CSDC week 1- ascetic rune?

[petercordia]

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~ebering/cra ... .24/1.html

This weeks combo is a Vampire Assassin of Dithmenos / Kikubaaqudgha / Qazlal
It sounds like a strong combo, but I don't have much experience with it
Dithmenos & Kikubaaqudgha sound much stronger than Qazlal, especially given the -1 invocations aptitude.

I'd like to try to get a rune without using potions or scrolls, does anyone have any advice for that conduct? It's not a disaster if I have to give up half way, so long as I don't die.
Try amulets? Try rings? Don't try any unidentified items? Try or don't try artefact shortblades if they show up?
Is Dith or Kiku stronger for an ascetic conduct? I know Kiku is really strong when you're underleveled, but I don't know how strong he is in this context.
I think the bloodless form will be stronger so long as I'm very careful to run away from / avoid dangerous enemies, because bloodless vampires are better at doing so (due to stealth & bat form) and rPois and rN are nice. But once a bloodless vampire is down to 30% hp he might just die if he doesn't quaff potions. (No regen with monsters in LOS -> no pillar dancing)

Also, I think this character is going to be strong in extended. He's going to have to kill a Hell lord, and might as well try for 15 runes. What is best in extended? Kiku+UC, Kiku+pure magic, Dith+long blades? Dith+conjurations? I read Dith+UC is bad?

Any other advice I didn't mention?

Success with CSDC for anyone else who's trying

[TheMeInTeam]

Kiku is the strongest god option among the 3 by a margin, but if you see Dith early it's reasonable to take it. Kiku might be on next floor...or 5 floors away.

Kiku also gives you more early if you're skipping pots/scrolls, since you have some guaranteed magic access and with any luck you'll get the receive corpses --> animate dead combination, which will take care of most bad situations.

It's up to you if you want to risk wearing cursed gear. A reasonable case could be made to just wear-ID stuff and then use scrolls if it's really bad --> go for ascetic the next week(s). This is assuming you already have a good bank of scrolls saved up so that you actually CAN remove curse though.

The rules for bat form kill aren't very clear. For example could you raise 50 zombies, switch to bat form, and let them kill the hell lord? Based on the way it's written it would be cheating players out of the bonus if that didn't count. My impression is that unique just needs to die while player is in bat form, but it's not clear that's necessarily true. You can also probably get the kill vs antaeus or something by blowing box of beast x3, horn of geryon, wands of acid etc on him with very high evo training.

[petercordia]

Another question, which I have because the wiki is a little confusing:
Is the batform UC base damage equal to 1 + skill, or 1 + skill/5 ?
I'm not sure it will matter, but vampires have decent UC aptitudes, and it'd be interesting to know whether a vampire can have any success biting things to death in Batform.

[vt]

The rules for bat form kill aren't very clear. For example could you raise 50 zombies, switch to bat form, and let them kill the hell lord?

Yes that's fine. So are summons. In another context ebering said he checks the generated milestone's status field for 'bat-form'. So you can confirm you got the kill by using queries like '!lm . uniq x=status'. IDK offhand if there is any way for a unique's hp to go to zero without generating such a milestone.