Lair Larrikin
Posts: 17
Joined: Wednesday, 7th September 2011, 20:35
First Win Ever! (just took me 5 years)
I started playing crawl 5 years ago and I was quite hooked. I kept coming back to the game every once in a while, and I came very close to winning a few times. Only to die embarrassingly. Getting teleported into the rune chamber of the Snake Pit and instantly getting mauled by half a dozen hydras. Or just stepping around a corner and getting reduced to red paste in a single turn by a giant. Most of the times I died without getting any runes at all.
I think most of the deaths in promising runs is due to getting banished to the Abyss in the Elf levels. I have NEVER been able to escape from the Abyss. Even with stealth and bat form I just get mauled by the hordes of monsters, and if I fight anything I run out of mana before I kill anything. I never have enough magic resist to stop Elf banishment. Hydras probably come second (I hate them so much that I carve up any corpse I come across out of principle) and boulder-hurling giants are the third bane of my existence.
It took me a while to figure out which race and class would suit my playstyle, so I tried Demigod and Tengu first. But I always ran into food problems, so I continued on with Mummies but realized I really disliked the inability to drink and mutate, because I loved gambling on the mutations by drinking mutation potions or sparkling wells. So Vampire was the only option left. And I really loved the spellcasting system, so I eventually ended up as Vampire Wizard and really loved it. So I kept playing Vampire Wizard forever, and dying every time. I really liked conjurations, in particular fire magic, and unfortunately vampires just have really poor aptitudes for that. Still I'm a very stubborn person and I just kept trying this template every time, only to be horribly underlevelled in the midgame and unable to kill anything with the conjurations before I would run out of mana. So I started dabbling into summonings as well, but this never really worked either, especially not after the big nerf that put summoning caps on everything and removed the ability to pre-summon allies and take them down stairs. I tried melee but I always kept dying the moment I went toe to toe with anything so I stopped training melee skills alltogether, saving up valuable XP elsewhere.
Lately I stopped wasting all my XP on conjurations and went with summoning and air magic instead and this has finally resulted in my first win. This wasn't particularly successful earlier, but we recently got a few interesting spells that REALLY helped me out: Summon Lightning Spire, Spellforged Servitor, Summon Forest, Summon Mana Viper and Monstrous Menagerie. I finally started earning some runes and making my way to areas of the game I had never seen before! And one run I just managed to break through and got my summonings levelled up high enough to be able to Summon Horrible Things, and when I got there I just managed to clear almost everything in the game that same run. I was very very lucky and got a bunch of good mutations too as well as one of the best items I've seen:
ring of Panentheism {SustAb MR++ Int+6 Dex+3 Stlth-}
Just wow... Probably the main reason I didn't get banished to the Abyss this time. There were a few points where I came close to dying though. Vaults 5 is just insane. When I went down I had the stairs locked by a warden almost immediately. I managed to cast malign gateway, summoned lots of stuff and used a few fear scrolls, but was getting overwhelmed and ran out of mana very fast (even with using 2 mana pots). I used a teleport scroll and ended up in one of the rooms, near the rune, and just ran away into a corridor with a lot of enemies chasing me, while I was out of mana. Then I realized I had 2 scrolls scrolls of summoning and used them. Got a lot of overpowered creatures that managed to kill everything while I got mana for another cast of horrible stuff and that was it, I finally had a clear corridor!
The other times I nearly died were related to orbs of fire. Man these are nasty, and the game didn't generate ANY fire resisting gear except for a robe, so I only had 1 level of fire resist...
Anyway here is the morgue, have fun
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Shakk ... 183159.txt
NB: I have one gripe with this game and that is that I just don't see how conjuration spells are supposed to work in this game. To me they always cost way too much mana for what they do. Battlesphere was a nice addition but even with that I still often can't kill stuff (Like those godawful hydras) before I run out of mana.
- For this message the author shakkara has received thanks: 3
- all before, Aule, greedo