How do you prepare for extended?

[PerverseSuffering]

I've ascended a 3-runer recently, but I feel like I've missed out on so much content. I tried peeking inside the optional branches, but they were too much even for my (I think) rater mighty character.
How do you prepare for extended? Do you start tailoring your character for extended games from the very start? What are the general requirements, what are your personal preferences?

[Wahaha]

Pan: Haste, the ability to kill tier 1 demons easily or run from them, a wand of digging, enough food, regeneration or Makhleb/TSO. rMut and sustain abilities are sometimes useful. I would list amounts of consumables but it doesn't matter anymore just bring all of them. There are probably some more minor items that I'm forgetting, the only one I can think of is you can bring a distortion weapon to banish yourself to the Abyss if you want.
It's nice to know what vaults are guaranteed to have the demonic rune. A vault with many 1 tile cages with draining eyes inside, a vault with smoke demons behind grates on both sides of a passage and lava between the grates and the passage, a vault that's an island surrounded by lava with many hellions.
Hells: same as above but regen or heal from kills is more important. Healing potions/wands amount is also more important, because it's harder than Pan.
Slime: rCorr, rC. Good offense and defense for the royal jelly fight, piercing ranged attack like bolt wands for when the royal jelly retreats behind slimes, summons to occupy space around the royal jelly and yourself so that it can't summon as many jellies.

I decide to do extended at around character level 20-22 towards the end of the game, like while getting the 3rd rune before entering Zot.

[ThreeInvisibleDucks]

Things that I have found helpful in extended, in no particular order:

• Lots of HP. The main threats in extended are hellfire and torment, both of which ignore your defenses. This makes certain species better suited for the extended run than others.
• Resistance to torment. I've managed to get by with just rN++, but I'd rather have the third pip as well. But the easiest all-runer in this regard was a GhMo (of Makhleb); undead are immune to torrent.
• High damage output. Best defense against high-damage monsters is to kill them quickly. My preferred methods are bardiche of holy wrath + Spectral Weapon, and Statue Form + UC. The former requires worshiping TSO at some point of the game, the latter a non-undead background. In addition to good damage output, Statue Form also provides 50% torment resistance and +30% HP, and a pip of rN, all very useful traits in extended, but at the cost of being slow. Any means of haste help.
• A useful god. I find TSO the most useful deity in extended especially if you consider his holy wrath weapon gift, but Makhleb also helps staying closer to full HP. Kiku is often mentioned for his torment resistance, haven't tried him myself.
• As much regeneration as possible. I always have at least Regen spell unless I'm worshiping a good god that forbids Necromancy. Especially hells are bad places for trying to heal up by waiting up because of hell effects.
• Wand of heal wounds. Or two.
• Wand of hasting or Haste spell.
• Teleportation and blinking for reseting fights when they're not going your way.
• rMut, as bad mutations (frail, teleportitis, *rage, others) can really make things much more dangerous.

[KoboldLord]

With Pan and Hell, you want to be able to recover quickly from a fight. You can either use minimal resources in a fight by killing quickly and efficiently, or you can pick up a way to restore yourself quickly, or some combination of both. Regeneration is a common example of a good way to speed up recovery time, but there are many. You'll deal with mostly the same sorts of monsters you're already familiar with, but in greater numbers and without a safe place to sit and mash 5 unless you're willing to give up a bunch of progress. You definitely don't want to be sitting and picking off fodder when one of the bigger threats are on the screen, and you generally don't want to march across the full length of your LOS to kill that bigger threat with it pelting you the whole way. And definitely don't attempt to 'clear levels', or attempt to kill monsters that you don't have to kill. Hell is 29 levels of more or less the same thing and Pan is approximately ten thousand levels long before you finally get that last Rune level you need, so even if you can kill everything you see effortlessly it'll still take forever. Just rush from stairwell to stairwell or portal to portal until you get to an important level, and then steal the Rune while clearing as little of the level as possible. The tattered remnants of your sanity will be grateful. Haste and Controlled Blink are really nice for minimizing time-wasting, although neither is critical. A strong character can usually just walk right past most of the bosses gesturing rudely with both middle fingers and simply teleport away after picking up the Rune, if they are so inclined.

Slime isn't actually all that bad. Monsters mostly hit very hard, and you can handle that because many other late-game monsters hit just as hard. The thing to watch out for is the fact that you really don't get any good choke points to work with, and your defenses that are normally really good don't stay that way. You'll want to stair-dance a whole lot, letting corrosion expire off-level before it builds up. Do not attempt to fight with any significant amount of corrosion built up, particularly if you actually plan to hit things with a weapon. Have a plan for giant eyeballs and golden eyes, because they are the scariest things down there.

Tomb is basically testing your ability to handle one monster and its gimmick. Your high-end mummy has Torment and Summon Tons of Crap and it will spam both incessantly. In multiple places you will use a flight of stairs and immediately have more than one of these in your line-of-sight. You'll want to stair-dance their chaff upstairs a few at a time, and then start stair-dancing them up preferably one at a time. Expect to kill the chaff and then the top-end mummies on around 25% health, because that's what you're going to be at by the time you use the stairs and you should tough enough to be confident that you'll win anyway. If you get two mummies stair-danced at a time, that's probably a good time to teleport because you're probably at lower than 25% health now, and you can just come back and lure them off one at a time. There are a couple other newish monsters that present other sorts of threats, but they aren't really all that worrisome as long as you're not trying to kill a top-end mummy at the same time.

[ThreeInvisibleDucks]

And to answer to the title of the post. The main thing I seem to do to prepare for extended is not to train up a shield, and go for the highest damage two-handed weapon instead from the get go. IMO, it's often the better choice for 3 runes as well.

If I've found many of the items in the extended kit, I think one crucial moment is pre-Crypt: By switching to TSO beforehand one is almost guaranteed to be at max piety after clearing it, and one can brand a holy wrath weapon.

If the character is otherwise ready for extended, but is missing some crucial piece of the kit, like a wand of heal wounds, or rMut amulet, as a last resort I clear a "few" levels of the Zig in Depths before heading to Pan. I've managed to lose a number of very strong characters by getting fixated on finding a piece of gear and getting annihilated on a Pan-themed level though.

[njvack]

A strong character can usually just walk right past most of the bosses gesturing rudely with both middle fingers and simply teleport away after picking up the Rune, if they are so inclined.

If you've found it, Apportation is also a real nice way to minimize the number of rude gestures the bosses will make at you.

In my experience, while none of the parts of extended are too terrible once you've seen them and are prepared, all of them are very good at surprising you and killing you the first time you see them. So, expect to die a few times and don't sweat it. You'll get all the runes.

Slime, I guess, is pretty much like the rest of the game. Tomb, Hell, Abyss, and Pan are not. KL's post is excellent advice.

[tabstorm]

The thing to watch out for is the fact that you really don't get any good choke points to work with

On Slime:1-5 maybe, but chokepoint use is like the whole trick of M:6 for melee users.

[daggaz]

Dont get paralyzed and whatever you do, dont let your hp get below zero.

[Sprucery]

Dont get paralyzed and whatever you do, dont let your hp get below zero.

Zero HP is not good either :)

[Wark]

FWIW, my first successful clear of extended happened with character who was worshiping Ashenzari. Monster detection, portal detection and ability to peek into unknown vaults with Scrying were quite useful in Pan/Hell and helped to avoid quite a few unpleasant encounters.

[mopl]

My extended preparation :

Am I playing Op :
- yes : get SF + CBlink + Haste + Apportation, train some Stealth*
- no : get Haste*

*if I'm a Be, train a lot of Throwing, get a blowgun and para/confuse/sleep needles

I always thought rMut was a must-have but discovered in recent games that luring and care can free your amulet slot for anything else...

[tasonir]

Statue form will help a great deal in extended, although I'm more comfortable recommending it to people with the caveat that they have some experience in dealing with slowness ahead of time. The two main threats in extended are hellfire and torment, and statue form gives you resistance to torment that makes it nearly harmless. The only resistance to hellfire is more total hp, and statue form gives you +30% hp, so it again works quite well there. Trolls work pretty well for this, if you can get through the midgame with one, but most any race can do a statue form build.

If you'd rather not bother with the spell, gargoyles work the same way, but you don't get the +30% hp, so watch out for hellfire.

In all cases, you want the regen spell to heal the hp taken off quickly. You usually can't stay at 100% health in extended, and will usually be fighting at half health - the rate at which it regenerates is very, very important. Any regen equipment you can also keep on will help hugely.

[partial]

my best win was 11 runes w/ a GrFi^TSO

torment resist is key

[Sharkman1231]

I really like Ashenzari for extended, who hasn't been mentioned yet. Ash makes it really nice to go from one pan level to another, and get to the bottommost levels in the Hells. I also tend to ninja the runes and not pick fights wih the pan or hell lords. Ash isn't great in tomb, but I just learn Silence, which Ash helps with.

Kiku is also really nice with the rTorment, which is super helpful in Pan, Hell, Tomb, and the guaranteed Dispel Undead is nice for Greater Mummies.