1. run away from everything 2. invis stab clear lair, mines, and up to swamp/snake branch ends 3. discover the joys of passwall 4. dive dungeon until you run into a lich then RUN AWAY 5. clear some of vault, then get stuck for many thousand turns without means to kill anything. wander lair for blood. 6. BLINK STAB NIKOLA -> burn scrolls -> +7 elec saber 7. Finally get a decent spell (Shadow Creatures), use to finish snake 8. invis bat ninja swamp rune 9. spend many thousand turns trying to break into crypt. uniques are hard when your killing spell summons rat zombies. 10. Freezing Cloud on lvl 3 of Crypt finally 11. Clear Vault and Elves 12. Spend many thousand turns running into and out of Zot:5 13. nearly die to a ghost moth, then to a tormentor, on the ascension run.
I made soooo many game-ending mistakes with this guy. My amazing gear kept me alive.
I should also plug ##crawl on freenode, lots of people who know what they're talking about are there.
On January 06 2012 11:42 vonPluring wrote: another stupid question, how do you get food as a herbivore? trying out a SpEn but i have no idea what to do as i start starving
You find it on the ground. If you are starving as a SpEn you are doing something wrong. You start with a potion of porridge that you should quaff on the first turn (lest it get shattered somehow) and that should last you a long time. Get Ensorcelled Hibernation hungerless early if you're having food problems.
Ok, I want to learn Haste and Agony from the book of Wizardry that I found, but Haste is at useless and Agony is at terrible. Is there a way that I can make it so that I can memorize them, cause right now, I'm having a hard time.
EDIT: I just found a book of Necromancy, so should I just memorize one spell from it (thinking regeneration) so I can get the Necro skill (for Dispel Undead, Agony)?
On January 06 2012 14:00 Misder wrote: Ok, I want to learn Haste and Agony from the book of Wizardry that I found, but Haste is at useless and Agony is at terrible. Is there a way that I can make it so that I can memorize them, cause right now, I'm having a hard time.
EDIT: I just found a book of Necromancy, so should I just memorize one spell from it (thinking regeneration) so I can get the Necro skill (for Dispel Undead, Agony)?
If you want to memorize spells you can quaff brilliance (this acts as both wizardry and an int boost I think) to improve your spellcasting success rate to memorize them. Taking off your armour/shield also helps if it has an EV penalty. Equipping Wizardry stuff and raising your int helps also.
Most likely the best route is just learning another, hopefully useful, spell of the same school. Regeneration is an extremely useful spell, so that's a good choice. It'll unlock both necro and charms for you.
If you want to check the success rate of a spell that's in a book not currently in your inventory, you can do so by searching for the spell, then examining the item (instead of traveling to it; use ! to swap modes), then examining the spell. The spell success will be listed as you read it.
I was able to unlock both Necro and Charms and now focusing them so I can get these spells at a decent success rate :D
In other news, I found the ring "Blut" (Hunger- Int+5), and right now, I'm wearing ring of rPoison and rF+. Hunger- is useless, but is the Int+5 better than resistance?
And, I die. That was depressing and fun at the same time haha. Died to Frederick when he hit me with Iron Shot for 65 dmg... YASD, didn't need to fight him Best run though so far.
Ashenzari? I avoid him because I feel he's a lot of micromanagement for bleh benefits. Can you write a little about what you used his powers for, if anything? If you just picked him up for the giggles I can totally understand that too.
The big thing about Ash is that you get skill boosts. Think about Okawaru heroism; now imagine that that is always active and affects all of your skills instead of just your combat skills. That's Ash's biggest boon.
He also lets you always focus on leveling up the skill that gives you the biggest benefit now instead of having to worry about whether that skill will taper off later on, since you can just reskill. You also get to pick your fights since you get warning about enemies and scrying. He's not a terribly exciting god, but he's plenty strong. Also completely nullifies berserkitis since he gives you clarity.
This was my first time seriously using ranged combat other than to get out of the early game, and it's wicked strong. I could tab hydras with my bow as soon as they showed up (it helped that I found a very early longbow of velocity, which is about as good as it gets for bows) and for the majority of the game I actually did more damage in melee range by shooting my bow instead of swinging my greatsword.
I actually played pretty sloppy in parts of this game, and knowingly made a bad decision to go ahead and go through Cigotuvi's Fleshworks when I found it, despite knowing that the rewards were mostly useless and I was likely to get heavily mutated. Well, I was right on both accounts; I got pretty much nothing out of the loot and ended up with teleportitis, berserkitis, statrot, lost stats, blurry vision, and fast metabolism. So that accelerated my abandonment of Okawaru (which I had planned to do as soon as I saw that the HEHu high score was eminently beatable): I went and grabbed Zin right away to undo the damage. At 6* Zin piety I had him cure my mutations then immediately picked up TSO, just in time to do crypt. The rest of the game from there was pretty ordinary.
Pan is really not scary at all if you have cblink and 35/30 defenses with 200 hp and TSO. I kept my swamp dragon armour through the end of the game despite not needing the rPois simply because 7AC/-2EV was the right stat spread for my purposes, since I trained both armour and dodging. I used my blessed greatsword for the most part in Pan/Hells simply because it was less work than using ranged combat ... I think my bow still killed stuff faster most of the time, especially if you factor in the time spent closing to melee range. I ninja'd all the Pan/Hell runes that I got since I didn't want to chance anything, and sort of half-ninja'd the orb too, which ended up with my first three runes taking about 120k turns and the remaining 8 plus the escape taking under 40k. I stopped at 11 because that was all I needed to win, and the only interesting place left was Tomb, which I'm still scared to do so I didn't.
On January 06 2012 15:19 beef42 wrote: Ashenzari? I avoid him because I feel he's a lot of micromanagement for bleh benefits. Can you write a little about what you used his powers for, if anything? If you just picked him up for the giggles I can totally understand that too.
Monster warning and scrying spam (uses barely any piety) are very powerful for stabbers, especially with passwall. I didn't have to do much equipment micromanagement because what I found was so good. His skill boosting was really, really helpful for all the spell schools I dipped into; it makes out to be tons of free XP, topped off by Ash not requiring invocations. Also having nearly every item auto-id'd is nice. I never used his respeccing ability.
If you need to gear swap alot / are playing a race without innate resistances, Ash wouldn't be very fun.
I picked Abyss Knight so I could say that I've won with more than 3 runes. Merfolk seemed a good fit with their amazing polearms skills, and their swimming speed making Abyss navigation much easier. Of all the gear I found, the MVP was clearly boots of running: kiting with reach is stupid good. I never self-abyssed or used corruption, but liberally banished things like Jellies and Hydras. The game was pretty straightforward tbh - tab dudes, banish scarier dudes, kite the scariest un-banishable dudes. Caste haste and play stair games. Or just berserk them all down. Even orbs of fire were no big deal with rF+++ and rMut.
My ongoing run started out with draconian berserker. Changed god to Yrdemnul after found Faith, rF++ amulet and 9+/9+ Reap double sword but at that point all the living mobs had almost died so didn't get to enjoy mass summons. This also left me with another problem of having to munch permafood because reap sword didn't leave food for me. Now I'm back to good old TSO while trying to figure out how to get food and keep the game going without the need to finish. About 15 good meals left!
any tips for a newer player playing as a deep elf fire ele?
The furthest I have gotten (with a different character) is d: 7. I normally die on d:4-6 due to something dumb that probably could have been avoided or just being unlucky with missing spells.
Hmm. Did I just encounter a bug? Blessing an anti-magic weapon leaves your power at anti-magic level even if the brand changes. Doesn't help to drop or switch the weapon. Grr.
Edit. Quiting and relogging helped. Now back to max power.
So recently I've been playing a bunch of characters that all ended up in "medium" armour--which pretty much encompasses the light dragon armours (mottled, swamp, fire, ice, or pearl if you can find it). Wearing this sort of armour has a few benefits: for one, you're looking at base AC ranging from 6 to 9 (10 for PDA) on your armour, compared to the 2 of a robe or the 3 of leather (and then you get that much more AC from enchantment also), so you get some pretty nice AC. The EV penalty is pretty small, so dodging skill still raises your EV quite nicely and you can still cast spells pretty easily. So you want to train both armour and dodging with these armours, and you end up at around 30 AC and 25 EV before any buffs, and if you're in fire or swamp dragon armour you get a nice free resistance out of it too. Haste is easily castable with ~14 charms and decent spellcasting skill; controlled blink is castable with ~17-18 tloc (or lower with wizardry).
Pre-dragon-armour look for enchanted ring mail or scale mail instead; a bonus if you can find elven versions for the lower spellcasting hit.
Defensively you get stats far superior to the ~15 AC and 35 EV you'd have going all-in on dodging in a robe for about the same xp investment (since it's easier to raise both armour and dodging to skill 15 than it is to get one of the two to skill 25).
Put it all together and you end up with pretty nice stats for someone who primarily kills things with tab, but who also uses spells to do non-damage stuff. This is not a good idea for a conjuror-type unless you worship Vehumet, since getting the really big spells castable with a -3 EV armour is very tough, but the effect on spells level 4 and below is very small in the end (and other than Haste and cblink/Phase Shift there aren't many above-level-4 spells you want to cast if your primary source of damage is tab).
My last three wins have all been in this sort of dragon armour: the HEHu I mentioned above, a GhMo, and just now a HuGl. Mottled dragon armour is possibly the best stats of any of the options other than PDA (in 0.10) since it's 6 AC/-1 EV, and you can use Ozocubu's Armour instead of Stoneskin, but fire dragon armour has the best resistance built-in (and mottled dragon armour is apparently pretty rare, whereas FDA is nearly guaranteed before Zot, which is when you really start to care).
Here is an example of what your skills might look like at the end of the game, though I found a manual of armour so that ended up getting raised higher than it would have otherwise. My GhMo ended up with a pretty similar skill spread.
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On another note, Nemelex is disgustingly overpowered and decks of destruction are the most fun decks. Also the new guardian spirit effect is actually really good, it's much better than it used to be.
EPT
Best run though so far.
