You'd win that bet. I easily cleared all of the first Pan level except for a vault lined with smoke demons behind glass, with a Cacodemon and a tormenter at the far end. Teleport control, blink, blink, torment, abjure, torment, abjure, blink, smite, and dead. So, yeah, I'll have to be a lot more car...

Thank you all for the candid assessment. I've only recently managed to produce Zot-viable characters on a fairly regular basis, and it's clear I have some bad habits still to work on, especially in skill training. I think the pearl dragon armor and the shield contributed to that, as I kept boosting ...

Despite a few truly dim-witted moves on my part (drawing Shuffle twice, for instance) and a lot of careless skill training, my Deep Elf Wizard of Vehumet has cleared Zot without mutations and cleaned out the Slime Pits without much difficulty. I've only ascended once before (a three-rune win) so I'm...