Pure melee with generic god is rough. But you have the XP to train SOMETHING. Any of these help a lot:
- Lich form: probably the only time this feels worth using outside of zigs, 100% torment immunity on tap.
- Lignification: tree form makes you a plant, and plants are also immune to torment. Works better with TSO/Makhleb (you can usually clear entirety of W:3 in one go with TSO + lig + some potions), but still relevant without TSO/Makhleb. Having potions of cancellation to get out of it when needed is recommended.
- Throwing: Used extensively in this run, and Tomb was no exception:
https://crawl.kelbi.org/crawl/morgue/Th ... 024000.txt. Rip controlled blink...that was TOTALLY needed to remove from the game, derp. Couldn't have people progressing quickly in extended w/o crutching on particular gods.
- Darkness + silence is okay, but you have to be very careful with it in tomb. Getting caught unable to use scrolls and magic can end poorly if you're even a little impatient and something draws attention from outside the cone of silence. What really screws this up is bad alarm trap placement though. Death scarab tendency to flop all over the place means that even having an alarm trap on screen creates a risk of having the whole purpose of the combo ruined. If you have means to prevent that, you can gradually work through W:3.
- Fog is generic good for anybody in Tomb, no reason to allow massed summons/torment/smite at a distance you can't do anything back.
- You can still scum abyss for blink scrolls to replace cblink. "Enjoy" this nice incentive as a melee character :/. Alternatively, PoG is still useful too.
- Dithmenos also can grant torment immunity with shadow form, which can be overlooked as an option in extended.
If you're worshipping Trog in extended you're basically just asking for tedium. But you can store a stack of blink scrolls + lig/cancel/fog/other consumables, throw javelins + immolate and it will work. If you have evocable blink or aren't with Trog farm a bunch of nets, mummies waste a lot of turns getting out of those when you have 1v1 situations.
I don't like the design of multi-entry into W:2. I was double-paralyzed and killed before getting a move after clearing W:1 hallway and going into a side area of W:2, which is an example of the very rare BS late game death. 100 --> 0 from chain paralysis without getting a move on the floor is very unlikely, but it should probably still be sanity checked. Other sources of paralysis don't allow chaining it IIRC.