Mindcrafter advice

[grobblewobble]

You need more toughness and a better weapon.

What is your toughness potential? How about strength?

I would actually grab Rolf's axe. No risk involved in getting it, and it's much better than what you have now and it can still serve as a ranged weapon later, after you found a better melee weapon.

You can also finish the dwarf quests and gain several better weapons: golden gladius, big punch, nonnak's. Unfortunately with 12 strength, carrying big punch is a bit of a pain. I never like girdles of carrying, it locks you out of several points of PV from a high metal girdle. And if a green hag curses it, it can even kill you.

[asdalol]

Right now I've maxed my strength and toughness to 14 and 17 respectively (willpower and dexterity are also at the potential, at 22 and 14), thanks to herbs/training/carrying around stuff.
I already got the scrolls from the mystic, so no Rolf's Companion. I found a lawful altar in a cavernous level in a random dungeon, so I think that the next step will be crowning, after converting myself or the altar, and then I will go on with the dwarf quests. I tend to carry along a lot of stuff, so right now the girdle is more or less mandatory, especially with my low strength, but I agree that I should try to change it in the future.

[grobblewobble]

Good luck, and please let us know how you fare.

A general tip for mindcrafters is to play them as a melee class that has some cool tricks. Unlimited confusion, and teleport control from the start. Don't be afraid to apply the confusion on corrupting monsters like orb guardians. It will corrupt you a little, but not much. Unlimited monster detection can be a life safer, too, if you do it every time you enter a new level.

Also note that poolsipping is much less of a pain for you, because you can never lose teleport control. Although you can still be doomed, but you should have enough piety soon to remove it when you need to.

[Blasphemous]

A geologist lvl 30 mindcrafter with lots of crystals of power ceases to be a melee class and becomes a GTB freak destroying emperor liches and greater molochs with the sheer power of will.

[grobblewobble]

yeah but then he first has to equip his uncursed brass goggles {cha+5} otherwise he's not really a geologist

[asdalol]

Right now I'm on a holiday without my laptop, so I won't be able to play for about a week. I'll let you know if this character will win or die horribly.

[Burb]

I never like girdles of carrying, it locks you out of several points of PV from a high metal girdle. And if a green hag curses it, it can even kill you.

I mean, when you're at that low level of strength, a girdle of carrying is essentially the equivalent of a +5, +10, or even +15 speed boost (if it takes you from strained! to burdened). That is way more valuable than a few points of PV.

There should be no reason to engage hags in melee, confuse them and hit them with missiles. You have herbalism so it's not that hard to max your dex to its potential.

The *biggest* worry is simply item destruction from traps or breath attacks, but it's pretty easy to check what your kill limit with the girdle unequipped and not going above that (i think you'd have to be strained! with the girdle on anyway, which you'd prob want to avoid for the speed penalty).

And with a few scrolls of protection you can easily enchant that girdle to high levels of pv anyway. It's not a bad use of your scrolls of protection since many more common armor items have high pv and can't be further enchanted (eterinum anythings~, which you'll get lots of from chaos knights etc) and most other items don't have intrinsic benefits to be worth enchanting from a low pv value - main exception being 7LB if you get them.

[grobblewobble]

I mean, when you're at that low level of strength, a girdle of carrying is essentially the equivalent of a +5, +10, or even +15 speed boost (if it takes you from strained! to burdened). That is way more valuable than a few points of PV.

Fair enough. It´s a quirck I have, I´m a big anti-packrat. If you clean out your inventory rigorously, you can wear a girdle that adds PV and still be unburdened. But it's a matter of playstyle, the girdle is mostly a convenience thing, just like the beast of burden talent.

[Burb]

>Fair enough. It´s a quirck I have, I´m a big anti-packrat. If you clean out your inventory rigorously, you can wear a girdle that adds PV and still be unburdened. But it's a matter of playstyle, the girdle is mostly a convenience thing, just like the beast of burden talent.

Hm I'm not sure you can if you're at low levels of strength carrying around lots of food/gold/consumables. This is actually pretty true if I have an herbalism character who finds herbs early (big room is too annoying to farm properly), 40 morgia is 120s for example, and it makes a lot of sense to carry around lots of morgia/moss to stat increase while you adventure with no downtime, stomafillia/spenseweed/pepper for obvious reasons if you need to use lots of healing in an emergency.

I like carrying around spare equipment in case of destruction, or simply equipment to suit my need (ex: spear for DV, Nonnak for willpower, any weapon of "penetration", sword of sharpness for raw damage) - different crowns of immunity, regeneration, mental stability, thick gauntlets, heavy xbow + longbow to make use of *all* the slaying ammo I find, etc etc.

Even if you can purge your equipment to be 100% unburdened, it makes sense to have copious amounts of spare carry weight to pick up all the loot you'll find. Until you hit casino having more gold is always useful for training, or buying random shit, or altars. Even if you don't want gold for some reason it's more economical to get lots of loot all at once and read a single scroll of identify, and it'd be super annoying trying to backtrack several levels worth of loot. In fact, most of the time the PC *wants* to pick up equipment as soon as possible. Monsters can drink potions, equip armor/weapons, and breath attacks are muuuch more likely to destroy things on the ground than in your inventory. (and past the casino you'd have found more than enough scrolls of prot to make your girdle of carrying as good as eternium...)

If you really are sad on missing +4-6 points of PV from an eternium girdle and somehow are totally lacking scrolls of prot, why not just carry around the eternium girdle, and when you find a tough fight pop up a staircase and drop everything unnecessary and swap out your girdles? It'd be *less* back tracking than only looting on your way back up, and you keep all of the other advantages I mentioned above.

[asdalol]

A little update after a vacation and some hours of play.

Things are going much better!
My stats are much higher thanks to several potions of potential <whatever>, and in particular lots of giant corpses allowed me to get a respectable strenght (enhanced by the fire orb and some gauntlets).
Right now I'm at about level 40 of CoC, with two orbs and the kitty ring. My only concern is that I've got a quite low damage output. Right now I'm using an eternium spear +2,2d8+11, and I foolishly got rid of better artifact weapons such as big punch (I thought I would never be able to carry it around comfortably...). Anyway I have quite a number of slaying ammo, so I should be able to deal with it.
There were a couple of weapons (a grey one and a brown one) in the greater vault in the frost giant cave, but it is a fire vault and without fire immunity I didn't feel terribly comfortable to deal with that when I went there. Other weapons I have seen were my nice divine gifts: black thumb (pre) and the staff of the wanderer (crown).

Speaking of crowning: if I'm not mistaken this is about my fourth character in a row to receive acid immunity upon crowning... is it a coincidence or anybody else observed a similar behaviour?

Mindcrafters are quite fun after the early game... the on demand confusion is incredible and while expensive telepathic powers are very nice for their range and the ability to ignore walls (and I was lucky not to kill cats with such powers). Also being on coward and using telekinetic blast is very useful. I wonder if I will be able to test greater telekinetic blast, too, or if I will execute this character with some dumb mistake.