tasonir wrote:I usually only do abyss on characters that I'm intending to 15 runes on, and so by the time I get to abyss I'm completely and totally overpowered. Since pan often gives you an exit to the abyss instead of a real exit, I'll often run pan first, then exit to the abyss, and get the rune then. So by then, it's easy.
Generally in crawl I value defenses and trying to think about ensuring you can't die, but I do think that abyss (and some other parts of extended) do place more emphasis on your ability to quickly clear swarms of monsters. It's a good case where "the best defense is a good offense" really applies. But for most of crawl, I think the best defense is a good defense.
I'm pretty far away from this perspective. I think the abyss is an exercise in 1) threat assessment and 2) walking away. Abyss is ducking around corners and then casting blink to gain 2 spaces, /Digging when you hit a dead end. Abyss is generally not engaging monsters, but varies greatly by character.
I'm generally really content to go into the abyss if I have more than ~8 tele scrolls. If I'm going into the abyss after depths, I don't expect to use more than 5 of them.
I never go into the abyss with an intent to quickly clear swarms of monster, unless, as previously mentioned, a character is really overpowered, or I'm taking on a rune vault.