The Tavern

Whats the worst that could happen on D6 when a worker ant walks into a Dispersal trap ~5 tiles away? You get teleported 2 tiles away from Menkaure in the open with imps preventing easy retreat, taking a step in and towards a corridor I find a centaur with a good line of fire and later a Jelly. Like any good Crawl player - I'll go down fighting, so I try my 4 un-ID'ed scrolls and get a fear but no tele. I break line of sight in 3 moves, quaff haste and wield a +4 staff of Chaos I got off of Yiuf and managed to take Menkaure down with a few good brand rolls. I quaff ambrosia and a brilliance (for darts) and managed to killed everything else with 6 hp to boot by virtue of good rolls. And this is all on a Tengu Wizard with ~4 staves skill and no useful spells. One of the more satisfying early game fights I have played in a long while, although I should have been dead 4 times over. Correct play was likely to lay down a conjure fire or two and run from the start, but "correct" isn't fun, well at least now I know the real dangers of Dispersal..

Char dump for those who'd like to see the rolls: http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Cornercat/Cornercat.txt

Well done, but why do you have 7 free spell levels and several useful spells unmemorized?

call imp & Mephitic cloud are very useful spells. (As are the necro spells, but you might not have had those on D:6)

If you mean Mephitic Cloud, I make a point to never mem this spell in online play due to ghosts. If you mean Summon Imp, I don't see it being too useful generally speaking as it just summons red imps (who usually blink out of the fight) without decent skill investment. I should have mem'ed Vamp Draining before this, but I must not have been paying attention to my Nec skill level (I believe it was at level 2 or 3 before the fight, so I'm unsure if it was castable then). If its another spell, please explain how it would have been useful.

Imps are good against Menkaure because they are immune to negative energy. They're also good against ants, because they're poison resistant. They're pretty good all around. It's true that you get crimson imps often at low spellpower, but other imps are also reasonably common. Tengu have +2 summoning apt. You can also quaff brilliance for increased spellpower.

I don't understand your reason to not memorize meph, but it is a good spell. You can use meph in conjunction with imps (because imps are poison resistant).

If you go for weird conducts for arbitrary reasons, expect the game to be harder than normal. Anyway, as long as you're having fun, play however you like.

Imps a very good in the early game. Ghosts are completely harmless, as they are locked in vaults.

I hadn't noticed the ghost change, good to know. Well, its also true that I just don't like the spell very much so I'm not likely to take it anyway. Good point for taking Summon Imp just for use with Brilliance, I hadn't thought about doing that. But otherwise they just seem a tad too luck based for my tastes, needs a good 5 or skill investment before the odds become decent from my experience.

If you summon 3 Imps, you can kill most things before lair. Even with 1 summoning skill and 5 spellcasting it's not unusual to get 2 red imps and 1 white imp.
Mephitic cloud trivialises centaurs and Orc priests and wizards.
I usually train 5 levels of Conjurations and 1-2 levels of fire, air, poison, summoning on a wizard. With that skilling all wizard spells (except slow) are very worthwile.
I can reliably get to L:5 using only the wizard starting spells (though it is a bit annoying).