The Tavern

Ever had an idea for a build that sounds awesome but you can never get off the ground for whatever reason? Right now I am stuck trying to get a ghoul conjurer going. It looks workable, claws and fighting to get you through early game, a good start on conjurations, ice magic works up better than average. The problem I have is he is all offence, and not very good at it at the start. I barely make it to temple, and never last long enough to get any sort of devotion going on. Defence sucks so I almost always end up being a centaurs pincushion. Anyways, what is your red herring?

Basically any Mummy build. I extremely rarely manage to get them post-Lair. Granted, Mummies don't sound good on paper due to their craptastic apts, no berserking and no potions of cure wounds.

OgWz. Sounds similar to the GhCj issue you have. I know this is a viable combo because I see people post about them all the time, but I never seem to make it to Lair.

I think the robustness of the Ogre makes me less want to run, whereas if I saw something like an orc priest with a Deep Elf early, I'd hightail it as fast as I could.

Kenku fire elementalist - with the fire/conjurations aptitudes you ought to be able to do awesome damage very quickly, and probably get Fire Storm castable even quicker than a DEFE.

The problem ends up being that of your two powerful midgame spells, Sticky Flame is only usable at melee range, and Fireball makes a lot of noise and wakes everything up. Neither of these things are good when you are as fragile as a kenku.

Though actually most of my attempts have died to stupidity or underestimating how fragile I was. My most successful run got to Zot, but for some reason I worshipped Makhleb rather than Vehumet, and never found any fire or conjurations spells beyond those in the starting book, so was relying largely on summoning by the late game. With a bit of care I could easily have won, but wasn't quite cautious enough when I met a player ghost and got blasted by Ice Storm on Zot:2 or 3.

Any air elementalist. They are quite fragile and shock seems underpowered respect magic dart

Roderic is right. Even with new Static Discharge, which is excellent against packs of weak opponents, Air Elementalists are fragile in the debut.

I got my first win with a HEAE, and didn't find it particularly fragile - but I guess HE is one of the most powerful species, and that was when they got Mephitic Cloud (but not Lightning Bolt) in the starting book, and Tornado was awesomely awesome.

The trick with air elementalists is mobility. You get swiftness in the starting book. Don't hesitate to use it.

(it is effective both on offense and on defense; you can both kite enemies and run)

Enchanters, I can't win one to save my life. Everything goes wrong, and I feel like I constantly get undead vaults/spawns early-game whenver I start one.

Can't you Confuse the undead?

Indeed. Confusion works on damn near everything, and very little in the early game has enough MR to withstand more than a couple of casts. As opposed to FE's running into crimson imps, or IE's running into those same undead before they get Throw Icicle up (and it being level 4 vs. Confuse's level 3 makes it that much harder).

On top of it, enchanters start with some Throwing, so they can always fling stuff at the undead if Confuse isn't up or isn't reliable / hunger-effective enough.