YASD: MiBe - Farthest So Far

[ThumpSmash]

Hello!

I've just picked up DCSS again last week, after a long hiatus. This is the farthest I have gotten, so I do not really feel bad about the death. First time with a rune, let alone 2. I just need some general criticism and/or advice. This was my first time to the depths. Really, it wasn't going to badly until, well, when I died. I couldn't figure out a way to get out of the bad situation. The best solution would have been not getting into the situation at all, I took a few steps in the level below before I realized that I was surrounded.

Here's the morgue: http://pastebin.com/Qz0WGWWZ

Thanks for your time and input!

[CanOfWorms]

Train Dodging; wearing heavy armour doesn't mean dodging is useless. It's not entirely clear (in the sense that I can't tell what buffs you used before the fight started) but it looks like the reason you died was that you didn't treat a caustic shrike pack as a dangerous fight. They are in fact quite dangerous and worth burning a few consumables if you feel you must absolutely fight them. Doesn't look like Trog's Hand was active, or that you had any Brother in Arms summoned. Looking at the message history you somehow got to 35/224 HP before you drank Haste or read Tele. You also got surrounded by them somehow?

[ThumpSmash]

Train Dodging; wearing heavy armour doesn't mean dodging is useless. It's not entirely clear (in the sense that I can't tell what buffs you used before the fight started) but it looks like the reason you died was that you didn't treat a caustic shrike pack as a dangerous fight. They are in fact quite dangerous and worth burning a few consumables if you feel you must absolutely fight them. Doesn't look like Trog's Hand was active, or that you had any Brother in Arms summoned. Looking at the message history you somehow got to 35/224 HP before you drank Haste or read Tele. You also got surrounded by them somehow?

Honestly, I don't know what happened. It was just really sloppy, avoidable pain at the end. I probably should have taken a break, I played it hard all morning.

And I thought that might have screwed up on the dodging, I couldn't remember if it was worth training or not.

Thank you!

[BugHunter]

It sounds like you did what I often end up doing with MiBes: Everything goes fine, I have no problems, I just start hitting tab-tab-tab-o-tab-tab-tab-o-tab-tab-Oh shit. And I suddenly find myself in over my head in a situation I should have either avoided, prepared more for, or simply run away from when 3 more swamp dragons and a hydra appeared on the edge of LoS.

That's the trap of the MiBe, it just steamrolls everything, until it hits a situation that can't be solved by steamrolling. Then it dies if the player didn't notice until too late. It's just so easy to get complacent and not pay close enough attention to a developing situation.

That's why I'll play a few MiBEs until i get one that I know really should have won, but gets killed because I let things get out of hand before I stopped tabbing. Then I switch to something like a SpEn that requires much more attention to detail.

[WingedEspeon]

The advice on training dodging is good. You already had 22 throwing, so that manual on crossbows was basically worthless. There really isn't much of a point of training more than one ranged option on a character like that. If you are going to wear GDA or CPA you should probably raise str one level up ( this is after you actually find the armour). venom generaly isn't a very good brand past early game, so if there were enough scrolls of enchant weapon to get your antimagic ex axe up to +8 or better it would have been better to use that rather than the one you were using (IDK if there were more ?ew on the ground or not, without enough that ex axe is your best option). This is provided you were not using the evocable invisibility on the axe, which given your evo I doubt you were. it is generally a good idea to enchant up your auxiliary armour pieces as soon as you can. You probably should have also found a hat with at least +1 enchantment or a useful ego.

Caustic shrike packs are probably the most dangerous thing in depths. I once got a pack of caustic shriks from a rod of shadows and had them fight an orb of fire (the toughest single enemy in a standard three rune game) They shredded right though the orb of fire.

In general it is worth slowing down and playing carefully whenever you get corroded, because your fighting power will decrease very rapidly. It is also worth slowing down and playing carefully whenever you drop to 50% HP.

[daggaz]

To be completely clear on the dodge thing:

MiBe (or Fi or Gl and probably a few others) are all going to have gobs of strength, more than enough for standard plate and dragon armour. If you find an early CPA or GDA, you might want to put a point or two in STR but you should still end up with more than enough to wear the gear comfortably. So what to do with the other points? Put them into Dex until you get to around 24 or so. Now once your armour skill and offensive skills are looking pretty solid, take a little time to pump dodge, I usually do this near the bottom of Lair, myself. At first you wont see much, but the early ranks are cheap and suddenly you will see your EV going up. With moderate dodge ranks and a solid dex score, you can easily get a very comfortable EV of 25+, which combined with an AC of 35+ makes you very hard to hit, also with ranged weapons and certain spells. This is possible while wearing crystal plate, keep in mind.

If you arent running a berserker, some low level utility spells can be useful, but you really dont need a lot of INT here as most of them should be things you cast out of battle where spell failure/spell power/spell hunger are more or less unimportant. If my Dex is looking good, I'll toss a point or two in Int (I like having a buffer there anyhow to avoid being at 5 or less, in case of -INT items or INT draining attacks), but for the majority of games you wont need it and often you will have some +INT on your gear as well.

You should do this with HO(Be,Fi,Gl) as well, though they do have better INT and can take better advantage of mid-level spells if that is your thing and you arent Be.

[tv1990]

you had M - the ring "Japreur" {+Inv Str+3 Dex+2 Slay+2 Stlth+}
and you were wearing one od see invisible, may i know why ?