My poor trollish wizard

[Starhawk]

So I had a trollish wizard with teleport control, great equipment, loads of spells, and most important stats at 20 or higher. ~180 hp and ~160 mp. Also was perma-invis from a pool.

And I still couldn't beat the ACW in the ToEF. I cleared the tower with no problem at all (had a crown of fire and an Ice Ball spell with R:4). Lured the ACW down to the level below the top; I was going to bolt it, then teleport away to regain MP if needed.

After a couple tries at this, the ACW triple-critted me for an instakill.

What does it take to get a wizard past the ACW? It seems like my bolts weren't even touching it. :eek:

[Elone]

It takes some training at Garth. Invest all your money into Toughness. 400.000.000gp is not an odd sum to pay him, but anything less than that will also help. Encounter ACW with more health - something like 400-600. THATS what it takes to take that ACW down with a wizard.

A note: Start training toughness as early as possible, to give it time to grow by the time you need it! I remember paying Garth to train a stat to 99 at midgame. The stat was still increasing during my battle for Chaos Gate.

And above all; tell me if that works for you.

[riktikticheck]

shouldn't ball spells work as they do good damage and aren't shrugged off, altho you need really lots of powerpoints to blast him away with that :D

well more than that my L22 gnomish necro just killed the ancient wyrm by luring it into a short corridor and bounciong lightning for multiple hits (lightning immunity from crowning) sure you run at risk of destroying your stuff, but that risk is always there in the tower anyway :D stats of the bolt at the time, p +17 r 19 e 13d6+r
killed the water guardian in the same way :D

[Macros]

You don't need to train your toughness to 99(actually it's not possible to obtain such large amount of gold<before casino> without serious exploit of dragon gold bug), 25 from morgia root should be fine. Water orb and elemental gauntlets are really handy in ToEF(high willpower = higher ball spells radius, and you can use for full healing). If you have wand of paralyzation, you can paralyze ACW. If you have potions of confusion or blindness(cursed potion of invisibility also works here), you can throw it at ACW. Because you was wizard, probably(but such recipe is not guaranted though) you was able to make potion of blindness from alchemy. Try to not engage in melee with ACW(ie. stay one or two tiles away from him). Also having decent DV and PV is quite handy too.

[Doalag]

Once TO is at 25 use sickness is fine with morgia to get TO to 31 (or it's 30? I wonder why my current char has TO 31).

[reich]

What does it take to get a wizard past the ACW? It seems like my bolts weren't even touching it.

so why didn't you try your Ice Ball?

[Grey]

Personally I'd say you shouldn't go into the tower with so little HP. With around 250 (easily possible with herb-training) there's very little chance of getting killed in one round. Also, never stand next to him if you're a spellcaster. You should be hitting him from a distance at all times. Ventriloquism, if trained well, also helps reduce the threat from him, on top of the methods mentioned above.

[Starhawk]

so why didn't you try your Ice Ball?

I did. That's how it got close enough to triple-crit me. :(

But some good advice here; I am pretty sure I had wands of stunning/paralyze and some good potions I could have thrown. That would have left it open for me to blast away a little more safely with Ice Ball.

[vogonpoet]

Stunray spell. Its cheap, and its cheerful, just train it up a bit before entering tower, and lead W to your corridor so he can't stagger around too much.
If you have the water Orb and Nonnaks sword, and Ice or Acid Ball spells, its really not very hard. At all. And To of 29 +/- 2 should be fine.

[Evil Knievel]

Yes, stunray! Yesterday I entered the tower with a feeling of boldness, at LVL 19 with around 130 Hp, high elven priest. I had lots of nether bolts that helped immensly to get up there. For the ACW I had prepared the water orb and lots of spenseweed... and a wand of stunning. When the ACW was approaching finally, a demon and a chaos servant got in between in my self-made corridor. I choose stun ray at first merely not to kill those creatures shielding me, then realized I can try that multiple times, until the ACW started to stagger around.
Then I switched bolts to acid bold. I used some 200 pp on him, prayed, used another 150 to get it killed as fast as possible. That's my second time to beat the ACW at all(now its 2:1 for me).