This is technically


spoily


since it talks about items/resistances that you might want at

specific

places.



There are places in the game where there's an advantage to specific resistances or items . My favorite example is Griffyard....because death by paralyzation is a really high-odds risk if you don't have an intrinsic or an amulet of free action. I don't try to farm corpses anywhere; I just get the 'natural' drops as I proceed through the game. So I generally don't do the Portal quest until (a) I get an amulet, or (b) I'm overleveled for the quest, like level 18 wizard, to be cautious.

Right now I have a level 23 grey elf wizard who is ALMOST ready for ToEF -- reasonable stats and equipment -- but no ice ball, no acid ball, and no lightning ball. I'm sure I could frost bolt my way through the first four levels, but I'm hesitant about the Fire Temple without ball spells (since I'm pretty sure that Fireball and Improved Fireball will work poorly....).

But, I finished the Frost Giant caves (asterisk, I finished the vault, I killed a handful of Master Liches and ran the heck away before running into the Kings and Emperor of the Greater Vault), am level 23, have the mana orb. I started thinking that this is a cross-class issue--like if an Archer didn't have any of the right kind of slaying ammo, and so forth.

So I'm curious how other people tackle this. Just tackle the dungeon (and again, I'm curious about this for any dungeon, there are a lot of places where specific things help you with specific enemies) and hope it goes okay? Burn a wish on something that in lots of games is pretty mundane? Go back below the water temple, hoping to get something good on D21-D26 even though you'll have to spend a bunch of time going down/up? Repeatedly clear the first 5 levels of the ID hoping for drops? Switch (e.g. in the Griffyard example) to employing corpse farming?

I don't heavily farm herbs, I just try to make 2X2s in passing, and pick what I can on later passes by. In following that, I had one game where I did the Pyramid with no way to treat disease...got sick...didn't die, but it was stressful.

I'm just curious how people approach the desirable-but-not-quite-required things.

-Dan