YAVP: 5-rune NaBe


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Slime Squisher

Posts: 419

Joined: Monday, 12th September 2016, 16:25

Post Tuesday, 27th March 2018, 02:01

YAVP: 5-rune NaBe

https://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/damerell/morgue-damerell-20180326-055415.txt

Won again! Oddly I've never won a Troggie, nor played more than a handful of berserkers, and after DEFE I was due for another easy-ish melee character, so now seemed like the time.

Trog is of course pretty strong, especially in the early game, and I knew I was going to want to do naga at some point... and I think it's really in the early game that naga suffers - body armour does you practically no good, no armour also is pretty terrible with rotten Dodging, and it seems much easier for variance in combat to eat up your extra HP. Once you get going, sure, you're still slow but at least you have a ton of HP, decent offence (nothing wrong with naga apts there) and your inherent AC and a barding now mean you have as much AC as anyone.

(That said, Spit Poison is good, use it on everything that isn't immune.)

That's pretty well how it worked out; seven attempts, with three deaths in pre-Lair Dungeon, one in the Lair, but all three of the nagas who cleared Lair looked pretty viable.

Indeed, I became pretty smug when the very first attempt got the Shield of Ignorance out of a vault which helped an easy run to 2 runes; they were clearing Elf when they hit a wizlab, Doroklohe's Tomb. It turns out if you can't dig this wizlab can be really bad; if you can't dig and you get the version that's all greater demons, it's _really_ bad. I could still have escaped with an immediate blink, but up until now nothing had really hurt me so I was convinced of my own invincibility and charged in. Splat. About the only silver lining to this particular cloud was it largely cured me of hubris for the subsequent games.

The second Lair-clearer got Wyrmbane on D:5. Hooray! I've never seen it before, except in Sprint. I got it up to +11, but died on the second S rune; not simple overconfidence, but when things turned bad I didn't make the right decisions to escape, ending with a bad teleport into the enormous slime creature that had been wailing on me.

I nearly didn't win this game owing to pure inattention on D:1, nearly dying to a rat and an ooze. I berserked it out, but I was already so low on HP that was a gamble.

Not much to say about the early game, Lair and Orc, save that I bought the ring of Springtime {rC+ Str+5 Dex+7} on O:2, a great item I'd use all game, along with a naga barding which I enchanted up, because what are the odds of having a wide selection of naga bardings? (The answer is, quite good if Vashnia is waiting in Snake; I didn't regret my early use of enchant armour scrolls, but I did find myself sort of lacking at the end in +2 gold dragon scales as a result).

I cleared out Snake first: Snake:2 had Aizul, Kirke, Vashnia, and Frances, but fortunately I managed to tackle them one at a time without difficulty. Asterion turnd up on S:3, presumably lost on the way to the unique party on Snake:2. On Snake:4 I found the ring "Juoxe" {rC+ Slay+4} which I'd use most of the game - these twin rC+ rings sat nicely with an otherwise-decent rC- body armour I'd get later.

I did Swamp next with no real difficulties; a bit cautious because Swamp:4 was where I lost the character with Wyrmbane.

Next I cleared V:1-4, finding the +5 plate armour "Oployle" {rC- Regen+ Dex+5} which I'd use most of the game, and which I'm still not sure I shouldn't have kept for everything but Slime. This and the rings were a pretty good combo overall save that I couldn't swap a ring without having no rC; problematic in Slime with wanting rCorr and azure jellies buzzing about, but otherwise not much of a problem.

Much later I'd kill a gold dragon in Z:3 and swap to the scales. I'm still not sure about that (except for Slime, as above); the extra rF and rC were nice, but I lost a chunk of EV and a little AC until I enchanted it up - I bought the ring "Qigrelis" {MR+ EV+5 Str+3 Int+3} to patch that over, but since I didn't need the MR I was effectively swapping 4 points of slaying for Str+3 and a couple of resistance pips.

I went to Elf, as I usually do, to find a wizlab on Elf:2... Doroklohe's Tomb. I wasn't entirely happy about this, but I could dig and it turned out to be the version with golems, which is a pushover by comparison. Vexingly, however, I left the +9 flail of Guarr {venom, rElec rF+ Str+4} in there, which I'd been using as an rElec swap, so Doroklohe gets me either way, I guess. This would hurt me later when I was reduced to using the Elemental Staff to beat electric golems to death.

I cleared out Crypt, with a bad moment on C:2 with a curse skull who summoned a flayed ghost; I had to blink away and heal up. Oddly, no horde of mummies on the Tomb entrance.

I cleared Depths without difficulty, then hatched down to V:5, with a lucky landing in one of the side corridors. Clearing V:5 from there was easy and (overconfidence sneaking in again) since the character seemed pretty solid and I had lots of potions of mutation, I decided to try for some extra runes. Abyssal wasn't too bad; Trog, the merry prankster, gave me a weapon of distortion, which I thought I could unwield with impunity; joke's on me when it gives me yellow contanimation (albeit leading to subdued magic, which obviously I cared about not at all).

I got the rune from the vault with two orange crystal statues and a bunch of neqoxecs and other unpleasantness; I'd seen a bunch of neqoxecs this Abyss run, but one of them gave me shoutitis. I tried to roll it out on exit, but decided after two failures I could live with it - I wasn't exactly Mr Stealth anyway.

I was still a bit stuck on this "no way to get rCorr for Slime without giving up rC" problem; I cleared the Vestibule of Hell, since apparently that's a thing I do now, but then decided to give up on Slime for now and work down Zot. There I got the gold dragon scales that let me conveniently wear rCorr; I did all my final consumable shopping then went to Slime.

I got badly complacent here with how strong the character seemed to be coupled with a huge supply of potions of mutation; I had a couple of bad run-ins with shining eyes, and rolled mutations repeatedly to get my final set (minus the Dex-4 I got from OOFs later, which was annoying but hardly critical). I risked losing clarity to get rid of deterioration, which I hate, but got lucky and kept clarity. I got Horns 1, losing me 3 points of AC, but the headbutts seemed worth it.

I also had a bit of trouble in Slime with large hordes of slime creatures; a naga has the unenviable choice between backing up and hoping they split before one of them gets a big hit in or hammering away and hoping one of them doesn't get a big hit in.

TRJ made it out of the centre - I should have been more careful about fighting near it - and I berserked it down, unleashing a truly impressive horde of jellies. I wasn't too worried about this because I was near the stairs, so as soon as the berserk wore off I blinked out and escaped, approaching the goodies using a second set of stairs. This would have been all fine except I, sigh, forgot to pick up the rune, so when I got back to the Lair I had to go back to Slime:5 to collect the stupid thing.

Finally to clear out Zot, where I found a manual of Maces & Flails - a bit too late to do me much good. I resisted the transporter vault on Z:4. Zot had some pretty heavy fights in, but nothing too serious.

I killed 5 orbs of fire on Z:5, mostly by reading fog, closing the range under cover of fog, and using my antimagic demon whip. Nothing else on Z:5 posed any real difficulties.

However, I suspected the orbrun was going to be tough on a naga, and I wasn't wrong. The first real problem came when a Tzitzimitl turned up when I was in melee with an Ice Fiend in one of the side chambers of the orb vault. I don't think my subconscious distinguishes ice devils and Ice Fiends, so my first thought was, "I'll read silence, barrel past the Ice Fiend to get the Tzitzi in the silence so it can't torment me, and flatten the Ice Fiend afterwards."

Of course since Ice Fiends are not the same thing as ice devils this just represents a lot of wasted turns, and it would have been better to just polish off the half-dead Ice Fiend (especially if I'd been using my holy wrath eveningstar having failed to recognise this was not a windshield kill). A more fundamental deficiency with this approach, however, is that you can't silence Tzitzis - or Ice Fiends - and furthermore I should have known that since I'd just inspected the Tzitzi. So, being handed this invitation, they tormented me three times in a row. (Since they were both in the silence at this juncture, I should have started to question my approach when the first torment went off...)

This looked pretty bad, especially having just locked myself out of all non-silence options. Fortunately I'd brought a stack of potions of berserk rage for just this eventuality, and I had 19 heal wounds, so I quaffed a couple of heal wounds and went berserk.

That sorted them out in a hurry - a berserker with 40 Str, 27 Fighting, and 27 M&F does a lot of damage with a +9 holy wrath eveningstar - even including the death cob that unsportingly turned up. However, the Ice Fiend got one more torment in and I was now in the position of being about to have very few HP while slow and silenced in the orb vault.

As soon as another monster (a soul eater) turned up I quaffed some more heal wounds (why didn't I do this immediately when out of berserk? I don't know) and a haste, then popped Trog's Hand. Luckily it walked over a teleport trap, solving the immediate problem; I moved a few more spaces onto to have a panlord, a balrug, and a lich pop up. Hooray?

I read a Holy Word to buy time, and kept moving towards the exit - also a convenient choke point. I dropped a Brother in Arms in the chokepoint, but the panlord flattened it almost immediately. As soon as the panlord got undazed, I read a second Holy Word, which blew up the balrug - alas, the panlord was regenerating like anything and was basically up to full health by the time I read the second scroll. I realised I'd probably have to fight the thing at some point unless I fancied teleporting and risking landing in the uncleared wing of the orb vault, so started hammering away... which actually was surprisingly easy, and the lich could then be polished off in two hits.

This gave me hope; it's not exactly conventional on the orbrun to try and deal with panlords by bashing them flat, but clearly I was better suited to it than most and also very badly suited to running away. I evaded one panlord on Z:3, but just meleed down four more, none of which proved to be a problem (and if one had had a nasty spell set, I had a decent antimagic weapon to shut it down.)

As ever I seem to have finished with a vast stack of evokables I didn't really use. With this character also having a huge supply of most consumables, I guess the need didn't really arise.
Ascension reports with too many words since 2016.

Slime Squisher

Posts: 419

Joined: Monday, 12th September 2016, 16:25

Post Friday, 30th March 2018, 10:22

Re: YAVP: 5-rune NaBe

As a small extra bonus, a 17-rune DDFi of Makhleb. https://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/damerell/morgue-damerell-20180329-091251.txt

Well, kinda.
Ascension reports with too many words since 2016.

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