Temple Termagant
Posts: 14
Joined: Wednesday, 24th July 2019, 12:00
Tuesday, 18th February 2020, 09:13
YAVP: Kobold Spelunker of Nemelex (bcrawl)
So, official first spelunker victory is done. Allow me to briefly boast about my conquests.
Spelunker is one of the two new classes recently added to bcrawl (I seroiusly recommend everyone to try both, they are super fun and fairly well balanced). They start with a dagger, leather armor, boots, Corona, Passwall, a wand of digging, a lamp of fire, and a scroll of noise.
Dagger, boots, leather is plenty to pop the popcorn for most species, but the key feature for the early game here is the ability to passwall ninja. This pretty much means going through walls to end up adjacent to sleeping monsters and getting a free stab on them (passwall spends all this time "channelling" and none at the actual exit). It is a unique and enjoyable playstyle. Very far from foolproof but hey...you have a lamp of fire.
After a convenient d1-3 where i picked up elyvilon my d4 was a nightmare running into packs of orcs including priests (that were obviously a menace to my tiny hp pool), Sigmund, hilariously bad teleports and backing into ogres during escaping. The combination of Lady Luck, Elyvilon, clever passwalls and quality advice from my specatators such as "how are you still alive" kept me going through what was definitely one of my most memorable early game levels. Once that was done i ended up landing a chain of succesful passwall stabs on uniques and ogres which got me plenty of exp to stabilize my pre-lair situation. Dagger of venom was also an amazing pick up for this character for obvious reasons, i kept using it until almost mid-lair.
I converted to Nemelex who received a bit of a rework in bcrawl that i would call a reasonable buff (changes at: https://github.com/b-crawl/bcrawl). It turned out to be a great choice, since it allowed me to go basically spell-less on this guy and run around in a pwetty artifact cpa i picked up much later. While i usually consider Nem an early-mid game god, a healthy amount of investment into invocations kept him relevant throughout the run.
Another thing I enjoy about starts like this is that your build will be ultimately defined by the gear you find rather than your starting combo. I mainly planned on going ranged and fiddling with the new flaming arrows spell, but a demon blade from gauntlet and amazing armour and jewelry pickups changed my mind in a hurry. I ended up with one of the best lair:6 gear sets i have ever seen and decided on perfecting my melee greatness while pumping invo/evo. While I am usually a big promoter of the "biggest shield possible on all characters" school of crawl, I opted for warlock's on this run. It is a fun shield and with the bcrawl sh bonus from longblades (which replaces parry) I ended up 50/27/22 which is more than enough defenses for...well pretty much anything in crawl.
For the endgame I picked up infusion which has considerably better power-scaling than in vanilla-crawl and - after using up a manual of charms- it proved to be a nice tool to make my encounters vs oof and other baddies quite a bit smoother.
The whole run was really a treat, i would rate it amongst the top 5 enjoyable playthroughs amongst my ~120 wins across all variants.
https://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/A ... 221653.txt
Spelunker is one of the two new classes recently added to bcrawl (I seroiusly recommend everyone to try both, they are super fun and fairly well balanced). They start with a dagger, leather armor, boots, Corona, Passwall, a wand of digging, a lamp of fire, and a scroll of noise.
Dagger, boots, leather is plenty to pop the popcorn for most species, but the key feature for the early game here is the ability to passwall ninja. This pretty much means going through walls to end up adjacent to sleeping monsters and getting a free stab on them (passwall spends all this time "channelling" and none at the actual exit). It is a unique and enjoyable playstyle. Very far from foolproof but hey...you have a lamp of fire.
After a convenient d1-3 where i picked up elyvilon my d4 was a nightmare running into packs of orcs including priests (that were obviously a menace to my tiny hp pool), Sigmund, hilariously bad teleports and backing into ogres during escaping. The combination of Lady Luck, Elyvilon, clever passwalls and quality advice from my specatators such as "how are you still alive" kept me going through what was definitely one of my most memorable early game levels. Once that was done i ended up landing a chain of succesful passwall stabs on uniques and ogres which got me plenty of exp to stabilize my pre-lair situation. Dagger of venom was also an amazing pick up for this character for obvious reasons, i kept using it until almost mid-lair.
I converted to Nemelex who received a bit of a rework in bcrawl that i would call a reasonable buff (changes at: https://github.com/b-crawl/bcrawl). It turned out to be a great choice, since it allowed me to go basically spell-less on this guy and run around in a pwetty artifact cpa i picked up much later. While i usually consider Nem an early-mid game god, a healthy amount of investment into invocations kept him relevant throughout the run.
Another thing I enjoy about starts like this is that your build will be ultimately defined by the gear you find rather than your starting combo. I mainly planned on going ranged and fiddling with the new flaming arrows spell, but a demon blade from gauntlet and amazing armour and jewelry pickups changed my mind in a hurry. I ended up with one of the best lair:6 gear sets i have ever seen and decided on perfecting my melee greatness while pumping invo/evo. While I am usually a big promoter of the "biggest shield possible on all characters" school of crawl, I opted for warlock's on this run. It is a fun shield and with the bcrawl sh bonus from longblades (which replaces parry) I ended up 50/27/22 which is more than enough defenses for...well pretty much anything in crawl.
For the endgame I picked up infusion which has considerably better power-scaling than in vanilla-crawl and - after using up a manual of charms- it proved to be a nice tool to make my encounters vs oof and other baddies quite a bit smoother.
The whole run was really a treat, i would rate it amongst the top 5 enjoyable playthroughs amongst my ~120 wins across all variants.
https://crawl.xtahua.com/crawl/morgue/A ... 221653.txt
Last edited by artagas on Tuesday, 18th February 2020, 13:02, edited 3 times in total.