The Tavern

I believe that the vast majority of my many untimely deaths have been due to carelessness, haste (the non-magical variety), and hubris. (Most of the rest involve early encounters with orc priests).

Specifically, my latest resolution is to play closer attention to the 50% hp rule, especially at level 10 and above.

Yeah, we'll see how that works out...

Edit: Five minutes later, dead courtesy of an Unseen Horror on Level 8. Good times, bad choices.

Sounds pretty normal.



Count those too, as a more subtle version of carelessness.



The 50% HP rule is good, but I prefer the 100% HP rule: if there's a dangerous enemy on the screen, and I'm at 100% HP or less, I run away (or do something else that makes the enemy not dangerous).

Like kill it!

I can feel you on the hubris though. My greatest run ever of all time was a MiFi^Qaz (shut up, I know I'm a casual, you don't have to tell me). Found a +22 GDA on like, D:10, shit was ridiculous. I put it on immediately and never took it off again, and just like, didn't take damage up through my first two runes, pretty much. A randart vamp battleaxe later with +5 slaying or something, I don't even remember, and it was actually almost comical how brutally I was steamrolling everything. Everything fell before my might. I felt like I was playing Doom, I swear to god, except instead of Doomguy I was Doomguy with an axe and a raging storm of elemental brutality bent to my whim. Effing glorious. Lair fell before me. The spider nest fell before me. Shoals fell before me. I stood right in the center of the V:5 welcome wagon and took on all challengers in a one-on-eight roaring bloody slugfest, and I won it. I kicked in the door of Crypt and laid the undead to rest, furiously mashing the tab key and laughing maniacally.

And then I went to the Slime Pits.

I had never been there before, I always avoided the place like the plague more experienced players told me it was. But I was basically immortal, right? Let's roll.

I found out pretty quick that the walls corroded you, that was simple enough. What I didn't catch until it was too late was that the Royal Jelly does too. I smacked him up quite a few times before realizing that all my equipment had been corroded down to a whopping -28, and I was surrounded on all sides by various flavors of jellies. The teleport scroll kicked in just a little too late, and that glorious god damn armor is probably still down there somewhere, part of some very interesting new breed of awful golden dragon slime. Or it's in the rune vault. That would be cool too.

Yeah, the Slime Pits can be pretty scary if you don't have the specific 'formula' to do it, I think the same for a lot of other challenges in the game(Like V:5, Abyss, Winning the game at all, learning how to play 'weak' characters.).

Once you learn to:
1. Dive to the last floor
2. Magic map
3. Walk to the centre structure
4. find TRJ
5. Buff up
6. When it's adjacent, summon a bunch of stuff around it to block its spawned jellies
7. Kill it fast
8. Tele/ Blink out, and walk to the stairs
9. Kill the remaining enemies at your own pace and collect your rune and loot

Then Slime becomes the easiest 3rd rune. Otherwise, if you don't know how to trivialise it, then it becomes a bit of a nightmare, even when you have a very strong character that would be fine in other contexts.

the real boss of slime pit is acid blobs

The TRJ fight is basically a tiny example of the larger "think about your situation and tactics" which helps in a whole lot of Crawl situations. TRJ doesn't do anything mysterious, you can puzzle out how to cheese that fight pretty easily if you stop and think about how it works.

More generally, I like amalloy's approach. Crawl is about winning easy fights, changing hard fights into easy ones, escaping if you can't do that (or if it's not worth the resources), and knowing which of those situations applies to your current fight.

If you do hard fights in Crawl, you will eventually lose.