Is tomb too difficult?


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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 04:51

Is tomb too difficult?

My impression is that the new tomb with trapdoors requires specialty spells to do safely. It cannot be done safely with any typical brute that was prepared for the rest of extended. The brute has to learn specific spells, or do tomb unsafely.

A character can safely do tomb if he can use controlled blink to ninja the rune.

A character can safely do tomb if he can use necromutation or if he is a mummy or ghoul.

A character can safely ninja the rune if he has Dithmenos shadow form and a few blink scrolls.

It could be possible to more-or-less safely do tomb if you got lucky and just have a dozen blink scrolls.

It is possible that controlled blink is unnecessary and the same plan can be done using passage of golubria. Having not tried it, I can't say for certain; there may be issues with getting surrounded and monsters entering the portals.

It may be possible to safely do tomb if you have just silence and a lot of cancellation potions. It has been done this way, I can't say whether it was done safely. Having darkness too would make this safer.

It may be possible to safely do tomb if you have firestorm or other level 9s, even without the other tools mentioned.

Some extremely powerful melee characters can *un*safely clear tomb by relying on TSO or Makhleb healing. I have seen no evidence that doing this is safe. I would expect anyone trying this to hang out in the 40 HP area even if they have rN+++. Anyone disagree?

Any other ways to do tomb *safely* that I neglected? Perhaps W:3 could be done with Disaster Area, but I wouldn't expect that to be safe. I've seen one game in an earlier version where the mummy death curses killed a guy trying to do it that way.


My own experience in my last 2 games when I reached tomb as a melee brute, was that I spent much of extended preparing Controlled Blink with Zin, and I really freakin needed it. In neither of the 2 games was I able to clear W:3, or kill more than one or two greater mummies on W:3. In the first game I had rN+++, in the second rN++. Recite would clear out lesser enemies but any time I tried to sit around tabbing a greater mummy I would get tormented to the danger zone very quickly. I had to ninja the rune both times despite being a powerful melee brute each time.

In the first of the 2 games I also wasn't able to clear the narrow corridor on W:1 coming from W:2; it was the one with a lot of g. mummies as soon as you arrive. I only managed to reach W:3 in the first game by randomly teleporting in W:2.
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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 06:26

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

I'm glad you've reconsidered your positions and realized that heavy armor brutes aren't the best characters in crawl!

bel

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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 06:48

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

Well, they might still hold to their belief that armoured brutes are the best in Crawl \ {Tomb}.

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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 07:41

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

my favorite way of doing tomb safely is to not enter it

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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 08:24

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

duvessa wrote:I'm glad you've reconsidered your positions and realized that heavy armor brutes aren't the best characters in Tomb!


Fixed.
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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 14:49

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

I don't think so, but it does require a lot more supplies to clear if you don't use spells much. To be fair, Tomb was explicitly redesigned to get rid of stairdancing which was the main way melee characters cleared Tomb, wasn't it? You could always just get statue form for Tomb and cast it in robes or something. Tomb is probably the hardest branch now, so should be done last.
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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 17:50

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

You can do tomb safely as a melee brute by simply going there as your last rune and using your spare teleport, blink scrolls, haste and heal potions, which you should have plenty of if you assume melee brutes can do anything else in the game safely, which i assume you do.

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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 19:07

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

Do you have a log where you did tomb safely without any special utility spells?
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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 19:23

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

As a melee brute, why can't you just learn cblink or necromut or whatever? We are talking about a 15 rune character (I guess), you can do whatever you want.

Edit: Nevermind, next time I wil read the whole opening post :D
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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 20:46

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

I've only done one 15 runer with new tomb, I think. It was a Chei character, so that'll obviously have an easier time than most. Your best bet would probably be to run directly to the stairs upon entering W:2 or W:3, then wait for some enemies to get next to you, then go back up. You'd probably have to burn a sizeable number of haste potions and blink scrolls to get it to work, though. Alternatively, you could burn like 10 teleport scrolls trying to land on the outer side of W:2.

Here's a morgue (TSO character so easy mode, but still, I only had passage): http://crawl.berotato.org/crawl/morgue/ ... 015225.txt
Having TSO or Makhleb is obviously recommended, but it's still doable with other gods, just harder and more resource-intensive.
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Post Saturday, 4th August 2018, 22:03

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

sundaye wrote:You can do tomb safely as a melee brute by simply going there as your last rune and using your spare teleport, blink scrolls, haste and heal potions, which you should have plenty of if you assume melee brutes can do anything else in the game safely, which i assume you do.
Teleports, haste and heal potions are helpful, but unreliable, even assuming a generous amount of all. If you have enough blink scrolls, then I would say you can do tomb safely, as it basically replaces the purpose of learning controlled blink. Question is, would you have stocked up enough by the time you would decide to train for cblink?

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Post Tuesday, 7th August 2018, 00:17

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
duvessa wrote:I'm glad you've reconsidered your positions and realized that heavy armor brutes aren't the best characters in Tomb!


Fixed.


LoL. If firestorm and controlled blink make tomb safe, they make ANYWHERE IN THE GAME SAFE. Case in point, I just cleared vaults:5 by walking down the stairs with my DEFE of Veh and spamming firestorm until I had killed almost the entire level, didn't even need to teleport I killed so many bad dudes my mana was full pretty much the entire fight. I've NEVER done that with even my most obscene melee characters, and certainly not in the short time it took to clear the floor.

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Post Tuesday, 7th August 2018, 05:40

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

crawlnoob wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:
duvessa wrote:I'm glad you've reconsidered your positions and realized that heavy armor brutes aren't the best characters in Tomb!


Fixed.


LoL. If firestorm and controlled blink make tomb safe, they make ANYWHERE IN THE GAME SAFE. Case in point, I just cleared vaults:5 by walking down the stairs with my DEFE of Veh and spamming firestorm until I had killed almost the entire level, didn't even need to teleport I killed so many bad dudes my mana was full pretty much the entire fight. I've NEVER done that with even my most obscene melee characters, and certainly not in the short time it took to clear the floor.
Good luck in Gehenna after your MP are drained by hell effect. Lol, you think we have never used DE of Vehumet with fire storm, CBlink and necronomicon spells. Go try getting 12 runes during orb run without level 7+ spells, crawlnoob :)
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Post Tuesday, 7th August 2018, 10:05

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

I have, I've gotten 15 rune runs on all sorts of characters. I'm actually an old player and just changed my name to something ironic, if you didnt realize.

I think it is interesting that you have to pick probably the only place the in the entire game that is even remotely challenging for a fully-developed magic user, and you follow it through with the curious addendum "try it with only 6th lvl spells". Why? 9th lvl spells are part of the game and what we are talking about, and 9th lvl spells make it ridiculously EASY to get through Hell in the first place. You would probably balk if I told you that then you couldn't wear CPA or use too many enchant scrolls... But even then, between the boltspells and freezing cloud, a good magic slinger spends considerably less time taking damage than a tank build. Ranged is broken, my man.

I mean, I just tabbed through depths in all of fifteen minutes and cleared everything without even really thinking about it with this guy. You can tab with a melee brute but its NOT that easy and to argue otherwise is just purely disingenuous. Now I am gearing up for Hells (I'll tab thru zot first tho of course) and I have 26 ac and 28 EV (which I can get higher with ring of phasing not that it matters at that point) and 13 shields, and I dont even have any of those skills remotely maxed, I have an ENORMOUS pile of consumables because I pretty much never need to use them on this character, and I am trying to decide if I should use the +9 eveningstar of holy wrath I built or just keep smashing dudes with a staff of fire, after all I have fire magic at 26 now.

Something tells me I should be fine in the case that my 60 MP gets drained totally (Veh likes to top me off with firestorm of course) and I don't want to use one of my potions of magic.

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Post Tuesday, 7th August 2018, 10:29

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

I find it weird that you call casting spells "tabbing". Do you really use tab to cast spells? For me it takes much more time and effort to win as caster and I think I am not alone here, it suffices to check real time games, luckily we had a new world record last week. Personally I am much more likely to die as caster than as heavy armour melee guy, especially if I rush to fire storm for depths.
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Post Tuesday, 7th August 2018, 14:23

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

I would say that it is cblink that made tomb "safe" for you, noobcrawl, not that you had firestorm and cblink. I could be wrong though. I suspect that if you didn't have cblink, you wouldn't have considered it safe.

Conversely, I don't know whether if you had lvl 6-8 spells fire and/or destruction spell with cblink with Vehumet you may still consider it safe.

Would you consider Ignition with Veh and cblink safe in tomb? If you do, then it isn't firestorm; it is the cblink that makes you consider yourself safe.

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Post Tuesday, 7th August 2018, 16:04

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I find it weird that you call casting spells "tabbing". Do you really use tab to cast spells?

Fwiw, i use tab to cast attack spells (and shoot ranged weapons, actually) if you haven't tried it, check out automagic settings and ===am_set_spell
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Post Tuesday, 7th August 2018, 16:20

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

Siegurt wrote:Fwiw, i use tab to cast attack spells (and shoot ranged weapons, actually) if you haven't tried it, check out automagic settings and ===am_set_spell


I know about it and I used it with Magic Dart and EH. It stops being useful after early game IMHO because there are spells with weird pattern (bolts, fireball) and just multiple spells so you may cast different spells one after another.
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Post Tuesday, 7th August 2018, 16:29

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

VeryAngryFelid wrote:
Siegurt wrote:Fwiw, i use tab to cast attack spells (and shoot ranged weapons, actually) if you haven't tried it, check out automagic settings and ===am_set_spell


I know about it and I used it with Magic Dart and EH. It stops being useful after early game IMHO because there are spells with weird pattern (bolts, fireball) and just multiple spells so you may cast different spells one after another.

Sure, and I don't use it on every cast, every time, but I nearly always have a 'standard attack spell that I use to take out a single target that isn't particularly threatening' (typically this starts as a level 1 conjuration, and probably moves up to a level 3 or even 4 by the end of the game) and I use tab and automagic for that, it just saves button presses. I agree it becomes *less* useful later as you get more choices, but you're going to encounter some simple targets that you can just shoot a few times and have them die, but I would never say that it's useless (it always can save me some keypresses even late game)

Similarly when I'm playing melee I tend to not use tab later quite as much, because it's more frequent that I care precisely about my positioning and which adjacent thing I attack, so I tend to use more direction attacks than tab.
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Post Tuesday, 7th August 2018, 16:35

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

I just use "/" and "Ctrl-/" for my most common attack spells. Works pretty well.

Anyway, this is offtopic.

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Post Thursday, 9th August 2018, 20:38

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

*strolls casually back into the forum*

> Tomb difficulty thread
> pissing contest about level 9 spells

*sips tea*

I missed this place

Also, abstractly, is it against the design principles of crawl to not have all branches realistically doable by all builds? Should 15 runers be made harder than they already are?
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Post Friday, 10th August 2018, 06:27

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

TeshiAlair wrote:*strolls casually back into the forum*

> Tomb difficulty thread
> pissing contest about level 9 spells

*sips tea*

I missed this place


Welcome back! Did you check the "How to Win Deep Elves*" thread? Now that's Tavern at it's finest :)

*apparentely a lot of math is needed (plus EV and/or SH, I'm not sure)
DCSS: 97:...MfCj}SpNeBaEEGrFE{HaAKTrCK}DsFESpHu{FoArNaBe}
FeEE{HOIEMiAE}GrGlHuWrGnWrNaAKBaFi{MiDeMfDe}{DrAKTrAMGhEnGnWz}
{PaBeDjFi}OgAKPaCAGnCjOgCKMfAEAtCKSpCjDEEE{HOSu
Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi

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Post Friday, 10th August 2018, 06:34

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

Sprucery wrote:*apparentely a lot of math is needed (plus EV and/or SH, I'm not sure)


Nothing is needed, Gr of TSO in CPA is fine with 0 EV/SH and low HP ;)
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Post Saturday, 22nd September 2018, 01:34

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

crawlnoob wrote:Case in point, I just cleared vaults:5 by walking down the stairs with my DEFE of Veh and spamming firestorm until I had killed almost the entire level, didn't even need to teleport I killed so many bad dudes my mana was full pretty much the entire fight. I've NEVER done that with even my most obscene melee characters, and certainly not in the short time it took to clear the floor.


The strongest characters can tab v:5 with a vamp axe. Helps if there is a corner so you aren't in LOS of 60 monsters at once.

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Post Saturday, 22nd September 2018, 05:29

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

You do not need any spells for Tomb3. I have cleared it many times without spells (usually before Pan because it doesn't mutate you). All you really need is TSO, a couple immolation scrolls and some practice. Various combinations of melee + throwing + evocations + invocations for cleansing flames will do just fine. Gargoyle is of course easier than most, but not necessary. A few blink scrolls it is usually enough insurance for me, and by the time I'm doing tomb3 I usually have several saved up unless I've played badly or was terribly unlucky. Very rarely have I ever needed to learn CBlink, and if anything I think it winds up just being a waste of spell points and XP (because I have blink scrolls). Is doing tomb3 perfectly infallibly safe? Well, no but it can be within reason as compared to the rest of the game. There are a few areas which I feel can be potentially more dangerous, such as coming down stairs into range of hellion island in Pan, or fast chaos branded pan lords which can poly you (removing EV) then paralyze you in 2 hits potentially, and you won't even see it coming.

If using spells, firestorm is absolutely not needed. In fact, I feel that ignition does a better job.

The key to doing tomb with TSO is knowing when to *not* kill stuff. If you're at full health, haven't been tormented yet, instead of slashing some critters which would heal you on death, you might want to advance and put even more targets in LOS. It isn't fully intuitive tactics at first. Get many things clumped up for immolation and know when to read it and when to light the fuse.

What pisses me off about tomb and greater mummies in general is that it nearly pigeons holes you into one of the original strategies by the OP, Kiku, Mahkleb or TSO. This is primarily because of the curses on their death. I really hate that mechanic. It's one of the reasons you also have to have specific configurations for Zigs. The punishment for destroying enemies heavily pushes needing Makhleb or TSO for reliability.

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Post Sunday, 23rd September 2018, 06:33

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

No, its just that death curses + smiting are a shitty mechanic

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Post Friday, 14th December 2018, 20:06

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

You could probably make a case that it's a bit too spoiler-reliant. The amount of XP you can get before challenging tomb would allow for cblink, necromutation, god swapping, abyss scumming for blink scrolls, and swapping gear around to make whatever you need castable.

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Post Saturday, 15th December 2018, 08:41

Re: Is tomb too difficult?

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I find it weird that you call casting spells "tabbing". Do you really use tab to cast spells? For me it takes much more time and effort to win as caster and I think I am not alone here, it suffices to check real time games, luckily we had a new world record last week. Personally I am much more likely to die as caster than as heavy armour melee guy, especially if I rush to fire storm for depths.


Sometimes on a powerful character I'll just cast tornado and move back and forth since that tends to kill everything. You'd be optimal to mix in iron shots or whatever you have for damage but since it's unnecessary, you just do what's easy. That's close enough to tabbing for me, and has about as much thought put into it.

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