Ranting Time

[fazisi]

6 Ps

Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performace.

[Blasphemous]

Sorry for necroing the thread, I wanted to start a new one but Silfir's narrative made me chuckle a few times so I'll just reanimate this one.
I'm Polish so I get to complain about everything everyday, or at least that's what other Polish people tell me I should do, but since I've resumed playing ADOM the past couple of days, I guess I have more stuff to complain about.
My petty grievances go far and wide but this time I'll just narrow it down to the exceptionally infuriating ones in recent memory.

Went to UC to get the rothk with my assassin. I equip-ided a ring of the fish a while before and wasted holy water to get rid of it and promptly got it melted by an acid trap (kudos Silfir) in a trap room.
Enter UC:1 - river. Fuck that shit. So at least I have a blanket. I also noticed a teleportation helmet though big room gave me double digits of blink dogs which failed to produce a corpse.
I equip the helmet then W5. Poof. I teleport into a treasure room. Autopickup is on. I take the gold, the white guy is pissed and stabs me for 70 points, I'm down to 40 HP, bleeding.
Of course I'm a packrat herbalist so I run around strained! and bloated, which reflects poorly on my speed. Switch to coward mode, take 3 steps, TP kicks in.
I get teleported to a room on the other side of the river, whew. I take a step. Acid trap. "Your blessed seven leag-" NOOOOOOO you cunt!
So I check my surroundings and yeah, it's a trap room. I finally manage to get to the down staircase. Enter UC:2. Guess what?
River.

[Cactus]

...Well, you can cry me a river, cry me a river
I cried a river over you...

[Blasphemous]

I think only that first river was genuine. The second one is just the reservoir of adventurers' tears.

[Blasphemous]

Not really a rant, though perhaps a bit of complaining is justified.
I overplay by a huge margin beyond what most other players consider reasonable game time. 219 in-game days passed, 129k turns.
My current run is a GElven Assassin, lvl 50, gate closed, most locations visited, huge pile of artifacts collected, L+ crowned, TotRR recovered, running around with the whip of extinction and the wall shield.
Other highlights include twin daggers, silence of the dead, most stats into 60+ (alchemy yay, my PoGA recipe is ultra healing plus cure corruption), and finally 117/89 DV/PV on berserk, 289 on coward.

Enter Ultimate Dungeon. I plow my way through emp liches, greater molochs, GEEs, balors (48 killed...) and what not.
Finally it's just me and the big guy. I'm a stealthy char so I stand next to him, equip twins, thinking about his huge pile of PV and HP, I gotta make the first hit count.

Stab. Supreme meatbag drops dead. One. Hit. How disappointing.
Just recalling monster memory: (...) DV of 126. He has a PV of 68. He has 1788 hit points (...)
Maybe it's just me or this specific character that became a mega-tank with 1k+ HP and two sources of regen.
I know the stab bonus on assassins is massive but still.
The dungeon informs me multiple times to prepare for the greatest whateveration of my time. One hit wonder.
Disheartening and anticlimactic.

Buff him?

[Grond]

Not sure what you would buff. He's hard to hit (need +232 to-hit for a 50% hit rate) and could kill even this ridiculously OP character in one round of melee attacks. Giving him more HP does next-to-nothing for the difficulty, because allowing him any opportunity to do damage is already suicide, and there's no time-pressure like with the Andor fight.

[SirTheta]

Stab. Supreme meatbag drops dead. One. Hit. How disappointing.
Just recalling monster memory: (...) DV of 126. He has a PV of 68. He has 1788 hit points (...)
Maybe it's just me or this specific character that became a mega-tank with 1k+ HP and two sources of regen.
I know the stab bonus on assassins is massive but still.

Doing some quick math from the wiki: backstabbing with daggers does 7x damage for L50 assassin, which stacks with critical for a potential total of 14x damage. Needle & Sting are two independent attacks each with a base of +58, 3d4 + 50 before any extra bonuses [weapon training, tactics, strength, etc.] are applied. So, a critical backstab is 674 (742 - 68) damage x 2 for 1,348 damage. Grandmastery in daggers alone sets this to 842 x 2 = 1,684 damage. Honestly, this seems right in line to me and appropriate if you're backstabbing with the most damaging one-turn attack in the game. I don't think it is possible to get anywhere close without this specific combination and a fair bit of luck since you still need to backstab him, still need to hit him, etc. (If you got the best possible roll [6d12] with a TOTRR backstab, you would do 720 - 68 = 652 damage -- which is not as much damage as a single attack from Needle or String.)

[Blasphemous]

I swear, every time Kinslayer is generated, regardless of its being used, the generation of disarmers is increased 1000%.
It's just ratling duelists, fencers and master swordsmen all the fucking time.
I'm not even using it anymore, since the autocursing bullshit has already forced me to waste about 10 potions of holy water, beginning with the surge of power that created it.
Found the whip of extinction in Dfg, a worthy replacement.
But no, let's generate as many of those annoying disarming cocksuckers as possible, just because Kinslayer is somewhere.
Ugh.