Post Monday, 1st February 2021, 18:54

YAVP: 0.23ish 6-rune HuGl of WJC

http://crawl.montres.org.uk/morgue/dame ... 151535.txt

I thought when the RNG handed me HuGl, well, humans aren't bad at anything, I'll start with a quarterstaff, see what spells turn up, maybe do enhancer staff melee, maybe find a lajatang. The RNG saw fit to disrupt this entire plan in the nicest possible way, mostly by dropping the OCPA, a +10 randart scimitar, and a decent large shield in my lap. I'd vaguely keep trying enhancer staff melee during the game, but even as Conjurations and Evocations improved, my regular attacks kept being better.

The Temple showed up early; it's a while since I've won with WJC, and I knew vanilla has removed pinning and we'd have to have a think about that; pinning was stupidly good, but WJC looked a bit sad without it. (Halfway through this game - standing on the stairs to V:5 - we decided to semi-remove pinning, having it only work during Serpent's Lash and Heavenly Storm, but to give an evasion bonus against monsters you hit with a martial attack that attacked multiple targets. WJC is less sad, but doesn't give free disengages anymore.)

As mentioned, the plan went askew on D:10 when acquirement gave me a stack of gold and the shops had the OCPA. I wasn't going to say no to it (especially since I'd just nearly died of yaks), but I vaguely hoped I'd get to use some spells in it later. I got two manuals of Conjurations and one of Spellcasting this game, but even so for a long time I thought this had just been a mistake, getting Magic Dart online long after it was any use. However, in the late game I got Isk's Battlesphere and IMB online, and then could do decent ranged damage with the battlesphere.

Lair:5 gave me a +10 randart scimitar of flaming, and that was clearly time to switch to Long Blades. (Hedging my bets, I'd buy a randart lajatang on O:2 which turned out to be +10 vorpal; I considered this but didn't want to give up shields. I would use it later in Crypt since it was one of my very few sources of rN).

After clearing out D I faced the choice of Snake with no rPois or rElec, or Shoals with no way to fly. I tried Snake first, which actually wasn't too bad; I ran into Nikola and Asterion in a tiny room, but I quaffed my one potion of resistance which let me survive a massive zap from Nikola which also blew nearly all of Asterion's HP off, which was nice of Nikola. Shoals had a pretty hairy Ilsuiw encounter, but that's about par for the course.

I did Elf: 1-2 then plugged down Vaults, dropping into a wizlab (Wucad Mu's Monastery, but Serpent's Lash is ridiculously good at dealing with annoying statues), and carried straight onto V:5 as I sometimes do these days. This got pretty hairy once the giant Heavenly Storm died down, and was probably a mistake, but it did yield an amulet with {Faith MR+}.

Depths was next, but I found a ring with {rElec Str+4 Int+4} and thought, between this and non-terrible MR, I could do E:3. I cleared it out without much trouble, but didn't get much good stuff.

After finishing Depths I did Crypt; C:1 was a bit of a unique party with Mara, Frederick, and Sojobo, but to compensate C:3 had no horrible mummies.

Slime was next; a fight with Dissolution on Slime:2 got pretty bad, but TRJ itself was easy enough with javelins of penetration. After the fight I got a trivial malmutation from a shining eye, and noticed I had an enormous amount of potions, so mutrouletted into rugged brown scales.

I did Hell last win, and I try to get at least one extended rune, so I stuck my nose into Pan. The very first level was Holy Pan; this is a pain to clear and multiple daevas are always bad news, but I got through it and picked up a +5 eudemon blade of holy wrath, which (at +9) was very useful in Abyss and Zot. I learned Irradiate here, but didn't use it much; I'm not really used to having it, and with WJC when you're next to multiple monsters you usually want to do a martial move. I also learned Yara's which would have been castable with brilliance, but didn't really get any nice opportunities to use it.

Abyss was pretty annoying; on the first trip I found an amulet with {Reflect *Drain rElec Dex+3 SH+3} which I swapped to. I think this was a mistake; I had vague ideas about making it possible to swap out my rElec ring, but the amulet of faith with MR+ was in retrospect better. The second trip took ages, but eventually I landed near the rune vault that's mostly full of dire/hellephants and HEavenly Stormed my way in and back again.

To Zot! I felt pretty short of OOF-killing material, so (unusually) I didn't clear Zot, just worked down by the easiest route magic mapping showed me. In particular I had only one box of beasts (which crumbled the first time I used it) and lower Evo than I'd have liked (very high Evo box beasts hammer OOFs flat). In practice the left-hand lung wasn't too bad (two ancient liches, but what is a +9 holy wrath weapon for?); I grabbed the Orb. A panlord turned up on the way out of the lungs, and I phantom-mirrored it, but then it turned out I could just Lunge at it and flatten it.
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