I look at it. What he thinks my definition is is rather strange (and he's bringing erronous assumptions about my personality/intentions into it). "Stacking" or "hoarding" potions =/= spiking. Avatar's always hoarding potions for the boss, but rarely ever ends up using them.

Heck, when people say "some vets blow potions, other hoard them" it ussually means they read Avatar's writeups on Jay's guides which prioritize efficeny and savign your potions for the endgame and herd me advocate using potions for small leveling spikes instead. The reason we differ? If you "hoard" or "stack" potions in your inventory, you ussually end up not having to use them since you spike with something else. He likes to still have the option, I don't mind blowing them early.

"Spike" might be to general of a category, but "hoarding" is just plain misleading. And it's true that you can pretty much only "spike" with potions, so it's a bit redundant, but since you can prep with it in mind as you main method of dealing with a boss (go halfling thief and stuff), then you can illustrate it with: plan - potions spike. Or if you end up killing something with only potions and are surprised about it (say vicious Blah Blah), the afterreport is ussually something like "I managed to potion spike Blah Blah, lol o.O". I mean, I've seen people write this, they wouldn't if it didn't make sense and wasn't logical and economical...

EDIT: Oh, and "stacking" is even more misleading since:

a) You can't stack all the possible fuel. You can't stack CP fodder because you just leave it on the ground, you can't stack popcorn (allthough popcorn bowling might be just that), you can't stack health and mana past you mana pool - that's blackspace which you can't really stack as much as conserve, you can't stack piety past 100 but can have a lot of fodder lying around, you can't stack items because your inventory is limited, you can't stack DP's - only piety for some sources and find shops for others
b) if it's supposed to refer to stacking damage on the boss, well, it's temporary and is technicaly having a fight
c) if it's supposed to be stacking permanent buffs/boons on yourself, you can do that without having a fight
d) if you're stacking options - thats just "setup"

-.-

[dislekcia]

"Spike" might be to general of a category, but "hoarding" is just plain misleading.

Only if you try to make it cover everything instead of the things it's supposed to mean.

EDIT: Oh, and "stacking" is even more misleading since:

Why do you have to be able to stack everything? Why can't people just stack resistances or burning or poison and leave it at that?

[Lujo]

Well ,exactly. If hoarding is hoarding, and spike is a spike, then how is spike = playing the game? Playing the game is hoarding/stacking/setup + spike. And several other things, ofc.

[flap]

Well, I have tried to summarize the definitions and debate in the wiki.

At least, new players reading AA reports and annotated play-through will get an idea of other players mean with that term.