When you just don't care about a character anymore.

[tcjsavannah]

So I finally got a HOPr going pretty good. Some Beogh-blessed plate armor (+7) had me with 40 AC, and with a large orcish shield I was running around with 63 shields.

Unfortunately, I got nailed by a neqoxec with slowness, and as a melee'er, I know that just wouldn't fly in Zot.

I cleared out all the usual suspects (Vaults, Crypt, Orc, Lair, Snake, Swamp, Elf) but no cure mutation and no amulet of mutation. There was also a treasure trove that needed a wand of hasting - of course, one of two wands I had yet to identify.

I bought into a Zig just to see if I could find any of the three in the first few levels, but no dice. Made it to level 8 before I backed out.

Without rCorr to try Slime, and without the cojones to try Tomb, I decided to go into the Abyss in an attempt to find either of the three items I wanted, but mostly the cure mutation to get rid of slowness.

I found the Abyss rune, but also found about 10 more mutations, none good. And no potion.

Finally I decided to just go into Zot. Many, many Dracs and an orb of fire later, I had even more bad mutations - so much so that I just decided that it was too much trouble to try and finish the game.

My question is this. What should have been my next step after I got back out of the Abyss? Or is there somewhere else I should have gone in an attempt to get rid of my slowness?

[Jiokuy]

Well it's a bit late, but I've generally had luck finding potions of cure mutation in Pan.

[tasonir]

Best chance probably is pan...pretty low chance on each pan level, but if you do come across the holy pan floor, there are several garenteed cure mutation potions. That said you'd either have to be able to handle pan lords, ninja-ing runes, or not getting a 15 rune win, which is going to be a hard with bad mutations...

[mikee]

The simplest thing you could have done was just to try to win with slow 1. It's not like it's impossible to do, especially for a strong character. (You mentioned something about slowness being especially bad when you are using melee, but I suspect this is some kind of myth you're buying into.)

The next simplest options would have been to convert to zin or jiyva. Scumming abyss is never a reasonable solution to a problem.

[Patashu]

With slow 1, you'll only get hit about 1 in 10 steps (or 10% more from ranged attackers) when retreating. That's not that big of a deal late game when you have lots of resources available to you.

[tasonir]

Small correction - slowness is actually 20% per mutation, so it would be 2 in 10, or 20% from range.

For winning all of your trivial pursuit dungeon crawl games, a naga of chei at max piety has the equivalent of slowness 8 on a normal speed race. It's still winnable

[varsovie]

The next simplest options would have been to convert to zin or jiyva. Scumming abyss is never a reasonable solution to a problem.

+1 for god.

With Chei you can slouch your way to the orb.

[Jeremiah]

Going to Abyss or Pan without resist mutation is pretty much guaranteed to result in more mutations than when you went in.

[tcjsavannah]

Thanks for the tips. And now for the real facepalm moment ...

... looking back over my morgue file, I had boots of running on the whole time.

I think I would have remembered that had any of my orcish followers made it in the later levels. I was pretty much solo from Vaults-onward.

Man, I feel dumb.

[mageykun]

Scumming abyss is never a reasonable solution to a problem.

It's a reasonable solution if you can trivialize the threats presented in the abyss. Which is far easier than trivializing pan, and you don't have to run the risk of skipping runes, or getting dumped into really dangerous vaults and or floors. Not that there aren't dangerous things in the abyss, but generally they're easier to prepare for.

Granted, hunting for rMut / cMut you're probably better off in Pan. There's a much higher density of mutaters in the abyss. Still, mikee's right- not good odds.

[cerebovssquire]

Scumming abyss is never a reasonable solution to a problem.

It's a reasonable solution if you can trivialize the threats presented in the abyss. Which is far easier than trivializing pan, and you don't have to run the risk of skipping runes, or getting dumped into really dangerous vaults and or floors. Not that there aren't dangerous things in the abyss, but generally they're easier to prepare for.

Granted, hunting for rMut / cMut you're probably better off in Pan. There's a much higher density of mutaters in the abyss. Still, mikee's right- not good odds.

It's less about "it kills you off" and more a "it gives you a crapton of mutations and destroys your stuff", so you will barely ever be in a better situation after scumming the abyss regardless of situation. The mere fact that you can trivialise a branch doesn't mean it is scummable because scumming implies long and safe work that presents benefits (obviously undesirable from a game design perspective), not just long and safe works that hurts you in the long run.

"reasonable solution" is an extremely extremely extremely I would have to spend the rest of my life typing "extremely" extremely exceptional case.

[mikee]

Small correction - slowness is actually 20% per mutation, so it would be 2 in 10, or 20% from range.

I don't think this is exactly true. Players get movement delay, not speed, and slowness 1 adds 2 to it. So one would have delay 12, which is approximately 8.33 speed, or being hit 1 in 6 times while kiting normal speed monsters.

[tasonir]

I've often wondered about exactly how delay translates to monster speed. I think it would be nicer if players and monsters used the same scale, but since they don't, I should probably figure out how it works one of these days. I mean, I play Chei after all.

Spriggans are "speed 6" in that it takes them .6 turns to move a tile, but that makes them speed 16 as a mob? 10/.6 = 16.6(repeating). The knowledge bots give a spriggan mob just speed 16 though, do they (mobs) occassionally move at .7 or is their speed really 16.6? Can a spriggan player outrun a spriggan mob?

A max piety Chei Naga has 2.8 turn movement delay, which is 3.57 speed. Does the game consider that to just be 3? Be 4?

Maybe this is beyond a level which is actually helpful, but come on, my slouch depends on it!