Playing stealthy characters?

[Tutankham]

How do you do this? The options I'm considering at the moment are Spriggan or Vampire as Stalker or Enchanter. I tried both Vampire characters (which I'd really prefer over Spriggans) and they failed quite early in the dungeon because stealth was much too unreliable (even at 10) while Fulsome Destillation + Evaporate as well as Ensorcelled Hibernation - although fairly reliable to cast - did not really help because weapon damage was still far too low to kill tough monsters, especially if they are only confused and not asleep. Without experience to spare for melee skills the vampires were too weak at dungeon level seven.

I tried to build stealth and spellcasting/spell school first (to get the incapacitating spells castable with a high chance of success), adding some levels in stabbing for damage. That left the characters with pitiful combat skills, unable to survive the first imp that picked up a pile of stones. Shoul I rather start with weapon skill, fighting and dodging until the character can clean the first ten dungeon levels without relying on stealth?

Edit: Oops, wrong forum. Can some Mod move this topic to Dungeon Crawling Advice please?

[ventricule]

On stealth characters, I usually turn off all the skills except for stabbing at the beginning, until I reliably kill every monster in one stab. Then I switch on all the needed skills, and as an Enchanter, casting ensorcelled hibernation + stabbing is a tremendously powerful combo for the first few hours in the game. At that point, with confuse and invisibility, the game should be a breeze until the end of the game, where you need to invest in some other way of dealing damage to get rid of the late sInv very-hard-not-to-wake-up monsters. In my experience, this works well both with spriggans and vampires

[eeviac]

VpEn^Ash has been my favorite win so far. With all stealth-stab characters, even moreso than normal characters, you've got to learn to pick your fights. There's no reason you should ever die to an imp with stones - just walk away. Once you get confusion up and running, anything you can't put to sleep, you confuse-stab. Not as much damage, but a much more reliable disable.

IIRC my general skill progression was: stealth to 5, then pump spells a bit, then pump stabbing to ~8, then back to stealth and spells. Maybe some short blades in there. Midgame is a cakewalk with Invisibility.

Don't play Stalker. Fulsome-Evaporate ruins that background.

[Lisast]

How much of this do you think is really just praying to the RNG gods to give you some good equipment early? I've had times when I felt like I couldn't stop getting branded small blades, and times when I couldn't find anything other than -2 -3 2h axes the whole game. What do you do in the latter case?

[slowcar]

to stab an enemy you don't need fancy brands, a simple dagger is usually fine.
my latest SpEn used an eudemon blade in normal combat and switched to a dagger when he could stab something.
with the exception of ranged enemies (centaurs) that resist your spells the early game is one of the easiest possible imo.

[nago]

I've recently rolled a VpEn, who died shamefully on Tomb:2, and I too need some advice, although for late-end game

Anyway, I can firstly give some some advices about I learned from the first part of the game. They're mainly focused on VpEn:

- as said by eeviac, first thing to learn is to pick your fights. This is probably the most important lesson to know and respect: the starting abilities, items and spells of the class make easy for them to select the foes to approach and kill quickly and very hard to survive in a extended fight. In others words, once the enemies are waked up you are going to have big trouble. This rule apply against both single-strong opponent and large pack of enemies.
In the fist case, always consider if is worthy to risk you life trying to stab a powerful opponent: he could wake up when you're two tiles away, or you couldn't instant-stab it. In both situation a stealthy character isn't probably going to survive. In this case is usually better to leave him sleeping and return to kill him when you are higher-level and with better spells. I've lost a VpEn with GREAT equipment to learn that

- Sometimes you can't sleep-stab a large number of relative weak enemies. In this case, it's usually safe to stab your opponents as long as stealth allows it, then finish them using your disabling spells. Always retreat until you can fight in corridor or stair-dance, and don't wait to run away until you're out of mana and almost dead: for example, confuse is a great spell to disable one enemy and block a corridor, but it can always be resisted so you could need a couple of turns and some mana to safely retreat!
Moreover, if you meet one pack where the stronger enemies (orc warriors of priest, for example) are behind the weaker ones, it's much better to find another router to approach firstly the stronger ones.

- Sp can be less selective about the enemies to face: their insane speed and evasion let them to face even strong fighter-type opponent without too much worries. On the other hand, I believe that VpEn should always stay at least at thirsty state, because rpois is great to have early on, the stealth bonus is useful and the bat-transformation is the best way they have to escape from danger

- about training: I've found that an hybrid like an En equally needs all the skill he uses. So, I only disable uc for Vp and focus on Spellcasting until I can memorize Confusion. Then, I'd keep all the skill active. Maybe Stealth could be disabled after it has reached 10, until Lair and Orc are cleared, but I don't believe it's so important. The only other exception is if you want invisiblity earlier (but it shouldn't be really necessary until lair:7), so maybe focus on hexes at a certain point could be worthy.

- invisibility is all you need for mid-game, in later part you should add some other spell, as Alistair's Intoxication, or Mass Confusion.



Now, my question: I've already cleared all the easier ending branches of the dungeon (Elf, Vault, Slimes, Shoal, Swamp and Zot), where there are a lot of spells useful to disable enemies when stealth fails.
However, I couldn't imagine a wat to rely on stabbing as the main way to kill enemies in area like Tomb and later, where enemies can't be reliably approached with stealth (even being uncannily stealthy!) and who can't be confused by spells, being piratically immune to everything. So, does a strategy which allow a stealthy character to rely on stabbing in late-end game exist?

[slowcar]

stabbing does not work well in the extended endgame, but you should have enough EP to train more conventional methods.
for tomb you could use a long blade (training synergy with short blades) with silence, for example. or dispel undead. or ood. or other spells.

stealth still has many uses. there are some enemies you can find sleeping after a while, even if they woke up, for example the royal jelly.
or pan/hell lords who wake up, but don't see you, so you can run circles around them to grab the rune.
i have more problems with my SpEn in extended compared to other characters though as the direct fighting power seems to be a bit on the weak side, even with lvl 27.

[BlackSheep]

if you meet one pack where the stronger enemies (orc warriors of priest, for example) are behind the weaker ones, it's much better to find another router to approach firstly the stronger ones.

I wanted to emphasize this and elaborate a bit. The less time you spend in your enemies' line of sight, the better. If you open a door or step around a corner and discover a group of enemies, often it's a good idea to double back and explore some more. You may find a better approach that lets you get off a stab from only 1 step away from cover.

This type of play dovetails nicely with nago's point about retreating. The more of a level you've explored, the more safe paths you have for retreat. If you leave the pack of ogres alone until you've cleared the rest of the level, then you can lead them on a merry chase and separate them. Then you can use secondary disablers like confusion and pick them off one by one.

I frequently run into a wall in the late game with stabbers. Necromancy helps a bit by providing meat shields and dispel undead, and I love using passwall to set up stabs, but yeah, dealing with aware enemies when your disablers don't work is a pain.

[XuaXua]

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