My way

[Dlightfull]

Once again i come to you, o greatest community of ADOM, for advice.

While playing my latest char, the DE Priest, i came to think about what do i like to do in this game. Since not every time i enjoy it, sometimes i hate it, but other times, i enjoy even doing some very arduous things.

So i came to realize that i actually like to build chars, not any char, but tremendously powerful ones. I don't care about ingame time, challenges and so on, i enjoy building powerhouses.

Here comes my question: what is the R/C combo that has what it takes to become the Deathbringer to all that moves (or something along these lines) and why do you think so?

[grobblewobble]

The ultimate powerhouse is an archmage: a wizard who can bookcast wish without limits.

The book is guaranteed to be found in the library for a wizard. Casting wish will drain a random stat by 10. To become a true archmage you need to increase your mana / HP until you can still bookcast the spell (without killing yourself) when all your stats are lowered to 1. I do not know the finer points of reaching this state, but I saw someone do it with the mana orb. He used the orb to increase his mana pool and wished for chaos removal to survive that. To reach critical mass, he started on silvernight and he had all the bookcasting talents.

The most essential stuff to wish for are crazy supplies of ball spells, willpower 99 to make them fill the whole screen, and enough speed to outblitz a quickling queen. And amulets of life saving (wear one at all times) in case you somehow manage to get killed (unlikely as it is).

Other classes can do the same, but it's harder. For one thing, spellbooks of wish are insanely rare and can't be wished for. Only wizards can easily obtain one. Nonetheless, I did witness an archfarmer on the server.

Race matters very little for archmages, but I guess that being a mist elf would add that little extra epic to it.

[Dlightfull]

The ultimate powerhouse is an archmage: a wizard who can bookcast wish without limits.

The book is guaranteed to be found in the library for a wizard. Casting wish will drain a random stat by 10. To become a true archmage you need to increase your mana / HP until you can still bookcast the spell (without killing yourself) when all your stats are lowered to 1. I do not know the finer points of reaching this state, but I saw someone do it with the mana orb. He used the orb to increase his mana pool and wished for chaos removal to survive that. To reach critical mass, he started on silvernight and he had all the bookcasting talents.

The most essential stuff to wish for are crazy supplies of ball spells, willpower 99 to make them fill the whole screen, and enough speed to outblitz a quickling queen. And amulets of life saving (wear one at all times) in case you somehow manage to get killed (unlikely as it is).

Other classes can do the same, but it's harder. For one thing, spellbooks of wish are insanely rare and can't be wished for. Only wizards can easily obtain one. Nonetheless, I did witness an archfarmer on the server.

Race matters very little for archmages, but I guess that being a mist elf would add that little extra epic to it.

Oh, i totaly forgot about archmages, thanks a lot for that. Will have to try that one . Not a Mist Elf though, i don't like them. i will pick some other race that has Alertness, since it can't be wished for .

Edit: Though i can still get it via potions/scrolls of education lol.

[Blasphemous]

Archmage:
Start off by getting to level 50.
Essentially you burn ~100 wishes on scrolls of chaos resistance and possibly potions of water to bless them (hence do this in or around a room that has an altar).
From then on, you can wish for power - each wish grants a flat increase of max PP by ~25-35.
Another ~50 wishes and you will reach a point where you can cast wish from PP only, without HP casting, which is usually necessary in the beginning.
You replenish power points using mana orb (which corrupts heavily) every time. The orb also grants +10 mana so it increases your power points considerably.

Some extra factors make archmage possible: great book caster talent is a must.
Being lawful on silvernight is useful but not always easy to achieve - it reduces the casting cost by half and stacks with great book caster.
2250 is the cost of bookcasting wish.
Calculate your PP+HP carefully or wear an amulet of life saving before casting, you won't get a second chance on this char.
All items that you can put on which increase mana should be used.
Additionally you should have the trident of the red rooster at this point which grants a huge +24 bonus to mana.
Armor of life or of power is useful too, to increase the initial PP pool.
Casting in a room that has "your skin tingles" message, will reduce costs by 20%.
Another reduction comes from mana battery corruption and they stack.
They don't stack with silvernight.
At some point you get to have ~11k power points at mana 1 and from then on you diversify your wish order - wish for potion of gain attributes 100 times and potions of education to get around 200 (which virtually ensure all skills at 100).
Wish for hundreds of scrolls of defense and protection to improve your items, wish for potions of quickling blood until your speed reaches 4 digit numbers... you name it.

In the past, I used to wish for a lot of brass rings and potions of exchange to get many rings of djinni summoning and use them once I stop bookcasting and my stats return to 99.
It's not possible anymore due to a bug (and I refuse to call it a feature) which only allows one RoDS from dipping so one thing that will be extremely tedious and time consuming even for an archmage is getting all weapon marks to grand mastery.
Since the amount of wished for weapon marks depends on learning attribute, an archmage with learning at 1 will be unable to get enough marks. As in, it would require hundreds if not thousands of wishes.
It is doable however.
Needless to say, it's best if the level which you selected for archmaging is pacified.
You don't want random monsters interrupting your casting session.

It's all very boring and very tedious and without some extensive macro work, it's going to adversely affect your real life
The effects don't last long but they are pretty grand - one of my archmages demolished chaos plane and created a large herb farm then proceeded to collect the herbs in the meantime playing on a lute trying to tame wished-for killer bugs, which refused to calm down and alongside Andy, proceeded to scratch the skin of my archmage. They were largely unsuccessful.

===============

As for the other interesting powerhouses, here's a few of my favorites:

1) Gray elven monk - always played armed, preferably with eternium two handers. Initially unarmored and weak, once you get some armor and a decent weapon, they quickly become very powerful.
After level 18, you get 600 energy cost for movement and monks become deadly, if you trained with two handers.
They can learn spells quite effectively, they have a nice skillset, they don't have any melee penalties and their class powers are amazing.
Monks don't lose mana when writing scrolls - the only class with that feature - so once you have some magical writing sets (which seem to drop more often for monks) you can create any scrolls you have already read.
With 7LB, lvl 18 class power, aotme, large dv and speed bonuses due to gray elf high dexterity, you can effectively hit and run any monster that is not a quickling, including emperor liches in melee.

2) Dark elven mindcrafter - very difficult to keep alive early but when they reach level 20+ they start to really shine.
At level 30 they get the single best skill in the whole game - greater telekinetic blast.
It cannot be resisted, all monsters can be affected, it works even if your target is separated from you by several tiles of summons.
With 40+ perception you can take out lich kings and emperors in greater vaults before they know what's going on.
With 30+ willpower, confusion attacks are immensely powerful and work against stuff like very experienced great red wyrms in greater vault, so you can hit them with a wyrmlance or vanquisher while they bump against walls, confused.

3) Assassin - they are devastating in melee, especially when you get twin daggers for them. Like monks at later levels, assassins get insta-kill skills and with their naturally great stealth and backstabbing, they can apply their own 6x critical multipliers to monster for some amazing effects. Ln reportedly stabbed some really tough wyrms with aotme and they died to a single hit. Assassins have a very nice skillset but are somewhat less skilled in the magical department.
They do make excellent archers though so with some nice weapons and missiles, they can do a lot of harm.
A powerhouse assassin with stats into 50 (alchemy ftw) are possibly the hardest hitting class in the game, when you consider critical hits/backstabbing.

[grobblewobble]

I will never forget how Porkman had his spellbook of wish drenched by rain while he was archmaging. Of all the thousands of items that was hoarding, the RNG chose that.

[Dlightfull]

lots of useful stuff

Thanks a lot mate, now i have things to do for a couple of years ahead lol.

What race would you recommend for the assassin? And what would be your preferred starsigns?

[Blasphemous]

I will never forget how Porkman had his spellbook of wish drenched by rain while he was archmaging. Of all the thousands of items that was hoarding, the RNG chose that.

Porkman is a... very special person
One thing you can't deny him is knowing the game.
He also starved once while bookcasting wish because he forgot that if you cast from HP, your satiation level drains too.
I think Porkman actually pioneered the method with mana orb.

What race would you recommend for the assassin? And what would be your preferred starsigns?

Don't ask me for a race recommendation because I will always recommend a gray elf.
They perfectly suit my assassin playstyle, offer high starting learning and dexterity with potentials into thirties and most importantly they live looong so all those ghost lords are harmless.
For assassin you need a char with high learning to quickly raise all those nice skills.
You need dexterity to get a decent to-hit chance. With that, strength becomes secondary because you rely on stealth, criticals and backstabs for damage.
With speed bonuses from talents and from high Dx, you can outrun most stuff that you shouldn't melee and high Dx is important for the archery part of assassin life.
Take the stealthy talent for extra bonus and max out stealth and backstabbing as soon as possible for some nice stabs.
Gray elven assassins start with elven chain mail which grants a flat 5 PV (or more) from the start - this lets you head straight to SMC and collect 3-5 more PV points from shields and other nice items.
You can even get an eternium two-hander there if you are very lucky.

[Dlightfull]

Porkman is a... very special person

Take the stealthy talent for extra bonus and max out stealth and backstabbing as soon as possible for some nice stabs.
Gray elven assassins start with elven chain mail which grants a flat 5 PV (or more) from the start - this lets you head straight to SMC and collect 3-5 more PV points from shields and other nice items.
You can even get an eternium two-hander there if you are very lucky.

Thanks. I usually get DE for alertness and find weakness (and i've never had problems with ghosts tbh, and i found enough potions of strength/potential, to get my Str up to more than 30, but i also eat some corrupting corpses that help with that), but seeing how Assassin already has those, GE might be good too.

[Dlightfull]

By the way, for an archmage, starsign matters?

I was thinking Cup, to be able to get those 100 wish castings (never read the book so don't actually know how hard is it to get 100 castings) or Unicorn, to reduce corruption from using mana orb.

I was also thinking, since for wizards it's as difficult as for Necromancer, maybe a necro would be better, for the immortality .

[Soirana]

I was also thinking, since for wizards it's as difficult as for Necromancer, maybe a necro would be better, for the immortality .

Non-wizards do not have guarantees at getting wish book.