I've just finished the game with 15 runes
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/Atlar ... 131733.txt Here's my spell list:
Fire Storm (9)
Glaciate (9)
OoD (7)
BVC (5)
Necromutation (8)
Death's Door (8)
Controlled Blink (8)
Malign Gateway (7)
Deflect Missiles (6)
Darkness (6)
Regeneration (3)
Ozo Armor (3)
(Summon Butterflies (1))
Compare with duvessa's proposal:
Fire Storm (9)
Shatter (9)
LCS/Chain Light.(8/8)
Borgnjor's Rev. (8)
Death's Door (8)
Controlled Blink (8)
Malign Gateway (7)
Deflect Missiles (6)
Darkness (6)
Regeneration (3)
Sublimation of Blood (2)
Swiftness (2)
Apportation (1)
Summon Butterflies (1)
First main difference: Different/More damage spells
Fire-Storm only (+LCS/Chain) doesn't seem optimal to me. Fire immune/resistant enemies took many hits to kill (brimstone fiend: 4, hell sentinel: 5, etc.), better to have something else up your sleeve. Glaciate one-hits brimstone, OoD two-hits sentinels. Of course, LCS fits that bill, too, but the range is so low and it can miss... don't like it. Glaciate is helpful against enemies in melee, OoD to kill "silently".
BVC is epic (thanks ebering). BVC+Malign+OoD, nasty combo. Killed Mnoleg, Gloorx, Antaeus and Dispater that way. Also nice to kill popcorn and to prevent monsters from reaching melee.
Second main difference: Necromutation
Thought really hard about that one.
Borg+D.Door enables quite a number of helpful buffs (potions, sublimation, regeneration) and gives you two great panic buttons, but it leaves you vulnerable to torment.
Necro makes you more resillient: rtorm, rpois, rc+, +6AC, rn+++, but disables mentioned buffs.
Depending on gear swap, my AC was at 13-16, (besides a rc+ shield, which I had to swap out for rn++ when alive) I had no reasonable source of rc+ or rpois, and with 165hp only 1-2 torments were enough to drop me into the red zone. So, forgetting Necro seemed unwise.
In the end, I went full Necro when I needed the resists (Cocytus, Dis, Mnoleg's realm) and otherwise switched between alive/necro, depending on circumstances. About 2/3 necro, though. C.Blink is enough to get you out of any trouble, no need for extra escape options. Didn't need sublimation either, staff of energy + crystal ball proved to be sufficient.
Only exception is the Orb Run, where I absolutely should have dropped Necro for Borg. No C.Blink+being undead almost killed me... won't make that mistake again.
TL;DR: Compared to duvessa I traded a number of escape options for higher killspeed, safer (read: silent) killing and higher resilience.
Some further notes:
Had hoped that 30EV+Rmsl would be enough... but ancient liches taught me it's absoluletly not. Kinda sad, so I had to use Dmsl.
Never needed Darkness or Death's Door.
Malign Gateway is nuts.
Shatter+ stealing runes is not my style
Extended spell list for beefier/more fighting capable casters would probably look different.
@svendre: You make many good points, I disagree on two, though:
TSO/Mak are absolutely not necessary for extended. Won my Gh with Wu Jian and my De with Vehumet. With the right strategy, most gods should be reasonable for extended.
Imo, Ignition is a waste of spell slots for everything but Zigs and maybe Tomb and V:5. Never encountered big enoug clumps of enemies to use it over fire storm/glaciate.
Thanks to everyone for the good comments
Edit: If anyone is interested, here is the YAVP:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=25524