The Tavern

I do read the wiki... but this god is confusing
I would not want a nicely started character destroyed by accidental summoning of a hostile balrug.
- What dangers did you encounter with Nemelex?
- What strategies minimize such dangers?


Here's a some story of my experiences: I lost one necromancer of Nemelex at Vault 8 due my own stupidity.. Started just using the decks and blinking around... I was quite disappointed with decks of escape, but more so with drained hp due legendary decks of destruction and the pain card. That necromancer had absolutely no difficulties getting runes from Swamp, Shoals, and clearing Elves. Earned about twenty summoning decks in the Lair. Nice to deal with uniques. Inspiring. I started another, demonspawn, who was about to get decks of wonder by offering potions, just to test a method someone instructed on these forums. But did not find enough so ended up offering all kinds of stuff. I was at leisure slaughtering orcs at the mines, experimenting the first decks, and... I summon a hostile balrug. Lucky blink+vampire drain hp+teleport combo saved me. Ah, but the Balrug is still here, sweet.

This guide is pretty exhaustive.

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=Nemelex_guide

that's pretty rare. by the time you can summon Balrugs you should have enough evo/piety so that they're always friendly. I don't think I've ever summoned a hostile 1 from a deck of summonings; they have to be Legendary.

All the summons from the deck of summonings are temporary, so that Balrug should be gone in a couple of hundered turns. My Nemelex is use is far from optimal, but this is how I use the decks. First of all never use decks as a last resort, unless drawing from a stacked deck. If you are in an otherwise hopeless situation, at least use triple draw. I usually sacrifice everything that is not going to be useful, so most of my decks are summoning or destruction with a couple of escape decks.

Summonings are used in tough fights. Plain and ornate are usually enough to distract gangs of orcs, centaurs so you can fight the monsters one on one. Legendary ones I generally reserve against tough uniques or single monsters.

Destruction is used to soften up monsters before a fight while there is still time to run in case of Torment. Legendary decks should not be used without rn+++ due to pain. This deck can also be useful if you are trying to kill a monster that is running away.

Escape decks I generally spam in non-dangerous situations for piety and evocations training if the decks are plain or ornate. Legendary ones should be stacked as Portal, Warp and Tomb are tremendously useful at high power.

Wonders should be triple drawn for Experience or Helix. Sure you might miss a couple of useful cards but an unwanted Shuffle is terrible.

I never seem to get Dungeons, but the cards look safe-ish. Save legendary ones to create treasure trowels and ziggurats.

Well it was a tough situation, too bad I don't remember it exactly, I may have been confused when I drew that card. A thousand turns later or so I went back cautiously to have a look, Balrug was still there.

Anyways the Nemelex decks seem to produce good options in many situations. I'll start to keep some arranged decks around for things like the foxfire, or a wall escape, used after blink.

It was probably from a Wrath or Wild Magic card, both of which can create permanent hostile 1s.