The Tavern

wear regen and shadow dragon armor (or robes) and 15+ stealth.

if you can tank, stair dance what you can until they get locked, then teleport. otherwise just teleport. try to clear a corner of the map with summons and consumables; don't berserk or use conj (iron bolt, etc) because you can't use stairs to heal slow or mp.

then slowly pull enemies into your cleared corner and kill them. stealth and regen together usually are enough to heal you between fights.

the idea is to avoid that big fight in the center.

I suggest doing this at level 26 or 27.

What has been working very well for me with tanky characters is quickly blinking/punching through to the most cramped of the 4 vaults. Then you fight in a corridor or - preferably - around a corner. The one with diagonal walls is perfect. This works really well in heavy armor with regeneration. An ogre with double regen (amulet, troll leather) and a large shield can also do that. A wand of clouds is great that way. You can also use a vampiric weapon.

I rarely play dedicated casters so I have a hard time imagining a character who can deal sufficient damage by staying in the middle. That is, a character that would be more inconvenienced by the restricted field of view than helped.

I remember two characters who stayed in the middle and won:
- a gnoll of Okawaru, fighting with the obsidian axe (god gift). It's absurdly powerful and summons demons on hit.
- a demonspawn of Nemelex. Start with Deal Four - Destruction, then when you're about to clash do Deal Four - Summoning. A couple of strong explosions go a long way.

There are multiple ways depending on spells, god abilities, and consumables available. Sometimes you can just straight up kill vault wardens so you don't need to blink/TP anywhere.

I nearly died when I stayed in the middle as a formicid of Wu Jian wearing the armour of the Dragon King (+MR GDA). I ended up running to a corridor. If you use Heavenly Storm, you want to skitter around the edge (whirlwind) with a vampiric/protection weapon or regeneration. I suppose Uskayaw would work just great.

You can also do scroll of torment + Yredelemnul drain life. Good times.

Ru, Qazlal, Chei, Beogh, Gozag, Lugonu also have options that make stairdancing/staying near stairs viable. Okawaru too, if you trained throwing and have javelins (you can just massacre wardens with them quickly using finesse). Big AoE magic/stuff that kills fast would work too.

For tanks immolation meme --> go up, heal, read TP and go back down is also reasonable, though a little less reliable than the above.

Another unorthodox but effective move is to cast darkness + silence and just stairdance stuff up repeatedly. Blocks the sound attracting monsters from LoS and thanks to darkness also blocks LoS beyond silence range, so you can largely prevent even wardens from stopping the stairdance. Useful to have an evocable blink if you can't kill an 8 man surround at once w/o magic though.

I find that walking between the guards at the beginning toward the most favorable of the generally two possible quadrants to do this with, somewhat as borsuk suggests, produces consistent results even with low level characters, say xl 17 or 18. Of course, best practice is to delay entry until just before zot, but this is poor playstyle in my opinion and teaches you nothing. Generally you can handle the initial rush with the usual buffs, might, brilliance, haste, etc., once you've established a good position to make a stand, either in the chosen quadrant or if nothing looks good in the outer ring around the level (which should be removed).

Sometimes you'll be blocked or have no good quadrant option. In these cases it sometimes makes sense to go through one of the lanes between quadrants. Taking an escape hatch or doing a teleport off the stairs is also a fine option most of the time, although I often pass on it -- it is a bit inconsistent and when it works well, it makes things too easy.

An interesting suggestion, although I'm fine with the outer ring. The level can be broken into 3 regions: center, any quadrant, and the outer ring. The center is the most dangerous (initially), followed by a quadrant, and the outer ring is the safest. But that's balanced by the outer ring being the furthest away and the hardest to reach without dragging everything along with you.

Of course you could always get lucky with a random teleport, but I'm okay with a less consistent approach having possibly very strong results, because that forces players to consider the risk vs other strategies and is a 'real' choice. Removing the outer ring makes teleporting a less attractive an option, and it's already quite risky, so letting it at least pay off some of the time seems fair.

About the outer ring, one big demerit is that you can escape hatch directly into it, which demotes probably the best fight in the game to a depths enclosure vault. The lanes have roughly the same problem, though they're more exposed and open. Of course these issues apply to teleports too. In general, the possibility of using a hatch or teleporting cuts against the design of the level. We should want teleportation and escape hatches to be a weaker option, if anything.

We are talking about ancient versions, and I can't find the commit, but this was briefly tried.

In very old version, V:5 quadrants were closed except the entrance nearby the stairs. The common suggested way to clear V:5 was to clear the outer ring - where only few or no monsters spawned and nothing could appear - and then taking one quadrant at time.

The first test to spice the layout a bit was to remove the quadrant - so a "cross" bewteen the 4 quadrant ending on a wall on each side.
As far as I remember it was changed in the current layout because the difficulty was too extreme.

I still remember clearing it with at least one char - possibly a couple - and it was insane. Not too different to a Ziggurat level as you could easily end in a closed hallyway with the LOS full of monster, and other waiting behind.

Hm, should cook up a version of hellcrawl without the ring.

Maybe I'm giving myself too much credit, but it feels like that thread went about how I'd expect the change to have gone. The rim is basically the only way to really break up packs on V:5, which is supposed to be the optimal strategy in dcss, and something that is encouraged as good play (vs being considered 'cheap').

That said, I'm lazy and worship chei, I so pretty much stairdance to this day, despite vault wardens. Stairdance + some form of ranged attack is usually good enough, and stairdance + smite or penetrating attack is nearly certainly enough. Slouch is just full LOS, and while it'll cost a lot of piety to kill normal speed wardens, losing 2*'s of piety is better than dying.

interesting link. Weird that they'd remove the gaps at the ends of the lanes between quadrants and but not remove the lanes entirely.

edit: This is the relevant commit for anyone who'd like to do some homebrewing:

http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a= ... 76716fe0e0

edit 2: I went ahead and tried this... I edited the basic vaults:$ vault as follows:



Not a super careful job. Anyway, I did this with a xl 20 hellcrawl MiFi (casual mode, skipped orc and lair branches, so relatively light on loot, but plenty of xp). The lack of outer ring made surprisingly little difference, just cut down on dead space in the level really. Generally positive change in my opinion, better flow. Think I'll try removing the lanes too.

If you remove outer ring the lanes become a 1 way choke. If you let their ends still move into quadrants you get a LoS choke-breaking point that's stronger than anything available in vaults 5 right now.

I don't think removing outer ring changes difficulty much (seems historical posters disagree strongly with this assessment, however). Some of the quadrant layouts make the floor a lot easier than normal though because they break LoS and/or limit number of things that can attack you. When they do both it's probably too much.

I do think vaults 5 is harder/less consistent than slime though (and for some species abyss also), so maybe it's not in a bad place. Getting the abyssal rune is annoying but if you have at least some TP scrolls and don't do anything weird it's pretty safe.

I tried the lane removal thing too. Here's .map from a successful test run:



I compressed the map in both directions and filled in the remaining lane space with wall. I found initial rushes to be somewhat more intense, as expected since things are significantly closer together. I found the difficulty level reasonable for hellcrawl characters, but I gather people think my view of crawl difficulty eccentric (I cleared this one with an xl 20 VSFi with absolute trash equipment going in). On this run I fought through a couple guards to get to the upper right quadrant (obviously the best quadrant) and you can see I depopulated about half the level from that position. Again, I found that the lack of dead space to travel through kept the player experience tighter than the usual hellcrawl v:$, which differs from dcss only in having no stairs.

I think this style of V:$ has some merit and with some workshopping would make a good alternative to the classic DCSS version.

Speaking of alternatives, having some variety in the general layout rather than just the quadrants would be cool actually. While I disagree with people favoring vaults 5 over slime in most cases (unless their rationale is something other than "vaults 5 is easier"), V:5 is still the most common 3rd rune attempted I think.