18,533 turn melee speedrun record (Raven DrAs)

[SirTheta]

This is my 3rd win in R101 and sets, to my knowledge, a new melee speedrun record. (Beating out Ars's legendary 18,755 turn Barbarian speedrun.) I take back what I said in my previous YAVP and now think that the addition of the Borderlands Settlement potion shop and surface altar has made melee speedrunning easy enough that the 18,000 turn mark is beatable with a bit of luck. This run did not use piety abuse, but did use some other exploits. As per previous YAVP, much thanks to Grond for his help getting this strategy figured out and getting me up to speed on 3.3.3.

The strategy is the same as in my previous YAVP (I didn't write one up for the Gnome Duelist):

1. Goblin Camp to check for good shields and grab rocks to kill the grizzled dwarven veteran with.
2. SMC > UD > HMV to get eternium chainmail.
3. DT to complete Thrundarr quests 1-3 and get arena and portal quests.
4. Griffyard & Pyramid in some order, grabbing teleport wand if teleport control is already installed (somewhat likely with new blink dog spawn rate). If Griffyard second, you can dig up ancient dwarven map fragment to assist with crowning.
5. Talk to 3 important people in Terinyo to autocomplete arena quest.
6. Grab gold from diggable vaults in merchant guild for crowning.
7. Grab phial of Caladriel if time allows.
8. Crown on surface at Borderlands Settlement altar (and buy out any wand recharging potions / other useful potions). The idea is to get to this point by as close to 8,000 turns as possible. Cost to convert altar is 8,338 gold, so you need about 108,338 gold to crown.
9. Clear Darkforge for xp and poolsipping, targeting permanent invisibility, teleport control, and teleportitis. If not crowned with =Fire, get the Shield of Raw Steel.
10. Complete TOEF, grabbing teleport wand on way back to D:1 if you haven't already and rechecking Borderlands Settlement potion shop for wand recharging potions.
11. Dive, dive, dive. Talk to mystic; get Thrundarr rewards from arena quest; check casino for good gear; grab water, air, earth, and mana orbs; close gate and resurface. Ideally in 10,000 turns or less with liberal use of wand of teleportation.

Drakeling Assassin has the perfect crowning gifts and skill set for this type of run, all the way down to Detect Traps (at minimum for MT) and Alchemy (for D:50). Fantastic RC. The point buy on this character was a little unusual, the goal was to also run a no herb game for the achievement and to save some turns by ignoring herbs. So the buy was intended to top off Willpower (for confusion resistance + 2-radius wand of fireballs with water orb), Dexterity (for speed), and Toughness (hp, pv). Point buy for adult female drakish assassin (Raven-born) was 9 St, 10 Le, 22 Wi [maxed], 20 Dx [maxed], 25 To [maxed], 4 Ch, 13 Ap, 4 Ma, 12 Pe for 2 talents with 0 points left over. Initial talents were Strong of Will and Tough since those are kind of good now. Might've been a better strategy to go with Dextrous in retrospect. The low Ma and Ch is risky because we're going to anger the Paladin of Order later, and I did get lucky there. Level 3 through 27 talents were Healthy, Hardy, Tough Skin, Iron Skin, Immune to Pain, Steel Skin, Quick, Very Quick, Greased Lightning -- in that order.

This run started off very good and very poorly, and I thought it was a loss out of the gate. The Goblin Camp had the best haul I've seen in my visits -- a [+7, +4] large mithril shield I finished the game with and a [+9, +2] tower mithril shield. I entered the SMC on turn 346. On UD:3 I found an orc lesser vault (turn 677), but the weapon I was using was a 1d6+3 mithril hand axe that did jack all on very aggressive. After clearing it for items and xp I entered UD:4 on turn 1,466 and didn't make it to the wilderness from HMV until turn 2,875 -- an unmitigated disaster for a section of the game that should take about 2,000 turns on a decent day. However, I did have the grizzled dwarven veteran's eternium hand axe and eternium chain mail. St was trained to 14+ by the time I was headed to COC.

Fortunately, I persevered and managed to make up enough time in my dive to Dwarftown and resurface, making it to the D:1 upstair by turn 7,467 with Thrundarr quests 1-3 completed and the gleaming drakish scurgar "Devilbane" in my missile slot (cost 16.9k gold at Waldenbrook's and I snagged it by only a couple hundred gold). Crossing the Animated Forest was completed using the Fungal Cave exploit. I also managed to install teleport control on the way back with a stashed blink dog. However, I did lose my waterproof blanket and then lost a ton of scrolls to one water trap, so getting a new blanket was a priority. Scrolls were stashed on D:1 in the meanwhile.

I was only level 12 at the time, so I had to do the Griffyard first, clearing the bare minimum of the top level as I proceeded to the downstairs on the topmost line. Nonnak went down with only 3 blasts from the wand of fireballs (took 4 my last game) while Griff and the bone golem went down quickly in melee. This got me to level 13 and I quickly completed the Pyramid (since I hadn't yet sipped pools or crowned, I needed the AMW just in case and I needed the ankh to discover the merchant guild). I exited the Pyramid on turn 8,409 which was a good pace.

The merchant guild yielded ~110k gold so I did not go back to dig up Griff's grave. I believe this is where I grabbed the wand of teleportation using the mouseover glitch. After inspecting the potion shop and grabbing some booze and boost mana, I was standing on the Borderlands altar at turn 8,788. Converting the altar angers the bishop of order, who decided the first thing to do was stat drain me -- 2 points from Le and Ma. Luckily I was able to sacrifice enough gold for a crowning and get away before more stat drains. Prayed in the wilderness while wearing AMW and got =Fire and Silence of the Dead. 3 games in a row with no Executor, but Silence of the Dead is so good I can hardly complain.

I entered Darkforge on turn 8,912 and was poolsipping after clearing the golems and checking the weapon / armor rooms at turn 9,859. The only good thing was a white dragon scale mail, which I did use later for Nuurgy. Poolsipping got me a host of useful intrinsics including -Para (second to last sip), +Invis, lost and regained +TCtrl, gained and lost +Tele (fourth to last sip). Losing +Tele was foolish since I had +Invis, +Tele, and +TCtrl all at once, but I was desperately hoping to get a wish so that I could do the TOEF with rings of regeneration. In the end, I had enough potions and scroll that I didn't regret losing +Tele nearly as much by the end of the game.

I decided to charge into TOEF and go for it using prayers, which worked out surprisingly well. I required about 4-5 healing prayers from beginning to end (including a healing prayer 30 steps from the stairs, but I had no choice with only 3 hp from being extremely dizzy) and a prayer for pickaxe to save from having to exit and come back with a pickaxe that might burn up. I melee'd the ACW to death despite having Devilbane because I apparently cannot remember simple things. I went back to Borderlands to sac some gold from the TOEF in order to up piety -- found I had been taken down to inner peace. Those pickaxe prayers are still no joke.

I failed to take appropriate stock of turn count here, but my next turn count marker was exiting Dwarftown after having talked to the Dwarven Mystic and Thrundarr on turn 12,095. I decided to semi-liberally use the wand of teleportation while descending in the hopes of solidly beating 20,000 turns. With a combination of downstairs luck and intuition, I was able to kill the SFB and get to the Casino on turn 14,093. I exited the Casino level after robbing it on turn 14,367. I did some exploration mode testing on Barnabas to see if I could find a method of aggro'ing shopkeeps that didn't curse the PC. I did, but I of course the Casino shopkeep is special and as I found out much later, I did get cursed.

I got the ROTMC (used scroll of monster detection to quickly find cat lord, luckily he was one short hop over from the downstairs, which were one short hop from the upstairs) and had a surge of power on the Air Temple level, where I got the amulet of indomitable life. What a beast! I cleared most of the Earth Temple with a wand of fireballs (radius 2), finishing off the ASB with Devilbane in order to conserve some wand recharging resources. This netted me a few levels, and was done by turn 15,342. My greater vault was on D:46 and was a fire dragon vault. Despite semi-easy raidability (it was the layout with two big hidden chambers with artifacts on the bottom), I skipped it completely to conserve turns.

The Casino had netted me a wand of trap detection, which in combination with being recharged once and downing 4 blessed potions of boost perception, allowed me to discover all the traps by wrenching the wand. This was when I became suspicious that I was cursed because it took 4 turns to wrench the wand. Downing a blessed potion of insight confirmed this. Despite this, the Mana Temple went smoothly and only one potion of blindness was necessary to take out Nuurgy. I exited MT on turn 17,191 and teleported back to D:47. After putting all the orbs in, I was back to the D:48 downstairs on turn 17,550.

At this point, it was clear I was very low on wand recharging (two blessed potions of booze and 4 charges in my wand of teleportation) and that I had made several mistakes. (1) I had never blessed any of my wands of digging, so I had been using more charges than necessary. I had also lost one in the Air Temple, which might not have happened had it been blessed. So, at this point I had a wand of digging with 0 charges and a wand of digging with 2 charges. This was barely enough to get to one level while bypassing the chaos mutant rooms, much less both top and bottom. (2) The wand of fire I had gotten in the Casino had 0 charges, so I did need to use alchemy to get my speed back up, yet I had stupidly decided to play a no herb game. (...also, by the time I got to D:50 I had forgotten about the wand of fire because I played this game over 3 days.) (3) I had taken 0 screenshots of rooms between D:32 (Darkforge shortcut, I had used a blessed scroll of magic mapping there and knew the stairs were pretty far) and D:47, so I had no idea which levels had short walks to stairs and which REALLY required teleportation to cut down on turns. This meant my strategy was essentially "pray for some drops on D:50".

My potion of uselessness gift was the beheading axe "Headman's Hand", which I obviously did not use. I blessed both my wands of digging and used one charge to cut a diagonal path to the stairs. On D:50 I started taking on chaos mutants and WMOPC without increasing my speed, which netted me lots of xp but overall went pretty poorly health and corruption wise. Eventually I started mixing useless potions that I had fortunately kept on me to get my speed back -- berzio, wonder, potential charisma, charisma, etc. For some reason it didn't occur to me to use the 7 uncursed potions of invisibility I had. During this time, I took off some equipment and forgot to put it back on, including bracers of speed. Oops. The goal was to clear the chaos mutant rooms and use a wand of digging straight to the left from the top / bottom left corners of those rooms to get into the chaos servant corridors that lead to the levers, while bypassing many WMOPC. This worked well. However, there were ants on D:50 and they were in the central room, so things nearly went completely to shit. What I did was clear out most of the top lever room (without disturbing the ghost lords) then cleared out a bunch of the bottom lever room. The ants disturbed the mobs in the bottom lever room and the balor fortuitously moved off the lever, so I teleported there, threw it, and destroyed it with a wand of destruction (a Casino gift, and thank goodness since my last two runs had to use monster creation / bunny summoning + door creation). Then I teleported to the upper lever room hallway, walked around a bit, got stuck, summoned two greater earth elementals with a blessed and uncursed SOFS, and then a spot next to the level (occupied by a chaos warrior at this point) cleared out. So I teleported there, stabby stabbed the chaos warrior a few times, and threw and destroyed that lever. I exited D:50 on turn 18,354.

I was very fortunate that a potion of boost mana AND a wand of teleportation dropped on D:50. I recharged the VDDL wand of teleportation and figured I had just enough charges to wrench my last charge in the NDC by walking certain close levels -- immediately forgetting about the extra wand of teleportation. So I walked D:47 (wasting 16 turns), did not retry to teleport on D:43 when my teleport was blocked (wasting up to 36 turns), took 2 turns to kill a Chaos Servant that couldn't follow me upstairs on the Earth Temple on D:42, walked D:41 (wasting 8 turns), and overall completely blew a very easy opportunity to come in under 18,500 turns. On the bright side, I did get a controlled teleport in Darkforge, so I can't complain too much.

In addition to the turncount, this is also my fastest real-time win, clocking in at 4 hours 34 minutes.

I did take a video of D:49 through surfacing, uploaded here.