Non-renewable healing DD

[Arrhythmia]

Has anyone played one? Thoughts? I mean more specifically, a DD that worships a god other than Makhleb, Ru, Pakellas, Elyvilion, Trog, or post-game TSO.

[duvessa]

Has to be Zin really, since otherwise you can heal with vamp weapons and vampiric draining spell.

[Sandman25]

I tried DD of Zin today, gave up in Lair and switched to Makhleb.
My comment from another thread:

DD of Zin is not boring, it's extremely unusual game. I guess the idea is to dive to lair runes, then get abyssal rune and dive into Depths/Zot ignoring Orc/Vaults but it is not my playstyle especially when I am DDEE and device recharging gives me 2 zaps twice in a row

[crate]

At least elliptic and jeanjacques have won DDPr that didn't abandon Zin all game. I don't know a lot else about the games, it sounds no fun at all since you're strongly encouraged to make sure you take as little damage as possible.

[Arrhythmia]

Has to be Zin really, since otherwise you can heal with vamp weapons and vampiric draining spell.

I'm not really concerned with the lack of vampiricism more than I am with the lack of the specific gods listed. I suppose the thread should have been titled "non-god-based-healing-DD", but hind-sight is 20/20 I guess.

e: let's be spicy and also assume that you just conduct yourself into not using them

[duvessa]

That's been won over 100 times online.

[Arrhythmia]

so do you have any thoughts on them or want to tell me about them or what

[goodcoolguy]

Non-renewable healing DD? My take? Don't play them.

[Sprucery]

When I came back to Crawl after a break of a few years, I played a DDSt of Chei. That was probably my first Chei character and was killed by an enormous slime creature (that was my first interaction with merging slimes). I assume that the game would have turned pretty horrible if I had survived longer.

e: so I learned from another thread that qw wins DD of Chei now, so...

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I didn't find it very fun. Trying to minimise damage all game places a fairly high burden on attention. Trying not to melee the majority of even simple enemies is pretty slow. And DD can't even kite, so you have to reset fights fairly often.

If I tried again I would go DDEE of Sif/Veh and either branch into summons or go for shatter + OOD (or some other long-range spell). Not because shatter is optimal in any sense, but it's a fairly low aggravation way of playing. Shatter a bit, rest a bit, shatter a bit, rest a bit, etc.