Slime Squisher
Posts: 419
Joined: Monday, 12th September 2016, 16:25
YA2VP: Troll in the Hat. GhCK of Xom & Ru, Tomb 4th, Zig: 27
http://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/dame ... 191504.txt
Another twofer, with a cheeky one-game streakbreaker inbetween, a GhCK who got rinsed by Harold on D:8.
I don't have much to write about the Troll in the Hat; I got the Ponderhat on Lair:2 and first wore it for MR then out of a perverse desire to finish the entire game in the Ponderhat. I kept thinking (partly owing to manual drops) that I'd maybe get some spells online which did very little except guzzle XP and get me a handful more MP for guardian spirit. I found Wyrmbane in Zot and got it to +18 because I could. I made little use of Lucy abilities, partly out of overconfidence but partly because Tr is very strong if you don't drop the ball, especially once you can cast Large Rock at everything. Went to Pan and found a demonic rune vault I'd never seen before, which satisfied my informal desire for at least one extended rune every game.
However, I did hit a vault on Zot:4 with electricity-themed monsters which I completely failed to back out of and put on my +7 storm dragon scales until hitting 3 hitpoints (and no MP with spirit shield) when doublezapped by two black draconians. One panic later and I turned the hubris down a notch, took Z:5 a bit slower, Corrupted the orb chamber and ran away in the confusion. One panlord on the orbrun but I just punched them to death.
The GhCK was a bit more interesting. Stoat Soup has the bcrawl-ism that CK can take a new religion but Xom keeps right on joggling their elbow, and this (and the GhCK collected by Harold) was my first experience of this. This made for a certain amount of god infighting after taking Ru on D:2 - Xom would charm something which Sacrifice Love sometimes made hostile again.
My Ru sacrifices were -1 skill aptitudes (tolerable since Gh is so good at Fighting/UC you can work through it and so terrible at spells you weren't going there anyway); Love; Evocations (painful, but a good chunk of piety); Fire/Tmut/Tloc magic (basically free); Stealth (I was planning to go heavy armour anyway).
I did branches in an odd order. After the Lair branches I went to Depths in the hope of finding gold dragon scales, which I did on the outside of a gold dragon on Depths:3. Then I went (more conventionally) to Vaults, directly into Crypt from V:3, then to Tomb from Crypt. Careful approaches to Tomb don't work too well when Xom pings you about at random, but while Tomb:3 got a bit hairy I was able to keep things under control in each landing spot until Apocalypse was ready. I got Abyssed on Tomb:3 but got out quickly enough.
Back to Depths - Vaults still unfinished - to try and get something off my Crawl bucket list without actually kicking the bucket; finishing a ziggurat. The log doesn't show as much as I might hope, but the worst floors were demons, one early holy floor, and Shoals (albeit I got a lifetime supply of javelins) - mummy floors were much more manageable, and I had no panlord floor. I acquired food for the first time ever since the other options were terrible and having the freshest possible chunks would be a boon.
However, everything seemed controllable until Zig:27 was holy. There are way too many monsters on these late floors to Apocalypse the lot of them, it's hard to find defensible spots when most of the floor is full of angels milling around and Xom keeps pinging you about the place, and it's hard to chunk heal when any time you kill a chunky monster something steps onto the corpse. One of these Xom trips landed me next to the exit but I foolishly resisted the urge to just bail.
The really heavy hitters were pearl dragons, who could holy wrath me from halfway across the screen. I burned consumables like water, survived one trip down to 17 HP, but then got killed.
Xom revived me; I guess Xom giveth and Xom taketh away. Xom did revive me with 33 HP and no MP, but crucially my teleport kicked in immediately after revival and the resulting situation was survivable. It took me some time more to get the level under control but I managed to eat the corpses of two apis and get back into sensible hitpoints.
After the Zig I went to U:5 (just to drop off a large shield with rF+ on the Zot stairs, but I hit a bazaar and a wizlab - Cloud Mage - the bazaar had only a manual of Slings and Cloud Mage was easy). Between manuals and swapping into appropriate gear I had Regeneration and then BVC online; later I'd get Aura of Abjuration, Vampiric Draining, and OTR.
I'd solved my MR problems in the zig so cleared out Elf - getting a Desolation where once again the usual careful approach was wrecked by Xom pinging me about - finally finishing off Vaults:3 (unique party with Frances, Agnes, Sojobo, and Boris), then doing the rest of Vaults for a 4th rune.
Finally, to Zot. Xom of course pinged me into the uncleared lung halfway through clearing the other lung, and I met a horde of monsters there, but Apocalypse cleared them out. The orbrun was pretty uneventful.