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You could also find the Singing/screaming sword too.
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Jun 23, 2014 05:32
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Also no berserkitis.
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Jun 26, 2014 02:04
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http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Haifisch/morgue-Haifisch-20140626-035021.txt posted:Haifisch the Heavyweight Champion (level 27, 315/315 (323) HPs) 
Haifisch fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jun 26, 2014 |
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Jun 26, 2014 02:30
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If the images are too large, tell me and I'll resize 'em! I still haven't quite figured this out. SOMEONE AWFUL'S SPRIGGAN MISADVENTURES!!! SUPER FUN GREAT TIME!!! Episode 1: Murder: How to Do It and not Get Done Yourself Okay, so first off I'm just gonna say this: I'm not at all fantastic at DCSS. I'm not really a numbers person, know what I mean? So there will probably be situations where I get them wrong, or neglect to emphasize just how dangerous something is by posting its dice rolls or whatever. I've learned how to play and not die mostly by experience, trial and error, spectator advice, and a lot of failure (read: really dumb splats). For the most part, I almost enjoy losing as much as winning, because no matter what happens you learn something. So feel free to chime in if I either get something wrong or don't adequately describe it. Everyone will learn, and that's the warmest fuzziest feeling of all.  Also these are just my strategies and how I feel comfortable playing, that doesn't mean they are anything close to the end-all of stabbing or even that they're the greatest! I'm just hoping it helps some people, especially those intimidated by the STAB LYFE, to start to get a handle on things. SO WITH ALL THAT SAID: WTF is a Spriggan?! Well, according to Google Imagesearch it's either some kind of dryad-thing, an anime man, or a weird fuzzy black Final Fantasy monster. But according to Dungeon Crawl it's this: code:For a Spriggan stabber, there are probably three backgrounds I'd call "best": Assassin (As), who starts with a dagger, blowgun and some curare and needles. Enchanter (En), who starts with the Book of Maledictions and a dagger. Earth Elementalist (EE), who starts with the Book of Geomancy and some small rocks to cast Sandblast with. Each of these has their own merits and drawbacks, but all are strong choices. I tend to favor the Enchanter's spellbook over Assassin's needles, and Earth Elementalist stabber plays best with a specific god I'm not planning for (Ashenzari, who rchandra is doing a good job of showing off), so I pick SpEn.  Here's our starting position, and  Here's our vitals. Note the NINE HITPOINTS -- this is important. Forget d:1 gnolls -- a hobgoblin could sneeze heavily and kill us. So we have to play smart, and we have to play careful. But it's not all as dire as it seems! We have some skills (to pay the bills etc etc), items and innate awesomeness at our disposal:  Look at how cool we are! ... yeah, okay, some of these are pretty major drawbacks. Our tiny size means we can't wield two-handed weapons, or wear most armo(u)r, including boots, gloves, helmets, and most body armors that aren't dragon scale. The good news: We wouldn't want to wear most of that junk anyway. Two-handed weapons don't stab as well as our trusty short blade, and heavy armor is really dang noisy. "Supernaturally acute eyesight" is innate see invisible. It's probably been made obvious how good this is (very). We "cover ground extremely quickly", meaning we move two-thirds faster than most races, and this is the main selling point of Spriggans to me. In a game where positioning is so direly important, a Spriggan generally has the advantage over its normal-speed opponents. If you know when (or more importantly, how) to run, we can survive the early game and beyond no problem. We're herbivores but we also consume almost no food. Spriggans can't eat chunks (chopped corpses of enemies), meat rations, or beef jerky but we get extra nutrition from vegetarian food like bread rations and fruit (RIP fruit variety). It's a decent trade-off in some ways, but it means we have to be very careful about spell hunger. Not mentioned here is our HP growth: it's the second-lowest, only ahead of Felid. That 9 HP will never become as impressive as you'd want it to.  Our starting inventory. Enchanter used to start with 12 darts before darts were removed. Not having a ranged option to begin with kind of sucks, but darts were basically garbage anyway so it's less of a loss than you'd think. Luckily, we're standing near a pile of stones, so we can pick them up and throw them at things. We also have a potion of porridge. DELICIOUS. I'll get to the spellbook later, when we have enough levels to memorize anything out of it; when you're actually playing an unfamiliar caster class, I'd recommend looking through all of the spells in detail to get a feel for what your general trajectory is going to be. At the moment, we start with one spell memorized.  Corona! (Check out that spell icon! They're getting an overhaul at the moment, and the new ones look great.) The knowledge bot (which has been described before, I think? You can access it on IRC easiest, but there's also a web interface) describes it thus: "Outlines the target in light, making them easier to hit (by boosting your to-hit randomly between 2 and 9). Makes invisible things (temporarily) visible. Tastes less pissy with a wedge of lime." Now, as a Spriggan we have innate see invisible, which makes the second benefit not as helpful to us, but having a bonus to hitting things is always helpful. I think the most important thing about Corona is that it's nearly silent, making it a useful attention-getter throughout the game. Which is nice, because as I'll keep repeating ad nauseam, positioning -- and learning to manipulate enemies into favorable situations -- are very important to us. It has range to the edge of our line of sight, so we can cast it on anything we see (that isn't blocked or obstructed somehow).  Our skillset. As you can see, we have some dodging, stealth, short blades, spellcasting and Hexes; we have a very high aptitude for Dodging and Stealth, especially, but our other stuff isn't too shabby either. I try to be flexible with my skills but as a Spriggan I always, always prioritize Spellcasting for awhile. See, with most races who cast spells, it's all right to take heavy hunger from their offensive because they are turning enemies into food, which replenishes that resource. Spriggans, however, can't do that -- they don't eat meat. Spellcasting and Intelligence are primary contributors to reducing spell hunger, so as opposed to the logic of many other races, I'll be levelling Spellcasting rather heavily -- at least until our bread-and-butter spells are hungerless. I also leave on Hexes and Stealth, two other key assets to our not-getting-killed strategy. All spells in our starting book are Hexes, and we'll want to be able to cast them. Stealth does just what it sounds like -- it helps us go unnoticed by dudes who want to crush our face. WALL OF TEXT OVER, WE'RE PLAYING THE GAME NOW. I head to the right to pick up that pile of rocks, and already I've met our first target:  A kobold taking a nap. Had we not started with a few levels of stealth, he might have been awake. There are quite a few ways to approach this: our goal is to sneak up to him unnoticed and stab his face in. If we just go straight up the hallway, we'll give him way too many chances to notice us and wake up. Worse, when things wake up they often shout, which can draw more enemies to their position. So instead I decide to go around the left side, taking as few steps as possible in the monster's line of sight.  He woke up anyway, and he shouted. At this point and in this position it's probably not that big of a deal, but it never hurts to be careful. So I pull him back into the hallway --  -- and dispatch of him there. That way, if anything headed towards the position where the kobold shouted, we wouldn't be in its direct line of sight (and even if we were, being in a hallway means worst-case scenario we could only be hit by one monster at a time, and best-case we'd have an easy out to run away). None of this was strictly necessary -- his shout didn't draw any monsters to us, and he died quickly -- but it's good to get in the habit of fighting cautiously. With that dealt with, we continue on.  This goblin is in a difficult position to sneak up on, so I decide to cast Corona to pull him back. If he's standing with other enemies, we're out of their line of sight so they won't know where to follow us, and we have a couple of corners to lead him around. Unfortunately, I walk too far away and he gives up the chase pretty quickly.  I could have shouted (t t) to try and draw his attention, but that would also potentially get the notice of other things. Instead I just wander down the hallway, find him again, and murder him to death. Things proceed pretty uneventfully until --  What's this?   For most people, unknown enchanted weapons are a sign to be cautious. For us, it's a sign to Not Let That Dude Touch Us Ever. It could very easily be something like electrocution which might kill us in one hit. Or Distortion. Or any number of horrible things. (It could also be cursed with a negative enchantment, but I don't like the odds.) Luckily for us, he seems to be favoring tossing stones at us over closing into melee, which means we can do likewise. I hit him with Corona and sling a few stones of my own. He falls quickly, and we claim his dagger. I don't want to equip it just yet; a cursed weapon could spell our end this early, especially if it has a negative enchantment. I also pick up the ring and don't wear it yet. Though all jewelery IDs when you wear it now, I don't want to chance it being a ring of Loudness, which would certainly screw with our stealth strategy.  I find another kobold in a hallway who doesn't wake up as I approach (it's only a few steps, so I risk it). When you attack a sleeping enemy, something glorious happens:   You get a major damage bonus for stabbing sleeping enemies, which is increased by the fact we're wielding a dagger (other short blades also increase it, but not by nearly as much as a dagger, specifically). This damage scales with both your Short Blades and Stealth skills. It used to be its own skill, Stabbing, but it was combined with Short Blades to be that class of weapon's bonus-thing (like Axes having cleave, for example). The amount of !s on the attack flavor text gives us a somewhat-helpful shorthand for evaluating our damage. One ! is 7-17 damage; two is 18-35, three is 36-71 -- it keeps going. We did somewhere between 18 and 35 damage with one stab, which is nice and will kill a lot of early threats outright.  Killing this newt gets us to level 2, which means we can memorize our second spell. (The hobgoblin is asleep, so I feel okay messing with this stuff here.) So, let's have a look at our handy dandy SPELLBOOK  Being experience level 2 (xl 2), we can only memorize up to level 2 spells, even if we have the spell levels to grab a 3rd or 4th level spell. Now I'll be honest -- I probably underestimate Sure Blade, it's a weird spell, and I rarely feel the need to memorize it. I'm not saying it's bad. It boosts your to-hit with short blades by a lot, but it doesn't last very long -- you can cast it multiple times and that stacks the bonus and the duration. I'm almost positive I underestimate this spell, but it feels awkward to use, which makes me dislike it. Ensorcelled Hibernation, on the other hand... awwww yeah. If you can make it to XL2 as a Spriggan, you'll probably be able to make it to Lair if you don't play dumb, and Ensorcelled Hibernation is the entire reason why.  It puts enemies who aren't rC+ (or higher) to sleep for a(n extremely) short period of time, checked against the enemy's magic resistance (MR). And remember what I said up there about stabbing sleeping enemies? Mmmmm-hm. Most things in the early game aren't rC+ (notable exceptions: ice beasts, any monster who picked up an enchanted armor of some sort might be rC+ too, and undead can't be slept with it at all), so if they don't resist this spell will earn you a free stab against it. It does have a few cons: It doesn't last long at all, so it's best cast on a monster in melee range or very close to it, so that you can stab them immediately. Also, when things wake up they can't be put to sleep again immediately; you have to wait a pretty long time for a second shot. If you have allies, they are dumb enough to hit the sleepy thing and wake it up, ruining your stab chance, so be careful about that too. But still, this spell kicks rear end and I will be using it a lot. It does cost a little bit of hunger, but it will become hungerless once we get our Spellcasting to about 6. To demonstrate:  Mr. Hobgoblin woke up, so I led him back here and allowed him to continue his nap. Permanently.   A pair of glowing gloves on d:1 would potentially be a really cool find if I could wear them. I can't. The rest of d:1 goes without incident, so I head down to d:2 with hopes that it will be more of the same. With some basic concepts introduced, I'm going to take a break here because this post is getting really drat long, what with all the explanatory walls of text I'm laying down. NEXT TIME, ON SPRIGGANBALL Z: Fun things actually happening! Excitement! Peril! Some other stuff! 
someone awful. fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jun 26, 2014 |
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Jun 26, 2014 06:55
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pathetic little tramp posted:I think the stealth boost with Dith is still essentially "Calculate all sources of stealth, then multiply by 2," so with a good stealth skill investment + light armour + Dith's umbra + invisible, you can easily get to uncannily stealthy, which I believe is the max. 'Uncannily stealthy', >= 500 stealth, is indeed the max stealth displayed. There's no such thing as 'max' stealth, though - you can get as much stealth as you want! It's the denominator of a fraction (detection_chance = mons_perception / stealth), so each point of stealth is worth less than the last, but still... UncertainKitten posted:
  Gross, dude.
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Jun 26, 2014 08:29
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...I'm not sure whether it'd be funnier to keep it that way or to edit it and cite overexposure to a Song of Ice and Fire.
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Jun 26, 2014 18:35
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Given how those two talks about their love, it's probably still accurate.
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Jun 26, 2014 21:43
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Last time...  Part 10: Swiss Army Axe  A quick picture of my character in summary to check for holes in my defenses before I head on to the rest of the dungeon: my rF and rC look pretty empty here, but they can be covered by the respective protection from ___ rings. Thus, rElec seems to be the last big hole in my defenses, but it isn't absolutely necessary.  Dungeon:13, here we come!  I run into a tengu pack pretty early.  But they are too busy confusing themselves with their own mephitic clouds to really do anything to me.  Vampires can turn invisible and cast confuse to try to screw with you, but I'm defended against both.  Unseen horrors also suffer from being boring to fight as a Formicid.  Dungeon:14, and all it can do to threaten me is a gargoyle? Yawn.  I manage to find another scroll of holy word while on my way to fight an undead hydra (which dies without incident).  Drinking an unidentified potion reveals it as a potion of magic. Not really necessary to me, so I'm not sad about wasting it.  And reading an unidentified scroll reveals a scroll of brand weapon! I select my vorpal battlaxe to get enchanted, with the hopes of getting something great like freezing, or electrocution, or   Protection-branded weapons give an extra 5 AC; it's pretty significant, but unless you only plan on using your weapon as a stat stick (or it's the early game and 5 AC is actually a big boost), it sucks due to the reduced offensive capability. It's even less useful for heavy armor users like me, as my AC only goes up from 35 to 40 (when 35 is, in my experience, enough AC to beat the game for a melee fighter).  Looks like I found the Vaults entrance; time to tab it clean.  Wizards are dangerous in the same way that ogre mages are: they can potentially have Crystal Spear or Banishment in their spell list, both of which can end your game. However, my good shield and MR ratings means I don't have to worry too hard.  Oh hey, an enchanted battleaxe on that vault guard! That might be worth looking at after I pry it from his cold, dead fingers.  The necromancer decides to play dirty. Even though I'm surrounded, I'm not really in any danger. However, I think I'll use Cleansing Flame to show it off, just in case I don't get a chance later.    As you can see, almost all the zombies died from a single use of Cleansing Flame, although the humans were barely hurt. It can still be useful to take out low HP creatures that are outside of direct melee contact.  I finish up the survivors and pick up the battleaxe, which turns out ot be freezing! Freezing is probably the best brand for melee weapons in the game, as very few things resist cold. Those that do resist cold will either die quickly regardless of my weapon brand, be vulnerable to holy wrath (like undead and Cocytus demons), or be orbs of fire (rC+, but immune to almost anything else).  Thus, I decide to not let my (ex) vorpal battleaxe's high enchant values go to waste, and decide to go get it blessed by TSO. I could hold out for an executioner's axe, but I have awful luck when trying to find them outside of worshipping Trog or Oka. I could also enchant my holy wrath battleaxe from the Ice Cave, but I also plan on enchanting this freezing battleaxe right away, which would mean splitting my scrolls up. Thus, I'm confident that I won't have any regrets doing this now as a good backup to my new freezing battleaxe.  TSO will also ask if you are sure, just in case you accidentally select a +0 short sword or something.  Bye, protection brand! Hello, blessed battleaxe! It seems I also got really lucky with the extra enchantments too!  I head back to stash and pick up all of my enchant weapon scrolls to burn them on my freezing battleaxe. (Changed in Trunk: With weapons only having a single enchant number now, enchant weapon scrolls have been combined into a single type. They also will never fail to work!)  End result: from +1/+2 to +6/+7. Pretty good, but not quite maxed on the damage end. I'm still happy with it!  Nothing else was interesting on D:14, so I decide to head into D:15 to clear out the Depths vault.  Unfortunately, it is pretty underwhelming.  After clearing out the rest of D:15, I head on back up some stairs, only to stumble upon a hidden stairs vault and: Maud ('the Forgotten'): A mysterious warrior princess from a far-off kingdom, on a quest to retrieve the legendary sword ‘Entarex’. Countless have been the admirers who, thinking about Maud, forgot everything else. Maud is a basic melee fighter unique, who's only unique quality happens to be that she usually has a pretty nice piece of weaponry. In this case, it's an eveningstar.  Splat.  With Maud dead, nothing else of interest was in the stairs vault, so I dig through the wall back into the rest of D:14, and head over the Vaults entrance.  Vaults is dangerous for many of the same reasons as Shoals for Formicids: just replace 'wide open areas with water' with 'wide open areas with the chance to be marked'. If you don't have at least 3 pips of MR on a Formicid before entering Vaults (or massively outlevel/outpower everything), start looking for another rune, because being marked in Vaults (where the walls are made of stone, not rock) and having Stasis is rolling a pair of dice weighted heavily towards your death. Aside from the odd difficulty spike that may occur, I should be fine as long as I take it careful.  Yaktaur packs can be scary, but I have enough AC/SH to just run up to them without taking too many hits.  I cleave through the pack and hit level 20, netting me a point of strength! The vault warden in the pack was carrying a battleaxe of flaming! I can swap out that scimitar for something more familliar now! Let's give it a wield and see what it's enchantments are.   WELL THEN. That's certainly a backup weapon.  A gadget shop! Let's see what's for sale:  It might be good to come back for a phial of floods or two later, but I can't afford them now.  Uh oh, a vault sentinel. Come on, MR, do your job!   He marked me one turn before dying, too. Well, being on the edge of the level will help with the agro, all I have to do is be careful for any  Convokers   He manages to get off a recall before I can close the distance and pummel him. Hopefully this doesn't get worse.  As I retret to a more defendable position, I stumble upon a scroll of acquirement. I'll pick it up in a bit.  Luckily, it seems that only a pack of ogres and a giant orange brain wandered over. I slice up the brain first, then work on the ogres.  Mark wears off shortly afterwards, and I pick up the scroll of acquirement. I go for armor again, as I really want some nice artifact pieces.  . Well, maybe it will be a shield of resistance and be useful...  . gently caress scrolls of acquirement, they are garbage. I'll just be over here with this pile of mutation potions and gamble with the RNG this way, thank you very much.  Net result: +1 AC. Not bad.  Elven demonologists are dangerous to just sprint up to, as they can summon all the nasty Fiends.  Thus, I duck behind a wall quick to cut line of sight, forcing it to get closer for me.  The preserver might make it a problem with killing the demonologist quickly, but let's hope.  Sliced and diced. I finish tabbing through the remainder of the elf pack without incident.  I finish clearing out the corners on Vaults:1, and move onto Vaults:2.  The ugly things from the entrance leave a corpse, so let's just keep pushing my luck!  Wild Magic 2: even more reason to just forget about casting magic!  A whole bunch of tab fights across half the floor later, and I finally run into another challenging room!  I shut the door first to get them to approach me without spamming recall or mark.  Unfortunately, the sentinel and convoker were smart and stayed near the rear of the room.  I manage to cleave my way through to them before they do any damage, though.  I also hit 18 Fighting in that fight, and decide that it's time to swap my skills around. If I was going to be optimal, it would probably be best to either put some points into either Throwing or a spell school in order to increase the effectiveness of my options. However, I decide that TITLES and BIG NUMBERS are much more important. Thus, I get prepared to start cranking Shields until it hits 27, regardless of the consequences!  Another pack of moving purple slaughtered, but it turns out I'm too engorged to eat the chunks right now. Guess I'll have to leave them here.  Ha, just kidding! I put on my ring of flight and proceed to evoke it constantly to give myself flight (and end it prematurely). Every time I evoke the ring to give me flight, it burns a small chunk of nutrition, which will allow me to get my hunger down to Very Full before these purple chunks rot away.  After getting myself hungry enough, I chow down. Net results: Deterioration 1 and Magic Resistance 1. Deterioration 1 is annoying: it causes you to become stat drained occasionally, which can screw with people who rely on spellcasting, or are balancing on the minimum strength needed for their armor (and weight for non-Trunk players). However, level 1 (usually) only triggers around the time the previous stat loss has naturally recovered, thus making it more of an inconvenience than a must-cure, or at worst just wearing a ring of sustain abilities. Magic Resistance 1 is what it says on the tin, MR+, which is great because have more ring options now if I so choose.  In fact, it seems that mutation was enough to push my MR into 5 pips while still wearing my ring, which makes me 'almost entirely resistant to hostile enchantments'. Barring the worst luck imaginable, I can't even suffer an enemy inflicted status effect without something causing me to lose MR first!  This changes my plans slightly, but first I'll finish cleaving my way through Vaults:2 with even less of a care than I had before. Kobold demonologists, by the way, can't summon Tier 1 (Fiends) or Tier 2 (Cacodemon, Reaper, Shadow demon, etc.) demons, so they are popcorn unless they summon a neqoxec.  One of these kobold demonologists had an artifact ring! I ID it to reveal that it is pretty average in terms of usefulness. However, rElec is pretty useful for a swap, and since I don't care about -Tele, I can just straight up use this as a better ring of flight! Score!  I also find another legendary deck, but this one turns out to be a deck of war. It gets trashed because it has no strategic effects, so I don't care about trying to use it.  Finally, in the last room on Vaults:2, I find THREE scrolls of enchant weapon II on the ground! Time to see how much better my freezing battleaxe can get!   I head back to stash to drop off some of the stuff I found, and decide to change course with my newfound magic resistance...  NEXT TIME: The Elven Halls! Floodkiller fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 20:46
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What the gently caress do you mean 'enough AC' there is never enough AC, only more AC (where more = better)
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Jun 29, 2014 21:18
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Neruz posted:What the gently caress do you mean 'enough AC' there is never enough AC, only more AC (where more = better) "Enough AC" refers to the point at which I will no longer accept sacrificing another department of survival (damage, resists, etc.) for more points of AC. Obviously, more is better, but diminishing returns are a thing. E: Unless you are a gargoyle, then 70+ AC for days.
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Jun 29, 2014 21:26
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How in the hell does everything in that room fail to notice you!? You're a heavily armored firefly by this point!
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Jun 30, 2014 07:08
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Arcade Rabbit posted:How in the hell does everything in that room fail to notice you!? You're a heavily armored firefly by this point! Let's be honest. If you were in their position, you would continue to "not notice" the horrible death machine and just happen to wander at full speed in the opposite direction of it as soon as possible.
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Jun 30, 2014 07:43
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WOAH IT'S SPRIGGAN TIME AGAIN YOU GUYS!!! Episode 2: You SpEn Me Right Round, Baby, Right Round Last time on Spriginja Warrior: Nothing interesting happened, but we survived d:1 with minimal incident. Harder than it sounds with 9 hitpoints! Now, we delve to d:2! SO SCARY OH NO   We stab that guy, and then take a look at our scroll situation. If I have multiples of a scroll(s), I'll read one in the hopes of finding Identify so that I can start to sift through my potions. FUZASI DELOY looks promising, so I take a chance on it, and --  It turns out to be Remove Curse. This is pretty good, actually! Now we can try on that ring we found, as well as wield the glowing dagger we picked up from that kobold. The glowing dagger could be Distortion, which wouldn't be the best, but I actually don't dislike having Distortion as a SpEn so I'm willing to risk it.   Hell yes. Venom is an incredibly strong early game brand for us (we'll want to upgrade eventually). Against things that aren't rPois (which, like rC+ enemies, is most early-game critters sans undead) we'll be able to hit them with a few stabs of poison and then, if necessary, flee -- and they very well might still die from the remaining poison damage. With our movement speed, this hit-and-run tactic can be invaluable against tougher enemies like early ogres. The ring is fine, too; it's not as useful as some others could be, but with nothing better to wear I leave it on. I head upstairs and drop my enchanted (not-poison) dagger so other things can't wield it, which is probably overcautious, but "you can never be too careful" is a good rule to live by. I also reassign the new dagger to slot a (= i (letter) a), so that when I find something I want to quick-swap with it it'll be in the right slot. That tedium done, let's keep exploring d:2.  I find these two together just above the stairs, but with a hallway and our new dagger they're no trouble.  He does get a hit on us (which pops hugedmg.rc, and gives me momentary sad-laughter when I realize that 3hp is almost a fourth of our pool) but it's not a big deal.  Worms can be problematic! They have a pretty big HP pool -- like you can see, our stab didn't do more than about half its health, and the two !!s let us know that it was somewhere in the 18-35 range. They hit like a truck (to our HP pool, at least), but the upside is they're super slow -- even without our Spriggan speed bonus. We poison it, back up and pelt it with rocks. It quickly falls.  More goodies! A wand is especially exciting. We zap it to identify it.  Always remember to target at least two spaces away from yourself, and not in a straight line towards a wall! Lightning could ricochet back and hit you, and a fireball could explode in your face. Safety first.   Polymorph! This is... not entirely terrible, but I'd have preferred something better. We can use it to change dangerous monsters (ie, something that is rC+ or rPois) into something that might be slightly less so -- or it might be worse. Lots of dumb deaths have been caused by polymorph, so just be careful and don't use it all over the place. The amulet we found is Resist Corrosion, which we wear for want of anything better; corrosion has been changed to a temporary debuff rather than a permanent decrease of armor/weapon enchants, and while it can still hurt, especially if surrounded like in Slime, it's less of a big deal.  Stabbing this dude nets us level three and a choice: what the hell do we do with our stats? As a general rule I used to always get our STR to 8 before throwing points into other stats, but recently they removed item weight. We can carry as much as we need to without encumbrance being a factor. I'll still probably bump it up a bit from fear of stat rot (getting to 0 in a stat gives you a massively bad debuff that will likely get you killed, though it doesn't outright kill you itself anymore), I throw this point into INT. With level 3, we can also memorize two new spells: Confuse and Dazzling Spray I'll gush about these in time, because they're both fabulous. Their failure level and hunger is too high for me to feel comfortable casting them for now, though. Our stats, as of XL3. Still pretty fragile.  Jackals can be a problem since they come in packs. Solution: don't let them surround you.  We find a bog-standard cape and look pretty fabulous in it, if I do say so.  Snakes!!! Poison is really scary with our low HP pool, so we -- again -- have to be more wary of already potentially game-ending threats like adders than a normal character. We spotted this one from the right side and came around through this hallway to score a stab on it. Eventually we won't be so lucky, but snakes are rC-: they're susceptible to cold. Ensorcelled Hibernation works great on them.  When we round the corner this goblin shows up, but he doesn't shout for whatever reason so the stab still goes off fine. The rest of d:2 sucks. To d:3!  While this situation doesn't look too dangerous, imagine if they had all been higher-level enemies! The true benefit of stealth is that it lets you pick your battles, and I decide this one isn't worth the trouble. I'll come back later from another angle.  This snake is guarding a glowing robe! Let's beat him up and take his stuff.  We read our remaining Remove Curse scroll and leave this trash behind.   Here we meet our first player ghost! Player ghosts are immune to most of our usual tactics, since they're undead. I look at him to see what he's capable of, which turns out to be not too much. An AK is likely to have armor, though, and without stabs or poison our damage isn't anything to write home about, so I take the coward's way out.  I wander around the back, counterclockwise, to the stairs, but the ghost seems to have lost track of us so I don't ascend them -- instead I just continue on my way.   Sweet as. A kobold with a blowgun. Being able to poison enemies from range is great, since their health will plummet while they're walking to engage us (and with our fast movement, we can kite things, too). I step to the left, out of LOS, to avoid getting poisoned myself -- then I make with the murdering.  Our prize! 8 needles isn't great but it's not terrible either. I'll just re-arrange my item slots and then slap this sucker on --  gently caress I used my last Remove Curse scroll on that robe earlier. Soooo uh, basically this is why you don't equip blowguns (or other forms of ranged weaponry) unless you've either witnessed the enemy swapping it out for itself, or have a remove curse scroll on hand. Now we can't stab, we can't really melee -- all we have going for us are needles and our spells.  This isn't the end of the world, but it sucks. A lot.   A life-saving find, for obvious reasons. d:3 has nothing more for us, so we head downstairs.  I think this is a newer mechanic? When you hit a sleeping or distracted target with needles, you can stab them, which... poisons them more nastily or something. I don't know, I need to look this up. All I know is that it's making us very effective, even though we have to be careful with how many needles we shoot -- after all, we only have 8, and they can mulch (get destroyed on use) easily. If we run out... well, let's just not run out. There are more sleeping orcs in this room; mopping them up gets Spellcasting to 5. I'm dumb and didn't take enough screenshots, but I turned off Stealth once it hit 6. Spellcasting 5 isn't enough to get EH hungerless, but Corona is by now.  We hit level 4 in here somewhere as well. Enslavement is still a bit hard to cast (yellow failure rate, I think it was at 27% or so) and quite hungering. I memorize it anyway.  Apparently not everyone was dead (or asleep) in here. That shout will rouse the centaur skeleton, so I have to figure out how to deal with this. I decide to cast my newly-memorized spell. Casting spells with high failure rates is really dumb and you definitely shouldn't do it, but sometimes I do things because reasons (mostly because I'm weaponless and desperate, honestly).  It works, unexpectedly -- we both cast it without failing and get through the orc wizard's MR. He's our bro now, and he'll beat stuff up for us and use abilities (such as spells) like normal, until he dies or it wears off. Enslave is loving awesome, even into the later portions of the game. Draconians in Zot have lower MR than you'd expect, for example...  The other advantage of Enslave is getting a scary enemy killed, of course, since it's the enemy of everything now. He lives, though, and heads back to take out the threatening centaur skeleton, too. I wander off somewhere else in the meantime.  Either my orc friend killed something I couldn't see, or he got killed. Either way's fine with me.   We find the Temple being guarded by an iguana. In our lovely situation, the boost of a god's power would be absolutely amazing. I head in to see what altars I can find. Here are our immediate options:  If Nemelex Xobeh hadn't recently been ... except ...  Fedhas Madash. Fedhas rules over plants. You can use piety and/or fruit to evolve plants into friends, shoot sunlight or water at dudes, and other useful stuff. We're herbivores, so spending one of our precious resources (food) on offense is risky. I could wait and find another god -- maybe Gozag, the newly-added god of money and commerce. But... I think I can make this work. And, like everyone says, Crawl is about adaptation.  We've found our path. Now let's not die walking it. NEXT TIME ON THE ART OF SPRIGGAN: Beware the fruit cost! More ghosts and goblins! Almost no stabbing whatsoever! Me remembering to take pictures of the skills screen!!! 
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Jun 30, 2014 08:44
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Interesting you didn't go Ash or Dithmenos; any particular reason why?
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Jun 30, 2014 14:07
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That is a very good example of why you should save at least one remove curse scroll. Sure, the cursed robe lost you 1 AC, but not being able to stab is much more dangerous.
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Jun 30, 2014 14:30
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Beamed posted:Interesting you didn't go Ash or Dithmenos; any particular reason why? if i read the screenshot correctly, he had not found their respective altar.
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Jun 30, 2014 15:10
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Arcade Rabbit posted:How in the hell does everything in that room fail to notice you!? You're a heavily armored firefly by this point! (  I haven't pressed -more- yet)Also, good luck with the spriggan of Fedhas! My spriggans always die when I forget about how little health they have and I try tabbing something. It never works, and I just can't figure out why. 
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Jun 30, 2014 15:21
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Fatherwolf posted:if i read the screenshot correctly, he had not found their respective altar. Yup - their names are greyed out which means Someone Awful haven't seen the altars for them yet. brainwrinkle posted:That is a very good example of why you should save at least one remove curse scroll. Sure, the cursed robe lost you 1 AC, but not being able to stab is much more dangerous. Yeah, having a subpar armour is actually less deadly than getting a bad weapon stuck in your hands.
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Jun 30, 2014 15:33
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Beamed posted:Interesting you didn't go Ash or Dithmenos; any particular reason why? Fatherwolf posted:if i read the screenshot correctly, he had not found their respective altar. This is exactly why. Also, I was considering holding out for Ashenzari but I feel like it would be somewhat redundant with rchandra's LP. The playstyles are very different, though. And I'm not the world's biggest fan of Dithmenos, though a VSAs I'm playing in my off time is making me start to come around in some respects. The original plan was to pick up Gozag, but at this point I was just desperate for a god and I feel like I can make Fedhas work for me if I'm careful and have good luck finding fruit. Famous last words, right?
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Jun 30, 2014 16:20
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The Limits of the Game So far, the different LPs have been primarily focused on the early to middle game, with only a few of them showing of some of the extended end-game of Crawl. Since I spend most of my play-time in the very end of extended, I figured I'd show a glimpse of what happens once you go very, very far in the game - further than you probably should. Meet my latest Deep Elf Conjurer:  As you can see, I am currently in lich-form, in a level of Pandemonium, standing outside a Ziggurat. When I play DECj, I like to hunt down and complete Ziggurats, because that's usually the only real challenge left past a certain point. Let's talk a bit about Ziggurats. Ziggurats give you 27 increasingly difficult levels with enemies randomly selected from different sets - like "orcs" or "gigantic, demonic lords of Pandemonium and their retinues". That means that their difficulty is incredibly variable, but never really easy - once you get past level 20 some enemy sets are nerve-wracking, no matter how powerful your character is. I'm going to be showing off a full run of a Ziggurat in this post and some of the loot - which is normally why people do Ziggurats. The loot – as well as the exit from the Ziggurat and the entrance to the next level – is always at the end of the level, past the enemies spawned. Later levels have the -cTele effect, which means you can teleport but you can't use the spell Control Teleport to bypass the enemies. The Ziggurat I'm standing in front of is the sixth one I completed on this character and the last one I did before finishing the game. I would have liked to continue doing Zigs, but it takes absolutely ages to find them. Every character is guaranteed one Ziggurat in the normal game and beyond that, you have to hunt through Pandemonium for more. They supposedly have a spawn-rate around 8% per Pan level, but this character saw (and fully cleared) 344 Pan levels, finding only 5 Zigs. I could have made it easier on myself by worshiping the god Ashenzari, who will reveal portals on the map, but that would have severely hampered my ability to actually complete the Ziggurats once I found them. Let's take a quick look at my character. First, as you can see in the picture below, I've got some skills:  To get invocation finished I'd have to abandon my god, Vehumet, and as I mentioned above, I'm not really prepared to do that, since Vehumet makes combat casting much, much better. Below is my inventory:    As you can see, I've got a lot of stuff. The version of the game I'm playing doesn't have item weight, so I've got more consumables than any character probably should. In addition, I'm carrying a lot of evocables - the phials, fans and rods. These are my insurance policies for different dire situations. Phials do massive single-target damage and spawn some water elementals in a pool of water - they are great for killing tough enemies when I'm low on mana. Fans blow back any other creatures nearby and spawn some air elementals. They give me some breathing room and air elementals work well with the spell Tornado, since they don't get torn apart by it. Last, the rods are mainly for taking out enemies that use Silence. Since I'm (usually) a caster, being able to kill a silencing enemy is a must. The last item worth mentioning is the staff of energy. When used, it gives me back a bit of mana. That's pretty much it, but for a character like mine, that's plenty. Let's have a look at my stats with everything on:  Not bad at all! My AC could stand to be a bit higher, but I didn't find any way to improve it without sacrificing essential resists. It doesn't really matter, if I'm honest, because things rarely hit me anyway. One last thing I should mention, before we get into the action, is my spell-set: code:Alright, let's dig in! I won't go into too much detail for every level - explaining everything would make this post even more unbearably wordy. Level 1 starts out nice and easy with a slime set of enemies:  It takes exactly one spell to clear:  Level 2 goes much the same way, except with undead:  Level 3 has one of my favorite enemy sets, orcs! As you can see on the image to the right, I decided to give them a sporting chance and fight them in melee, which is why my health is so low. I'm out of lich-form so I can use Regeneration to heal.  Level 4 features some enemies from the Spider branch, including a Ghost Moth that's currently not visible. Ghost Moths are kryptonite to casters, since they drain your mana really fast. Fortunately, Fire Storm is kryptonite to mostly everything in the game.  Level 5 has giants of a few different types, but still no actual challenge:  The loot includes a potion of experience, which, when quaffed, gives a clue as to why giants don't represent an actual challenge to this character:  The messages above that are from switching lich-form off, which is necessary since you can't drink potions when undead. Level 6 features a set of enemies from the Vaults branch. They don't like Glaciate:  Level 7 has some dragons and hydras, but I forgot to screenshot them before I used Fire Storm, so a few of them are missing:  And here's a sample of the early-Ziggurat loot:  Level 8 finally throws a bit of challenge my way - a set of Pandemonium enemies, with a Pandemonium Lord called Houwnumaynt as their leader.   Unfortunately for them, I've cleared around 340 levels - on this character alone - filled with their kin, so I'm sort of used to cleaning them up. I opt for Glaciate since the Pan Lord is only resistant - not very resistant - to cold damage.  Level 9 continues the trend of actually somewhat dangerous enemies, with another set from extended. Both the hellion and the balrug are capable of casting Hellfire, which is one of a few spells I fear at this point, since it ignores rFire and AC.  Luckily, Hellfire is trumped by Glaciates to the face.  Level 10 has a chaos set – demonspawns, killer klowns, apocalypse crabs and a shape shifter. Nothing threatening.  At this point, the loot is getting pretty good.  Level 11 is full of inferior magic users. Sure, they might be respected sages in their respective civilizations, but they aren't going up against some scrub wizard here. They are facing the chosen of Vehumet, the killer of demonic lords and the master of all magic! Fire Storm cleans them up in two casts.   Level 12 continues the earlier trend of sets of extended enemies, this one another Pan set I think. The only real threats are the two balrugs, but a couple of Glaciates are enough to neutralize them – and everything else.  Level 13 is some slimes and eyes from Slime. Not much to say about them – the only really dangerous enemies from this set are giant eyeballs, since their paralyze can't be resisted.  Level 14 has a set of enemies from Swamp and a couple of poison demons. The whirly winds around me are from the spell Tornado.  I like getting easy and crowded sets like this on later levels, since I can have fun with my spells. Tornado lasts for a handful of turns, in which it grows to fill a larger and larger area. During this period it damages everything inside it and shuffles creatures around. It works great with my other two level 9 spells, since I can cast them while Tornado is going – it even mixes the frost/fire clouds into the whirling maelstrom of death:  I forgot to grab a screenshot of the level 15 enemies before I roast them with fire, but it features an ice set with some ice dragons and ice giants. Unsurprisingly, they aren't big fans of Fire Storm:  The same thing happens with level 16 – although this time with another slime set. They are just as unhappy with my tendency to fill the world with fire:  Level 17 has a set of assorted, dangerous enemies from the early rune-holding branches. It has some emperor scorpions and orb spiders from Spider, a couple of nagas and salamanders from Snake and some sea snakes and hydromancers from Shoals – that sort of thing. They burn just like everything else.  On level 18 I get one of my favorite sets – a whole zoo's worth of animals!  These are great, because there's a lot of them and you can flash-freeze them with Glaciate and then pretend that you are opening up a meat exporting business. Roleplaying is an integral part of Crawl!  As you can see, both the number of enemies and the amount of loot is starting to really ramp up:  I'm getting close to the part of the Ziggurat where I have to actually pay attention and buff up with Haste before engaging. Not for level 19 though – its another assorted branch set, which means I can play around some more with Tornado, without any real danger.  In the picture above there are two things worth noticing: One is how the poison clouds from one of the dead swamp dragons have been swept into my tornado. The other is the confused ghost moth all the way to the right, which is confused because of a neat trick. You see, ghost moths are invisible but are not able to see invisible beings. So, if you need to be sure they can't drain your mana – or you don't have SInvis yet – you can cast/evoke invisibility yourself, to either even the playing field or get a solid advantage. It doesn't come up a lot, but it can be a lifesaver in certain situations. Level 20 is another boring set, with enemies from the Vaults branch - titans and humans and such. It is boring because there aren't a lot of them (so I can't revel in the carnage) and they aren't threatening (so I don't have to think). As a form of protest against the boring level I'm only showing the aftermath.  I do take a lot of damage, since I decide to use Tornado, which has the side-effect of giving me the “flying” status. Normally this doesn't matter, but titans can cast the spell Airstrike, which deals a lot more damage to flying creatures. Still not a legitimate threat, even with that. I go into level 21 hasted, ready for the worst. Instead I find a lot of soon to be toasted spiders and moths. So yeah, you guessed it, another aftermath picture:  The swirly fire things are fire vortices – shortly lived fire things that Fire Storm leaves behind, that can attack enemies and will occasionally distract them. Level 22 has enemies from the Swamp set, with such horrifying dangers as grass-summoning thorn hunters.  I'm starting to get anxious at this point – it took me hours to find this Ziggurat, I'm pretty sure it will be my last one, and the game isn't throwing anything remotely challenging my way. Going out on an easy Zig would suck. Things do start to look up a bit on level 23, with a draconian level. In my excitement I forget to take more than one screenshot though, but at least it looks action packed.  Draconians aren't a real threat on the level of pan lords or Hellfire casters, but they can take a pounding, throw some annoying blink spells around and summon beefy reinforcements, so they give me a bit more resistance than previous levels. Level 24 features a set of enemies that I think is from one of the Hells – the fire-themed Gehenna. Most notably it features another Hellfire caster, the Brimstone Fiend, in addition to some balrugs and undead. I kill everything with some fire and frost mixed together:  The loot has also reached end-Zig levels:  On level 25 I kill a lot of boring dragons. You can play a fun game identifying which types by their corpses:  Even draconians are usually more of a challenge, since at least they bring along casters. Oh well. Level 26 presents a real challenge – enough so that I forget to screenshot most of it.  It features another pandemonium set of enemies, but this time with one of the worst creatures in the game: Hell sentinels (the three armored eyes in a row just above the fat cacodemon). Like Brimstone Fiends, balrugs and hellions, they are able to cast Hellfire. Unlike their lesser cousins, hell sentinels don't die to two casts of Glaciate. These bastards are immune to fire and cold, so while Fire Storm and Glaciate will damage them, it will only be the damage that can't be resisted (45% and 55%, respectively). On top of that, hell sentinels have a lot of AC, HP and are pretty fast.  In the screenshot above, you can sort of see how the battle progressed. I started out moving to the lower left, in the area now grayed out, to scout out the enemy set. The first enemies I saw were relatively easy to deal with, even if one of them was a Brimstone Fiend. Glaciating the first enemies called in the rest of the level though, so I quickly had to retreat to the right, slowing my pursuers with more Glaciates. Once the hell sentinels showed up, I used multiple Fire Storms to lay down a cover of fire vortices, since all Hellfire casters besides hellions require line of sight to hit you. Then it became a matter of balancing the need for cover and damage from Fire Storm, with my need to restore my by now dwindling supply of mana. Vehumet gives mana back on kills, but since the primary threats – the hell sentinels – take a lot to kill, I had to use my staff of energy a lot. Eventually, with a few heals from my wand of heal wounds, a lot of casts of Fire Storm and some creative line of sight management, I cleared the level. Level 27 features enemies from the same set, sans hell sentinels. It is far less of a challenge, but you get to see one of the things I like to do with Glaciate and Fire Storm:  The Glaciate clouds stick around a lot longer than the Fire Storm clouds, so it is useful for making a sort of defensive wall, that many enemies won't go through. I can then spam Fire Storm from behind, in relative safety. The loot, like the enemies, are relatively sub-par for level 27.  So, that's a full Ziggurat, cleared with a character that's beyond even the usual bounds of extended. I decided to go win the game after this, which unsurprisingly was very easy. Here are some of the more ridiculous stats from the morgue file: code: which shows a pan lord who knows what's up, even if the game estimated my reaction incorrectly.
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Jul 1, 2014 01:07
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Does Shatter end up being a more effective zig-clearing tool due to more unresistable damage, or does it even really matter at that point?
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Jul 1, 2014 01:53
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Meunkin posted:Does Shatter end up being a more effective zig-clearing tool due to more unresistable damage, or does it even really matter at that point? I've actually never tried Shatter, so I can't say for sure if it would be more effective. Personally, for the types of characters I play, I'd be hesitant to replace Fire Storm or Glaciate with it. Both of those spells are great for controlling movement and line of sight: Fire Storm has its fire vortices and it can hit creatures outside of line of sight; Glaciate leaves freezing clouds, slows enemies pretty drastically (I think it's 40% or something) and will sometimes leave behind frozen corpses as obstacles. I think I forgot to mention those last two points about Glaciate in my post. Whether the damage from Shatter outweighs the control from the other spells is hard to say - most enemies don't resist everything and only a few are immune to both fire and frost like hell sentinels are. I think I'd have to go with "It doesn't really matter that much, once you are talking level 9 spells.", if I'm being completely honest - I'm probably influenced more by habit than anything else, when it comes to spell choices.
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Jul 1, 2014 02:12
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Shatter is very powerful, and at max power basically can hit everything on screen instead of being targeted. (And for a lot of damage.) Downside is that the power its power is heavily, heavily reduced versus flying targets, which includes a lot of dangerous later game enemies. I've cleared two? zigs with shatter/firestorm casters. Of course, my first zig, Z:27 was a Pan Lord floor, and I barely escaped with a lucky blink and with single digit HP, sooo. e: Shatter is also really fun to play with in like, Vaults:5 and stuff if you can stairdance/survive!
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Jul 1, 2014 02:44
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That's basically the same approach I use for zig raiding, except that I generally go with an amulet of clarity instead of the macabre finger necklace. With clarity you can evoke large amounts of MP from a crystal ball or the staff of Wucad Mu without having to worry about confusing yourself on failure. Confusion on a character in lichform, who can't drink curing potions or any other potion, is a death sentence in a zig. You were fortunate not to get a mummy level! Mummy levels in zigs can be incredibly dangerous, since you'll be forced to absorb huge numbers of mummy death curses at the same time.
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Jul 1, 2014 07:13
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Jazzimus Prime posted:That's basically the same approach I use for zig raiding, except that I generally go with an amulet of clarity instead of the macabre finger necklace. With clarity you can evoke large amounts of MP from a crystal ball or the staff of Wucad Mu without having to worry about confusing yourself on failure. Confusion on a character in lichform, who can't drink curing potions or any other potion, is a death sentence in a zig. I understand why people use the crystal ball/wucad mu approach, but I don't like it for my Zig-raiders. Primarily, I dislike the way it shapes my play, since it forces me to constantly keep my mana up. Usually, I'd much rather try to kill off as much of a level as possible, hopefully keeping my mana up through Vehumet's mana return, which crystal balling every second or third turn interferes with. I'm also not a huge fan of giving up a slot just for clarity. Sure, I'll wear it if I find a good artefact with it, but I really feel people tend to make a bigger thing of it than it is, exactly because so many people use crystal balls over staff of energy. It is the one remaining weakness on a character like the one I posted about, but it comes up so rarely, that I'd effectively only be using clarity for the crystal ball. Like I said - I understand why people choose that approach, but I really dislike it, especially for Zigs where front-loading damage is pretty much my strategy. Mummy levels are as boring and tedious as Tomb, but I've never really had a problem with them, even in the late twenties - probably because I'm always playing as a Necromutation-capable caster. The biggest risk for me is usually smiting, but careful Fire Storming usually means, that the mummies are too busy smiting vortices, to notice the guy making endless streams of them.
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Jul 1, 2014 09:54
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I ran into the macabre finger amulet before, but I junked it because I didn't think warding would help that much for a possible three rune run, but I never knew you could wear an extra ring with it on, drat.
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Jul 1, 2014 17:26
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rchandra would you post a link to your rcfile?
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Jul 4, 2014 13:49
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:rchandra would you post a link to your rcfile? http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/rcfiles/crawl-git/rchandra.rc Should be able to make an update this weekend - I took some time off with the forum downtime and Steam sale.
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Jul 4, 2014 19:54
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rchandra posted:Sure, especially since I think I just have 1-2 sections left. I assume the line code:
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Jul 5, 2014 01:40
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It's actually ignored for all saprovores. It only drops rotten chunks if they're useless to you.
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Jul 5, 2014 08:48
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I'm going to stab my way through Swamp or die trying here shortly. Come watch! http://crawl.berotato.org:8080/#watch-MrDespairSA e. not dead, but at xl22 and still no boots!!!!!!!!!! I've literally found piles of quickblades and bardings but no boots! Dr. Despair fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 02:45
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I'm quote:Use which ability? (? or * to list) 
Haifisch fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 05:54
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"Are you sure you want to explode?" what kind of a stupid question is that.
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Jul 6, 2014 06:51
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Neruz posted:"Are you sure you want to explode?" what kind of a stupid question is that. Yeah! I mean, why would you ever not want to explode?
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Jul 6, 2014 07:26
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Jul 6, 2014 07:40
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Hopefully work will be less of a clusterfuck this week, so I'm hopeful of making a post on Monday! Sorry about the drought there.
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Jul 6, 2014 18:03
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In the meantime, come see the exciting conclusion of a vinestalker who wants to cast tornado! http://crawl.berotato.org:8080/#watch-MrDespairSA now featuring BOOTS e. Taking a break now after clearing vaults and slime, but if you weren't there you missed this happening! 
Dr. Despair fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Jul 6, 2014 |
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Jul 6, 2014 18:43
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Naga Monk of Cheibriados, currently breaking the power curve and trying to get through vaults with No Device Heal 2. Come watch me die miserably the moment I make a mistake because I don't have healing panic buttons. EDIT: Oops, my bad. Thanks, Read. EDIT 2: And done for the evening, because V5 is brutal. Next time I'll head to Shoals (again) with no flight in an attempt to get more piety. Karia fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 01:53
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Karia posted:Naga Monk of Cheibriados, currently breaking the power curve and trying to get through vaults with No Device Heal 2. Come watch me die miserably the moment I make a mistake because I don't have healing panic buttons. http://crawl.akrasiac.org:8080/#watch-Karia
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Jul 7, 2014 01:57
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An Og Named Su, Part 7 Last time, this melee/summoning OgSu had started on Ice spells since no more summons had been found, With Lair and Orc complete, it is time to finish the Dungeon and then work on a Lair branch for a rune.  Slime creatures are a pretty common foe from here on, when possible it's good to retreat when you see one since they are always in packs and much more dangerous together.  Here you can see the extra ones around the corner.  And here my warg ran forwards and made noise, causing them to merge into something that can probably kill me in two hits.  Retreating while distracting it with spires and throwing tomahawks works fine.  Another potion of beneficial mutation provides +MP, a minor benefit. Especially with guardian spirit, so it's now like more HP.  This fire is blocking a little gold. I might as well walk through and get it, with ogre HP and guardian spirit it's fine without rF.  Return trip, total cost: 100 damage.  Upgrading my throwing weapon.  D:13 has the book of Summonings for me, a great find. Now I am considering abandoning Freezing Cloud even though it's almost reliable - the 6 spell levels would let me easily fit two of these spells, and I wouldn't be as tied to my wizardry ring. It'll be much easier to get level 6 single-school spells like Menagerie, even with Ashenzari helping all 3 schools of Freezing Cloud. For now I'll just get Menagerie - will need a little more Spellcasting.  Skeletal warriors have good defenses and can often cause trouble with their weapons, but keeping the fight 3v1 helps a lot. The fight gives me the additional 0.5 Spellcasting needed for Menagerie (I also used an amnesia scroll to forget Summon Small Mammal, which I never use anymore).  It summons harpies! It can also make a manticore, lindwurm, or sphinx (only with a lot of spellpower).  Gate to the Vaults. I can't go in there yet, I need a rune.  Menagerie in action. I let them get an advantage on me while trying to surround them with summons, taking more damage than needed.  I need to remember to use Englaciation _before_ I make normal fleshy allies.  Unknown scroll is either acquirement or enchant armour (all others have been found)...  Oh well, I'll take the 1 free AC on my cloak. Though it is tempting to wear Snorg, that might have been better.  A mottled dragon leaves a hide, if I find a bunch of enchant armour that could be good to get some AC.  This is a fairly cruel trove cost - assuming I can't just buy or find the armour, it'll need 4 enchant armour scrolls (with the first one in the game having just been found) and I have to actually find storm dragons, too. I'd also be very tempted to just wear the armour given my strength - storm dragon armour is like plate, but a little lighter and usable by Ogres.  The book of Burglary provides Swiftness. Invisibility is also tempting, but I don't think I need or want to follow that path.  The staircase to the Depths, which is available but highly dangerous. I will visit the Swamp first.  Good welcoming hydra, thankfully it's alone. edit: Apparently I am mistaken, it's just that players in water have troubles and hydras have faster movement.  The swamp drake (south) is trying to confuse us, but Ice Beasts and I resist poison and are thus immune to his mephitic breath.  After the hydra dies, everything else follows. I took a lot of damage though, this low AC/EV is really being a problem.  I'm sure there's a good balance reason why not all plants are weak to fire but I really wish they were. Shambling mangrove can tangle you in roots, reducing your EV and movement speed.  I'll keep my freedom, thanks. I think this is just a straitjacket.  I don't really know how I can bludgeon insubstantial things, but I'm glad I can.  Orcs in the Swamp? This can only mean one thing... (screenshot missing) Saint Roka is leading his flock to their doom. He has a lot of defense and melee skill and smites like an orc priest but more often, so I probably want to split up this pack and fight him alone.  I had a freezing cloud here, but my lindwurms have been melting it with their fire breath. Looks like an orc sorceror is here too, animating the dead. Roka is the big angry face behind the treeline.  Saint Roka got lost trying to walk around these trees, so I can rest up and deal with him alone now.  He cannot stand up to our onslaught, despite two wasted turns miscasting Freezing Cloud. One lindwurm is off hunting the straggling orcs.  Thorn hunters are pretty tough, they summon walls of plants behind you and between them and you, and then shoot you. The harpies and a freezing cloud help me squash it. That tile looks really weird too, editing this is the first time I've seen it - a rose with two stems making a circle around it?  If only that trove wanted floor junk like this wand of heal wounds instead of storm dragon armour.   Ashenzari letting me know about mimics.  On Swamp 5, this MiBe ghost corners me as I leave a dead end. Fortunately ghosts can't cleave, so I think I can swarm him with the Menagerie. It gets one good hit in, but now seems to be troubled.  I celebrate with chokos.  This place looks promising.  I peek through the wall, and that's looking like trouble. The 27-headed Lernaean hydra is standing on the rune, and I don't think I can risk having it next to me ever with this character.  while wandering around clearing the rest of the level I find this book -- it might be a sign, Mass Confusion should help with that group a lot.  I'm going to use a potion of invisibility (nothing in there can see invisible), open a hole in the trees with fire, then use a potion of brilliance and Mass Confusion and hope things kill each other. Swiftness should let me get away if it goes poorly.  Seems to be going ok. Swamp dragons (upper left) are not a big deal, OK melee and poisonous breath. The enemies pictured asleep (lower left) are probably not actually there, they're the ones I'm fighting.  Starving, but winning. This would be a good time for porridge, but I'll just use beef jerky.  And a wand of cold finishes it off.  And the reward!    State of the Ogre. I'm unsure what I want to be doing with skill training - could make Freezing Cloud or Mass Confusion more reliable, or amnesia one or both for say Shadow Creatures and Summon Demon, or just keep training Fighting - maybe Maces as well. rcfile The rest of my re-glyphing. code:code:code:rchandra fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 01:58
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