The Tavern

My L13 MFCr just id'ed 8 potions of gain intelligence. (From a bailey, I think.)

First, that's insane.

Second, is there any reason not to quaff them all right now? (Do the good players sometimes wait for an rMut item?)

This must be 0.7. I am pretty sure I removed that for trunk. Please shout if this *is* trunk

There is a reason not to quaff them: if you have negative mutations. Also, back when stats mattered less, potions of gain foo were classified as useless or even traps by good players: quaffing them makes it harder to get rid of mutations later on. For a caster, however, Int+8 is meaningful enough (and was back then, too).

Trunk!!!

I could have gotten some from a sewer and others from a bailey. I've definitely gotten a few potions of gain str/dex from a bailey before.

Let me know if I can help.

I have no negative mutations. I guess I'll go for it and put on any rMut items I find.

AWESOME!
HIGH FIVE!

You're lucky. My MDEE got 8 gain str potions and 1 gain dex (from an ice cave).

There is one particular bailey (at least in 0.7) that will smack you in the face with loot. If you run across an Orc Warlord in one and don't die* you're about to get more than one scroll of acquirement and a set of potions ranging from 3-8 stat/exp plus some other rad stuff. That and the one with room after room of Orcs and a bunch of enchant foo scrolls at the end are what I'm hoping for whenever I see a bailey portal.

*[That's kind of the trick, though.]

Just an orc knight, I think.

Nope, Warlord. I haven't source-dived, but from personal experience, all baileys that are just ordinary WAAAAAAGH with no special loot have at least 2-3 knights to make your life miserable. I haven't survived the warlord variant.

("No special loot" != "no loot". Surviving a bailey is always worth your while.)

Warlords seem pretty rare...most of the time they don't even show up in Orc Mines. Has this changed in trunk? (I'm currently playing 0.7)

I'm playing trunk, my current character met a warlord in Orc.

Looks like I need to find more baileys. I finally managed to clean out that spider's nest that's been my characters' siren of doom for so long (killing the ghost of a previous victim in the process), and was disappointed about the treasure, to say the least. Why so disproportionate reward? Spider's nests are hard even with resist poison, utterly deadly without.

The spiders' nest vault I see most often has four portions of ambrosia and four random items that appear to be trove-level. That's actually pretty good for such a small portal vault. The one I'm talking about is the three-chamber one with trapdoor spiders and usually a ghost moth (*shudder*). The ambrosia has a useful consumable effect and is not destructible by fire or cold, although I've never actually tried it because it's unfortunately 'too awesome to use'. The random items are usually disappointing, but that's just how trove loot is in this game. You have to be happy just getting four chances for a good item.

I tend to prefer casters, so maybe that's a factor, but I've found SInv to be more important for clearing Spiders' Nests than RPois. If you can take the regular spiders down fast enough they won't have time to poison you, and they're perfectly vulnerable to normally-trash wands like confusion or slowing. The ghost moths are where the trouble is at. I do tend to be extremely liberal with my wands here, and that definitely helps.

Then it's a design success, philosophically. "Don't hoard consumables, use them" is one of the game's central tenets. Certainly more than half of my own deaths are the result of trying to directly outmaneuver or outfight the enemy, rather than expending a consumable.

Yea, I just 3-runed it. My first win. Sorta felt like cheating, though. Ended the game with 32 int I think. I probably could have cast ice storm, but I didn't need to because a holy trishula might be the best weapon in the game.

wise words indeed... my last few promising characters died that way, trying to kill the enemy with one more hit instead of quaffing a healing potion or blinking away

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=534&p=6065#p6065

Just died after finding 8 potions of gain dext.

This was my best char EVER.

I'm so pissed off I'm gonna quit this game for a while!

You'll be back. You're in an abusive relationship with Crawl. It hurts you badly, over and over again, but you can't stay away.

Let's be honest here; we're -all- in an abusive relationship with Crawl.

And it's Valentine's day! Don't forget to make a gift to your lover and contribute!