A Beginner's Guide to Pools

[JellySlayer]

You could easily farm giant slugs in the bottom level of the DD. It's easier to go to PC: 2 and eat an ant though.

I'm aware that you can find them. With hunting ammo, yeah, you can get the corpse easily enough (but such ammo is pretty rare, and the bow is quite high DL). The standard drop rate for slug corpses is about 2%, and their spawn rate, even in DD:7, is not so high. In casual play, the odds of getting one to drop are pretty low. Certainly not at the level of "almost guaranteed". Might as well say an AoLS is "almost guaranteed" because you can just wander around the ID for 100k turns until you find one.

[SirTheta]

I've seen 2 giant slug corpses in my time. They are nowhere near guaranteed (unless you think it's worth spending ages scumming them or have hunting ammo, which will give you a corpse very quickly), and you can't even get acid immunity from pools anyway, so I don't even understand that?

[YourMum]

Maybe 1 corpse in over 10 years. You're all right, there's guaranteed, and technically 'guaranteed' isn't there. Even with food preservation 100 and a weapon of hunting corpse drops aren't guaranteed. Not even 50/50. How many slugs do you see in a normal game as well?

[SirTheta]

Maybe 1 corpse in over 10 years. You're all right, there's guaranteed, and technically 'guaranteed' isn't there. Even with food preservation 100 and a weapon of hunting corpse drops aren't guaranteed. Not even 50/50. How many slugs do you see in a normal game as well?

Weapon of hunting is really bad to be fair (only really has an effect on animals to start with, then it's small) - it's ammo of hunting that really works. So, if you go heir gift on an Archer, the corpse is practically guaranteed if you do DD - definitely. On every other character, good luck. Probably 2-5 in normal course of doing DD.

[Sad Death Generator]

they also show up in the mid to late game pretty often in tomb of high kings, blue dragon caves and shimmering cave. Usually everyone has hunting ammo by then.

[SirTheta]

they also show up in the mid to late game pretty often in tomb of high kings, blue dragon caves and shimmering cave. Usually everyone has hunting ammo by then.

Okay, no and no. They do show up in the TOTHK or cavernous levels (to my great astonishment, I once found two on a cavernous level in TOTHK *and* got a corpse from one). They are, however, not "pretty often" - they occur about half as commonly as a berserker lord (and with +5 DL on top of that). Moreover, hunting ammo is very rare even if you're picking up *all* the ammo [because it is a suffixed arrow type instead of a separate arrow type]. The chance of you encountering both a giant slug and having hunting ammo is not even a once in 12 game occurrence (where a game, in this case, you get to TOEF) outside of DD & Archer heir gift.

[JellySlayer]

You can't even get acid immunity from pools anyway, so I don't even understand that?

I suggested earlier that losing acid resistance from pools can be a bit annoying because the resistance is pretty hard to find except from the ants in PC. Apparently everybody else just scums giant slugs for acid immunity at the start of the game.

Incidentally, there's a recent YASD about this exact problem.

[GordonOverkill]

The big problem with all these scumming tactics is that they are just no fun at all. However, just yesterday I finished a run with an orcish paladin who again killed two giant slugs, both randomly in the CoCs... no corpse though. Maybe I am just extremely lucky with finding these guys x-)

[divij]

i think the only reason to not do pool sipping anymore is if you have a VERY low age limit character like an orc or a troll, or if you have already obtained a wish and have -para, invis and teleportis. in any other circumstance , i dont think pool sipping can EVER be bad in the long run. also maybe its just me but i think that acid resistance/immunity is over-rated. though that maybe because i either play tough characters or spell casters, not something like a mist elven duelist or some shit!!
also , i DONOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME know what eye colour has got to do with pool sipping!!

[BenMathiesen]

Some corpses are very hard to find if you don't have the Food Preservation skill. This is one of them.