High Elf Reaver - Elyvilon?

[danr]

Just started a HERe and off to a not bad start - found a +2 elven sabre of protection.

I wasn't sure what god to take, I was thinking Vehumet or Sif Muna or Okawaru. I want to try splitting fairly evenly between melee and conjurations, so I'll be training dodging, stealth, fighting, spellcasting, and perhaps armour actively. (short blades and conjurations go up quickly enough even turned off)

Anyhow, I found an Elyvilon altar on D:4 and now I'm wondering about going Ely -> TSO. Trouble is I don't want to start splitting XP off into invocations yet too.

I think these are my top choices:
1) Vehumet -> for best support of pure conjurations approach, and no need for invocations
2) Okawaru -> to really shore up the melee game. I'll gamble on finding a book of power, they seem to be pretty common. I won't be carrying any missile weapons or even have throwing skill so that should help focus the gifts.
3) Ely -> TSO -> access to healing, pacification, and TSO's weapon blessing, halo and RN+++ for the endgame

[Sometimes]

I've never been able to focus Okawaru's gifts, there's usually a dozen slings and a negative cloak for every decent melee weapon. Except for my Halfling Hunter, of course.

[tormodpwns]

Unfortunately Book of Power just got rarer. It used to generate normally PLUS replace other generated books 10% of the time but now it's just 4%.

I would recommend Vehumet just because spellcasting is so powerful in the end game. Plus Okawarus gifts tend to suck and you can just cast Haste.

[casmith789]

In the 0.7 tournament, I played a few HERe. I prefer it over HECj for its nice melee, and I designed it to do 15 runes and beat Cerebov. If you play Okawaru -> TSO or Okawaru -> Makhleb (as I did, Makhleb is better than TSO in a few ways such as he allows necromancy), this is a pretty smooth run, however you probably won't get any massively powerful spells.

If you want these then Vehumet or Sif Muna is probably the best choice but this will leave you low on hp.

You could go kiku and build yourself a necrusader - this would be fun but you'd have to luck into a holy weapon at some point so endgame wasn't disastrous with pain. However, kiku would make the game pretty nice overall, and you could switch to ash to reskill the necro into conjurations for your firestorm