Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - Page 20

Turn off all skills but invocations at the beginning. Pick up a weapon when you find one (anything but shortblades is fine, though axes have the best aptitude) and equip it. Find some heavy armour and equip that as well. Pacify everything you can unless you are hungry or worse, in which case you should try to get chunks from stuff you can eat and that won't kill you.

Note that pacification takes quite a bit of nutrition, so you probably want to eat permafood if you drop to Near Starving; you need your aa online to not die.

Get Invo to 15 before you turn on any other skills. Once Invo is at 15 you can turn on your weapon skill so you can chop up zombies and J's better. You can turn on fighting and armour a bit later. Keep raising invo though, since it's still your most powerful way to deal with enemies. Get to lair ASAP, pacify all the enemies in lair, now you're maxed out on piety. Once you hit 6* you can start meleeing stuff to death instead of just pacifying everything.

With maxed Ely piety you basically cannot lose unless you get into a really bad spot or do something dumb or starve to death. The only enemies that you have to worry about are slime creatures, so just keep them split up in any way you can (stairdancing does this pretty reliably, if nothing else works). If you need to fight, Divine Vigour gives you about 40-50% more maxhp and you're maxed out on piety so go ahead and pop it if you run into anything tough that is undead or demonic or unpacify-able (Boris is probably the main culprit; you're better off using Divine Vigour and a might potion or something instead of trying to pacify). Use purification and the self-healing abilities liberally, you have plenty of piety to spend.

At invo 20 you can head into Shoals/Snake/Swamp and your greater pacification should be strong enough to pacify anything you run into except Boris, so just go get the runes. After the first rune you grab you should be at about 22 invo, 15 weapon skill, 10 fighting, 8 armour. You can turn on evocations at this point if you want (or earlier if you found a rod.)

Go clear out Orc whenever you want, you get a bonus to pacifying orcs so the only orcs that don't go down to aa are Saint Roka or warlords (you'll almost always pacify sorcerers or high priests in one attempt). If you get the ogre ending you should still be able to aa the ogres but you can use ad if you want since you have tons of piety.

You can actually head straight into elf after orc if you want and your invo skill is ~22 or more, since the elves all have low HP so they're easy to pacify. Greater pacification should work reliably on the dangerous elves. With 25+ invo skill you can pacify ancient liches no problem, as well as use lesser pacification on any dragons you run into, so clearing D and Vault 1-7 is super easy.

Vault 8 requires 1 blinking scroll and a way to haste yourself once, as well as full piety. Put on divine vigour, haste yourself, descend the stairs. Use your blink scroll to go either to the top or the bottom so you get the entire vault guard band on one side of you, then back up and pacify as you go (lesser pacification works unreliably, greater pacification works reliably; start with some greater pacification on the nearest vault guards then use whichever you like on the rest). Once the vault guards are cleaned up the rest of V:8 is pretty easy. You'll need greater pacification on titans and tentacled monstrosities. From there you have three runes so just clear out Zot and go win.

Crypt is actually decently hard since to pacify you will generally have to spend piety. You can clear it out if you want since you can probably cut stuff up by this point, but unless you are seriously in need of some item you can skip it and probably do better.

As far as equipment goes--
You want a two-handed weapon. The main purpose of your weapon is to kill zombies, Js, golems, and orbs of fire. None of these have attacks where a shield helps out, so using a shield is a bad idea. Battleaxes and great maces are good and basically guaranteed. Executioner's axes, triple swords, and bardiches are also good but rarer. Greatsword or glaive is ok but not ideal. A brand is nice but not a big deal; if you find freezing aura/fire brand spells you can take off your armour to learn and cast those and then make the brand permanent, otherwise just make your weapon vorpal.

I find that storm dragon armour is generally the best armour to aim for, since it gives nice AC and, most importantly, gives rElec so you can fight electric golems (which cannot be pacified). If you have rElec from some other source then go for gold dragon armour. If you happen across pearl dragon armour then wear it because you can train dodging and get some decent EV to go with your AC, and you can even pick up some spells in it.

Gourmand is really really good since pacification uses a lot of nutrition. Rage is the other good amulet. Stasis is good to put on so you don't get paralyzed. Conservation is decent as always. Nothing else is important (the only thing that mutates you that you can't pacify is orbs of fire, and you can just get mutated by that point since it's the end of the game).

Rings you only really care about see invis (so you can pacify invisible stuff), resistance rings, slaying, +EV, +AC, or regen. CTele is a huge boon for Vault:8 but disabled in Zot:5 so not that big a deal overall. Wizardry is good if you found PDA or are sticking with one of the lighter dragon armours since it'll let you cast spells.

Acquirement should go toward staves or wands in almost every case. You want hasting or teleportation wands (heal wounds not so much since greater self-healing is basically heal wounds, though if you max evo the wand is the most reliable way to pacify stuff), and all the good rods are good. Only take staff acquirement if you've trained Evo skill some.

You want rF++ and rElec possible for Zot (having to swap is fine). You can probably do Zot with just rF+ and no rElec though it'll be harder, though you do have Divine Vigour to let you tank a lot more damage than most characters.