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Thread: New Player (no guides) Just Reached D50 (and failed)

  1. #1
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    Default New Player (no guides) Just Reached D50 (and failed)

    Dear Fans,

    tl/dr: I know next to nothing about this game and I love it!

    [warning, spoilers ahead]

    I discovered and first played this game last May, 2018. Like most probably I found it frustrating and difficult, feelings that were compounded by my aversion to guides, wikis and (somewhat) forums. In many ways, the internet has made games like these too easy with all the answers revealed, but I digress.

    My early characters never made it far, never even reaching Dwarftown. And then I decided to play it on my twitch stream and save-scum my way to victory. I knew I wanted a wizard so I selected that and left everything else to chance. I ended up with a female, mist-elf, wizard. I named her Sirendel because it sounded Tolkien-esk. I had no idea at the time of the limitations or advantages of the mist-elf. Looking back at the dates on the save-games my commitment to the game was spotty at first. A couple of days in August, four days at the end of September, one day in the middle of November, and then nothing...

    A few days after Christmas (the 28th) I made a commitment to finish this game and let my viewers know that we would be playing this exclusively until the end. Back in November we had left our little Sirendel waiting in Dwarftown. She had completed some of the early dungeons, made her way to the western side of the map, found the plentiful food source at the arena, conquered the Pyramid, and had just discovered Dwarftown. Somewhere along the way she drank from a magic pool and was now permanently invisible. That fact, more than anything else, may have contributed the most to our success going forward. For one thing, without it we probably never would have learned the effect of the Ancient Mummy Wrappings, but when you yourself are invisible it's a lot more obvious.

    So on we forged, delving deep into the CoC. We found Khelvestar who gave us some direction. Aggressive usage of the Magic Map spell found us the Water Temple and our first major battle. We tunneled our way in and burst through the wall casting fiery destruction in all directions. Looking back, this may have been the first time where we felt like we had the strength advantage over the opposition. They fell in droves as we crossed the moat to the central island and then....oh god the water elementals. We died, and died, and died again. Sometimes to the water elementals, sometimes to that dammed snake. I'll be honest, it took us a few deaths to realize that it was not a "normal" snake, and maybe a few more before we realized that it was the boss. We developed a plan. We entered the room and moved our way carefully to the left, aggravating as little as possible. We cleared the southern side of the room and then tunneled our way through the side of the temple to the altar and....ran. It worked perfectly. We managed to pull the Chaos Serpent without waking the elementals. We kited him back into the tunnel and prevailed. As a bonus, he was carrying what we needed and we didn't need to reenter the temple at all.

    Then we ate the Chaos Serpent corpse and....wtf are corruptions!? Living Mana Battery? What is this? YOU DRAINED ALL MY WANDS?? Seriously game????

    This battle was the turning point for my feelings about the game. What up to now had seemed like a capricious RNG fest (just keep starting characters until the RNG eventually rolls you n lucky items in a row, then win) became a game with multiple solutions and strategy. We had made it to mid-game.

    Deeper we went. Along the way we found a fire-proof blanket. A few levels later we found a burning flight of stairs. Surely they must be related...but they weren't. No matter what we tried, we could not get up the stairs. And then we got another corruption! What was causing this!? This one was bad. Lightness or something like that, all I remember is that all our stats were trashed. We started the game with only 8 toughness, losing any of it sucked. I don't remember whether the game prompted us to do this or not, but eventually we retreated back to Dwarftown and asked the king (?) there about the stairs. He told us it was time to enter the Tower of Eternal Flame. And so began our second strategic challenge.

    This one was tougher. The continuous destruction of our equipment just seemed insurmountable. Eventually we interrupted our attempts to explore when we noticed that the giant storm to the west was gone. We met the Ice Queen, completed her quest and received her AMAZING potions of corruption removal. We then took a quick look at the other areas in the north-west, finding the Ring of High Kings. Back we went to the ToEF. I don't remember the exact sequence of events, but during our assault on the tower we learned many things like a) that we could safely leave items on Barbarian island, b) that sacrificing 30K gp on an altar would let us turn water into holy water, c) that blessed things survived longer in the ToEF, how a Djinn ring works (we needed another Fireproof Blanket). Eventually we managed to defeat the tower by blessing our potions of corruption, removing all our corruptions, blessing our fireproof blanket, and finally, stripping butt naked and entering the ToEF with just a fireproof blanket and a wand of digging. It still wasn't a walk in the park, but we already had a strategy of kiting the boss and it worked well again. Web was a help.

    Now we had two orbs and headed back into the CoC. I should note here that I was usually leaving certain critical items behind on Barbarian island. Things that I was worried might get destroyed like our potions of Holy Water, the new ring, the potions of corruption removal, etc. That worked against us eventually, as we had to return to the surface for that ring at one point. Even though we had cleaned ourselves of corruption, the trips up and down the CoC were taking their toll again. All of our corruptions were returning. We worked our way past obstacle after obstacle, the Eternal Guardian, the Cat Lord, the F'ing Bunny Guy, the Orb of Earth, the Orb of Air and finally the bottom.

    Wait a minute, why are there spots for 5 orbs? For some reason I remembered Khelvastar saying four orbs, but chat found his text for me (I won't look stuff up because I'm avoiding spoilers). Damn, there are 5 orbs. Well, down into the Unreal Dungeon and....OMFG what a pain in the ass! Mister Biskup, if you are reading this, I once made a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon with a trap on every square. I was twelve years old! Okay?

    This fight was a bitch, but we had a lot of tools (spells) at our disposal now. We learned that we can essentially cast spells forever as long as we have Cure Critical Wounds and a lot of food. We tried to take out the Wizards first because they would spawn new mobs. Sadly it wasn't until the end of the fight where we figured out what was causing our mana problems. This fight will be different next time. We died many times but eventually won through due to the magic of save-scumming. Finally we had our last orb.

    We placed the last orb and descended to level 49. We cut a short-cut through level 49 and descended to 50. And this is where the story comes to the end. So many monsters, so much corruption. We had been stacking up corruptions for a while, but now they were coming every 20 or 30 turns it seemed. We were winning the battle mind you. We where making progress down that hall slowly but surely, step by step. But then, without warning, we ran out of Cure Critical Wounds.

    That was the end. Without the ability to heal we couldn't proceed. I could restore to before we entered level 49, but frankly that probably doesn't solve the problem. We have so much corruption and so few spells that I don't think we can win through. I have two choices, a) retreat out of the dungeon and try to find more spells and a solution to our corruption or b) start a new character and try to get here more efficiently. I'm torn honestly. The more I think about it though, the more I like the idea of retreating Sirendel, who is quite capable now, and seeing if we can't just explore the world a little more, forgetting about the CoC for a while. I mean, we have gills and can breath water!

    Thank you for reading. For those who are interested if you want to watch a newbie struggle with the game, I stream on twitch as any2ldo, usually from 5:00pm-9:00pm PST during the week and earlier on weekends.

    -Dan

  2. #2

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    This was a fun read. Particularly to compare to my own extremely- spoiled but permadeath experience.

    Would it feel spoilt to you to share more details of your stats/inventory/castings, in order for others to weigh in on whether to try a?

    No pressure at all if you want no outside input. Neat to hear about your unspoiled journey.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Dec 2014
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    Pennsylvania, USA
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    I love the idea of someone beating ADOM unspoiled. I was inherently spoiled in more ways than one because my dad taught me this game and it makes me wonder if I ever would have been able to win unspoiled.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Sep 2012
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    San Francisco, CA
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    Well done getting that far unspoiled!

    Being careful about spoiling, I do recommend using Potions of Insight to learn more about yourself.
    Keep your DV and PV high.

    Also, try a few characters accepting permadeath, which can teach you to be resourceful.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
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    San Diego
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    Update: We did it!

    Thank you everyone for your advice and especially to those who tuned into the stream and helped without spoiling. I just spent an hour typing up the recap but then lost it all with a mis-click, so unfortunately here comes a very abridged version.

    When we last left our hero she was at the bottom of the CoC, out of spells and full of corruptions. Before starting over however, I decided to retreat back to the surface and use this relatively powerful character to scout out the rest of the map and learn as much about the Drakalor chain as possible. Over the next 5 streams we did almost everything which I will bullet point...

    * revisited the Ice Queen hoping for more work (and potions of Corruption Removal) No luck
    * took advantage of our gills to explore the submerged cave and completed the dragon quest. No reward because "we'd only lose it."
    * discovered the Mountain Village. Found some hidden passages but didn't find anything interesting. There is more here, I'm certain
    * attempted the Rift again because our climbing is now 100 but, dammit, our Willpower is too low! (Chaos orbs already spent on D48)
    * discovered the Minotaur Maze.

    * Restored again before we placed the Chaos Orbs
    * Explored the Rift and discovered the Great Library. This was a huge relief and the point where I felt like we might be able to succeed without restarting.

    It took quite a bit of work to get through the library. Chat very discretely offered a spoiler which might help with the Corruptions and I took it. It had to do with the librarian (you know what I mean) but we were never able to get it to work. Maybe it was bugged or we were doing something wrong.

    I had a small amount of corruption removal (1 potion, 1 scroll) and decided to try D50 again. Along the way we used the Djinni ring to get a wish which we used for Scrolls of Corruption, bought some more spell books, bought water in the casino gift-shop (which oddly is priced similar to bottled water purchased in Vegas gift shops), made a bunch of holy water and blessed a bunch of stuff.

    On D50 we did a lot of fighting and teleporting around, eventually learning the layout of the level before dying surrounded by Balors. Eventually we decided to tunnel along the bottom and come up from the side, and thus discovered the levers. Eventually we killed all the mobs in that side room, pulled the lever, figured out that there must be another lever on top of the map, dug another tunnel, killed even more monsters and pulled the second lever. We were not fooled by the message. Once we realized that we could pull one Balor at a time with this lever business it became a matter of kitting and hoping our spells held out. They might not have if the Balor's themselves hadn't dropped a couple of Magic Missile tomes along the way.

    All in all, despite my occasional frustrations with some of the game-design choices, I think this is a fantastic game. The amount of detail and complexity of the systems is really exceptional and the story is great. I will certainly play it again as I have so many unanswered mysteries to solve!

    Dan

    For any who are interested, Twitch will preserve for about 9 days the videos of the last 5 streams that it took to finish the game. The url is https://www.twitch.tv/any2ldo/videos.

    edit: I have no idea how anyone would beat this game NOT playing a mage.
    Last edited by any2ldo; 01-23-2019 at 11:25 PM.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
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    Dan
    CONGRATS on a win unspoiled
    mages are indeed incredibly powerful in the mid-late game. I personally prefer melee classes and my wins are all on such chars. ME Theif Barb and Fighter. Melee chars end up getting nice ways to deal with stuff and you can always pick up a bow or crossbow and kite away the medieval way.

  7. #7

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    Hi Dan,

    Congrats and just an incredible story! I know it may sound crazy, but I happen to be one of those geeks who are trying to learn the basics without wikis and guides. And yeah, that's pretty bewildering at times. My "newbie struggle" (as you called it) still goes on... And I'm planning to do the math on how many hours I've spent playing ADOM so far.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Feb 2014
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    Europe
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    Gj, even savescumming this is very hard to beat unspoiled.
    I think Thomas have said (as in written) that the game is supposed to be difficulty that is requires collaboration.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
    Location
    Groningen
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    Ummmm how did you get back to the surface having placed the Chaos Orbs and not yet closing the Chaos Gate? Or did I miss something?
    Anyways: very well done, if I wanted to finish the game unspoiled I would have given up long, long before D:50.

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
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    Poland
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    It would have been nice to have the vlg file of the char before the final descent. That way we could have evaluated more options. Still a nice read.
    "Hell is empty and all the devils are here."

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