bel wrote:You must be a masochist
Maybe I am, love these kind of things. 8 hours playtime may trick someone into thinking the challenge is extremely tedious, but in fact that's only ~1.5 times slower compared to how I often play casually. Plus CUE is laggy for me these days
bel wrote:Why did you abandon Chei?
Well, in the hindsight I shouldn't, at least that early. I was going to abandon him anyway for Zin or Dith at some point before Zot, because, as you already mentioned, both OOF and curse toes have no attacks, making fighting your way through impossible. The plan was to dive Z:1-Z:4 mapping every floor and then use some combination of LRD, haste, fog-controlled blinks and Sanctuary/Shadow form on Z:5 to snatch the Orb and run. I wasn't sure when to do the switch and then ran into a couple glowing brains in Vaults, which I completely forgot don't have attacks as well. The right play was to skip the floor and proceed, instead I decided to convert to Ely, then try to wait out the wrath and get enough piety for Pacification in Elf. Turned out Chei stats were crucial to my previous success (Lair, Orc and S-branches went really smooth): not only I was struggling to kill basic elves and dancing weapons, but summoned Nexoqexs were threatening my 5 Int really badly. Ended up teleporting into a disto short sword, getting abyssed and drained to brainless.
I'm a bit sad, because the RNG was really good this run: D:2 Chei altar, D:4 acrobat amulet, blind-quaffing !mut into Dex+2 and +Blink, good S-branches (sharpshooters in Snake and satyrs in Shoals have master archer flag, so I guess you have to wait for them to run out of ammo or how does that even work lol), randart plate with rCorr and Dex+8 to name a few. However I didn't play particularly well too, partially because this was the first attempt which went past D:4 and I had hard times estimating how fast I'm able to kill certain things. Anyway, now I'm fairly sure it's doable, gonna try again. Fun fact: you can't actually guarantee you follow the conduct, cause bumping into unseen horror despite !a on weapon is always a possibility (that's where my 1 staff attack comes from
)