Best r/c combo for ultra ending?

[fir]

63% chance to dry during the 6th gulp, that doesn't sound 'average' to me.

Yeah, Tactics is a good reason to avoid drinking from pools early. I don't understand your aversion to invisibility itself - it's one of the most useful things.

if a chance to dry is 2/13 it means that whan you make 1000 drinks from sequential pools 2/13 of them will dry the pool (154 dries)
2/13 is 2/13, 1000/154 is 6.5

[grobblewobble]

- So, 1 - (1 - 8/52)^4 = ~50%.

That is true, but it does not mean that you get an average of 4 gulps for each pool. You're calculating the wrong probability here.

If you get a lot of pools, you will drain half of them in 4 sips or less, but the other half will last longer, and some of them will last much longer, which greatly increases the average number of sips per pool.

The probability you need, however, is the chance that you gain a wish from a pool before you drain it. That chance is 1 in 17, because the event of draining the pool is 16 times as likely as the event of getting a wish.
Then the probability of gaining a wish in darkforge is 1 - (1 - 1/17)^N, where N is the number of pools.

But there are many more than 6 pools on average, from playing the game I'm quite sure about that. The pool room has 20 squares. I always thought that each square has a 50% chance of spawning a pool. This seems to be about right from the samples I've seen, although I have no hard evidence.

Assuming it is correct, an average DFG with 10 pools would give you 1 - (1 - 17)^10 = 45% of at least one wish. Or, to keep it simple, nearly 50-50.

[Carter]

(Chance to gain a wish in Darkforge, assuming an average 6 pools and 4 gulps before drying, is ~21%)

Wizards have the best chance. Extremely hard to kill early, even stronger when you find few books. Very fast leveling. Great skills. Combine with dark elf for alertness, find weakness and lifespan.

the issue you have with wizards is killing Andy, since you cannot level weapons up as quickly, and by and large, you need to kill Andy with weapons. I've died to andy on a wizard who annihilated D50 within a couple of minutes.

Obviously any Wizard with good stats has a reasonable chance of getting archmage going in which case the ultra is a cake walk.

My pick for ultra is dwarven barbarian/farmer since they get strong stats and can fight very well vs Andy. Fencers are also insanely powerful but TOTRR is required at the end which can make it a tiny bit tough (not really).

Archers of any race also make Andy easy since you can just farm up arrows of slaying which will kill Andy in about 50-60 turns.

Andy is the challenge once you have a wish. Everything else is easy.

[JellySlayer]

I've never had problems killing Andy with acid ball as a wizard. Unless that's changed in recent versions? I haven't done an ultra in a long time. Even still, killing him in melee with a caster is not a big deal... non-archmage wizards can be melee powerhouses just as well as barbarians, tremendous blows excepted.

[kuniqs]

Thanks for correcting me!

[sweetnothing]

Average number of sips before the pool dries is (1-p)/p where p is a probability to dry a pool on a sip. The proof is here:
pool-drying.png

I used Wolfram Alpha to sum series, already forgot how to sum it

Anyway, if p = 8/52 then E = 5.5. Assuming plain 1/54 probability to get a wish, you expect to get 5.5/54 ~ 0.1 wishes per pool. Then, you expect to get one wish per your 10 pools.

Maths!

EDIT: ok, probability to get a wish is something like 1/104. Then 5.5/104 ~ 0.05 wishes per pool. Half of a wish per 10 pools

[sweetnothing]

So if you did not get a wish from Darkforge, you can think about it "It was statistically UNEXPECTED".

EDIT: see above

[Blasphemous]

That statistically unexpected outcome is quite common though; Dfg fails to provide a wish around once every three of my games.

As for Andy - wizards are easy mode and yes, acid ball still works.
All you really need is the trident and something like 40 intrinsic strength.
Weapon marks don't count as much, so having pole arms at 9 (which for a wizard is a perfectly doable feat) and using TotRR against him is the simplest and most straightforward method.
Add some crowd-control acid balls against his summons and wizards really are the easiest.

[blunk]

EDIT:
@blunk
As far as I am aware, boar skull drops have nothing to do with Food Preservation. This is not the first time I'm seeing this particular bit of info. I wonder where it started.

This was just an incorrect assumption from me that the skull was the corpse.

[grobblewobble]

According to the GB they can drop a corpse that increases strength and lowers willpower. So apparently, a board can leave a skull but no corpse, or leave a corpse but no skull. Conclusion: their corpse does not contain a skull. The skull is an object they may carry in a hidden extradimensional pocket.