Post Thursday, 1st November 2018, 00:36

YAVP - 5 Rune HoMo of Beogh

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Lobst ... 192041.txt

First win after coming back from a long break. I killed many Hill Orcs to get this win under my belt. By the end I had a pretty strong character, I could've probably pulled off a 15 rune run (which I was going for at first), but I just wanted to get a win with HoMo. Micro managing my orc friends was getting tedious as well.

Very unique play style with the orc follower management. My strategy going into the game was to get to *** piety ASAP so I could start grabbing orcs an training them up (hence Monk start), next order of business was hit ***** piety so I could start handing out polearms to my crew. I'd take 2-3 orcs around with me, get them trained up to warlords, then park them and rotate in new orcs. Use recall on the boys if needed some extra bodies.
The orcs are very powerful mid game, you just have to do a lot of position management, and if your warlords start getting killed off it puts you behind. I also turned on Invocations ASAP and never turned it off, as Smite is what really makes this character shine. It's a kill-anything-on-the-screen win button, I would often one or two shot annoying casters as soon as they came into the screen, Mennas crumbled at my Smite spam, etc. The last part was to keep my character tanky, so I could have my orcs behind me and DPS.
The downsides to this is managing the orcs can get tedious, it can be tough to separate your lower level orcs away from the pack. There's also a ton of combat spam so I found myself having to hit enter several times after each turn, which got old real quick. Using an axe didn't help with this. I couldn't figure out if there was a way to by pass the combat spam pause.

All in all I highly recommend the character if you haven't tried one yet.

Shout out to Ultraviolent4 for bringing the fun of this character to my attention, check out his play through if you haven't;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G8JgOm ... 1ZIuOYNg8_