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On January 14 2014 12:43 Therapist. wrote:
Hey Bitter, try a Minotaur Fighter using polearms. Reach makes things a lot easier. Start with Okawaru. He'll give you stuff. Equip plate as soon as you find it. Switch to The Shining One later on when you're ready to take the end of the Vaults. Max your piety in the Crypt. From here on in, summon TSO's minions on anything that even seems tough. Use it very liberally, because you can always recharge piety at any time in the abyss, which should be effortlessly easy by the time you worship TSO. Use TSO's one time max piety ability to turn a demon trident into a Blessed Trishula and upgrade that to +9,+9. Even if you have terrible luck and find NOTHING... as long as you have a large shield, 40 AC, and TSO's minions, you can near effortlessly tab your way through zot to the orb and get out.
Whenever I'm feeling bad and want to just win, I play this character. It's about as easy as the game gets, so if you really want a win, give it a try. This character can tab through just about everything. Later on you can learn haste and tab through the extended endgame too.
I tried this out and it went really well. Wound up dying in Elves 3 due to terrible teleport luck. Cleared the whole level save the very end. Tried to tp out when it got dicey and 3 times my teleport moved me less than 3 squares until I eventually died. 
Any other ezmode guides for me? ;D
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
If you're willing to try spellcasting and be very cautious, I think HEAE is a pretty strong combination. High Elves have -1 Hp, but they have good aptitudes in everything an AE needs, and +2 mp.
At the start, train up your air and conjurations, and use bolt bouncing to doublezap enemies with your Shock spell. You will want to get Swiftness and Repel Missiles castable as soon as possible. With these two spells working you will be safe against most enemies, since you'll be faster than them, and able to repel projectiles and certain spells. Anything too dangerous than you, you run away from it. Eventually pick up a decent blade and get it to mindelay. I personally like worshipping Makh, but Fedhas is also a fine choice if you're having trouble in the early game.
The big threats to worry about early on are:
Fast Things - killer bees and any sort of snake have the potential to be dangerous, since you can't outrun them easily. Doglike creatures and bats are fast but aren't a huge threat. Centaurs aren't really a problem if you have rmsl.
rElec things - killing electric eels and Sky Beasts will be hard until you get a good blade down to mindelay. I recommend running form Sky beasts or locking them in rooms, and avoiding eel ponds.
Orc Priests - they're not fast, but they can smite and rmsl won't stop that
Hubris / Carelessness - If you see an Ogre, the first thing you should do is cast swiftness so you can escape. If you see multiple enemies, always draw them away from the pack. An HEAE specializes in running away. Play cautiously. There are a lot of fights that an HEAE can win as easily as a MiFi but ONLY if he is willing to run at the slightest hint of danger. This is probably the hardest part.
The usual progression after getting a smallish weapon to mindelay is to train some defenses and really focus on getting your spellpower up for a killing spell. This depends on what books you find, but even your Lightning Bolt spell will take you a long way (but remember, it's loud!). I like getting some frost magic and going for Freezing Cloud, and investing in additional charms like Deflect Missiles, Regeneration, Sublimation of Blood and Haste. Summon Elemental is pretty decent for the experience investment, and spellpower goes into duration rather than strength. A good one to pick up is Animate Skeleton just to give you bodies to retreat behind when you run. Plans really branch out at this point. Maybe you'll find a big honkin double sword or triple sword and decide you want to win using that plus spells, which is fine.
The big constant after "use your starting book and run a lot" is "get a blade to mindelay" and "get haste". Even the haste one can be excused if you worship okawaru. I like Fedhas though, he carries you through a 3-rune basically.
That being said, I consider the strongest combination for someone who's willing to spend some time learning to be DDBe. Deep Dwarves don't regenerate HP but basically get an additional kind of damage reduction called Damage Shaving. It works very well in conjunction with a high AC. As a general rule, here's how I think a DDBe should roll::
>Get the biggest honking axe you can find.
>Wear the heaviest armour you can.
>Use the wand to heal yourself. don't be afraid to recharge it, you won't be using MP for anything anyways.
>Train Evocations for MP if you start to get low. If you're low on MP and have tons of piety, use Trog's Hand. Don't be afraid to use all your invocations. they can save you hp
>Train Axes, Fighting, and Armour.
This might seem less obvious, but take few risks and try to lose as few hp as possible per fight. Fighting enemies in corridors is important even against really weak enemies. An XL7 MiFi might not care about 2 kobolds, but if one of those 2 kobolds costs you a hit point you'll never regenerate, that sucks, so the XL 7 DDBe fights them in a corridor.
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ezmode guide to crawl: you should almost never take a step toward an enemy that is in los
let them come to you instead
in general the most important part of crawl is controlling enemies; thankfully enemy movement in crawl is 100% predictable outside of things with batty movement
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On January 18 2014 04:06 MrBitter wrote:Show nested quote +On January 14 2014 12:43 Therapist. wrote:
Hey Bitter, try a Minotaur Fighter using polearms. Reach makes things a lot easier. Start with Okawaru. He'll give you stuff. Equip plate as soon as you find it. Switch to The Shining One later on when you're ready to take the end of the Vaults. Max your piety in the Crypt. From here on in, summon TSO's minions on anything that even seems tough. Use it very liberally, because you can always recharge piety at any time in the abyss, which should be effortlessly easy by the time you worship TSO. Use TSO's one time max piety ability to turn a demon trident into a Blessed Trishula and upgrade that to +9,+9. Even if you have terrible luck and find NOTHING... as long as you have a large shield, 40 AC, and TSO's minions, you can near effortlessly tab your way through zot to the orb and get out.
Whenever I'm feeling bad and want to just win, I play this character. It's about as easy as the game gets, so if you really want a win, give it a try. This character can tab through just about everything. Later on you can learn haste and tab through the extended endgame too. I tried this out and it went really well. Wound up dying in Elves 3 due to terrible teleport luck. Cleared the whole level save the very end. Tried to tp out when it got dicey and 3 times my teleport moved me less than 3 squares until I eventually died. Any other ezmode guides for me? ;D
MiFi/Be are still the overall easiest by far for a normal 3 rune win.you still have to play careful cause beeing melee can suck but no big micro of skills,spells etc.
also why you doing elf. just the banish alone is enough to be scary till late. go lair,orc,kinda deep in dungeon and then start lairbranches. had chars that cleared 2-3 branches and then almost died in elf when i wanted the big lootvaults before tackling pan/hells.
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
My general rule for Elf is I don't go in unless I'm okay with being banished.
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few more things:
- gargs are probably the easiest race atm with their broken acbonus + innate resists. Yes, even easier then minotaur, except for the first few levels.
- stairdancing is a good strategy for every char... and most levels have multiple stairs, so use different ones, if you lured too many opponents
- use evocables! lamps of fire and phials are a lifesaver... Even extended endgame crumbles under them and killing hell runebosses with a few phialshots/lamps is a common sight. While <XL20 they recharge quite slowly, so use them only for major fights or tough spots, later on you can make very liberal use of them, as they often allow multiple uses per fight
I ended several runs with 10 phials/lamps in my inventory... I can hardly imagine any items i would prioritize over them, except maybe blinkscrolls. They are already decent without evoc skill, but with some investment they are just insane. They deal tons of damage AND create summons, that also deal a lot of damage while tanking well.
- potions and scrolls are there for a reason: If you have some trouble, check your inventory! Think about what happens with each scroll or potion, if you would use it now. You think healing pots are the most important pots? no, they aren't. An invis pot (especially as melee) or magic pot(as caster) can often turn clutch situations. And most other pots also have their situations, when they shine.
Same goes with scrolls. bunch of centaurs slaughtering you? scroll of fog! assaulted by half the lair? scroll of fear! 2HP and way to close to the opponent? scroll of blinking around the corner! just reached branchend? scroll of magic mapping! had to cast too much, so you started glowing? Scroll of vulnerability!
- wands are poor mans evocables
A wand of fire/cold (not the shitty versions) can kill most tough opponents in early with very little investment in evocations. Later you will skip those for the above mentioned evoc items, but telewands are still very handy, especially because they can be used while silenced! Digging is also incredibly useful, as with 2 charges you can force any ranged opponent into melee (just dig two orthogonal diagonals and hide behind the corner) or break LOS to escape. Not even talking about hastewands, consider yourself lucky if you find one.
It is advisable not to waste scrolls of recharge early and keep them for eventual haste/digging/telewands. But remember that losing some scrolls is better then losing your life. So if those high priests are hiding behind mobs in Orc3, consider recharging your firewand and blast them down instead of dying a horrible death 
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I've been enjoying HaHu and found them to have a pretty nice early and early->mid game play with the ability to hybrid more than the MiFi/MiBe and great starting apts. It's obviously not the tab-to-win powerhouse of something like MiFi, but I find it a good mix of accessible and flexible. Seems like a solid "I'm tired of *Fi/Be, but am still struggling getting 3-runes" choice.
My starting build was something like:
+ Show Spoiler +
-If you find stones on D1 or D2 get slings to 8 then 12 short swords for min delay
-If you don't find stones get slings to like 6 then short swords for min delay (basically just put less into slings since you can't use it as much)
-After that work on slings to 10
-Get shields to 7 once you find a buckler and have reached at least this point.
-Slings to 15-18 for min delay and decent damage output
-Work on Dodging, Invocation and Fighting until you're awesome on those fronts
-After this point you can branch into charms/air/translocations casting, evocations, or work on AC.
I find this setup to have some nice pros to it:
-Quick apts for both ranged and melee combat offering gives you flexibility early game for survival and quickly lets you start getting into defensive or other skills.
-Access to stones early lets you rely on slings for anything of notable difficulty.
-Flexible. You can branch out in a few ways. You can invest easily into charms with +1 apt and slow metabolism means you don't really need to worry about spell hunger that much so you only need spell casting (or heck even just use invocations) for MP unless you're going really high into spell casting. You also have +1 for translocations so you can nab blink and portal projectile pretty easily. You can also easily grab something like Fire Dragon Armor for really strong defensive stats.
-Works well with oka gifts since you'll get melee blades, ammo, slings, possibly a buckler, and can even use a fairly reasonable selection of the body armors.
-Also works well with oka's heroism early/mid game because you'll get both your dodge and shield boosted by it and benefit defensively from both.
-High dex, small size, light armor, and even a few points in stealth means you'll have many chances of seeing monsters without waking them. This lets you pick your fights a little better. Combined with that slings are relatively quiet so you can pull apart some packs and take things a little more piecemeal or just in general fight without waking up whole dungeon sections. I suppose if you got an evocable invisibility or invested enough into hexes you could go fully into stabbing, but I just enjoy that little bit to allow me to scout encounters a bit more safely.
-Low skill investment for good offensive payout (provided you grab a good short blade and get a sling to a good enchanted level) means you can spend a lot of your time investing in boosting your defenses while still having a reasonable offense.
-Slaying bonuses really benefit both combat forms well. Having armor slaying bonuses from artifacts can make your offensive powers shine especially if you find a quick blade somewhere. Go go gauntlets of war.
-Stats work pretty well, your starting int isn't terrible, your str is >8, and you have high dex.
-No major armor restrictions like other strong ranged combat characters.
-Fast leveling to get things rolling nicely.
-Access to explosion brand on sling bullets which is nice for large groups of mobs, though use them as sparingly as possible until real AoE threats since they mulch 100%.
Cons:
Well the cons are pretty obvious. Your Spellcasting apt stinks so you can't quickly go into spell casting hybrid play like a HEAE might (though getting rMiss, swiftness, and stuff is trivial). Your ranged offensive power is always going to be from slings, evocations, and/or invocations. Your hp are also lower than average and your fighting and armor apts are negative so getting the most out of your armor and hp is tough. With 2 low damage/fast attack weapons you're relying on brands and slaying to tackle high AC opponents. You pretty much have to start with Trog or Oka for sling ammo. Also stones are heavy and your str isn't stellar.
Anyways I just thought the mix was nice, especially as a change from *Fi or *Be. You really have quick to develop core skills (slings, short blades, dodging) and can get rolling early with that in a way that still has lasting power mid game. I would be skeptical of clearing hell or anything unless you got some truly awesome quick blade going (though next release you can convert to Lugonu and be able to use a distortion quick blade and sling seamlessly), but that's fine. It's nice that there's plenty of room to tweak for item drops too. You can get 11 str and use something like fire dragon armor if you wanted to, you can stay at 9-10 str and focus soley on EV+Dex with a lighter armor, or you could invest into int and get some spells rolling reasonably well (just don't expect a big mana pool). I suppose you could grab enough skill for medium shields as well as dodging, but I'd rather spend the points elsewhere until very late if at all.
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On January 18 2014 04:06 MrBitter wrote:Show nested quote +On January 14 2014 12:43 Therapist. wrote:
Hey Bitter, try a Minotaur Fighter using polearms. Reach makes things a lot easier. Start with Okawaru. He'll give you stuff. Equip plate as soon as you find it. Switch to The Shining One later on when you're ready to take the end of the Vaults. Max your piety in the Crypt. From here on in, summon TSO's minions on anything that even seems tough. Use it very liberally, because you can always recharge piety at any time in the abyss, which should be effortlessly easy by the time you worship TSO. Use TSO's one time max piety ability to turn a demon trident into a Blessed Trishula and upgrade that to +9,+9. Even if you have terrible luck and find NOTHING... as long as you have a large shield, 40 AC, and TSO's minions, you can near effortlessly tab your way through zot to the orb and get out.
Whenever I'm feeling bad and want to just win, I play this character. It's about as easy as the game gets, so if you really want a win, give it a try. This character can tab through just about everything. Later on you can learn haste and tab through the extended endgame too. I tried this out and it went really well. Wound up dying in Elves 3 due to terrible teleport luck. Cleared the whole level save the very end. Tried to tp out when it got dicey and 3 times my teleport moved me less than 3 squares until I eventually died. Any other ezmode guides for me? ;D
Should just play the same thing and skip Elf. Just stick to one god too... Okawaru probably more useful than TSO in 3 rune game. Trog, Mahkleb and Elyvilon are other powerful gods with melee.
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Brunei Darussalam622 Posts
If you are looking for an easy melee, try Hill Orc anything and worship Beogh
They can pretty much tab through to lair. Just fight in hallways and use basic techniques to deal with centaurs/ogres/uniques.
Convert to Beogh asap. Wear the heaviest armor and use the biggest axe.
Once you get some followers, just baby them and watch them grow. They will grow even faster if you let them kill stuff, so try to do that. The monsters will follow you around and you can just do circles while your guys beat them up. To get the most out of your doods, its best if you focus them using 't' to tell them to gang up on a monster.
If you see good items, pick them up and save them for your army. You can tell your orcs to pick up items by pressing 'T' and selecting 'a'll. Just drag your army over the items.
Try to keep an eye out for bows/slings/polearms. It really gives you an advantage in battle when you have 5-6 archers laying into a monster and a few tridents backing up your melee. The idea is to have as many of your guys as possible able to hit a monster at a single time. To get them to shoot at a monster, 't'ell them to gang up on it while the monster is still a distance away.
If you play it right, you can have tier 3 orcs (generals/sorcerers/high priest) by the time you reach lair. Your army will pretty much carry you to the end if you protect them from their own AI blunders and if you always focus their fire. Beware of deep water since your guys get owned by eels and sometimes can get confused and drown themselves. If you ever get confused, just stand still and be very careful not to hit one of your own. It can cause a chain reaction and you might be forced to kill your champions.
Save Orc branch for if you ever get wiped and need to raise another army. Slime is generally off limits. Snake can be hard since your guys dont deal well with poison.
Another important skill to controlling your army is liberal use of recall. Press 'A' to bring up the menu. If you see an orc is about to die, you can use recall to mix all your guys up and hopefully move the injured one out of the way..
Have fun drowning unbelievers in a sea of blood!
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Decided to try to crawling back and again try for my first win. Haven't played for a few months. A question though. How do you objectively tell which weapons are better. For instance usually the more damaging weapon the weapon is, the slower it is. So it's like a trade-off, and I'm unsure where to stand on the issue.
As a beginner, I just carry the weapon with the highest +X, +Y regardless of the weapon-class because more damage is good right, or is speed always better?
As of Lair 3, Okawaru decided to be pretty generous and gifted:
1) +9 +0 demon whip of slashing
2) +13 +8 great mace of speed, hunger+, rElec+, rC+, MR+ Str+3, Int-2
I've heard demon whips are an end-game staple, but I'd like to know the formula once and for all.
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
It depends on whether or not you're a mainly melee fighter. I play a lot of spellcasters, and as a spellcaster you usually aren't exactly rolling in spare experience. I usually pick up a fast 1-handed weapon that doesn't need a ton of experience to get down to minimum delay. Remember, training your weapon skill after you've reached minimum delay is usually not a great idea.
My rule of thumb for melee characters (minotaur fighter, deep dwarf berserker, what have you) is to use the biggest weapon I can find. Since I have the spare experience to train M+F to like 20, might as well go for the super huge one. In the end, most weapons have the same minimum delay / maximum speed (0.7) so you might as well go for a huge one. There are exceptions-- small guys, quick weapons, spellcasters, and so on. Generally though, unless it's super early and each swing takes 1.4 turns or whatever, go as big as you can.
In your case in particular, I'd recommend wielding the great mace instead of the demon whip if you have enough skill to be at 1.0 delay or less with the great mace (you probably do). It's quick, it deals a lot of damage, and it's got amazing slaying. The +9/+0 on the demon whip is not great since you're probably hitting anyways and demon whips don't deal much damage. vorpal is kinda a poop brand on small weapons too.
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Ok, thanks for the advice. It's a Gargoyle/Gladiator, so yah it's meleer. Haven't played since last update. New class sounded cool :D, so gave it a whirl.
I intended to hybrid it a little, but have been relatively unlucky and haven't found many spellbooks yet (1 so far). Also the whip was actually a +9 venom, but I used an unidentified scroll and it switched the brand.
Oh I guess I'll segway into 2 more questions.
1) I've only managed to get an XL 27 dude once. I know 27 is the max level, but does that mean after maxing out, you will also can no longer gain xp to train skills such as evocations or w/e as well?
2) while hybriding a character, sometimes while conserving mana, I forget to use skills for awhile, and they automatically stop training. Is there a way to prevent that?
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
1) After maxing out in XL, you are still able to train skills like normal.
2) The best way to deal with skill training is to turn off "automatic" mode. it's certainly possible / plausible to win in automatic mode, but you will want to set your skills to manual mode.
First, open the skills menu using m.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/W5EUsjv.png)
go to your skills menu and hit "/" to change your skills mode. then manually set which skills you're using by hitting letter keys. You'll notice that despite the fact that my character has lots of fire and conjurations, and mostly fights using them, I can manually redirect his skill points to melee combat stuff that he has fallen behind on, which can be useful. This way requires you to actively manage your skills, which is more work, but worth it.
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Ok great. Beforehand I was trying to disable skills in automatic mode. It was futile and they kept turning back on. Awesome. With manual mode does that mean if, say, you want to train charms and you don't know any spells, you will still get experience?
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
On January 23 2014 06:36 Zerbra wrote:
Ok great. Beforehand I was trying to disable skills in automatic mode. It was futile and they kept turning back on. Awesome. With manual mode does that mean if, say, you want to train charms and you don't know any spells, you will still get experience?
Manual mode doesn't disable any functionality that Automatic mode has. It just gives you more control.
For example: if you do not know ANY spells, it's actually not possible to train Charms. You can train Spellcasting, but until you learn a spell with the appropriate school, you will never be able to train that school. Similarly, if you don't worship a god that has invocations (or if you are an atheist), you can't train invocations, regardless as to whether you are in automatic or manual mode.
Training skills can be a bit weird, but your experience will always go somewhere. For example, if you want to train charms, step one is to learn a charm. If you try to turn on charms training, you won't be able to unless you already know a charm. If you turn off all other kinds of training and try to exit the skill menu, it won't let you exit. It'll say something like "dude you need to turn on at least one skill for training, or else where will the exp go?"
One advantage of manual skill training is you can learn some kind of charm you can barely cast, then because you "know" the charm (even if it's at 99% failure), you're allowed to allocate skill into charms. So you can turn on charms and turn everything else off and train up your charms until the spell is castable.
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Ok, fantastic. Beforehand, for the last like bazillion runs, my opening move would be to try to pointlessly summon butterflies just to keep the skill active. This should be much easier now. I'll report back when I inevitably die.
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
Cool! Let me know if there's anything else confusing you rules-wise. If you want serious advice on more complicated matters the guy to talk to is probably crate.
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Ok 2 more questions then. First one is super dumb.
1) d# is to drop a specific number of items. how exactly to you hit that shortcut. d+(shift+3) doesn't work. Alternatively going into the drop menu and hitting # does nothing. How do you drop like 3 healing potions?
2) Currently I still have my +9 +0 demon whip of slashing and had been using it sometimes to avoid the Hunger+ of the great mace. Is it worth using a bunch of weapon scrolls to buff it to +9 +3 to convert it into treasure trove (+4 +3 or better whip). I've never managed to go to a trove before. Also I'm not totally sure if I could even use the scrolls on a +9 +0 whip anyways.
Edit: compared to the center of the last floor of the slime pit, how much better is a treasure trove?
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
1) to drop some, but not all of an item type, here's what you do.
Step 1: hit d. this opens your drop menu.
Step 2: hit a number, such as 3.
Step 3: the letter of the item you want to drop some of
Step 4: hit enter.
2) I'm not sure that a trove looking for a whip would accept a demon whip. Also, enchant Weapon scrolls fall into 3 categories:
I: enchants the first number by 1
II: increases the second number by 1
III: increases both numbers by 1d2
If it's a randart, don't bother enchanting your demon whip anyways (does it have a name like your mace does?). randarts can't be changed. If it's just a run-of-the-mill magic weapon, EW 1 scrolls won't work on it because it's already at maximum accuracy. EW 2 scrolls will work fine on it. that being said, if you're using it in combat now I would be very hesitant to give it to a trove.
Edit: compared to the slime loot, a trove is like... potentially as good as one of the quadrants, or substantially worse, or slightly better, depending on what you need. Trove loot is generated by acquirement I think, but sometimes you'll walk into a trove and it's a "trove of all the different kinds of body armour" but you already have the best one. I'd say troves are usually worth it, but I wouldn't give up an important weapon for a trove.
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Awesome thanks yet again. Since demon whips are common-ish late game I won't give it up just yet. It isn't a randart though, so it seems like I could buff it up though.
(So strange, only 3 books found and up to D22)
Update: Whelp that was my second best run. Died on Vaults 1 XL19.....First enemies encountered on the floor were a pack of ogres. An ogre mage banished me immediately. About 45 long minutes later, an exit finally spawned and I found my way out. Finished off the ogres and decide, well vaults isn't that tough, let's keep going. The very next group of enemies is another pack of ogres and another mage again banishes me immediately. Didn't have enough strength to fight through 2 liches and and executioner while confused after fending off a previous large wave of enemies.
1) If you're strong enough do you typically just kill everything in the abyss?
2) has banishment become much more common since the last update or was I just unlucky? I was doing well with 0 life-threatening encounters until the one happened.
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EPT
