I managed to drag my ass out of Hell with the rune at -17 dex (the actual drain was worse, as I had on a +7dex ring, meaning it was AT LEAST -24, I may have had on even more +dex at the time).
With my 13AC and 1EV, permaslow and clumsy, I couldn't take on Zot (the last area for me to run besides Coc).
I realized the only non-suicidal option would be to grind scant spawns around the dungeon. Only after getting my dex back up about 5 points through grinding did someone point out I could stack dex from unused gear. Which got me up to 2 and fixed my EV1 problem.
But then Xom hit me with... you guessed it. Dex drain. I got a death message from it, which Xom pulled me out of with a confused mutter. Even with all the dex stacking I'd done landed me at -2. So, I had to grind even more to fix it instead of chancing Zot.
While the dex drain was my fault (not dealing with petrify using ?cancel and worshiping Xom in the first place), the results wound up encouraging me to grind to undo the dex drain and backtrack all over the place to find +dex gear.
While I found the experience, honestly, challenging and something I've never had to do in Crawl before, it feels like it might be a situation you guys would want to avoid putting a player in. For a bit I was just randomly wandering Depths while my food dwindled waiting for mobs to show up so I could safely kill them.
I'm putting this report in to make it known that the current stat drain mechanics can, circumstantially, lead to making grinding it back up the most appealing and reasonable option.
I did have options such as "switch to ely, wander abyss:1 permaslow waiting for purification piety, then switch back to Xom" but it seemed both risky and scummy. It felt contrary to Crawl design to make these sorts of solutions the only alternative to death or grinding, so I decided to issue this to show what kinds of things can happen with the current stat drain mechanics.
In the chardump @103354 you'll find the moment where all this started.
morgue-RobertPalmer-20150621-194606.txt [^] (158,937 bytes) 2015-06-21 22:22 
