Attack styles in the kingdom of loathing

Writing this here, for a friend 'cos it's too big to fit in a kmail. In no particular order.

Outmoxie: Use the Safe Adventuring page on the wiki, and use a ranged weapon for fighting. This is an ideal strategy for moxie classes, low level characters and as a backup where you can't afford anything else. Buffing moxie (hairspray, moxious madrigal, etc) will help of course.

Delevel and plink: As outmoxie, but use delevelling skills too (Disco face stab, etc). This just means that you can fight at a slightly higher monster level (and therefore more stats) than simple outmoxieing.

Smack them hard: Buff muscle (blood of the wereseal, ben-gal balm), buff initiative (cheap wind-up clock, springy fusilli), and hit them as hard as you can. The default attack style of the muscle classes, this is improved by using the special seal clubber or turtle tamer skills such as headbutt, lunging thrust-smack, etc - using a skill has the added advantage in that you won't fumble too. Having access to cheap healing is pretty darn essential though. Use the safe adventuring page to work out if you can hit them at all (compare muscle with the number mentioned).

Heroic smacking: Exactly as above, but using hero of the half shell skill and a shield. Decreases the amount of healing needed dramatically.

Potions: Use your amazing reagent skills (Advanced Saucecrafting) to buff yourself madly and fight as a different class. This is effective for saucerors because of their intrinsic potion making abilities - 3 reagents x 3 potions x 10 turns = potions for 90 turns a day (and improvements are possible too), but not really for other classes. Great for boss fights as other classes though.

Spell-slinging: Horrendously expensive in terms of MP and skill buying, it's very hard to spell-sling your way through a run. It is possible, but you need a boatload of skills and probably a specialised familiar to even stand a chance of making this work!!! The sad thing is, this is the default option for pastamancers, which is deeply annoying because it makes this class the hardest of all of them (most people resort to outmoxieing as a pastamancer).

There's nothing new in programming

Java seems to re-invent the wheel all the time, mostly for no good reason. Or things start out simple as a replacement for the complex thing that they're replacing, and become that complex thing over time, which leaves outsiders like myself who come in saying things like "Why did you do it that way? There's already a good, platform independent way of doing that!!"

For example:

Ant - the java compile tool, is very complicated in places, can compile almost everything under the sun, and is basically, Make with a different syntax. What was wrong with Make?

Xml - Ooh look! A self-describing file! What a forward-thinking approach!! Except, it's not, EDI was exactly the same, and probably will go the same way - Xml will be adopted by very large businesses, and everyone else will ignore it or write libraries so they never have to deal with it directly. You still need to get the information out of each file, and yes, parser's help extract the information you need, but still. Big fat meh.

HQL - "Hibernate" query language. I'm sorry, but with all the major databases these days being ANSI compliant, what was wrong with forcing programmers to write ANSI sql? By using HQL, I tie myself into doing hibernate forever; With ANSI, I don't, and I get database independence anyway. The caching on most databases these days is pretty darn awesome too. What's the point of using hibernate at all?