Airwolf wrote:Where's the covfefe?!?
I was too tired to actually finish this post yesterday.
The most straightforward elementalist, FE, is checked off the list now. Once again, it was a deathless game, but oh boy, was it a tough one.
The character had a nice and slow start until it got
shafted from D:3 to D:6. Hilariously, "i'm so getting shafted this game" was the main thought on my mind while i was methodically clearing the first few dungeon floors. Thankfully, i identified qutie a few consumables by that point and got back to D:3 at the cost of a haste potion and two scrolls of magic mapping. Afterwards, the shaky dungeon floor
sent me from D:8 to D:10 and that adventure was
even tougher. I had to use one of !haste, !curing, !heal wounds, ?fear and ?teleport to get out.
Then the game went relatively smoothly for a while. I was supposed to join Sif instead of Vehumet for the sake of variety but Sif Muna wasn't in the temple, so i found a decent excuse to go Vehumet again. Even though Vehumet seems to have a similar role for conjurers as Okawaru has for melee/ranged combatants, being a rather no-brainer pick, i don't find him as broken so i'm not very ashamed of worshipping him. In fact, he only makes playing casters bearable. As far as felid casters go, extended range is amazing for them, especially on fireballs.
Vehumet was kinda trolling me with midgame gifts. Instead of Bolt of Fire he gave me Bolt of Magma which was my spell to spam for the rest of the game. To be honest, it's not even that bad of a spell since it's a partially irresistible bolt which is not twice as loud as a shout and doesn't miss all the time. In other words, it's much better than the embarrassment we call Lightning Bolt. Its damage was okay as well, a bit higher than Fireball's. The only real downside is its range.
I also received Iron Shot as a god gift but he replaced it with a goddamn Conjure Ball Lightning as i was 0.3 Spellcasting away from picking it up. I was already training 100% Spellcasting to learn it, probably should've aggressively amnesia'd one of the spells i used at the time too. When i finally got Iron Shot in a book, it was too late as i was already throwing crystal spears at things.
So, it was going to be a nice game of Kiting Kitten (i even had the easiest Orc:2 clear in a while) but i found a way to mess everything up: mutation roulette. Mind you, it's pretty safe in versions with !cure mutation as long as you have enough of those potions. But i had only one, was too impatient and accidentally drank !beneficial mutation before it so i ended up with teleportitis 1 like an idiot. As you'd imagine, i was playing the exact type of character that "wants" teleportitis the least. But at the very least i had speed and stealth on my side to escape some of the teleports. In Vaults, teleportitis was manageable but then i had an unpleasant choice between Depths and Elf. I usually go into Elf first so i did it this time too, even attempted Elf:3 despite knowing it's a terrible idea. I thought i could accomplish something on that floor with all the extra lives i had and maybe snatch a !curemut out of their loot. That didn't happen at all. Maybe if i was playing a recent version and had Ignition in my spell list, facing all elves at once wouldn't have been so bad. As it stands, i had to pull off a couple of very expensive escapes and then leave that place.
Depths entry had a bunch of dudes as well, including spark wasps and spriggan air mages with no rElec outside of !resistance on my side. This is when i thought i just lost the game but then realised Crypt was also a branch. Guess what, Crypt:1 had Khufu and at least one greater mummy two screens away from the entrance, so i had to escape from being teleported into their LOS a few times. Crypt:3 was pretty rough and had no !curemuts, sadly. Afterwards it was time to man up and burn through a lot of !resistance, !agility and !heal wounds to deal with the Depths welcoming party. The rest of Depths was mostly easier than that but i had some truly ridiculous random teleports, the #1 highlight easily being
this. Somehow i still survived it even though i haven't even read !fear. It's embarrassing to think now that i didn't read that scroll, it's so obvious. All in all, what i realised there is that with teleportitis you can't just clear 80% of a floor and skip a ridiculous vault behind a runed door because the game will make you face your worst fears anyway. Lesson learned.
After finishing Depths (except for one skippable full-floor vault) and Abyss my last resort was going into a Ziggurat which actually gave me a couple !curemuts on the fourth floor and even a couple !benemuts for +10% to both HP and MP. The game suddenly became pretty darn easy without teleportitis. The hardest part of Zot was
this vault, mostly because i faced it before and was absolutely sure that the third upstairs are in the same area. They weren't and i couldn't have checked it easily because i had no time for mapping and skipped the part of Zot:1 with respective downstairs. So, i just teleported into a safe spot, then dug myself a resting hole and used it instead of an upstairs while clearing the vault. Also, it was in Zot where i finally found OOD, solving the OOF problem.
And that was the game which was a lot harder than it really should've been. I would've probably been drowning in consumables near the end if the whole teleportitis accident didn't happen. The last thing worth mentioning is that i learned Confuse pre-Lair on this cat and did not regret having it one bit. There are quite a few otherwise broken monsters in this game (spark wasps, shock seprents, moths of wrath, ironbrand convokers, death cobs) with low MR.
Oh, also: this game had quite a lot of Delayed Fireball abuse.
https://underhound.eu:81/crawl/morgue/FelidMasterRace/morgue-FelidMasterRace-20170616-172344.txt