probably obvious exploration trick

[Doesnt]

when entering lair:1, look for down staircases and explore lair:2 at the first opportunity.

lair has a habit of throwing stupid ghosts, stupid uniques, and just generally stupid monsters at you. if you get chased off lair:1 into D by one, then you have to go back in the way you came, which is no good since whatever you were running from is now squatting at the entrance to lair.

if you've cleared out lair:2, any stupid stuff on lair:1 can be evaded by just taking a down staircase, and if you run into anything while exploring lair:2, you can retreat back to the explored parts of lair:1 and resume exploration there.

doing the floors out of order isn't likely to mess you up either since the lair floors are all very same-ish, unlike early dungeon where there's a large difference between the first three floors.

the strat also applies to most other "normal" branches; most notably depths.

apologies if everyone knows to do this already or if there's a thread for this kind of post, i didn't see anywhere else to put it and i've seen a lot of players in binds that could be avoided by doing this

[MrRokkomies]

I had not tought of that. Simple, yet effective. Thanks

[JFunk]

This is a great observation, and not necessarily so obvious. I certainly had been playing the game a long time before I even really thought about using down stairs defensively.

In my opinion, branch entrances can be some of the most dangerous situations in the game if the map generator is unkind. Branch ends get the glory, but except for V5 and O2, I fear a branch's entrance more than its end. There is a sudden spike in danger relative to your PC, and there is only one location on the level to escape to safety. Down-exploration potentially allows you to create multiple semi-safe rest points in case the branch exit is unreachable. There could be danger down those staircases, but level 2 is not likely to be drastically more dangerous than level 1 for most branches, so it should be within your PC's capabilities.