Post Thursday, 24th June 2021, 21:21

YAVP: DjCj^Makhleb

https://underhound.eu/crawl/morgue/pete ... 163118.txt

I'm glad I played this as a Conjurer, because Prism & Mystic Blast carried me for a *very* long time. I did get Summon Forrest at XL13 and two more summoning spells at XL15 and XL17, but I those were a bit tedious and didn't work well with my conjurations, and I only really needed them for one encounter before I got Crystal Spear at XL23. Besides its nice AOE damage, Prism also allowed me to block LOS, and Mystic Blast has a lot of obvious utility.

TRJ was a very scary fight, and the only fight where I actually needed (& used) Evokables.

Shortly after that I got Firestorm and then Chain Lightning, and from that point on it was plain sailing. Chain Lightning was an amazing opener for V:$, though I still don't quite understand how the spell works. Sometimes it did self-damage, but usually it wouldn't, and it would often damage all enemies on the screen, but not if they were split apart by walls.
Tabbing through Zot with FIrestorm felt pretty good, as did blasting through most of the Zot end-vault monsters in a single fight.

I completely skipped the Shoals.

I felt rather unlucky getting Bladehands, Dragon Form, and Storm Form. You could argue I could/should have made use of the spells by raising Strength a little and training UC, but I think that would have made winning the game harder, not easier.