Stuck in the Tomb of High Kings

[sweetnothing]

Maybe he triggered some traps or what.

[Scooter Fox]

Minotaur maze is honestly not that hard as long as you are lucky and have fate smiles without curse/doom. You usually have at least those 8-10 missiles of humanoid slaying and some means of confusion resistance at this point in the game. It's incredibly tedious, yes, but not tedious enough to deter me from the incredible rewards the emperor holds. I mean, not counting some unlucky stat drains, you get around +11 St, +10 To/Pe, +4 to everything else, 1-2 effective PoCCs, the most damaging weapon in the game available to all characters, a random artifact and some spellbooks. You can't say it's not worth it. I go there even without means of teleportation and magic mapping; the only thing that would stop me from going there would probably be lack of teleport control.

By the way, my last two minotaur mazes (in R59) had the same exact path to the emperor. I wonder if it's only a coincidence. For the curious, the path was
1-2-3-4[-5]-3-2(-1?)-3[-4]-4-5-6-7
with [] denoting a false level/dead end and (?) indicating an unexplored alternative staircase.

[JellySlayer]

The minotaur emperor seems oddly very vulnerable to poison. I encountered his group of minotaur mages at the corner of one corridor. Since the mages are pretty good at draining stats, and the visible one was standing in an area that prevented an arrow from reaching, I decided to get them moving by bouncing the ray of a wand of poison.

Wands of poison are very powerful. They poison they inflict is much stronger than the poison that you get from potions or poisonous weapons. They're one of my favorite boss-killer weapons.

[Burb]

Should be on the list of things to wish for honestly. They are fantastic, very few monsters are immune to poison and i don't think they can shrug the bolts it fires (i think?)

[Tyrnyx]

I was on D50 when a balor summoned karmic worms and I had zero options, missiles weren't trained nearly enough and I tried using limited slaying ammo to limited avail (and I didn't want to get myself doomed from punching them). Then, looking through my items I found a wand on poison with a bunch of charges - think to myself, well it cant hurt. And blast as many as I can as many times as I can, run away. Thinking that will at least weaken them not too long later I see piles where I once saw wyrms.

Long story short: Wand of Poison is beast and has saved me on D50.

Also, I've had to wish for a way out of TotHK before as well. I now try to bring an extra climbing set that I leave on the stairs upon entering the first level. You only have to happen to you once...

[auricbond]

Long story short: Wand of Poison is beast

Agreed, at least when they don't shrug (karmic wyrms are quite soft to non-elemental bolt spells, magic missile also being effective). In one of my earliest trips in the minotaur maze, with an underpowered, struggling character that lost tons of eq to traps and lots of stats to minotaur mages, finally made the grueling journey to the emperor, I easily took care of him with a few zaps of the wand of poison.