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On those lines, iguana : giant gecko :: water moccasin : snake. (Or, worse, as yak : sheep.) Huge increase in power for being "only" the next level up for the monster type.

I was about to start a naga character, but decided to choose demonspawn instead at the last minute. Second item I see: naga barding. The best way to generate barding is not to play a centaur or naga. If you play a centaur, you won't kill Nessos. He either won't be generated, or he will two-shot you...

There are 3 or 4 different rune vaults for Swamp:5 just to keep you on your toes. For the ones full of clouds in the entrance (the ice and miasma variety), I've found that doing a lot of shouting around the stone walls on the outside really helps to draw the monsters out so that you can fight them w...

marikvulpina wrote:
minmay wrote:
TGW wrote:Big Fish and Giant Goldfish could easily be replaced with actual species of fish.

Show of hands for carp.

just make sure they don't end up being too hardcore.

So in the Dwarven Mines branch, if a fortress vault gets generated, any carp in the moat get insanely buffed?

(you can also throw other bottles with various effects i haven't tried em all yet so someone more experienced may have some more advice) If you know Evaporate, looking at a potion's item description will tell you what kind of clouds it generates. Degeneration is fun and can show up pretty early if ...

Hitting the direction keys more slowly, or more lightly, does not give you a stealth bonus.

Do not zap-test against hydras.

Given how many times I've blown myself up with a fireball or an electric orb, vs. the number of times a hostile greater servant has ruined my day, I'd take my chances with Greater Servant. I only use Major Destruction in circumstances like evilmike mentioned.

You'd need to ask a dev for a definitive answer, but being a fan of Tm, my answer is that it depends on the approach you want to take with them. Some players don't want to go the Distillation/Evaporate route, and so starting with Distillation memorized is a waste of a spell level. It's the best Tm s...

Going for the Pantheon banner in the last tourney, it came time to choose Xom, so I went with a TrMo and dived for the Temple. Fully expecting to die after another level or two, I ended up making it as far as halfway through Lair before getting squished. My best games with Xom have been when I didn'...

Late game switches are also bad because of the higher XP requirements to advance skills at higher experience levels. While you didn't mention your XL, it can't be horribly low if you've got Fighting 10, Unarmed 14, and can survive to take down Agnes and have gotten down to D:16. It will take an enti...

I hope to run into Pikel. Especially if I've found a wand of enslavement or am playing an enchanter. I love bypassing the slaves and nailing him with enslavement...and then when the spell wears off, watching the former slaves tear him to pieces. It's a waste of good XP if I don't manage to get the l...

I tend to wait till I find conservation before attempting Elf. It's a relatively common amulet. Barring that, the scrolls you need the most down there are teleport and blink (isn't that true for most of the mid- and endgame?), and the first can be covered with a wand and the second with a low-level ...

For a caster, you first need to be more concerned with the shield's effect on your casting success. Compare that before you look at EV/shield. What race are you? Most races suited for casting tend to have better aptitude for Dodging rather than Shields. You'll burn more XP building Shields skill. On...

Sorry, can someone post a link or explanation of troves? I'm not sure what's being talked about. A treasure trove. It's a portal that doesn't time out, but when you try to enter, it asks for items (At least in trunk. 0.7 might ask for money) before you can enter. The items are, at least in theory, ...

Gastronok would beg to differ on the matter of the hat.

I drowned myself once by standing over deep water and burning some piety to smite something.

Exactly. If your Invocations is decent (12-ish), the chance of a hostile summon is low enough that getting two or three in a row is a really bad run of luck. Normally I curse when I get a friendly Cacodemon, but if I need to cover a retreat instead of advance offensively, Cacos are great for the vol...

joellercoaster wrote:
szanth wrote:Eh, don't underestimate Nikolai.

+1

Even when he's asleep :(

Especially when he's asleep. You'll be tempted to stab him and he will invariably wake up when you get adjacent.

What about archers? Does the slower rate of fire for a buckler make an impact or are is the better defense still worth it? For slingers, the buckler doesn't affect rate of fire at all, so protect yourself. For bow and crossbow archers, it can definitely make the difference between getting in 2 shot...

You'll get to a point where simply getting enemies out of the way is more important than the experience for killing them. Going for the silver rune in Vault:8 and the Zot run come to mind. At that point the distortion exec axe will beat the hell out of the vampiric war axe.

I have to say, my annoyance isn't with the game itself, and I don't think it should save me from that level of foolishness. That could just be a grumpy old Nethacker talking, though ;) Compared to Nethack, as you've noticed it's REALLY hard to drown or dive into lava in Crawl...not impossible, but ...

Add the following lines to your config file (.crawlrc on Unix): force_more_message = You are starting to lose your buoyancy force_more_message = Your transformation is almost over Yes, this can be a pain when you are constantly recasting levitation or transformations, but it works for me. Someone wi...

Mephitic's success rate is based on hit dice, if I'm not mistaken, so really beefy monsters will ignore it even if they're not poison resistant.

If you go the Ignite Poison route, ditch your poison needles...that's a mistake that I made only once.

And however many decay that I can scrounge up, but necrophage corpses are rare. I like to strip naked and kill a (regular) mummy. Then, the death curse will convert a stack of useless potions into decay. There's never a mummy handy, it seems. Although I will take that advice when I've got 30 extra ...

Usually confusion works for me, too. But when I saw that he was packing a big wand, I should've ran. The approach to his house makes it real easy to break line of sight quickly.

(Yet Another Painful Death) 165 Stormfox the Charm-Maker (level 4, -6/19 HPs) Began as a Spriggan Enchanter on Dec 28, 2010. Blown up by Crazy Yiuf (16 damage) ... with a wand of disintegration {zapped: 1} ... on Level 2 of the Dungeon. Ow. Just ow. What makes it dumb on my part is that he shot at m...

I'm not a terribly good Nemelexite, but based on where you are at the moment, you're just looking for general advice. (Tagging up your dump so that it's easier to refer to.) Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup version 0.8.0-a0-4116-gd08ecb6 character file. Luquillo the Conjurer (Centaur Stalker) Turns: 11260, ...

I would've used the demon blade as primary and kept the flaming falchion around just to take down hydras. Demon blades have good base damage, then you had +10 on that, plus vorpal.

The nice thing about LRD is that even with the extra bonus to monster AC, it's undodgeable. And if you have walls of something other than rock or stone to work with, it can inflict tons of pain. (Or hostile skeletons. Skeleton warrior packs are suddenly a lot less threatening if you can keep your MP...

Wait until you run into a ghost that can summon butterflies and you'll see just how overpowered it is. However, depending on the opponent, even 15 butterflies per cast may not save you -- a couple of big hydrae will disperse that butterfly cloud pretty quickly. (If you want a quick lesson on how god...

That Necromancy skill will come in handy if you find a pain weapon. Skill 5 doesn't turn into a huge damage bonus, but it's better than nothing.

Alistair + Clarity = Powerful. But from my experiences, even with Clarity, Alistair can still hurt you. If you use it too much, your INT will occasionally drop by 1 point. I don't know what causes that, and Sustain Ability doesn't help either. :| "...works by converting a portion of brain matt...

Also, don't wait until the poop has hit the fan before summoning. Tension (allegedly) doesn't come into play for Makhleb, but the nature of the RNG itself pretty much guarantees that if you're in bad shape and are trying just to even the odds, you'll pop out a hostile Executioner or Balrug. Summon w...

And for summons, Invocations does not affect the power, just the likelihood of hostility, correct? Correct. Around 12 is where things start getting pretty safe even for Greater Servant, and the returns are diminishing from there. Hmm. My current game I have invocations at 12 and it feels to me like...

Merfolk -- I racked up a ton of games going for the Free Will banner in the last tourney with MfFE. I also like Cr, Tm, and the obvious IE, and CK is growing on me. Spriggan -- sorry about all the nasty SpEn ghosts in the mid-levels on CAO... Deep Elf -- until 0.8 gets finalized, I just don't do wel...

I want to like Vampires, but I'm also a little turned off by the whole blood mechanic.

Other than that I also like to try every race on occasion, even the tough ones -- and some of my most surprising games were ones where I went in not expecting to live long.

I've found that a few levels of Throwing (no more than 4-5) helps a lot, particularly in the mid game where you may find yourself wishing you could deliver some curare reliably. But it's nothing that you need to focus on.

danr wrote:And for summons, Invocations does not affect the power, just the likelihood of hostility, correct?

Correct. Around 12 is where things start getting pretty safe even for Greater Servant, and the returns are diminishing from there.

quaff potions you don't know to identify them I advise against this. A single potion of mutation can ruin your entire game if you're unlucky. Just use the scrolls of identify for potions. Also, read http://crawl.develz.org/info/index.php?q=packrat. actually i'd say (from experience) that the worst ...

Good call: immediately summoning again when the hostile popped out. I like CK's of Makhleb, and that's a standard tactic of mine that has paid off nicely. Bad call: sticking around to fight the hostile Executioner. If you had eels around, you probably didn't have much in the way of walls to take adv...

Do keep in mind that miscast effects for higher level spells tend to be nastier, and of course there's the additional hunger cost. But certainly the difference between a L1 and L2 (or even L3 at not-too-insane character levels) isn't bad enough to make you want to victory dance with the lower level ...

This was a few game versions ago, but metal walls just indicate proximity to *an* exit, not necessarily *the* exit -- I found an Abyss portal in a labyrinth surrounded by metal walls. It was nowhere near the real exit with the minotaur.

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