YASD: Elephants + Conjure Flame = sad DgFE

[laularukyrumo]

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Laula ... 211809.txt

TL;DR dropped fireclouds to keep an ogre from mangling me, saw an oncoming elephant and thought "No way I can let that live, it'll splatter me. Ogre dies second."

What happened is I dropped three clouds of flame on the opposite side of me, then started pelting it with fire, expecting it to die. It did not. It then trampled me back into a cloud of flame. RIP.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

Commiserations.

Elephants are annoying, because of their high health and the trample effect. If you want to kill them with flame clouds, you either need your back to a wall, in which case you will get trunk slapped, or you need to set a line of clouds, and somehow force the elephant into the first one, or get lucky on its random 'cloud/no cloud roll'.

In general, I would suggest you could make your FE life easier in several ways:
- Train some fighting, because it gives HP, and more HP is good!
- I would usually wear a robe at that stage of the game, maybe leather if something good generates. Heavier armour is fine later, but in the beginning you don't really have the experience for it, and lower spell failure rate is more important.
- Sticky Flame is really quite good against elephants, stick it on, then walk away. When it fades, stick it on again, repeat. I wouldn't do this with armed ogres, because they can hit very hard.
- A bit more dodging would not have gone amiss.
- You get more benefit out of training spells to whole, or half levels exactly.
- With your available spells, don't bother with Hexes. Inner Flame is difficult to use well. You want to fight one enemy at a time anyway.
- I would probably wear the Dex or MR+ rings. Swapping to rF+ is fine when required. Stealth, in ring mail, isn't likely to do much.
- The spear of venom is very good, because you can poke over flame clouds! In fact I think for polearms are usually great for FE, Dg have flat aptitudes as well.
- I wouldn't usually use chaos weapons, unless I want to take some chances. Hasting/zerking an Ogre/Elephant can be lethal.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Don't train Armour this early for ring mail, it increased AC by just a single point. As 4Hooves2Appendages wrote, training Fighting might be more useful for defense (or training Fighting and Dodging if you were in robe).