Thanks all for the discussion, I thought about it and decided to go with the RDSMs to maximize chances of surviving the Tower. Did puppy cave, the weak ass spear actually worked to my semi-advantage because I went from level 5 to level 8 in polearms dealing with the ants. Did the DD, found an adamantium spear, made level 12 on the bottom level; Keethrax is still pretty unbeatable since I can't see in darkness or fight off his stat drains. I lost 5 attribute points before I punted and decided to come back later.
Still haven't found a Troll for Thrundrarr's first question, but I have several blessed scrolls of identify anyway.
Graveyard... I'm probably still several levels away from being able to handle that.
So where's the best place to grind up to Pyramid entrance levels? CoC above Dwarftown? UD:8? ID9-15?