This was a good plan though
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And it still gives you at minimum 50% of the experience. Very well worth it if you arenāt lugging around bolt-type wands.
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Whew, played waaaay slower for the second half of my Merfolk Wizard and finally got another win! Even with playing slower I had one major mistake ā got down to 2 HP in Elf:3 (why the fuck do I ever go to Elf? The loot has never made my character significantly better).
I was mostly carried by my god Hepliaklqana who feels like cheating. Hep summons an ancestor who is basically a permanent ally. The ally levels with you, gaining new gear and abilities and at ** Piety you can choose their background: knight, battlemage, or hexer. Summons are really good in this game, and an effectively permanent one is even better!
Since your ancestor is part ghost or something theyāre poison immune, so I shot Mephetic Clouds at my ally (confusing everyone around her) in the early game. Later I transitioned to polearms as my main damage dealer (due to Merfolkās frankly gross +4 aptitude with them) and just used my knight ally as a wall while I poked enemies through her.
Transitioned to ice magic later, due to finding good books and Merfolks having good aptitudes. Metabolic Englaciation turned out to kind of be the MVP spell. It slows all enemies in LOS that arenāt cold resistant, which trivialized so many fights.
Learned freezing cloud to have some AOE burst before Vaults:5. Had a few scary moments there but I survived! I probably should have done Abyss instead since Iād already been there once this game and nothing was too scary, and the threat of mutations is greatly lessened by letting my ally block. The ally also means you donāt take nearly as much chip damage, so Abyss is way less scary (Iāve had characters die there due to death by a thousands cuts).
Got the bonus points for my second win and being one of the first eight people to win a Nemelex Choice. Iām pretty happy with this result in the tourney even if I donāt win any more!
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Fuck, I died with a super strong Gargoyle character that had max unarmed combat with Okaās heroism and blade hands. Turns out even the strongest characters die when you get marked in Zot (because you can no longer avoid getting marked in Zot with the new trap system) and 7 Orbs of Fire chase you down.
I was killing individuals OoFs in like 3 turns but the combined ranged fire damage is too much.
Thatās what I get for trying to finish the game tonight; I should have slept and done Zot in the morning when I was fresh and thinking more clearly.
Oh well, tourney ends on Sunday so thatās probably my last game.
Ughh Iāve learned nothing. Donāt play Crawl tired. Slow down and think when youāre in danger. Maybe turn off blade hands so you can actually block things with the large +4 shield and the maxed with heroism shield skill you had!!! Maybe put on your fire protection ring instead of for some reason still having your magic resist ring on you idiot.
Very embarrassing death.
There are two major things they changed with the trap system. The first is ALL traps now can be triggered by enemies against you instead of just Zot. They also introduced a dispersal trap that blinks you and everything in line of sight when triggered; a bonus when youāre a mage/ranger fighting non-ranged enemies but not great when itās the other way around.
The second is there is an algorithm that randomly applies teleportitis, getting shafted if on a valid level or triggering an alarm (along with getting marked without recourse) as you explore most levels of the dungeon. This is known to be occurring more than the previous rates of encountering these trap types and being especially egregious the first time you go down stairs (as youāre typically revealing a lot of tiles at once and itās rolled for every new tile revealed). The reasoning for it was to combat an invented hypothetical player that maximizes tedium; they would previously spend time marking all the tiles they had walked over so they wouldnāt fall prey to the earlier trap system. Instead they made an aggravating system that promotes even less aggressive play and still doesnāt reduce hypothetical tedium. You could be wearing an easily removed -TELE source during exploration to prevent the teleportitis. You could forgo auto-explore and manually explore in ever-expanding circles around a known avenue of escape for the alarm/mark double-whammy. Or just take up worship of Ashenzari because they are immune to this system altogether.
Ohhh, I actually didnāt know the Ash thing; is that why my Ash games were going so well?
And yeah, at least anecdotally Iām getting shafted way more often. The shafting has yet to kill me, but the marks are rough due to the relative rarity of cancellation. I think the shafts are at least kind of exciting to deal with; I like navigating unexplored floors, making footholds and slowly making my way back. The marks can go to hell though.
Iām a huge nerd and watch all the git commits so like I know about all these changes. If thereās one place that I should be more careful and plan escape routes, itās Zot. Even though the new trap system is pretty ass, I still had counter play that would have almost certainly saved me, at least in this scenario. A bunch of extra blocks and an extra pip of rF would have almost certainly given me more turns to turn the corner and escape up the stairs. And I should have expected the OoFs would be all clumped up after a mark and not opt to fight the first two I saw, which attracted the other five.
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The new trap system is bad, but if they just reduced the numbers on the randomly activated events it wouldnāt be nearly as egregious. (And get rid of the random mark effect entirely; it should only happen if you or an enemy steps on an alarm trap. That at least gives it some counter-play in most scenarios.)
The old trap system was also bad, so on paper it sounded like a lateral move to me.
They also didnāt consider the extreme cases of those numbers. Reasonably the chances of the random trap trigger on explore are greater the further down you go. However, it is also influenced by the density of the level: smaller levels are also more dangerous. The relatively open area of the dungeon and many of the branches makes this fairly unnoticeable to the chanceā¦until you reach a place like Tomb:2 and :3.
Suddenly thereās a non-trivial chance that your first step into these places, places where you want to approach with caution and stealth because of the deadly nature of the common enemies present in number, immediately throws you into danger. Youāre either revealed immediately from an alarm or randomly teleported away from the relative safety of known space. Worse still, the change of the traps now being triggered against you instead of an enemy snowballs the randomness heavily against you, especially with Zot, net, or dispersal traps.
Yeah Iāve still never beaten extended (I always get bored in the middle and make stupid mistakes) so Iāve not experienced how it affects those places.
Iāve been in Zot 3 times since the change, and I may have just gotten lucky because the placed traps werenāt a big deal any of the times. The one time when it was going to be bad, I just read a scroll of fog to break line of sight and avoid a dispersal trap getting triggered.
I think Iām good at this game! I just won 2 games in a row. The first was my first 15 rune win and the second was my fastest win ever (just over 3 hours).
The first game was maxing earth magic with a Gargoyle and breaking down walls in end vaults with shatter to steal runes without confronting the bosses. Tomb was definitely the scariest branch, but shatter also helped there, too. I broke down the walls on the first floor so I could skip most of the second floor. Then on the third I dug a little hidey hole with shatter and just firestormed the few enemies I could see at a time until the whole floor was dead.
In my second game, I played a Formicid, an ant race who canāt teleport, blink, haste, or berserk (so in general lacks escapes, save for their ability to dig). The upside is that they have four arm-like limbs, so they can use a two handed weapon and a shield at the same time. I decided to double-down on my lack of escapes by picking Cheibriados, a god who makes you move slower but gives you very high stats in exchange (also a god I think most players agree is bad, or at least a huge liability). I found āSniperā very early in a shop. Itās a +8 heavy crossbow that canāt miss. I destroyed everything as a slow moving turret, killing everything in my line of sight in two or three shots.
Had a couple scary moments where I got completely surrounded, but Cheibriados lets you step out of time for a bunch of turns in a row, and when you come back a good portion of the enemies have usually wandered away. There are probably better gods for a Formacid, but I found it serviceable and that one escape ability was enough!
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