Ali, a lv 29 mist elven duelist... eaten by grue on D:36.

[moozooh]

Yep, that's it. What was probably my best (and certainly most fun) character ever died one of the stupidest deaths of them all.

It happened like this: I met a neutral quickling queen on D:36. Since I was pretty hungry for speed at the time (had 135 as the base), and also because she's a dangerous opponent I'd rather deal the first blow to, I attacked her. Then I realized I virtually couldn't harm her with my rune-covered trident used as a weapon (range 4, ~55 avg dmg), so I had to switch to a melee with a swift eternium spear and risk dooming. There was an altar a couple levels back, so I wasn't too worried.

Two potions of extra healing later, the queen died (left no corpse, obviously) and I was left with lots of hostile monsters watching our brawl. One of them happened to be a wizard or something, and he decided to summon lightning vortices. Not willing to risking serious equipment damage (I had blessed 7LBs and gloves +5 Dx among other leather things), I tried to dispatch them with the trident, but couldn't do so in time thanks to being blocked in a narrow passage. It was at that point that my blot-the-sun corruption kicked in. I figured: hey, nice, I can just quickly do the vortices in the darkness! Should have teleported away instead, yeah...

The duelist had 87 DV on Normal tactics and some hilarious damage with the spear closely rivaling the sword of sharpness I carried on me as a backup weapon. Not to mention it could outrun killer bugs, the cat lord (I killed my first and only cat at around D:25, of all places), the assassin prince, and most other enemies. The character had at least 350k gold in reserves, artifacts, and scrap metal, yet had zero random artifacts that were actually useful; the artifact I managed to get at my only pre-crowning was the nearly useless hammer of the gods. He saved Khelavaster and had spare AoLSs. He could clear DH:2 and SMC (at the time) routinely, and went through what is accepted to be the hardest part of the game victorious. Can't believe I lost that character to a damn grue. Oh well, maybe my next duelist will have better luck with pre-crownings, and I get an actual endgame-worthy item.

[grobblewobble]

Quickling queens are not karmic, so that can't be the reason why you were doomed. Vortices aren't safe in darkness any more since darkness was changed.

[moozooh]

Wait, you're right. Who could it be then? I was pretty sure I checked my intrinsics not long ago, after tackling ToEF, to be precise. Could it be another karmic being I accidentally touched in the darkness not long before death?

[plllizzz9]

Why didn't you use the SoS as your main weapon tho?

[moozooh]

I had lv 13 in polearms and lv 12 in swords. According to my notes, the spear gave me +84, 2d8+49, 87 DV, +5 spd, while the SoS only gave +77, 4d8+43, 74 DV, i.e. 3 more average damage and lower everything else (this is all on Normal tactics setting). The spear was a clear winner.

Btw, I'm honestly impressed just how much DV it's possible to get without shield, and having no smithed or high-level artifact armor pieces. Basically, all of my DV came from my cap (+5) and 7LBs (+2), all the rest was purely from class powers, Dx score (around 34 I believe?), Dodge at 100, and weapon mastery. On Coward, the figure was around 130-ish. Gotta love the duelist!

Does anybody know how much Le do I have to have to be able to safely read books? Even the simplest of them failed the checks from time to time at Le around 30-32, and I had quite a few nasty ones (explosions and stat drains). Literacy was at 100%, obviously.

[SirTheta]

afaik, Le has minimal to no effect on book reading. Literacy and Concentration are what counts (and class, obv).