You can raise your stats without taming the big room. Especially raising toughness does not require that many herbs, just 10 morgia roots should be enough for +5 To.
Next, prepare for draining the pools. Checklist of preparations:
- do the first 19 arena fights, so that 1 pot of visibility is enough to finish later in case of intrinsic invis
- have a way to remove sickness
- be strong enough to deal with the golems
- have a way to remove dooming (lots of piety)
To become strong enough to deal with the golems, you could rob DF first, without touching the pools. Of course, for robbing you need controlled teleportation. Getting the wand should not be too difficult. Stairhop ID 3-4 for a blink dog, try to generate two corpses, eat the first and sell the second to the shop. Robbing DF, you are highly likely to find a kickass weapon and you might find a better elven chain mail too, with some luck.
Then there is the question how to get enough piety. The slow way is to pick stoma. The faster way is to sell some artifacts in DT and sac the gold. To get them back later on, you can put your ventriloquism skill to good use. If you confuse the shopkeeper, you turn him hostile with no further negative consequenses.
You steal a scroll labelled HITME. The orc hits you.