gym21
07-10-2013, 01:17 PM
Another week, another close-the-chaos-gate ending. This time I decided to play a melee character after two high elf spellcaster wins, and so I came up with Merry, the hurthling beastfighter. This was a really odd but rather fun game -- descended through the SMC and then the UD, which I probably try to do too often, and didn't run into any problems until the HMV, which featured a stone giant lord that chased me around half the village before I could escape through the stairs.
I haven't played hurthlings much, but one thing I love about them is that precrowns are really, really easy thanks to cooking and food preservation. Finding a co-aligned altar on D:7 made me decide to go for a precrown despite the risk I'd get something useless, and I ended up with Robes of Resistance for my (limited) troubles. Much of the rest of the early-mid game was easy - only the skeletal king gave me much trouble. I made it as far as Khelevaster before deciding to go get crowned, hoping for Preserver or the Bracers of War. Instead, got the Cloak of Oman, which gave me several issues.
First of all, I didn't have teleport control, which meant I had to go blink dog hunting as a champion of order (I should have done this beforehand, but I'm lazy). And second, I didn't have any critical hit ability. After some doggies had been cooked and devoured, Darkforge's pools were drained. Got a wish on the second-to-last one (as well as permanent invisiblity, a loss of teleport control -- good thing I had spare blink dog corpses -- and death ray resisitance). I agonised over what to use it for, because I wasn't sure how much corruption removal a melee character would need in the late game. Eventually settled on an AoLS.
But there was another way I could get a wish. There was a ring potion shop on D:2 that stocked about ten potions of exchange, and so I built a mini ring engine on D:8 that eventually popped up with an ordinary ring. From that, chose 'find weakness', and the rest of the game should have been pretty easy. Cleared upper CoC without a problem. Snake from Beyond was easy. Then went to ToEF, where everything seemed to be hitting me far too hard for a level 21ish beastfighter with decent defence.
Despite herb farming, I figured that my stats just weren't good enough. And so I found myself doing something silly: The Minotaur Maze. Things I had: Teleport control, teleportitis, arrows of humanoid slaying. Things I didn't have: Alertness, detect traps, any scrolls of magic mapping, on-demand teleport save for a single wand. I'm pretty sure it was one of the stupidest things I've ever done, so naturally it worked. Only went down one false level, had no stat drains, and got four PoCC, six PoGA and vanquisher for my troubles.
After consuming the PoGA, the tower was a cake walk. When I broke into the temple one of the grues dropped a wand of poison with eight charges, so I unloaded it into the Wyrm from range and went about my business killing everything else in the temple before he dropped dead offscreen. For which I got no experience. Oh well, it was funny.
Casino had Kinslayer and not much else. The cat lord had about 1400 health because I wasn't minding the cat count at all, but happily I had a wand of fireballs with 60 charges*. Unhappily, like an idiot I'd stashed the AMW in dwarftown, so I had to run away, climb the CoC and go back down to kill him. Fairly annoying. Skipped air and earth temples to go check out whether there'd be any vaults -- ended up with a giants one on D:45. Since I was invisible, it was easy to sneak in, get the artifacts, and sneak back out again. The rewards were the Far Slayer and Thunderstroke.
*All of my booze goes into wands of fireballs these days. They're the guaranteed cure to the cat lord, doppleganger kings, and a bunch of other late-game threats. You can also dip Thrundarr's gift into your early-game booze supply and get a silly amount of gold for selling.
Have you guys played with this combo yet? I spent the next several hours running around the Big Room like a loon buffing up my crossbow skill and slaughtering everything that so much as twitched. With quick shot, lightning shot and those weapons you can pump out an absolutely absurd amount of damage, and... yeah, I hope I get to play a high-level archer with that pairing. Now that Thunderstroke returns it's actually a top-level artifact, even if it fails to about 2 percent of the time.
After whetting my appetite for crossbow related mayhem in the upper CoC, I decided it was probably time to go finish the game. Thunderstroke killed Riurry, Yulgash, the Ancient Stone Beast and then Srraxxarrakex before any of them knew what hit them, and would have annihilated the Archmage too if I hadn't found out that my amulet of light had been lost somewhere on the descent. Instead, I had to lure him into the corridor and punch him in the face until he died, which meant that he got a few annoying stat drains in.
D:49 was very good to me, yielding Preserver, and D:50 was pretty trivial. Balors do not like to be shot in the face with a blessed Thunderstroke. At one point I killed two in four shots, and with a balor and an earth elemental helping me out through scrolls of familiar summoning. As soon as the balors were down it was an easy clear. Preserver's regeneration and a beastfighter's damage output in melee gave the warriors and mutants no chance, and a couple of critical hit stuns meant that a bunch of them were fighting each other anyway. Pulled the levers, wandered over to Terinyo to kill Keethrax, and then went home.
Long story short: The minotaur maze is totally doable without magic mapping (so it'll kill me next game), blessed wands of fireballs are absurdly useful, and Far Slayer plus Thunderstroke is the most hilariously broken combination I can think of.
I haven't played hurthlings much, but one thing I love about them is that precrowns are really, really easy thanks to cooking and food preservation. Finding a co-aligned altar on D:7 made me decide to go for a precrown despite the risk I'd get something useless, and I ended up with Robes of Resistance for my (limited) troubles. Much of the rest of the early-mid game was easy - only the skeletal king gave me much trouble. I made it as far as Khelevaster before deciding to go get crowned, hoping for Preserver or the Bracers of War. Instead, got the Cloak of Oman, which gave me several issues.
First of all, I didn't have teleport control, which meant I had to go blink dog hunting as a champion of order (I should have done this beforehand, but I'm lazy). And second, I didn't have any critical hit ability. After some doggies had been cooked and devoured, Darkforge's pools were drained. Got a wish on the second-to-last one (as well as permanent invisiblity, a loss of teleport control -- good thing I had spare blink dog corpses -- and death ray resisitance). I agonised over what to use it for, because I wasn't sure how much corruption removal a melee character would need in the late game. Eventually settled on an AoLS.
But there was another way I could get a wish. There was a ring potion shop on D:2 that stocked about ten potions of exchange, and so I built a mini ring engine on D:8 that eventually popped up with an ordinary ring. From that, chose 'find weakness', and the rest of the game should have been pretty easy. Cleared upper CoC without a problem. Snake from Beyond was easy. Then went to ToEF, where everything seemed to be hitting me far too hard for a level 21ish beastfighter with decent defence.
Despite herb farming, I figured that my stats just weren't good enough. And so I found myself doing something silly: The Minotaur Maze. Things I had: Teleport control, teleportitis, arrows of humanoid slaying. Things I didn't have: Alertness, detect traps, any scrolls of magic mapping, on-demand teleport save for a single wand. I'm pretty sure it was one of the stupidest things I've ever done, so naturally it worked. Only went down one false level, had no stat drains, and got four PoCC, six PoGA and vanquisher for my troubles.
After consuming the PoGA, the tower was a cake walk. When I broke into the temple one of the grues dropped a wand of poison with eight charges, so I unloaded it into the Wyrm from range and went about my business killing everything else in the temple before he dropped dead offscreen. For which I got no experience. Oh well, it was funny.
Casino had Kinslayer and not much else. The cat lord had about 1400 health because I wasn't minding the cat count at all, but happily I had a wand of fireballs with 60 charges*. Unhappily, like an idiot I'd stashed the AMW in dwarftown, so I had to run away, climb the CoC and go back down to kill him. Fairly annoying. Skipped air and earth temples to go check out whether there'd be any vaults -- ended up with a giants one on D:45. Since I was invisible, it was easy to sneak in, get the artifacts, and sneak back out again. The rewards were the Far Slayer and Thunderstroke.
*All of my booze goes into wands of fireballs these days. They're the guaranteed cure to the cat lord, doppleganger kings, and a bunch of other late-game threats. You can also dip Thrundarr's gift into your early-game booze supply and get a silly amount of gold for selling.
Have you guys played with this combo yet? I spent the next several hours running around the Big Room like a loon buffing up my crossbow skill and slaughtering everything that so much as twitched. With quick shot, lightning shot and those weapons you can pump out an absolutely absurd amount of damage, and... yeah, I hope I get to play a high-level archer with that pairing. Now that Thunderstroke returns it's actually a top-level artifact, even if it fails to about 2 percent of the time.
After whetting my appetite for crossbow related mayhem in the upper CoC, I decided it was probably time to go finish the game. Thunderstroke killed Riurry, Yulgash, the Ancient Stone Beast and then Srraxxarrakex before any of them knew what hit them, and would have annihilated the Archmage too if I hadn't found out that my amulet of light had been lost somewhere on the descent. Instead, I had to lure him into the corridor and punch him in the face until he died, which meant that he got a few annoying stat drains in.
D:49 was very good to me, yielding Preserver, and D:50 was pretty trivial. Balors do not like to be shot in the face with a blessed Thunderstroke. At one point I killed two in four shots, and with a balor and an earth elemental helping me out through scrolls of familiar summoning. As soon as the balors were down it was an easy clear. Preserver's regeneration and a beastfighter's damage output in melee gave the warriors and mutants no chance, and a couple of critical hit stuns meant that a bunch of them were fighting each other anyway. Pulled the levers, wandered over to Terinyo to kill Keethrax, and then went home.
Long story short: The minotaur maze is totally doable without magic mapping (so it'll kill me next game), blessed wands of fireballs are absurdly useful, and Far Slayer plus Thunderstroke is the most hilariously broken combination I can think of.